“Why do you think he causes these strong feelings?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I was hoping you could tell me.”
Craig Montero said he’d get with his friends in the Burlington Police Department and track down the source of the call to my cell phone. I figured I’d get a name and address and take a warrant for harassing telephone calls. I’d also seek a restraining order. I would do this because this is the course of action I prescribed to my own clients. Did he hit you? Take a warrant. Threaten you? Take a warrant. Then seek a restraining order. Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.
I believed this would work because ninety-nine times out of one hundred, it did work. Once I figured out who he was, the law would take care of him for me—as long as I practiced the same self-advocacy that I preached to my clients. I knew this. I knew how the system worked. I knew every gear, every spring, every creak and crack. I knew how to handle the Bald Man.
I didn’t know shit. I learned this out in the parking lot at Carwood, Allison at about seven P.M. I have never so badly underestimated someone in my entire life.
Our building shared a parking lot with a dental practice in the office building across the way. Bright lights lit the lot with the intensity of a mid-day sun, but trimmed hedges almost as tall as me lined every side not occupied by a building, blocking any view of the parking area from passing police cars on Church Street. I exited and locked the building and gave the parking lot the same visual once-over I had given it every evening for the past ten years. Then I mentally checked out, ambling over to my BMW on autopilot as I mulled over my completely useless session with Dr. Koenig. Had I paid more attention to my physical surroundings, I would have seen the man in the bushes. But I didn’t. And because of this, he materialized out of nowhere.
“Hey, you! Hey!”
Keys in hand, I froze. I turned to see a young man approaching me with his hands shoved in the front pockets of a gray hooded sweatshirt. He’d already covered half the empty parking lot by the time I saw him. Instantly, toothpaste syndrome kicked in and my brain jammed between hurriedly jumping in the BMW and questioning whether it was wise to turn my back on this guy. And did I need to do that, anyway? Did this man necessarily constitute a threat or did he just want to ask for a cigarette? Was I being paranoid?
I asked so many questions that I forgot the critical one: Where did he come from? I forgot this question right up until the point where I couldn’t turn around anymore, because he had closed to within hailing distance, then within speaking distance, and by that point he had withdrawn his right hand from the sweatshirt pocket and I saw the knife.
I didn’t hunt, but I knew a hunting knife when I saw one. Long, sharp, shiny. Perfect for gutting deer and wild boar.
“Wallet, watch, cell phone! Break yourself, motherfucker!”
The blade caught the sodium glow of the streetlights and reflected it into my eyes in a cruel wink. The man holding it, I saw, hadn’t shaved in several days nor brushed his teeth in several months or even years—his mouth was a fetid cave where lonely, uneven teeth jutted up and down from his gums like rotten stalactites. The face around it might have been young once, but the skin was splotched and drawn beneath the beard stubble.
“I’ll cut your ass!”
His eyes twitched and darted. His pupils fully dilated, they looked like lumps of coal set into his emaciated face. I thought, high as a kite.
Hands held up in front of me, I backed up until I struck the driver’s door of my BMW and could back up no more. He stepped closer, moving the knife back and forth in a motion like the mesmerized sway of a cobra. He clutched the knife in his right hand while his left contracted into a claw down at the waistline of his jeans. It shook.
“I’ll cut your ass, bitch!” He growled. “I’ll spill your guts all over this fuckin’ parking lot, punkass motherfucker! Don’t fuck with me!”
“I’m not fucking with you,” I assured him in a voice that shook like his hands. I heard the warble in it and a small part of me thought, Hero of the Month. Right.
Right behind that, the Bald Man: Not so big and bad without a gun, are you?
“Then do it! Come on! Cell phone! Wallet! Watch!”
Off came the watch. Allie had given it to me for our fifth anniversary, but I slid it off my wrist like some cheap plastic crap from a fast food kid’s meal and handed it over to the tweaking meth addict sticking me up in the parking lot of my office. His left hand darted out and snatched the watch, dropped it into the pocket of his jeans. My smartphone—address book, phone numbers, emails, calendar—followed it a moment later.
“Good. Good. Now gimme your wallet.”
I swallowed a tumbleweed.
“It’s in my right front pocket, okay?” I said.
“Get it, motherfucker!”
“All right. Just be cool, man.”
“Don’t tell me to be cool, bitch!” His voice climbed, agitated. Although it seemed impossible, my pulse raced even faster “Just gimme your fuckin’ money!”
And with my right hand, I reached inside the left front pocket of my suit pants and closed my fingers around my wallet. Ten years ago, Bobby had reached under his seat and came out with a Glock, but I had no Glock. I had a wallet and some ill-conceived delusions about being someone other people could look up to. I began to withdraw the wallet from my pocket and as I pulled it free, I heard Bobby.
Driver’s license, he thought. Don’t give him your driver’s license.
Why?
Because it’s got your address on it.
“That’s it. Gimme that shit!”
Right. Because if he got my address, he might someday decide to come to my house. Where Allie and Abby lived.
I opened the wallet. The man shook his head. “No. Whole thing!”
“L… let me get my driver’s license,” I said. I stumbled on the first word and hated my tongue for it. “I n… need it to get around.”
“Fuck that shit!”
The knife darted forward. With a quick, vicious chop he brought the handle down on the hand that held the wallet, striking it momentarily numb. My wallet fell to the asphalt. Credit cards, driver’s license, cash, store discount cards, picture of my wife and kid, my whole damn life spilled at this guy’s feet.
“Pick it up,” he ordered.
I didn’t move.
“Pick it up!” Roaring now, almost screaming.
And still, I didn’t move. Not because I didn’t want to; I just couldn’t. The whole scene—those nasty teeth, that drawn and puckered face, the knife, the electric lights—shimmered like a desert mirage there before the Carwood, Allison building. A wrinkle passed over my field of vision like someone had grabbed one end of it and flicked his wrist, like snapping a beach towel.
“I said, pick it the fuck up!”
I recognized it right away: I was about to lose it. Just like I had on the radio, and just like I had on the phone the night before.
I looked him right in the eye and said, “Fuck you.”
“What? What did you just say to me?”
I didn’t see the knife now, or I didn’t conceive of it. I knew it was there—I just didn’t care.
“I said ‘fuck you,’” I replied through gritted teeth. The man’s image shrank as my eyes narrowed. “You pick it up, you lazy sack of shit. You want my wallet? Bend your sorry ass over and pick it up your damn self!”
Now the knife hand began to shake.
“Motherfucker, I will cut you!”
“Bring it,” I hissed. “Game on, bitch!”
And he brought it. He lunged forward with his feet as he drove the tip of the knife straight at my chest, but an amazing thing happened then; my left foot shot out at a 45 degree angle and brought the rest of my body with it. The knife found only empty air, because I stood beside him now, my arms moving in a fluid circle that came down one behind his head and one on his outstretched and overextended knife-arm.