I hadn’t set foot in an aikido dojo since high school, but it all came back to me then. My right foot slid behind my left, my hips pivoted and my adversary found himself caught in the whirling dervish my body had become. I spun him once, twice, then stepped back and felt the bones crack in his hand as I folded it over and released the knife into my own.
He fell back against the BMW, bounced off it, stunned. I could have let it go at that—I had disarmed him, I had the knife now—but Bobby was in my head then. And Bobby said:
Handle it.
I darted forward and pinned his body against my car. And I jammed the blade as far as it would go under his right rib cage. Right into his heart.
His eyes widened and his mouth opened.
“Think you’re going to rip me off?” I hissed. “How do you like this? Huh? This how you thought it would go down?”
My face was six inches from his. I could smell tobacco and beer blending with the stench of rotting teeth and gums. Something wet and warm flowed down over my right hand, but I didn’t look at this. I looked at the man. I looked at his face. I looked for recognition of his position, the mistake he had made in attacking me and the understanding that he had accosted the wrong man.
But I found none of this. His face was slack, expressionless. I looked at those dilated pupils and a crazy thought danced across my mind, hooting and hollering and waving its arms as it barked at the moon:
He has no brain. He has no soul.
I swallowed. My jaw shook as I parted my lips to whisper, “Who sent you?”
He opened his mouth. Blood gushed forth, but he managed to say, “The Bald Man.”
And he dropped.
I didn’t even try to catch him. I let the body fall with the knife still buried beneath the rib cage. His blood glistened on my hand and ran from the wound in his chest in a dark, sticky river that soon enveloped my Mastercard, my Visa, my Alamance County Public Library card. His eyes stared sightlessly at my shoes. He didn’t move.
And I stared right back at him, unable to speak. I had killed again, but this wasn’t what gave me pause.
Did he just say the Bald Man? I thought. Did he really say that?
Blood dripped from my hand and splattered on my pants, my shoes, the asphalt. I looked all around me. The Carwood, Allison building, the only witness to my third killing this year, regarded me with dark, silent windows.
“What’s going on?” I asked aloud.
The meth addict—or whatever he was—I’d just stabbed through the heart didn’t answer me. A dark stain blossomed across the front of his jeans from where he’d wet himself when his brain had let go of his involuntary muscle control functions. When I knelt down beside him, my nose detected the stench of his feces mixed in with the coppery-sweet odor of his blood. I breathed in through my mouth and held my lungs still as I reached into his front pocket and fished out my watch and smartphone.
Bewildered and even more terrified now than when I’d seen the knife for the first time, I dialed the police.
15.
“He mentioned the Bald Man?” Dr. Koenig asked.
Outside, the dogwood trees flanking the concrete bench had largely shed their leaves. The weather had turned colder as we slid into that time of year when a body feels the first chills borne on the winds of autumn and understands that the temperature will continue falling, and falling and falling.
“He did,” I said with a sigh. I felt exhausted from too little sleep but wired at the same time—the lingering effects of this morning’s massive infusion of coffee and the adrenaline rush of the evening before.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
He closed his eyes and rubbed them underneath his glasses. He too looked tired and I wondered then what challenges he himself faced on a daily basis. I wanted to know more about his life outside of his office and my problems, but to date my attempts to uncover facts about his personal life had met with deft changes of subject and therapeutically appropriate reminders that we needed to focus on my case and avoid the small talk. Which, he noted, Southerners have a hard time doing.
“So…” he trailed off as he finished rubbing his eyes and had to readjust his glasses. “You killed this guy. Without a gun.”
“Uh-huh.”
“He had a knife. You took it away from him?”
“I did,” I said.
“Tell me again how you did this. No; show me.”
So I recreated the scene right there in his office. I showed him how I had stood with my hands up, pantomimed the robber’s own body movements. When it ended, I realized that my face and whole body had grown pleasantly warm. I was smiling.
“That’s amazing,” he said.
“It is,” I agreed.
“How long has it been since you’ve attended an aikido class?
Now I rubbed my own eyes, and I sat down. “About twenty years.”
“Two decades. And yet you remembered that move. That’s incredible.”
True. Toothpaste syndrome vanished and everything I knew deployed exactly where it needed to. “It is,” I admitted.
“You’re a hero again.”
“Yep.”
But I didn’t feel like one. Instead, I felt scared. The mugger had said “Bald Man.” I knew this to a moral certainty. But why?
He’s not a man, a voice inside me said. Not Bobby or Kate or Allie or any of the other people who habitually talked to me in my head—it wasn’t even me. I didn’t know who it was. He’s so much more than that.
I cleared my throat.
“When the Burlington Police got there,” I said, “Both of the responding officers knew who I was. One of them told me I’d done a good job. The other one whistled and said, you’re one hard son of a bitch, Mr. Swanson. Then a detective sergeant arrived and ‘investigated.’”
I raised my fingers and put quotation marks in the air around that last word.
“I say it that way because his ‘investigation’ consisted of him telling me what happened, closing his notebook and offering to buy me a beer. I’m not kidding. He said, so this guy tried to mug you, and I said yes, Sergeant. Then he said, then he attacked you with the knife when you didn’t comply fast enough, and I said, yeah, you know, basically that’s what he did. So, he concluded, you had to wrestle the knife away from him and defend yourself. You had no choice. I said, you’re right, I didn’t. He didn’t ask me a single question, Doc. He told me what happened and I agreed with him.”
“Did you want him to take you downtown? Book you for murder?”
“Not at all,” I said with a shake of my head. “And I’m not a criminal lawyer, so what do I know, maybe they do that all the time. But it was….”
I hunted for the right word. When the detective arrived, I’d been standing there over the body with the two uniformed patrol officers—who had done absolutely nothing to secure the crime scene. They’d let me stand there, leaning against the BMW, while they asked me questions not about the dead guy at my feet, but Pinnix and Ramseur.
I swallowed again. I rolled up my magazine and tapped it on the table. “I’m afraid,” I said, “that maybe… something’s going on here that I don’t understand.”
“Were there reporters?” He asked.
“What?”
“Reporters. Did the media come to your office? Has anyone asked for your statement?”