Still no answer. I moved to hang up, but then the caller spoke.
“Forget about me?”
That voice; I knew the voice. I’d heard it before.
The caller. The Bald Man.
“Who is this?” I asked. Across the room, Allie sat up.
“You did forget me. I leave you alone for a couple of weeks and you forget all about me.”
My head swam for a moment, and when it stopped, I found my entire bedroom draped in red. I wanted to do the right thing, say the right thing, but Toothpaste Syndrome kicked in and cut both my IQ and vocabulary in half. “Answer me, asshole! Who are you? What’s wrong with you? Why are you making prank calls at three in the goddamned morning? What kind of loser does that?”
“What kind of loser lies to the world?”
Alarmed, Allie asked, “Who is it?”
I waved my hand to bat her question away. My irritation had stoked now into full-blown fury. Lights flashed all over the control panel in my head, the needles of every gauge jammed hard into the red zone. “You’re crazy!”
“Ooh,” he said in mock terror. “I’d better be careful. I wouldn’t want the Hero of the Month to hose me down with his assault rifle.”
“I don’t need a gun to take your chickenshit ass down.”
“Mmm. Big talk from the world’s biggest coward.”
“So says the little bitch on the phone who talks mad shit but won’t tell me who he is and blocks his number!”
“Kevin?” Allie wrapped her arms around her knees. “Who are you talking to?”
“You know what I think?” I continued. “I think you are bald. You’re in your early forties, and you’ve got kind of a beer gut. Even if you don’t drink beer.”
I had his attention. The Bald Man didn’t speak.
The thrill of seizing control shot through the muscles in my core and almost made me shake. When I got done shining the spotlight on his soul, he would probably hang up and kill himself. Good riddance.
“Doughy, fleshy, lower-class features. You’re ugly. And you’re single. You don’t do anything particularly well and you never have. You’re disabled or laid off from some low-end, dead-end kind of job. You may or may not be looking for another one, but you’re a loser, and it’s tough for losers in this economy. So you spend your days on your ass. In either an old single-wide trailer where you’re constantly late on the rent or a one-bedroom apartment with the Burlington Housing Authority. You watch action movies and you play role-playing games with other losers over the internet. And you’re pissed at me because you want to be me, but you know what? You can’t be me. Because you’re a loser.”
Silence from the other end. That was good, but honestly, I wanted to hear the secondary explosions from my torpedo strike. But when the Bald Man spoke again, he spoke in the same amused tone he had used earlier. And I realized that I’d hit nothing.
“You really have no idea, do you?”
“You blocked your number and you won’t tell me your name. No, motherfucker, I don’t.”
“You are the loser, Kevin. You are the little bitch. Not me. You’re the Bitch of the World. You don’t know who I am. But I’m going to show you what you are. I’m going to show everyone what you are. And when you find out…”
He laughed.
“Oh my God, Kevin, it’s going to be precious. Just wait. Watch and see what’s going to happen. Watch and see.”
“Game on, bitch! Bring it!”
“I will.”
And with that, he hung up.
“Answer me, Kevin! Who was that?”
I set the phone back down on the bureau. I picked it back up again and cut it off.
With my wife’s eyes upon me, I felt just a little embarrassed. The specifics of what I’d just said escaped me at the moment, because one of the features of toothpaste syndrome is that you can’t remember everything you did or said, but you can remember enough to understand that you came off as a royal dumbass. In my case, I’d let the enemy reduce me to a pile of barking, cursing carbon-based garbage. The only saving grace was that tonight, this hadn’t happened on the radio.
I’d been angry, but my anger faded. Embarrassment stepped forward to take its place, but even that didn’t hang around for long. Another emotion shouldered its way in, and I recognized this one right away: fear.
“Kevin? Are you going to answer me?”
I rested both hands on the bureau and hung my head.
“I think I just challenged a crazy man to a fight,” I said.
14.
“His voice sounds familiar,” I said, “but I couldn’t place it to save my life. I don’t know who it is. But I feel like I should.”
Today, Dr. Koenig wore a charcoal gray suit over a pure white shirt and a dark, subdued tie. He wore black dress socks and black leather loafers which he’d obviously worn many times before but which he kept polished to a healthy shine. He would be giving a talk today, I theorized, a presentation to psych students at either UNC or Duke. Then he would go home and eat kale.
He started out poking around the Bobby issue, but the phone call last night had piqued his interest and led him away from that. Now he nodded as if I’d just said something he understood very well and tapped his pen on his notepad. “Why’s that? Why do you feel like you should know who it is?”
I held my Southern Rifleman in a pair of sweaty hands. I rolled it into a tube, unrolled it. Abby had had a pacifier as a baby; her father had a gun magazine as an adult. “For starters,” I said, “he had my cell number. I give that out to almost no one. A couple attorneys and judges have it, and that’s it. So he either knows me or knows somebody who knows me. Either way, I feel like I’ve talked to him before.”
“Can you describe the voice for me?”
I closed my eyes and searched my auditory memory.
“Smooth,” I said. “No rasp, no roughness, like he hasn’t done a lot of smoking or screaming. Makes him sound younger than he probably is. It’s higher in the register, not like a squeak, not soprano but not baritone, either.”
“Tenor,” Dr. Koenig offered.
“Yes,” I said, “tenor. Accent-wise, he’s definitely Southern. Not cornpone trailer-park Southern, but maybe like he was raised here by parents from another part of the country. I say he’s white trash, but between you and me, that’s not how he sounds.”
“How does he sound?”
“Crazy. There’s something wrong with him.”
I swallowed.
“That’s what gets me. You can feel this weird energy when he’s talking. His ki smells bad. Rotten, spoiled, gone over. And that’s what has me scared. Him being a mental case. You never know what those people are going to do.”
“He scares you, but he also makes you angry.”
I nodded slowly. “Very.”
“How angry? Angry enough to kill?”
“Definitely.” I took a ki breath and stared through the picture window. The temperature had begun to fall outside, but the sun glowed so brightly that this office could have stood right in the center of it. I almost couldn’t see the bench or the trees. “And that scares me. Everything gets easier when you do it once, Doc, everything. There’s a certain inertia in all of us that keeps us from trying new things, and once you overcome it, the task gets easier. I’ve broken the seal. So now, I get mad and I’m like, I could kill this son of a bitch. That scares me.”
No immediate answer. Although I couldn’t see what he’d written on his pad, at this point it had to be something like patient has become homicidal. Patient is eager to kill again. Hospitalize or not?