Page 10 of Never Flinch

“—she said, ‘You made your bed, now lie in it.’ How shitty is that?”

He lifts his hips and produces another trumpet blast. Izzy says, “Let’s get out of here. We’ve got all he can give us.”

“I made a clean breast,” Tolliver is saying as they leave. “Twice. First to that ADA fuck, then to Buckeye Brandon. I didn’t have to do that. And now look at me. Just look.”

Izzy and Tom go back to the nurses’ station. The old vet in the white rayon uniform is filling out forms. Izzy says, “He wants to go back to his room. He says by now his morphine pump will have re-set.”

Without looking up, the old vet says, “He can wait.”

7

May, and the weather is beautiful.

Not far from the city is a woodsy suburban township called Upriver. At its northern edge is a little pocket park where a few people are doing meditation poses that might (or might not) be called asanas. Trig doesn’t care what they’re called. They are looking toward the horizon, not at him. That’s fine. He got a burger at a drive-thru but tossed it on the passenger seat after a couple of bites. He’s too nervous to eat. The letter he sent to the police was a warning. This is the real deal.

There’s a question of whether he can do it. Of course there is. Hethinkshe can but understands he won’t know for sure until the deed is done. He killed squirrels and birds with a pellet gun as a boy, and that was all right. Good, in fact. The one time his father took him deer hunting, Trig wasn’t allowed to carry a real gun. His father said,Knowing you, you’d fall in a hole and blow your foot off.Daddy said if they saw a deer, he would let Trig shoot, but they never saw one, and he was pretty sure his father wouldn’t have allowed him the gun even if they had. Daddy would have hogged the shot to himself.

And to break his cherry by killing a man? Trig understands that once he’s stepped over that line, he can never go back.

The street running past the pocket park has an amusing name: Anyhow Lane. It’s a dead-ender. Trig has been here three times before and knows that the Buckeye Trail passes near the end of the street. The Trail is eighteen miles long. It used to be a railroad line, but the trackswere taken up thirty years ago and replaced by a wide, county-financed asphalt path that winds through trees and bushes, finally emerging beside the turnpike and ending on the outskirts of the city proper.

There’s a little beaten earth square at the end of Anyhow Lane with a sign reading NO PARKING AFTER 7 PM. On each of his previous reconnaissance visits, a dusty Komatsu bucket-loader has been parked there in defiance of the sign, and it’s still there this afternoon. For all Trig knows, it’s been there for years and may be there for years to come. It will give him cover for his car, and that’s all he cares about. Beyond it is a copse of woods marked by signs reading BUCKEYE TRAIL and DO NOT LITTER and WALK/BIKE AT YOUR OWN RISK.

“Hey Daddy, hey Daddy.”

His father is long gone, but Trig sometimes talks to him anyway. It’s not comforting, exactly, but it feels lucky.

Trig parks behind the bucket-loader and takes a backpack and a trail map from the rear seat of his Toyota. He shrugs into the pack and puts the map in his back pocket. From the center console he takes a snub-nosed Taurus .22 revolver. He slips it into his right front pocket. In his left pocket is a slim leather folder containing thirteen slips of paper. He passes picnic benches, a litter basket full of beer cans, and a painted post with a laminated map of the Trail. He has seen plenty of walkers and bicyclists on the Trail on his previous scouts, sometimes in pairs or trios—no good for his purpose today—but sometimes alone.

Today I may not see anyone by himself, he thinks.If I don’t, that will be a sign. “Stop while there’s still time to stop, before you step over the line. Once you’re over the line, you can never come back.”

This makes him think of an AA mantra:One drink is too many and a thousand are never enough.

He’s wearing a brown sweater and a plain brown gimme cap pulled down almost to the brow-line. There’s no logo on the cap for a passerby to remember. He walks east rather than west, so the sun won’t illuminate the part of his face that shows. An elderly couple on bikes passes him headed west. The man says hello. Trig raises a hand but doesn’t speak. He keeps on. About a mile ahead the woods thin, and there the Trail skirts a housing development where kids will be playing inbackyards and women will be hanging up clothes. If he gets that far without seeing someone walking alone, he’ll pack it in. Maybe just for today, maybe for good.

Sure, Daddy says.Go on and flinch, you fucking flincher.

Trig ambles along, one hand on the butt of the revolver. He’d whistle, but his mouth is too dry. And now, from around the next curve in the trail, comes the solo walker he was hoping for (also dreading). Well, not completely solo; there’s a Standard Poodle on a red leash. He always imagined his first would be a man, but this is a middle-aged woman wearing jeans and a hoodie.

I won’t do it, he thinks.I’ll wait for a man, one without a dog. Come another day. Only, if he means to carry through with his mission—all the way through—hemustinclude four women.

He’s closing the distance. Soon she and her dog will be past him. She will go on with her life. Make dinner. Watch TV. Call a friend on the phone and say,Oh, my day was fine, how was yours?

Now or never, he thinks, and takes the map from his back pocket with his left hand. His right is still clutching the revolver.Don’t blow your foot off, he thinks.

“Hello,” the woman says. “Lovely afternoon, isn’t it?”

“It sure is.” Does he sound hoarse, or is it just his imagination? Must be the latter, because the woman doesn’t look alarmed. “Can you show me exactly where I am?”

He holds the map out. His hand is shaking a little, but the woman doesn’t seem to notice. She steps closer, looking down. The Standard Poodle sniffs at Trig’s pantleg. He takes the revolver out of his pocket. For a moment the hammer catches on the pocket’s lining, but then it comes free. The woman doesn’t see it. She’s looking at the map. Trig puts an arm around her shoulders and she looks up. He thinks,Don’t flinch.

Before she can pull away, he places the short muzzle of the Taurus against her temple and pulls the trigger. He’s test-fired the gun and knows what to expect, not a loud report but more of a snap, like breaking a dry stick of kindling over a knee. The woman’s eyes roll up to whites and the tip of her tongue pokes out of her mouth. That’s the only horrible part. She sags in his encircling arm.

Blood is trickling from the hole in her temple. He puts the muzzle of the Taurus over the powder-blackened hole and shoots her again. The first bullet didn’t come out, it stayed in her darkening brain, but this one does. He sees her hair flip, as if lifted by a playful finger. He looks around, sure someone is watching,mustbe watching, but there’s no one. At least not yet.

The poodle is looking up at its mistress, whining. The red leash is puddled at its front feet. The poodle looks at Trig, its eyes seeming to ask if everything is all right. Trig slaps its curly rump with his free hand and says, “Go!”

The poodle jumps and runs twenty or thirty feet down the path, out of slapping distance, then stops and looks back. The leash is a red ribbon trailing behind it.

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