Free Termination Man: a novel by Edward Trimnell

sons. Laurie was pretty but she was also tough. A lot of the local boys admired her from afar, but only a few had the guts to ask her out. She used to have this disdainful stare that would quickly send the more timid ones packing. Laurie could hold her own with anyone, even in our tough neighborhood.
    I think that this was the source of our camaraderie. I idolized Laurie as I might have idolized an older brother. ( Though I would never have told her this, not in a million years. ) Laurie was a fighter.
    But Laurie had not been strong enough to stop a bullet. She had been working nights and weekends at a local convenience store when she was shot. This was a year after her graduation from high school. Laurie was nineteen and she had almost scraped together enough money to begin classes at Wright State University. She had already been accepted. She had wanted to become an engineer.
    Laurie would later tell me that she had known something was wrong when the young man in the ski mask entered the store. To begin with, it was July and the weather was sweltering. Who wears a ski mask in the middle of summer? The clock had read 12:42 a.m. Laurie remembered this because she had just checked the time when the robber appeared. Less than an hour had remained on her shift.
    She could remember the young man's demand for money, and she could remember reaching beneath the counter to press the silent robbery alarm button, the one that simultaneously contacted a private security company and the Dayton Police Department.
    She could not recall the shooting itself. Her doctors said that this was common; victims of violence were frequently unable to remember the last moments leading up to their attacks. “I remember thinking, ‘I've got to activate the alarm,’” Laurie told me. “And then I just freaking blanked out.”
    Laurie’s shooting prompted a widespread public outcry about the problems of crime and inner-city violence—along with a lot of handwringing about the decline of American youth. Laurie’s tragedy seemed perfect for a made-for-television drama: The bright, ambitious young woman who is struck down in her prime by a senseless act of violence. The local media took the bait. For a while the Dayton Daily News practically adopted her, running weekly updates on her condition as she lay in the hospital. The newspaper and a local Dayton television station also promoted numerous fund-raising events that various local organizations held to defray her mounting medical expenses.
    My family mostly appreciated the attention and the public sympathy. For a while it had seemed that that entire world was united to help Laurie; but fresh news stories and fresh tragedies inevitably crowded her out. Laurie was shot in mid-July, and by mid-September the rest of the world had moved on. But not us—and certainly not Laurie. We couldn’t move on.
    Nor were we able to see justice done. The young man who shot Laurie had come from the predictable background of a fatherless household headed by a shiftless, drug-using mother. We never saw him punished for what he did to my sister. He was killed in a drive-by shooting two weeks after he had shot Laurie, while the police were still hunting him.
    “What are you looking at, bub?” Laurie asked. “Did I spring a third ear, or something?”
    It occurred to me just then that I had been staring at her, lost in my own memories.
    “No third ear that I can see,” I said. “I’ve had a long drive, that’s all.”
    “You’re getting old, Little Brother.”
    This from a thirty-seven year-old woman who had spent the better part of two decades in a wheelchair.  You could still see traces of the old Laurie sometimes, a spark here and there. But eighteen years of being confined to a wheelchair had taken their toll. I could tell that a lot of her banter was contrived, an act put on for my benefit. Nevertheless, I admired the way Laurie handled her disability. God knows I would have had trouble getting out of