Free Trigger Finger by Jackson Spencer Bell

It only matters how they get
out.
    I got up,
staggered three steps, and collapsed on the far end of the sectional.   My balance.   They’d knocked the balance clean out of my ears.
    I said get up , you sorry sack of shit, get the fuck up and handle this!
    So I got up
again.   On the wall, the 2010-2011
University of North Carolina
men’s basketball squad stared at me in their coats and ties above a calendar
showing the month of February.   Smiling,
happy, excited.   They’d had a full view
of the back door but hadn’t said a word to me.   My eyes zeroed in on Harrison Barnes, he of the recent three-pointer.
    Why didn’t you warn me?
    Barnes didn’t
answer.
    I almost touched
my head again but caught myself.   My
stomach balled up around the beer and summer sausage I’d been eating when I
turned around and saw the two men I didn’t know standing right behind my
goddamned sofa in the moment before the one on the left swung the bat.
    The police.   I have to call the police.
    My heart pumped
white-hot adrenaline into my legs.   They
quivered and almost dumped me again, but they held.   Instinctively, I looked down at the coffee
table in search of my phone.   I didn’t
find it there, or on the entertainment center, either, or on the pool table or
the bar or any of the other places I usually chucked it without giving the
first thought to the possibility that it might become vital to my
survival.   I’d left it…
    Upstairs on the
kitchen counter, in its charger.   Up
there with them .
    You’re on your own, Devil Dog, Bobby
said.   You’ll have time to dial the 9 and maybe a 1 before they realize you’re
not dead yet and they come to finish the job.   It’s all you, Swanson.
    “And it’s a foul
by Virginia Tech!   Tyler Zeller goes to the
line!”
    On the wall, the
junior from Washington, Indiana
took to the free throw line in the Dean Dome in Chapel
Hill.   His stadium.   His court.   His home.
    I took to the
line.   I rounded the edge of the
sectional and headed for the bar, where the gun safe stood beside the
glass-fronted liquor cabinet.
    Move your ass, Bobby hissed again.   Move it
fast.   You don’t have much time.
    I blinked at the
combination dial on the safe’s narrow rectangular door.   The combination itself leapt to the front of
my mind easily enough-05-24-77, Allie’s date of birth—but the numbers
themselves presented a challenge.   The
dial divided in two, three, two before my eyes, their focusing mechanisms
knocked loose by the impact of bat on bone.
    Hurry!
    I reached for the
dial.   My hand held it still.   “I’m trying,” I whispered aloud.
    Try harder.   Maybe they’ll look around your living room for a few minutes or poke
around in the office, sack your drawers and grab the laptop.   But then they’ll go upstairs.   And they’ll look in the bedrooms.
    Zero.   Five.   Two.
    These motherfuckers have overrun your
perimeter.   What do you think’s going to
happen when they find your wife sleeping in her underwear?
    Four.   Seven.
    MOVE YOUR ASS!
    “I am!”   I whimpered now, tears streaming down my
cheeks as my trembling hands worked the dial.   On the final seven, the tumblers clicked and I twisted the handle,
pulling open the fireproof door.   On the
top shelf, my and Allie’s life insurance papers shared a file folder with our
wills.   Documentation of Abby’s college
fund, the deed to our house.   Account
numbers, passwords, the entirety of our financial lives on paper.   Two boxes of Russian surplus 7.62mm
cartridges.   Standing on its stock
against the green velvet interior, the Kalashnikov.
    Come on!   Man up!
    I took the thirty-round
banana clip from its resting place beside the box of bullets.   The cartridges, copper-coated stingers
crimped into the rocket of the brass casing, gleamed in the dim light over the
bar.   The magazine contained ten rounds;
Bobby had said to always keep a loaded magazine, always, because you won’t