The Dispatcher Read online

  Ian blinks.

  In the next moment Beatrice is sitting in the truck and the door is shut and Henry Dean is halfway up the steps leading to the house.

  What’s happened to time? Someone broke time.

  I need my gun. I can get him if I can get to my gun.

  He rolls in the other direction. It hurts and the sharp points of stones dig into his back. He looks for his gun. There it is, just over three feet away; within reach, if he’s lucky. He puts his arm out toward it, fingers stretched. His fingers touch it. He pulls it toward him. Then wraps his hand around it. He rolls back toward the house.

  Henry Dean is now dragging Maggie out the front door of the house. She is pale and thin and her nose is bleeding, but it is Maggie. His daughter. She’s so grown up. Practically a woman. And that man with his hand clutching her wrist stole her from him and stole her childhood.

  Ian raises the gun in his hand.

  But Henry Dean sees him and pulls Maggie to him and lifts her and uses her as a shield. She tries to pry his hands away, but cannot manage it. Blood drips from her nose and onto the man’s large arms.

  ‘You gonna shoot your own daughter, Hunt?’

  Ian tries to aim at the man’s legs, to shoot them out from under him, but his hand is too shaky, and he is afraid of hitting Maggie. He would never forgive himself for that.

  The man walks toward him, using Maggie as a shield, and once he’s close enough, he kicks the gun away.

  ‘Help me, Daddy! Daddy!’

  She reaches for him and a bloody snot bubble grows in her left nostril and pops. Tears stream down her face. Her teeth have blood on them.

  Ian reaches for her.

  ‘Baby,’ he says. ‘My Maggie.’

  But then a boot swings toward him at great speed, a blur of motion, and kicks him in the face. Hello, darkness.

  He comes to to the sound of that punctured-tire wheeze. That strange sound of air leaking from his chest. The pain is greater now, overwhelming. Something in his chest feels closed off. Like a door slammed shut. He cannot seem to breathe.

  His eyes are open and staring at the back tire of his car. Rust and splattered mud. And beyond his car is Chief Davis’s car. And in Chief Davis’s car is a radio. He turns over on all fours. He grabs the rear bumper of his car and pushes himself to his feet. Chief Davis’s car is only twenty feet away. If he can get to it everything will be fine. Thompson is working the phones and if he can get to the radio everything will be fine. He takes a step and his knees buckle and he falls. First to his knees, then to his side.

  Thompson is working the phones.

  He has a phone.

  He reaches into his pocket for his cell phone. He can feel it. He doesn’t need to get to the car. He can just call nine-one-one. He’s never been on this end of an emergency call. If he can get Thompson on the line everything will be okay.

  Everything will be fine.

  Henry throws Maggie into the truck and gets in after her. She looks through the back window at her daddy. She hasn’t seen him in forever and there he is. He’s lying on the gravel. He’s on his right side and his chest is bleeding and his head is tilted down to the gravel and red blood is flowing from his nose and down his face and his eyes are closed. He isn’t moving at all. His right arm is stretched out before him. It’s flat on the gravel, palm up. Several feet from it is a gun. Maggie wishes he would pick it up and shoot out one of the truck tires. He could still stop Henry. Unless he’s dead. He isn’t moving.

  ‘Sit down, you little bitch,’ Henry says. He grabs her by the shoulder and shoves her down into a sitting position.

  The truck roars around in a half circle, spitting gravel, and heads out of the driveway. Past a man with no face. A policeman with no face. She can tell by the uniform that he’s a policeman, but he has no face. And past another policeman whose chest is a red bowl filled with a thick black liquid that can only be blood.

  ‘Henry, I’m bleeding,’ Beatrice says.

  ‘I know it, Bee.’

  ‘Why am I bleeding? What happened?’

  ‘Not now.’

  ‘But why am I—’

  ‘Not now. Just hush up. I need to think.’

  The truck screeches out to Crouch Avenue, burning black rubber onto the ancient gray asphalt as it hooks right.

  ‘But why am I bleeding?’

  ‘Would you shut the ever-loving fuck up?’

  ‘Oh,’ Beatrice says. ‘Okay. Sorry.’

  She looks out the window.

  Maggie looks down at Beatrice’s right ankle. It is sliced open and pouring blood. The blood is pooling on the floorboard. It makes Maggie sick to look at, but she can’t look away. She almost escaped.

  ‘Fuck,’ Henry says.

  Maggie looks at him, but he’s staring straight ahead.

  In another five minutes they’re headed west on Interstate 10.

  Diego rolls down the driveway, dread heavy upon him. Based on the call Ian made, things went bad, very bad, and he’s anticipating some ugliness. But a moment later, as he rounds the last turn in the driveway and is facing it, he knows he wasn’t ready for it. He was not at all ready for this kind of ugliness. There’s an ambulance on the way, but he radios for a second before he steps from the car.

  Chief Davis lies on the blood-soaked gravel with a missing face. The fingers on his left hand twitch spasmodically, but Diego cannot tell whether the man is conscious and trying to accomplish some goal or if the movement is merely the result of his dying brain emitting a last few electric impulses before going silent as stone.

  A few feet beyond him lies Bill Finch. He is flat on his back. His chest is concaved and filled with blood, air bubbles rising from within him and popping on the dark surface. His open eyes stare at the blue sky. The wide open blue sky, lighted by a white sun.

  He does not move at all.

  Nor does Ian, further down the driveway, lying on his back with a cell phone in his hand and a bullet hole in his chest. His eyes are open, red-rimmed slits in a pale face translucent with exhaustion and clenched into a grimace. He is looking at Diego. Beside him, in a pool of blood, lies a dead dog.

  ‘Ian, what the hell happened here?’

  ‘I think they’re dead.’ Barely a whisper.

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Not . . . dead.’

  Diego nods, then walks toward Chief Davis and looks down at the man. His face ends just below his upper lip in a line of shattered teeth like the serrated edge of a bread knife. Diego could toe the roof of the man’s mouth if he wanted to. He does not want to. The skin on the upper part of Chief Davis’s face has been wiped off completely, and one eye is gone, replaced by a steak-red hollow, half-filled with black liquid. The other eye, brown and alive with fear and pain, shifts toward Diego, and Diego has to fight the urge to step back from him.

  ‘Ambulance is on the way, Chief.’

  A gurgle from the hole at the back of his throat. A slow ooze of blood runs down onto his neck and is soaked up by the collar of his shirt.

  ‘You’re not gonna die.’

  Another gurgle.

  Chief Davis’s eye twitches left, toward his hand. His ring finger twitches.

  ‘Betty knows you love her, Chief. I’ve got to check on the others.’

  Diego steps away from him. He walks to Bill Finch, and though he’s never liked the man—he stole a friend’s wife—he likes the blank stare he’s throwing at the sky even less.

  Diego leans down.

  ‘Bill?’

  Silence. His chest neither rises nor falls. There is no movement in his extremities. No sound escapes his throat. What now lies before Diego is nothing more than a wax replica of a man he once knew.

  ‘Dead?’

  Diego nods.

  Ian closes his eyes and lets his head rest on the gravel.

  ‘You okay, Ian?’

  No response.

  Diego turns in a circle, feeling helpless and overwhelmed, and falls to a sitting position in the middle of th
e driveway as in the distance sirens wail.

  Paramedics load Ian and Chief Davis into ambulances and declare William Francis Finch Jr, age forty-two, survived by wife and two children, dead. Diego wonders if he should call Debbie. It might be better to hear it from a friendly voice than from Sheriff Sizemore. The thought of having to put those words into the air makes him sick. Your husband is dead. With four words a world destroyed. And she’s already been through so much. He reaches for his cell phone. He has to call her. She’ll need a sympathetic ear.

  But before he can dial, Henry’s brother Donald is coming down the driveway in a primer-gray El Camino with an expressionless expression on his face: blank as unmarked paper. He passes the ambulances as they wail their way out to Crouch Avenue and then the Mencken Regional Medical Center. The car comes to a stop behind Diego’s and Donald steps out.

  ‘What the hell—’

  Diego walks up to him, grabs him by the arm, and leads him to his car. He yanks open the back door. He shoves Donald toward it. ‘Get in.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Get in the fucking car.’

  ‘Am I under arrest?’

  ‘Do you want to be?’

  Donald looks at him over his shoulder for a moment, tonguing the inside of his cheek. And he must see the scene behind Diego as well: blood and bone splattered across the driveway, several police cars, a covered dead body, a dead dog. And the absences: Henry’s truck and the man himself. He must be able to piece at least some of it together. After a moment he nods and steps into the back of the car.

  Diego waits till he pulls in his left leg and slams the door shut on him.

  ‘I don’t know anything about it.’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Are you and your brother close?’

  ‘He’s twenty years older than me. Old enough to be my father.’

  ‘That’s not an answer.’

  ‘No, we’ve never been close.’

  ‘But you eat dinner at his house.’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘You eat a lot of dinners with people you don’t like?’

  ‘I didn’t say I didn’t like him. I said we weren’t close. And except on weekends he ain’t there anyway.’

  ‘But you eat dinner at his house.’

  ‘Yeah, sometimes. I already said I do.’

  ‘Ever notice anything unusual?’

  ‘Unusual like what?’

  ‘Unusual like unusual. Use your brain.’

  ‘Henry and Bee have always been unusual.’

  ‘Like how?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Donald scratches at his beard stubble. ‘Look, if you’re asking if I ever noticed anything criminal, the answer is no. I haven’t.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You never suspected they had a third person in their house?’

  ‘I don’t know. I guess not.’

  ‘Don’t guess.’

  ‘I never thought about it.’

  ‘Well, think about it now.’

  ‘No. I mean, I seen kid stuff around now and then, but I guess I thought it was from their own kid.’

  ‘They had a kid?’

  ‘Died over twelve years ago.’

  Diego scratches his cheek. He remembers hearing this story before, maybe at Roberta’s, but he’s only spoken to Henry half a dozen times over the years, so it didn’t mean much to him—till now. ‘Boy or girl?’

  ‘Girl.’

  ‘How old was she?’

  ‘Not even one.’

  ‘How’d she die?’

  ‘Drowned in the tub.’

  ‘You only saw kid stuff that could belong to an infant?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘We’re searching the house.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And if we find stuff all over the house for a teenager we’ll know you’re lying.’

  ‘I know it. I’m not lying. I never thought about it.’

  ‘You don’t do much thinking, do you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t seem to know much either.’

  Donald shrugs and exhales through his nostrils.

  ‘You never heard any noise?’

  ‘Not that I noticed.’

  ‘You really expect me to believe you lived in a trailer not twenty yards from Henry and Beatrice, that you ate dinner there sometimes, and you never had any idea that for seven years they were holding someone captive? That’s what you want me to believe?’

  ‘It’s the truth.’

  ‘And you don’t know where he might be headed?’

  ‘I already told you like an hour ago.’

  ‘And if you told the truth you should be able to remember what you said.’

  ‘I said I didn’t know but if I had to guess, Juarez by way of El Paso.’

  ‘Is your brother that fucking stupid?’

  ‘Well, he ain’t a Mensa member.’

  ‘But you think he’s dumb enough to try to cross a border with every cop in the state looking for him?’

  ‘I don’t know. It was just a guess.’

  ‘A pretty shit one. Your brother’s not that stupid and you know it.’

  A knock at the door, and then it squeaks open.

  Diego looks over his shoulder. Sheriff Sizemore pokes his Stetson-topped head into the room. He wipes at his mouth with his palm.

  ‘Officer Diego.’

  ‘It’s Officer Peña.’

  ‘Let’s talk.’

  Diego nods, then gets to his feet and follows the sheriff out into the empty front room of the police station, making sure the door is locked on the younger Dean brother.

  ‘What is it, sheriff?’

  ‘You’ve been going in circles for over an hour.’

  ‘I know, but he’ll slip. I’m wearing him down.’

  ‘Look, this is our case. A county case. You don’t have the resources. I agreed to the hour outta courtesy for what happened to Officer Hunt’s daughter. For what happened to the chief. I know it means something to you guys. And, yeah, I thought maybe you’d be able to get something we could use. But one of ours got shot too, died, and the fucking hour is up, Officer Diego.’

  ‘Officer Peña. And I just need another thirty minutes.’

  ‘You can’t have it.’

  ‘I can’t have it?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Well, what the fuck?’

  The sheriff shrugs, seeming suddenly bored by the conversation. ‘That’s just the way it is,’ he says. ‘I got a manhunt going on and I’m done letting you dance in circles with our only possible source of information.’

  Diego watches Sheriff Sizemore lead the younger Dean to the back of his car and put him into it. Then Sizemore looks back at Diego and nods. Diego does not nod back. Sizemore gets into his vehicle and drives way, taking Donald to the sheriff’s office down the street.

  Diego tries to roll a cigarette, but his hands are shaky. He cannot seem to keep the tobacco in his paper. It shakes from the paper and falls to the asphalt. Finally, after his third try, he balls the rolling paper in his fist and throws it to the ground. He turns around and heads inside.

  Didn’t really want a cigarette, anyway.

  Picture a calm sea of oily black. Horizon to horizon: only this sea, flat and featureless. An entire planet covered in liquid midnight. A moon overhead like a silver dollar, and a few stars, but nothing more. There are no islands or trees. No fish or whales. Just a dead calm. Nothing other than one man floating on his back in the middle of it: Ian. Ian, floating in darkness. Arms and legs spread like the Vitruvian Man. Eyes open. He looks toward the heavens expecting God, but all he gets is the voice of the darkness between the stars: a hollow call like a desert wind.

  Then something touches his left hand. Someone touches his left hand. It is human. He is not alone. He tries to turn his head to the left but he cannot. Someone is stroking the web between thumb and index finger.
/>   He doesn’t understand why he can’t turn his head to the left.

  Open your eyes.

  They are open: the moon like a silver dollar and the points of stars.

  Open your eyes.

  He does and the night sky gives way to a white ceiling, first out of focus and soft, then gaining sharpness. He blinks several times and turns his head to the left.

  Debbie looks up from her lap. Her face is thin. She looks old, somehow, and tired. He has never thought that of her before, but he thinks it now. She is not wearing makeup and her eyes are red and the skin beneath them is blotchy and dark gray and the corners of her mouth are turned down.

  ‘Hi,’ he says, but it is little more than a whisper.

  She says nothing at first, just looks at him. She wipes her nose, her red-rimmed nostrils, with the back of her wrist. Finally: ‘Bill’s dead.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Then he coughs, and there is that strange feeling like trying to breathe underwater. He coughs and coughs, and feels like phlegm or something should come up, but nothing does. His muscles tighten as he coughs and pain ripples through his body from the dropped-pebble point where the bullet said hello. He hears a strange liquid sucking sound from beneath a thin blanket which covers his torso. He lifts the blanket. A clear tube, a catheter about as big around as a woman’s pinky finger, sutured into his chest just under his armpit. Thread stitched through his flesh and then wrapped around the catheter to hold it into place. The skin pursed around it like lips around a straw, like some strange alien tulip. In the tube, blood and pus combined to form a thick pink liquid. A knot of it flows down the catheter to a small box on the floor with PLEUR-EVAC written on it.

  He coughs again, and more liquid flows from his chest and into the tube. It hurts to cough. It hurts even to breathe.

  ‘Jesus,’ he says when he gets his breath back.

  ‘You were shot.’

  After a moment, after he manages to get his breath back, he says, ‘I know.’

  ‘You had a collapsed lung.’

  Ian nods.

  Debbie frowns and looks down at her lap once more.