“Have you ever wondered… why this keeps happening to you?”
“I have,” I confessed.
“Any ideas? Has anybody else weighed in on this, maybe noticed that really bad things seem to keep happening to you?”
“Well…” I began.
Dr. Koenig waited.
“There’s the Bald Man,” I said. “I’ve had a… vision, I guess. I don’t know what else to call it. It’s an image so strong that the closest thing I can compare it to is a memory—so I’m thinking it’s something I’ve seen in my nightmares.”
He leaned forward. For the first time today, I’d caught his interest. He had looked bored as I related my Chuck Norris, Bruce Willis, Steven Seagall-esque throwdown in Durham, but now that I wanted to talk about dreams, he was all ears. “What did you see?”
I swallowed. My throat had suddenly gone dry.
“A room,” I said. “Dark. There’s light, but not much—it’s like there’s something coming through drawn curtains, just enough to show you the outlines but not the details. There’s a man and there’s a table—dining room table—and there’s another man laying on it. The one standing…”
Something moved outside the picture window. My head snapped sideways to look, but it had only been the wind ruffling the bushes.
“The one standing is the Bald Man,” I went on. “And he’s bent over the one on the table. Breathing into his mouth.”
Lines had developed in Dr. Koenig’s expansive brow, that zone that stretched all the way to the back of his head. I had his attention today. Oh, yes I did.
“And the one on the table sits up. The Bald Man made him. To send after me.”
“A golem,” Dr. Koenig said quietly.
“What do all the guys I’ve killed have in common?”
He sat up a little straighter, taken aback that I’d asked him a question instead of the other way around. Wary, probably, of getting drawn into my silliness. He thought for a moment, studied me, cocked his head thoughtfully. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “Why don’t you tell me?”
“Nobody knows who they are,” I said. “Nobody knows who they are because they are nobody. They’re golems. They were made, not born. And they were made by that bald motherfucker for the sole purpose of coming after me.”
“You don’t think the girl in Durham was their target. You think you were.”
“I do,” I said with a nod. “I do think that.”
“So why didn’t they just…” he paused and looked up at the ceiling, thinking. “…kill you? They could have hid in the shadows, waited for you to pass, and jumped you from behind. Right?”
I pursed my lips and breathed through my nose.
“And if this… Bald Man… really wanted to get you, why doesn’t he send his minions after Allie and Abby when you’re not home? If he really wanted to hurt you, it seems like that would be a great way to do it.”
I stared at him.
“Because it’s about me,” I said.
“But why not go after your wife and your child? This idea doesn’t make any sense.”
“It makes perfect sense,” I said. I stood up, approached the picture window. The bench, cold and hard and empty, sat like a gravestone in the courtyard. Out there, somewhere in the darkness, the Bald Man plotted his next move against me. And I thought I understood his goals now. “He wants to get me, but more than that he wants to overpower me. He wants to show me that I’m nothing special, that I’m not a hero, that he can prevail against me. If he just knocks off my wife and my kid when I’m nowhere around, what does that prove? Nothing. Nobody could prevent that.”
I bit my lip.
“That night with Pinnix and Ramseur, I could have crawled out through the basement door and run away. In the parking lot at the office, I could have handed my wallet and my keys over and let the guy stab me to death. In Durham, I could have walked away and let those guys rape that girl.”
Dr. Koenig’s reflection in the picture window wasn’t writing. He sat motionless in his chair, staring at me where I stood with my hands folded behind my back like a general of Napoleonic times.
“He wants to show that I’m a pussy,” I said. “He wants to make me into a bitch.”
26.
As it turned out, I didn’t have to go far to find a neurologist.
Dr. Jeffrey Wingrove, M.D., respected practitioner of neurology and alumnus of Duke University Medical School, caught his wife cheating on him at roughly the same time as I was planting a knife in the chest of an unknown mugger. Mrs. Wingrove had forgotten to log out of her Gmail account before leaving for dinner with some of her girlfriends. According to Dr. Wingrove, her laptop had fallen asleep on the kitchen table, but he’d bumped into it when he came home from the hospital that night—late, as always—and the screen woke up. Whereupon it showed him evidence of a long email exchange between his wife and a professor at Elon University, where she worked in administration.
“It just woke up?” I asked in our consultation. “Are you sure you didn’t… hack into it?”
“Oh, yes,” he said with a rueful laugh. Dr. Wingrove was silver-haired, fifty years old. This was his second marriage. His first had ended with him running around on that wife with—drumroll, please—the current Mrs. Wingrove. “I ran into the table and it just popped up there. Like God wanted me to see it.”
Mrs. Wingrove, Dr. Wingrove discovered, could not wait to SUCK the professor’s GIGANTIC COCK. She wanted the naughty scholar to RAM IT UP INSIDE OF HER AGAIN AND AGAIN and to FUCK HER like she’d NEVER BEEN FUCKED BEFORE. All that would have been bad enough, but said professor had treated Mrs. Wingrove to several pictures of the gigantic cock in question. Another email made reference to a recent tryst at the Red Carpet Inn…
“The one down on the interstate…” I began.
“Yeah,” said Dr. Wingrove, cutting me off. “Twenty-nine dollars a night. She paid for the room. With my credit card.”
So Dr. Wingrove did what any self-respecting man of medicine would do. He jumped in his Mercedes, drove the five minutes it took to get to the restaurant from his palatial home in West Burlington, stormed inside and slapped Mrs. Wingrove across the face. Right in front of the waitress.
“Front hand or back hand?” I asked.
“Both.”
He called her a whore; he called her a bitch; he called her worthless and announced that she’d burn in Hell for all that she’d done. True, yes, but it didn’t stop him from getting arrested on his way out of the parking lot. He came to Carwood Allison for the services of Craig Montero in relation to the criminal charges and me in connection with the divorce case. And Mrs. Wingrove’s action for a domestic violence protective order under Chapter 50B.
On the day of Dr. Wingrove’s 50B hearing, we sat in the attorney-client conference room on the second floor of the courthouse. I needed to concentrate on his case, but I couldn’t. Because of the Bald Man.
“If you don’t mind,” I said, “I’d like to ask you a question. Completely off-topic. Send me a bill for a consultation if you want.”
The silver-haired fox smiled. “Shoot.”
“A man gets hit on the head with a baseball bat…”
“How hard?”
“Hard enough to knock him out. How likely is it that he wakes up thirty seconds later and is able to climb a set of stairs and operate an assault rifle?”
Dr. Wingrove whistled. He didn’t look like a doctor today; he had eschewed the white lab coat he wore at Alamance Regional Medical Center in favor of a charcoal gray suit woven so tightly that it seemed almost shiny, like his hair. The whitest collar God ever created surrounded his neck. “Depends; is it a direct hit, or more of a glancing blow?”