Page 97 of Never Flinch

10

Trig is in his home office. The radio is tuned to the Big Bob, as it usually is, but he’s hardly hearing it. Some local yokel is killing Sunday afternoon with a call-in show that mixes buy-sell-or-trade items with politics. Meanwhile, Trig has got insurance forms to fill out, three sets for three separate entities. What a word that is! Only an insurance company with a spokes-ass named Buster would call people entities.

This would be a busy week even if I wasn’t killing people, he thinks… and then has to laugh. Thank God he still has a funnybone. He only has a few attachments to the real world since Annette McElroy, and that’s one of them.

Sensayuma, he hears his father’s ghost voice.Where’s your sensayuma, Triggy ole Trigger?

Giving him an affectionate squeeze, or maybe—if he was drinking or in a pissy mood—thumping him alongside the head. Sometimes at the Holman Rink, when the other team was on a power play, his father would grip Trig’s arm so hard he left bruises, only letting up when the power play expired. And if he showed Daddy those bruises later, would Daddy say,Where’s your sensayuma, Trig?Of course he would. And for Mom?Gone. It was just Daddy and Trig.She left us, buddy. Went walkabout.

Well.

Maybe.

He looks at the Global Insurance papers without seeing them. Listens to the radio, where some call-in dinkleballs is trying to sell a power mower, without hearing it. He’s thinking of Daddy. He does it more and more. Thinking of Daddy and thinking in Daddy’s voice.

You’re going to be caught, Trigger, where’s your sensayuma about that? What you did today was so fucking risky I can’t even tell you. Do youwantto be caught?

Maybe part of him does. What most of him wants is to do it again and again and again. There are still jurors left to wear the guilt, plus Judge Witterson. Might he add him? Sure, if there was world enough and time. Why not? Finkel and Wentworth killed themselves andGod hit Cary Tolliver with the cancer stick. How many canheget? His dead father assures him that time is short, and Trig knows that’s true… but why stop at thirteen or fourteen?

From the radio, the guy with the power mower for sale is telling the host that the “rhymes-with-witch” is going to be doing her gig in Buckeye City after all. He calls her Kate McSlay. Trig pushes back from the elderly home computer he keeps meaning to replace and listens.

“You’re talking about the motormouth feminazi,” the host says.

“Right!” the call-in guy says. “Real Americans will be at Dingley Park, watching the cops and firemen play softball for charity—”

“Not to mention Sista Bessie singing the National Anthem,” the host interjects. “That’s a big deal.”

“Yeah, some Black lady,” the caller says dismissively. “But the fake Americans will be at Mingo, listening to McSlay talk about killing babies and how it’s all right to let their kids grow up queer.”

“You mean gay,” the host says, laughing.

“Gay, fag, queer, call it what you wanna. And taking guns away! What I think is someone should use a gun onher. One in the head and zip-zap, problem solved.”

“Here at the Bob, we don’t condone violence,” the host says, still laughing, “but what you do on your own time is your own business. Let’s go back to that mower. Is it a Lawn-Boy?”

“Yeah, and hardly been—”

Trig turns off the radio. He thinks, as he did at the dentist’s office, that seven at a blow would be too many. But what if he could get the two fame-hags? Maybe with their assistants? If he can hold out until Friday night, it might be possible. He can’t put slips of paper in their hands, not if he burns down the rink with them inside it, but he can still show their names, and in letters four feet high. Trig leans back in his chair, folds his hands over his slight paunch, and chuckles.

Hasn’t lost his sensayuma after all, it seems.

Chapter 15

1

Isabelle Jaynes sometimes thinks that she would like to inhabit the world the cops inhabit on the variousLaw & Orderprograms. Those shows are nominally set in New York City but actually seem to exist in some TV wonderland where the detectives only have to deal with one case at a time and the connections appear like magic.

She and Tom spend the morning at one of the low-rises in Breezy Point, investigating a domestic double stabbing. The missus is in Kiner Memorial, critical but expected to pull through; the mister is dead as dirt on the kitchen floor, wearing nothing but one sock and a pair of bloodstained Jockey shorts.

Izzy and Tom split up, questioning the inhabitants of the other two apartments on the fourth floor and the two directly above and below. Although it’s Monday, the start of another work and school week, everybody seems to be home, kids included. Izzy and Tom draw certain conclusions about that—they are, after all, detectives—but keep those to themselves. Meanwhile, the forensics team is doing its usual forensicky things. The stories the law-and-order team of Jaynes & Atta get from the neighbors are familiar in one way (the Greers were always fighting, lots of yelling, thumps, and thrown objects) and unique in another: Janelle and Norville Greer had the bad luck to snap at the same time and in exactly the wrong place.

“Most accidents happen in the bathroom,” Tom says.

“Yes.”

“Most murders, however, happen in the kitchen.”

“Yes.”

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