Depends on how many short sounds you need.

You could make a soundfont and use a small keyboard to trigger from the laptop. Then you can assign any sample to any MIDI note.

Most sample players would allow this.

Or you could use a real keyboard/synth. Many allow loading wave files via USB and creating patches (like drums) that assign different samples to different notes.

Or maybe even set your system to use a certain software as default for sounding wave files and create a bunch of keyboard shortcuts to open given wave files.
This last one would likely have a delay before sounding though.

I do not work here, but the benefits are still awesome
Make your sound your own!