The Dispatcher

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  A PENGUIN MYSTERY

  THE DISPATCHER

  Ryan David Jahn grew up in Arizona, Texas, and California. He left school at sixteen to work in a record store and subsequently joined the army. Since 2004 he has worked in television and film. His first novel, Good Neighbors, won the Crime Writers’ Association John Creasy (New Blood) Dagger Award. Jahn lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Mary.

  Acclaim from the UK for The Dispatcher

  “Reads at a cracking pace [and] is a one-sitting, fist-in-mouth read.”

  —The Guardian

  “A cross between Richard Ford and James Patterson . . . I guarantee that if you pick this up, then everything else in your life will immediately be pushed to the margins, and when you’ve finished you’ll resurface . . . dazed, confused and with a thin layer of cold sweat on the back of your neck. . . . If you only read one book tomorrow, make it this one.”

  —Dylan Jones, editor of GQ, in The Mail on Sunday

  “Jahn is the fastest rising star in the ever-competitive crime fiction world. . . . He is more a poet than a disciple of the hard-boiled, giving us one brutally swift, ultra-smart line after another. The characters live and breathe in all their wickedness, helplessness or determination. And then there are the plots . . . talk about page-turning.”

  —Daily Mirror, Book of the Week

  “A nerve-shredding thriller with plenty of energy and a tight plot.”

  —Big Issue

  “Over the past few years a new generation of crime writers has come perilously close to re-creating the jaded mind-set of the classic noir thrillers, but no one has succeeded quite like Jahn. . . . [He] leads the new noir pack with a series of palm-sweating situations that pay homage to the classics of the genre while feeling entirely fresh.”

  —Financial Times

  “Tense, thrilling. Jahn has written a real page-turner, well crafted with convincing characters and an involving plot.”

  —We Love This Book

  “Near pitch-perfect . . . Jahn’s clipped and economical prose is to the bone, much like the impact of the bullets of which he writes. . . . This is human life as we dare not imagine it can be, packaged in an adrenaline-pumped storyline and one that will leave you with your lower jaw resting on your chest. I don’t believe anyone else is offering Jahn’s insight and style of writing today. . . . Do try him out and make sure you allocate sufficient hours to read in one sitting. This continues to be outstanding work from Jahn.”

  —Rhian Davies, It’s a Crime!

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in Great Britain by Pan Macmillan,

  a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2011

  Published in Penguin Books 2011

  Copyright © Ryan David Jahn, 2011

  All rights reserved

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt

  from “Cascando” from Collected Poems in English and French by Samuel Beckett.

  Copyright © 1977 by Samuel Beckett. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

  Publisher’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product

  of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,

  living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Jahn, Ryan David.

  The dispatcher / Ryan David Jahn.

  p. cm.

  ISBN : 978-1-101-55931-4

  1. Police dispatchers—Fiction. 2. Kidnapping—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3560.A356D 57 2011

  813’.54—dc23

  2011039306

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means

  without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only

  authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy

  of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For my father

  THOMAS NATHAN JAHN

  1949–2004

  Author’s Note

  Bulls Mouth, Texas, does not exist, nor does Tonkawa County, in which it is supposed to be nested. None of the people who populate Bulls Mouth are based on people who populate the real world. While most of the other towns and cities mentioned are real, or based on real places, this novel and accurate cartography are not close friends. They’re barely acquaintances. In all instances where the story’s demands conflicted with reality, reality came out the loser.

  This book, like my first two, was edited by Will Atkins, who helped me cut fifty pages while simultaneously improving all those that remained. In a just world his name would have a place on the cover. Unfortunately, this is not a just world, so he’ll have to settle for my heartfelt thanks.

  Also due thanks are Mary (always), Seán Costello, Sophie Portas, Sandra Taylor, and everyone at Macmillan.

  Finally, thanks to you—for reading.

  RDJ

  July 2011

  If you do not love me I shall not be loved

  If I do not love you I shall not love.

  Samuel Beckett

  What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  ONE

  Ian Hunt is less than an hour from the end of his shift when he gets the call from his dead daughter. It’s been over seven years since he last heard her voice, and she was a different person back then, a seven-year-old girl with pudgy hands and a missing front tooth and green eyes that could break your heart if she wanted them to, so at first he doesn’t know it’s her.

  But it is.

  He’s sitting in the dispatch office in the Bulls Mouth, Texas, police station on Crouch Avenue, which, as usual, he’s got to himself, though he’s sure if he were to poke his head into the front room he’d see Chief Davis leaning back in his chair with his feet up on his desk and his Stetson tipped down over his eyes. An ancient swamp cooler rattles away in the window to his left, dripping water onto the moldy carpet beneath it, though the July heat doesn’t seem much intimidated by its efforts. Sweat rolls down the side of his face and he tilts his head sideways and rubs the trickle away on the shoulder of his uniform shirt.
He clicks through a game of solitaire on the computer-assisted dispatch system on the desk in front of him. If folks in town knew this was how he spent ninety-five percent of his time they’d shit.

  But Bulls Mouth just isn’t a big town. Three thousand people if you count everyone in the surrounding area, including the end-timers, revelators, ,snake-handlers ,speed-cookers, dropouts, and junkies, and he supposes you have to count them. Bulls Mouth PD handles their calls.

  Despite being the very definition of a small town, Bulls Mouth is the second largest city in Tonkawa County, making up a quarter of its population.

  He picks up his coffee mug and takes a swallow of the cold slop within. Grimaces as it goes down, but still takes a second swallow. He must drink three pots of Folgers a day, pouring one cup after another down his throat as he clicks through his hundred games of solitaire.

  He’s just setting down the cup when the call comes in from a pay phone on Main Street, just north of Flatland Avenue. Probably a prank call. In this day of cell phones, calls from pay phones almost always are. Fuck-off punk high-schoolers trying to chase away midsummer boredom with a little trouble. Growing up in Venice Beach, California, he did the same thing, so he can’t really hold it against them.

  ‘Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?’ he says into his headset, fingers hovering over a black keyboard, ready to punch in information.

  ‘Please help me!’

  The voice belongs to either a girl or a woman, it’s impossible to tell which, and it is trembling with panic and out of breath. The girl/woman is gasping into the receiver, which is crackling in his ear like there’s a heavy wind, and high-pitched squeaks escape the back of her throat. If it’s a prank call the person on the other end of the line is the best pretender he’s ever dealt with.

  ‘Please, ma’am, try to remain calm, and tell me what the problem is.’

  ‘He’s coming after me. He’s—’

  ‘What’s your name and who’s coming after you?’

  ‘My name is Sarah. Wait, no. No. My name is Maggie, Maggie Hunt, and the man who’s . . . I was . . . he’s . . . he’s—’

  As soon as he hears the name, Maggie Hunt, Ian’s lips go numb, and like a low note plucked on a taut metal cord running through his middle, a strange vibration ripples through him. Nausea in F-sharp minor.

  He swallows.

  ‘Maggie?’ He inhales through his nostrils and exhales through his mouth in a long trembling sigh. ‘Maggie,’ he says, ‘it’s Daddy.’

  The funeral was in May, two months ago now. At first he didn’t want to have it. He thought it an absurd and ritualistic way of burying a past that was still, and is still, very much alive, and you don’t bury something when its heart is still beating. But finally Debbie convinced him that she needed it done. She needed closure. Her shrink, whom she drove all the way to Houston to visit, thought she did, anyway. So they had the funeral and people came and Pastor Warden stood and spoke platitudes while behind him lay a small and empty coffin.

  But his words were as empty as the coffin was.

  People cried and sang hymns out of tune and dropped to their knees and bowed their heads and prayed. They looked at pictures of pretty little Maggie, from age zero to age seven—up to seven but never older—sitting in a high chair with cake on her face; walking for the first time; sitting before a blue background for her second-grade yearbook photo; sitting on the front step of their house at 44 Grapevine Circle with a bloody knee, a crash helmet on her head, and a wide, mischievous Cheshire grin on her face.

  If she were alive she would be turning fifteen in September.

  Ian was neither among the hymn singers nor the weepers. He sat silent in the last pew throughout it all. His back was straight, his fingers laced together, his hands resting in his lap. Though Bulls Mouth Baptist was hot, even in May, he did not move to wipe the sweat from his forehead nor that trickling down the side of his face. He sat there motionless, his mind a room without any furniture in it. He only moved when people began to walk up to him and offer their condolences. He shook their hands and said thank you and when someone tried to hug him he accepted their hugs, but he simply wanted to leave. He wanted to go home and be alone.

  After everyone else had come and gone Debbie walked over with Bill Finch. Bill was her new husband. He was also police, working out of the Tonkawa County Sheriff ’s Office in Bulls Mouth, just other side of the county jail from Bulls Mouth’s city police station, and a man who started many a jurisdictional argument with Chief Davis over even small issues the city always handled, which usually resulted in a yelling match between Davis and Sheriff Sizemore. Bill was one of only three county police regularly in Bulls Mouth. The main office was up in Mencken. The city PD handled most day-to-day policing on its own, and because of that all emergency calls in the area were filtered through Ian.

  Debbie hugged him and thanked him for agreeing to the funeral. He and Bill nodded stiff greetings at one another, but neither offered a hand to shake. Then they went their separate ways. Debbie and Bill headed to their house and their twins, now three, and their two dogs and their backyard with its above-ground swimming pool. Ian to his apartment on College Avenue and his buzzing refrigerator and his piles of regrets.

  ‘Daddy?’ Maggie says.

  ‘I—I’m here . . . I’m right here,’ he says after a moment during which speaking seems impossible. Then he realizes he has a job to do: ‘Tell me where you are. Are you on Main Street?’

  Sometimes the location that comes up on the CAD system is incorrect. If someone is coming for his daughter he wants to make sure he’s sending a unit to the right place.

  ‘I don’t know. I need help.’

  ‘I know, Maggie. Help’s coming. But I need to know where you are. Do you see any street signs? Any store names?’

  There is a pause. It seems to stretch on forever. Continents sink into the empty space. Then: ‘Yeah. It’s Main Street. The Main Street shopping center.’

  Two months ago she was dead. Her headstone even now is planted in Hillside Cemetery just other side of Wallace Street. Row 17, plot 29. But there is no one in the earth beneath it. The person who in another world would be there is now standing in front of the Main Street shopping center with a telephone to her ear.

  And she must be alive because Ian can hear her breathing.

  ‘Good girl. The man who kidnapped you, what does he look like?’

  ‘He’s . . . he’s big,’ she says, ‘as big as you, maybe bigger, and he’s old. Like a grandpa. And balding. His head is shiny on top. And his nose, it’s . . . it’s like all these broken veins and . . . oh God, Daddy, he’s coming!’

  His heart is in his throat; he swallows it back so that he can get words out.

  ‘What are you wearing?’

  ‘What? He’s coming!’

  ‘What are you wearing, Mags?’

  ‘A dress. A blue dress with pink flowers.’

  ‘Do you know the man’s name?’

  ‘It’s H—’

  But that is all and that is it. That followed by a scream.

  Ian can hear the phone on the other end bang against something as it swings on its cord. It bangs again and again as it swings, the space between each percussive thump longer than the one before until the final thump does not arrive and the space is infinite.

  Maggie escapes only because of an open door.

  If it weren’t for that door being left open she would never have tried to get out. Years of imprisonment have caused whatever hope she once felt to grow cold inside her, and now she does not feel it at all. She has not felt it for a very long time. She doesn’t know if it’s there anymore. Maybe it is: some small spark.

  Days and nights she spends in this miserable concrete-walled basement. She is alive but below ground all the same. Buried. Trapped in what she has always thought of as the Nightmare World. Trapped with its moist stink. Trapped with its seemingly living shadows. Trapped with nothing but her thoughts to keep her company.

  An
d sometimes Borden. She’d been here for several days when she first saw him. He was hiding in the shadows, a small, skinny boy in Chuck Taylors and Levis and a red button-up shirt tucked into his pants. He did not have the face of a boy, though. He had a shiny brown coat covering his face between forelock and muzzle and a black mane and shining black horse’s eyes and flaring nostrils and large square teeth. Maggie was afraid of him at first, but her loneliness was stronger than her fear. Now he is the only friend she has.

  He doesn’t talk about how he got here, and Maggie is the only one who knows he’s here at all. He hides when anyone opens the door at the top of the stairs, when anyone starts making their way down the wooden steps. Maggie does not hide. It would do no good. They know she’s here. They brought her here. Here to this horrible place. It is a small place, keeping you from the rest of the world. Keeping you from the sunlight and the grass and trees and playing with friends.

  The only way to remember that the rest of the world even exists is to look out a single rectangular window and see it. All you can do is look. It is too narrow for even a cat to crawl through. But the sun shines on Maggie in the morning and it is bright and warm on her skin. After noon the shadows begin to lay themselves out before her, growing long as the hour gets late. But mornings are hers.

  The window is partially covered by a few thatches of weeds growing from the ground right outside, and it is splattered with dirt. Her biggest fear is that the weeds will grow so thick that she will not be able to see outside at all, or stand in the light that cuts its way into the darkness for half the day every day. Most days. If the clouds are heavy all she gets is a hollow gray illumination that for some reason reminds her of having a cold. But this is summer and the sky is clear and the light is bright.