The Dispatcher Read online

  ‘The twins are too young to remember Bill. They’ll grow up without any memories of their father to look back on.’

  Ian is silent for a long time, lost on a strange raft of wooziness. Then what Deb said registers and he says, ‘Maybe—maybe that’s for the best. If it had to happen. Maybe you can’t miss something you don’t remember.’

  Debbie shakes her head. ‘I don’t think it works that way.’

  He squeezes Debbie’s hand. ‘I’m sorry about Bill. He made you happy. You deserve happiness.’

  Debbie nods but says nothing. Instead she turns to look at an empty chair in the corner. She looks at it for a long time.

  ‘Did they get him at least? Is Maggie safe?’

  Debbie shakes her head.

  ‘Bill’s dead, Chief Davis is in critical condition, he has no face, he’ll have to eat through a tube for the rest of his life, if he lives, and you’re here—yet that son of a bitch still has Maggie. It’s not right. It’s not fucking—’ Her voice chokes off and she looks down at her lap, and her shoulders shake.

  ‘We’ll get her back, Deb.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I don’t know, but we will. I’ll think of something.’

  He squeezes her hand again, but then another coughing fit overwhelms him, sending pain through his body like poison, and more blood and pus drain from his lung and into the catheter flowing from his chest.

  ‘Oh, fuck,’ he says. Then, once he’s caught his breath, ‘I’ll think of something. I’ll think of something and I’ll get her back.’

  ‘Do you really believe that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Debbie nods. ‘Then I’ll believe it too.’

  The sun, partially hidden behind the western horizon (looking to Maggie like a grapefruit-half laid face-down on a table), spills pink light into the evening sky. The Ford Ranger rolls along the road toward it though Maggie knows if that’s their destination they’ll never make it. This thought reminds her of a conversation she once had with her daddy. She asked him why moths like light bulbs so much and Daddy said they thought light bulbs were the moon, that moths at night used the moon for guidance and flew toward it constantly, though they never reached it, and that they did the same with light bulbs, but once they’d reached the light they had no idea what to do with it. The moon had taught them that they would never have to worry about actually reaching their destination.

  ‘That’s kind of sad,’ Maggie said.

  But Daddy just shrugged and bit the end off a cigar.

  Henry glances over her head to Beatrice. ‘How you feeling?’

  ‘I’m still bleeding. I feel dizzy. I don’t even know how I cut myself. Did you see, Sarah?’

  Maggie shakes her head and looks down at the pool of blood on the floorboard. Then she looks to Beatrice’s pale and sweaty face. She almost escaped. Beatrice collapsed as Maggie’d imagined she would, dropped like a felled tree, screamed and went down, but Maggie forgot her plan to wait for Henry and tried to run by the woman to get upstairs, and Beatrice reached out and grabbed for her. She grabbed her ankle and said, ‘Sarah, what happened?’ and Maggie went sprawling forward and hit her face on the third step and felt a strange bending in her nose, and blood flowing down her face. Everything went gray, a gray fog swept in, and by the time it cleared Henry was downstairs, helping Beatrice up the stairs and locking the door behind them as they left the basement. A moment later he came down for her, picked her up, and brought her outside where her daddy lay bloody in the gravel with a hole in his chest.

  ‘Look up yonder,’ Henry says.

  He points to a small brick house about a quarter mile from the road. A few horses graze on brown grass in the pink evening. The house looks quiet, a single window illuminated. A gray Dodge Ram pickup parked by the side of the house, under a carport made of weather-grayed four-by-fours and plywood. A tire swing dangles still and lonesome from a big oak tree in the front yard.

  ‘We’ll stop there,’ he says, ‘get you fixed up and get rid of this truck. We ain’t safe driving it.’

  ‘I still don’t understand what happened, Henry.’

  ‘I know it.’

  ‘I don’t know why we had to leave the dishes.’

  ‘We’re in some trouble with the law, Bee. I explained that already. Hell, you seen—’

  ‘I didn’t see anything.’

  ‘You seen the cops in the—’

  ‘I didn’t see nothing. I was in a lot of pain, Henry.’

  He looks at Beatrice for a long time, an unreadable expression on his face. Maggie has no idea what to make of it. Nor of the conversation itself. Beatrice must have seen the blood, she must have seen the policemen lying motionless in the driveway. You can’t not see something like that. Yet she says otherwise.

  ‘How you feeling, Sarah?’

  Maggie turns and looks at Beatrice. ‘Okay,’ she says.

  ‘You know we’ll get through this, right? You know we love you?’

  Maggie does not respond. She looks up ahead to the house they are quickly approaching. She looks at the light in the window and wonders what kind of people live within it. She imagines a cowboy hat with salt-white sweat stains on it hanging from a rack by the door. A man in dirty coveralls sitting on a couch. A woman mending socks. A baby playing in the middle of the floor wearing nothing but a cloth diaper. She wonders if they’ll be able to help her. If Henry stops there maybe she can get help. She can move her mouth silently when Henry’s looking the other direction. Help. Me. If she could just get help she would get away.

  ‘You better mind your behavior, too, Sarah, you hear?’

  Her face goes hot. She feels as if she has been somehow caught. As if he has read her mind. As if he has shuffled through her thoughts like index cards and spied everything that was written there. As Borden so often did.

  But Borden wasn’t real and Henry is.

  Real enough to shoot her daddy, to leave him bleeding to death in a gravel driveway.

  It’s her fault. If she hadn’t called him none of this would have happened. He wouldn’t have come and he wouldn’t have gotten shot. None of the policemen she saw would have gotten shot. They’d be eating dinner with their families instead of in the hospital or dead.

  ‘Sarah?’

  She looks up at Henry.

  ‘You hear me?’

  She nods.

  ‘If we go in there and take care of business and nothing goes wrong, whoever lives in that house will still be alive when we leave. But if you try any funny business, they’re dead, and you’re not any better off than when they was alive. You hear?’

  She nods again.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘You’re not really gonna kill nobody, are you, Henry?’

  ‘Quiet, Bee.’

  ‘But Henry.’

  ‘I mean it. Hush up.’

  Beatrice looks out her window.

  Henry reaches into his pocket and comes out with a kerchief. He spits on it and thrusts it toward Maggie. She takes it hesitantly, not knowing what to do with it. She can smell his spit and it makes her stomach turn.

  ‘Clean your face up,’ he says. ‘We can’t roll in looking like something from a horror movie.’

  Henry pulls off Interstate 10 and rolls down a single-lane stretch of gray asphalt. The window is cracked and though evening is coming on quick the air is still unpleasantly hot.

  He pulls to a stop in front of the brick house. A gate blocks the driveway. He steps from the truck to swing it open, so he can drive on in, but the gate is padlocked. He walks back to the truck, reaches into the open door, and honks the horn. It sounds very loud in the still evening air. He’s unsure about what he will say to whoever’s on the other side of that door, especially about what happened to Beatrice, but he’ll think of something. He usually does.

  He briefly considers tucking the Lupara into the back of his pants, but decides against it. He won’t need it. It can stay on the floor of the truck, beneath his seat, for now.

&nbs
p; The front door swings open and a man of about thirty-five, fellow looks like a scarecrow in Levis and a T-shirt, comes out to the front porch in his stocking feet. He squints at the driveway. Henry raises a hand in greeting and smiles. The skinny guy waves back, then grabs his boots from the porch by the door and slips into them, hopping around on one foot then the other as he slides each heel down into place. That done, he walks out to greet his visitors. As he approaches a dart of brown tobacco juice shoots out from between his lips with a sound like a wet fart. The spit hits the dirt in a stream and the dirt absorbs it, forming a hard bead around the liquid.

  Henry smiles and holds out his hand above the gate.

  ‘Howdy,’ he says.

  ‘Howdy,’ the man says and shakes the proffered hand. ‘You lost?’

  ‘Not hardly. Just run into a little trouble.’

  The skinny guy takes a wary step back and squints at him. ‘What kinda trouble?’

  ‘Wife got herself hurt.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah. We stopped at the side of the road so she could, well, so she could do her business, and she done fell over backwards. I laughed my ass off when I seen it—I know it ain’t nice to laugh at a fallen lady, but I done it—but turns out she cut her ankle pretty awful. Don’t even know on what. Didn’t stay to find out.’

  ‘Cut bad?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘All right, come on in.’

  He unlocks the gate and lets it swing open on its own. It slides into a well-worn groove in the driveway and stops when it hits the edge of the driveway and the grass grown tall there. Then he walks away from them and toward the house, sparing but a single look at the sun sinking behind the horizon.

  Henry wants to tell him to enjoy it; it’ll likely be his last.

  The skinny man, whose name turns out to be Flint, helps Beatrice inside and kicks a wooden chair out from the dining table and gets her sitting in it. His wife Naomi, a pretty woman in her early- or mid-twenties, paces back and forth wringing her hands and then stops and says, ‘What can I do, Flint?’

  ‘Call Doc Peterson.’

  ‘No,’ Henry says, maybe a bit too forcefully.

  Flint squints at him. ‘No?’

  ‘I . . . I’d rather we just take care of it ourselves. Ain’t so bad it requires a doctor.’

  Flint continues to squint at him for a moment, tongues the wad of tobacco tucked under his lip. He picks up a Coke can from the dining-room table and squirts a stream of brown spit into it. Then wipes at the bit that dribbled onto his chin and sets down the can.

  ‘How’d she really hurt her ankle, friend?’

  ‘Just like I said she did. You calling me a liar?’

  ‘I ain’t calling you anything.’

  ‘Sounds like you are.’

  ‘What d’you got against doctors?’

  ‘Can’t afford ’em.’

  ‘Peterson’s just a vet. Prolly won’t cost fifty bucks.’

  ‘If you got some needle and thread I’ll just stitch her up myself. Or even a fishhook and some line. Clip the barb off and it’ll work fine.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Flint says.

  ‘Can you move your ankle, Bee?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Try.’

  Beatrice straightens her leg and tries to turn her ankle. She cringes, but she manages some movement as well. ‘Yeah,’ she says.

  ‘I still think she should see a doctor,’ Flint says.

  ‘I appreciate your help and all, Flint, but this ain’t a debate.’

  Flint scratches his cheek. ‘Get my tackle box, Nam.’

  Ian puts the off-white telephone into its cradle, letting it simply slip off his fingertips and rattle to a resting position. He feels numb.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Debbie says.

  He swallows. It hurts to swallow.

  ‘Help me up,’ he says. ‘I don’t have time to lie around.’

  ‘What did Diego say?’

  ‘He said Sheriff Sizemore released Henry Dean’s little brother. Didn’t find anything incriminated him at Henry’s house or the mobile home—at least not till lab results come back—and he didn’t slip under questioning so they let him go. Told him to stay in town in case anything came up, but that’s all.’ Ian pushes the blankets off himself and puts his legs over the edge of the bed. His feet feel very cold and look very white.

  He looks around the room. ‘Do you know where my clothes are?’

  ‘Ian, you’ve been shot.’

  ‘Donald is lying. He as much as said it was his brother when I talked to him at the liquor store the day Maggie called. I should have realized it at the time. He knows something. I can’t just lie around waiting for someone to find Maggie’s mutilated body on the side of the road somewhere between here and—’

  The words are cut off by coughing. It’s a deep lung-cough that brings up blood which splatters into his palm and runs down his chin. He looks at his palm, then wipes it off on the bedding. He wipes at his chin with the back of a wrist. The pain, though constant and worsened by the coughing, is tolerable. He must still be full of painkillers. His swimming mind is evidence of that. He closes his eyes to try to center himself.

  ‘Jesus,’ he says.

  ‘You should lie back down.’

  He opens his eyes and looks to Debbie. ‘That’s not gonna happen.’

  ‘Ian.’

  ‘Do you know where my clothes are?’

  ‘They threw your clothes out. They cut your shirt off of you, and your pants were covered in blood.’

  ‘Shoes?’

  ‘Ian.’

  ‘Shoes?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Wallet? Phone?’

  She reaches into her purse and removes a clear plastic bag with a wallet, a cell phone, some loose change, a book of matches, and a watch inside. He must have left his keys in his car’s ignition.

  ‘Good,’ he says.

  He looks at the IV bag hanging from a pole by the head of the bed. The tube twisting off it, the needle stabbed into the back of his hand and taped in place. He has no idea what it is. Fuck it. He yanks the needle from his hand and scratches at the hole. A small bead of blood grows there. He smears it into the skin, then pushes himself off the bed and onto his feet. The floor is cold. His head swims. Everything goes gray and small black specks float before his eyes. For a moment he thinks he’s going to lose consciousness, but he doesn’t. He manages to hold on to it. Just.

  Once he’s sure of himself he looks at Debbie and smiles.

  ‘Your car’s in the lot, right?’

  ‘I’m not doing it.’

  ‘Do you want to get Maggie back or don’t you?’

  ‘Don’t do that. You know I do.’

  ‘Then let me get her back.’

  ‘This isn’t about that. Don’t make it about—’

  ‘That’s all this is about.’

  The car is quiet as they drive from Mencken down to Bulls Mouth. Ian looks out the window at the sun sinking into the earth. Just the top of it is visible above the horizon. He is cold and hot simultaneously. He believes he has a fever. The Pleur-evac chest drainage system sits on the floor between his feet. He can feel Debbie glancing at him as she drives but refuses to look back. If they make eye contact she might see how sick he really is. If that happens she’ll try to stop him. He will not be stopped.

  ‘You can drop me off at the police station,’ he says. ‘I reckon that’s where they moved my car to.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Whatever I have to do,’ he says.

  ‘What the hell does that mean?’

  Ian doesn’t respond. Instead he cracks the window and says, ‘Still hot out, isn’t it?’

  She pulls the car into the police station parking lot and drives around to the back where Ian’s Mustang is parked. She brings her Toyota to a stop beside it and puts the transmission into park and simply sits there. She stares straight ahead at the brick wall that is the back
of the station, both hands gripping the wheel.

  ‘I’ll get her back,’ Ian says.

  Debbie says nothing. She does not even nod. She simply continues to stare ahead.

  ‘Deb?’

  After a long moment: ‘Just go, Ian.’

  He nods and pushes the door open and steps barefoot onto the asphalt. He grabs the Pleur-evac drainage system by the handle at the top with his left hand and painfully uses his right to push himself to his feet.

  ‘My stuff.’

  She pulls the plastic bag with his things in it from her purse and hands it to him.

  ‘Thank you.’

  He’s about to slam the door home when the sound of Debbie’s voice stops him.

  ‘Ian,’ she says.

  He looks at her.

  She tilts her head up and sideways to look at him. Her eyes sparkle in the fading light.

  ‘Be safe,’ she says.

  He stares at her for a long time, but does not say anything. He doesn’t really think there’s anything to say. Instead he simply nods and pushes the door shut. He stands there and looks at her through the glass. After a moment she reaches down, slides the transmission into reverse, and backs her car out of its spot. Then she is out in the street.

  He watches the red taillights shrink as she recedes.

  Armando Gonzales is sitting at the dispatch desk and clicking through a game of computer backgammon, saying, ‘You would roll a fucking six, you cocksucker,’ when Ian glances in on him. Ian walks unnoticed past the door. He walks to Chief Davis’s desk and pulls open the top right drawer. There he finds his keys as he knew he would. Car key, apartment key, police station key, and a small fob with a mechanic’s logo and phone number printed on it. He pulls them from the drawer and pushes the drawer closed.

  Then he walks to the back of the station, past the interrogation room and the small kitchen, and into a storage room. The room is about fifteen feet wide and twelve feet deep and filled with rows of metal-framed shelves. On the shelves are boxes stacked upon boxes, loose file folders with last names scrawled upon them, stacks of photographs, orange cones, hand signs suggesting people YIELD or SLOW or STOP, yellow vests adorned with reflective tape, yellow tape for cordoning off crime scenes, Sam Browne belts, loose bottles of pepper spray, loose speed loaders for service revolvers they no longer use, old clips, handcuffs, and PR-24s. And against the wall to Ian’s left sits a locker about the size of a grandfather clock. Inside is a clutter of guns the Bulls Mouth PD has confiscated over the years.