The Dispatcher Read online

  He walks to it and unlocks it and pulls it open to take a look at what’s available: not much, as it turns out. But he does find a pump-action Remington shotgun with a six-inch barrel and the stock cut down. He grabs that and continues to look through the stockpile. He’d like something for long-distance shooting, but there’s nothing here for that purpose. He’ll just have to stop by Sally’s Gun & Rifle.

  He walks back down the hallway, shotgun in one hand, Pleur-evac system in the other. He glances in at Armando before heading out, but Armando doesn’t notice him.

  Once outside he allows himself to lean against a wall and cough. Just doing this has worn him out, and he still has a long night ahead of him.

  He pushes himself off the wall and walks to his car.

  At home, he changes into a pair of Levis and a button-up shirt, letting the catheter in his chest feed out the bottom. Then he straps a satchel over his shoulder. He extends the strap to hang as low as possible so there will be no backflow to his lung. Then he puts the Pleur-evac system into the satchel. He’s going to need both his hands free.

  Twenty minutes after arriving he leaves his apartment.

  Sally’s stays open till eight, and it’s seven forty-five when Ian pulls his Mustang into the lot on the corner of Crouch and Reservoir.

  She’s standing behind the counter, the most anomalous thing you ever saw, like a tiger sipping tea. Look at her: five feet eight inches of Italian sucker punch ready to send you into the fourth dimension, wearing a Versace dress and fuck-me pumps, lips smeared red, breasts spilling out, hips cocked to the right and waiting for someone to pull the trigger. It’s unbelievable that she owns a gun shop in Noplace, Texas, and though Ian’s asked she’s never told him how it happened.

  ‘Ian Hunt,’ she says as he walks through the door. ‘I am surprised to see you.’

  ‘The rumors of my death,’ he says, ‘are greatly exaggerated.’ He coughs into his hand, then wipes it off on his Levis. ‘Slightly exaggerated, anyway.’

  ‘How are you, honey?’

  ‘Like two hundred and twenty pounds of offal.’

  ‘Come here.’

  She walks around the counter and holds out her arms.

  ‘Be careful,’ he says as he walks to her, ‘I’m delicate right now.’

  They hug, painfully for Ian, and Sally plants a wet kiss full on his mouth.

  ‘You look good for a dead man.’

  ‘You look good, period.’

  ‘Then how come we never hooked up?’

  ‘You’d kill me, Sally. It’d be like a teddy bear trying to cuddle dynamite.’

  She laughs long and loud. ‘Then what can I do for you?’

  ‘Two things. First, I need a rifled shotgun that’ll shoot deer slugs accurate up to a hundred and fifty yards.’

  ‘Done.’

  ‘And second, I need a long-distance rifle.’

  ‘How long-distance?’

  ‘I dunno, thousand yards. Fifteen hundred.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘You got something like that?’

  Sally purses her red lips and a smile glimmers behind her eyes. ‘What kind do you want?’

  After a few minutes of discussion she decides she’ll lose a DPMS Panther .308. She sets it on the counter, beside a Remington 11-87 with a rifled barrel, and then gets out three boxes of ammunition and stacks them one on top of the other.

  ‘Are you shooting tonight?’

  Ian shakes his head. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ he says. ‘Tonight will require more intimacy than that.’

  Sally smiles. ‘Well, then, I wish I could be there.’

  ‘No,’ Ian says, thinking of his plans for the evening. ‘I don’t think you do.’

  Maggie sits at the foot of the dinner table. Across from her, at the head of the table, Henry sits hunched over his plate, fork gripped in his fist. Flint and Naomi sit side by side to her left. Beatrice to her right. They all have pieces of chicken on their plates and mounds of mashed potatoes from which slices of roasted garlic jut and piles of buttery peas. Maggie pokes at the peas with her fork, trying to only get them onto the leftmost prong. One by one she gets them onto the fork, lined up like a string of pearls. Once she has six of them skewered she sucks them off the fork one at a time.

  With a mouthful of mashed potatoes Henry says, ‘I gotta tell you guys, we sure do appreciate your hospitality, don’t we, Bee?’

  Beatrice nods, but keeps her head down and her eyes on her plate.

  ‘Not a problem,’ Flint says.

  ‘Well, it’s damn neighborly of you.’

  Flint nods.

  ‘And this is a real fine meal. Fine meal, ma’am.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Naomi says, smiling slightly before picking up a glass of Coke with cubes of ice floating in it and taking a drink. The ice clinks against the glass.

  ‘No,’ Henry says, ‘thank you.’ He picks up a chicken leg and sucks the skin off it. It flaps against his chin, smearing grease on it, before it vanishes into his mouth. Then he takes off a piece of meat and chews.

  ‘Flint made the rub for the chicken.’

  ‘Damn fine, Flint,’ Henry says through a mouthful.

  ‘I saw your tire swing,’ Maggie says.

  ‘Hush up, Sarah.’

  ‘Kids are allowed to talk at my dinner table, Henry,’ Flint says.

  The two men stare at one another for a long moment, but when Henry says nothing, Flint turns to her and smiles. ‘What was that, Sarah?’

  ‘I saw your tire swing.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  She nods. ‘Did you . . .’ she licks her lips, ‘did it come with the house?’

  ‘No, we have a six-year-old.’

  ‘Is he in bed?’

  ‘Spending the week at his grandparents’.’

  ‘Oh.’ She goes back to poking at her peas for a moment, and then looks up again. ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Samuel.’

  ‘That’s a nice name.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Flint says. ‘It’s Naomi’s dad’s name.’

  ‘Six years old?’ Henry says.

  ‘Yeah,’ Flint says coldly.

  ‘Naomi’s a little young to have a six-year-old, ain’t she?’

  ‘Naomi’s twenty-eight, Henry, not that it’s any of your business.’ He sets his fork down beside his plate. ‘You reckon you guys’ll be leaving right after dinner?’

  Henry takes another bite from his chicken leg, chews slowly, swallows. Then he sets it down on his plate and picks up a napkin from his lap and wipes his face off with it and then his hands. He sets the napkin down on his plate.

  ‘Well, no,’ he says finally. ‘I don’t guess we will be leaving right after dinner.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Why, you fart or something?’

  Maggie looks from Henry to Flint, and though neither man has said anything precisely confrontational, and though neither of them has used a tone that suggests anything but pleasantness, she can feel that something is happening: the temperature in the room has changed: the weather’s gone bad. It makes her stomach feel tight and her appetite has vanished. She looks at the two men to see what will happen next while simultaneously dreading it.

  Flint sucks at an eye tooth. ‘You know,’ he says, ‘I been awful generous with you and your family, Henry.’

  ‘I know it.’

  ‘Let me finish.’

  Henry extends an arm and bows his head slightly. ‘You may.’

  ‘I know I may. It’s my goddamn house.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re getting your panties in a bunch about, Flint. I know it’s your house. Go ahead and say what you gotta say.’

  Flints hits the table with the flat of his hand and while Maggie, Beatrice, and Naomi all jump at the sound Henry does not. Flint exhales heavily through his nostrils, closes his eyes for the length of a breath, and then opens them again. He looks at Henry.

  ‘I been generous with you and your family, Henry,’ he says, ‘but truth is, I just
ain’t comfortable with you guys staying the night. You get on the interstate and drive west another fifteen, twenty miles you’ll come across a perfectly nice motel where I’m sure they’ll be happy to put you up. If you leave after dinner you can get there before bedtime, no problem.’

  ‘Well, if it was just a matter of sleeping quarters that might be okay, but it ain’t just a matter of sleeping quarters. There’s more to it than that.’

  ‘We’ve been plenty hospitable. Whatever more there is to it ain’t my problem.’

  ‘Unfortunately, Flint, it is your problem.’ Henry reaches into his shirt pocket, pulls out a roll, thumbs a round tablet into his mouth, and chews. ‘I’m making it your problem.’ He tongues at a molar.

  ‘You’re making it my problem?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘You know what,’ Flint says, taking his napkin from his lap and throwing it to the table, ‘I don’t think I’m gonna wait for y’all to finish up. I’m asking you to leave right now.’

  ‘Now, honey,’ Naomi says.

  Flint doesn’t even glance toward Naomi. His eyes stay locked on Henry. ‘I’m asking you to leave,’ he says again.

  ‘Well, shit,’ Henry says, smiling, ‘you’re feisty.’

  When for a moment Henry does nothing Maggie hopes, despite what she knows of him and his temper like a loaded gun, that he will remain calm. He won’t do anything crazy. He’ll stand and walk to the door and call for Maggie and Beatrice. He’ll open the door and they’ll walk through it. They’ll all head out and Flint will slam and lock the door behind them. They’ll get in Henry’s truck and drive away. That could happen. There’s no reason for it to go any other direction.

  But as Henry gets to his feet it does go another direction. He grabs a steak knife from the tablecloth where a moment before it lay beside his plate and lunges at Flint.

  Maggie slides down her chair and hides beneath the table. She puts her hands over her ears, but that does not block the sound of Naomi’s scream. She closes her eyes, but not before she sees blood splatter to the floor.

  ‘Well, shit,’ Henry says, smiling, ‘you’re feisty.’

  His stomach is a tight knot of hatred, and despite the antacid he just ate he can feel bile burning the back of his throat. He tried to play the smiling fool for this son of a bitch, but the man saw through him, same as the cops did earlier. The cops had already seen past the facade—some doors can’t be closed—but Flint, well, maybe he didn’t try very hard with Flint. There was no reason to, really, not when he knew he’d have to kill him. He thought he’d kill Flint and Naomi while they was sleeping, but it’s come to it a little sooner than that. He needs their vehicle and he’s not leaving without it, and if they’re dead they can’t report it missing.

  He grabs the steak knife from the tablecloth and lunges at Flint. The man’s eyes go wide and his mouth becomes a black zero—and that is what comes out of it: nothing and nothing and nothing—but he still manages to get an arm out in front of him to block the attack. Arms and flattened palms, however, aren’t much protection against a stainless steel blade. Henry sticks the knife into the palm once, the serrated blade sawing at the bone of the ring finger’s knuckle, twice, into the meat of the thumb, and a third time, severing a pinky finger that just dangles from a single piece of flesh like a macabre keychain fob. Then he pushes in close and stabs the man in the arm and the shoulder.

  But Flint grabs him by the wrist with one hand—Henry can feel the loose pinky brushing against his skin like a ghost—and punches him in the neck with the other, and suddenly Henry can’t breathe.

  He staggers backwards, gasping for air, and Flint rushes him. This is a mistake. He overestimates the damage his blow has caused Henry. As Flint rushes him Henry simply turns the knife out and ducks his head to the left as a fist swings past it. Flint rushes onto the blade. Henry jams it into his belly further, till his fist is buried in stomach and the tip of the blade grinds against spine at the back of him, and then yanks upwards as if trying to lift the man by the blade’s handle, and in fact he does momentarily lift him off the ground, until his weight causes him to slide back down it, splitting him open.

  When Henry was ten or eleven his family had a cow. One of his chores was to feed her every morning, and it was a chore he took very seriously. Over the course of a year he began to feel that she was his friend. He named her Moo and sometimes after school, if he’d had a particularly bad day, he’d sit on the fence and tell her about it. She would sometimes lick his hand with her fat, coarse tongue. Then one day, as Henry walked up his long and winding dirt driveway, books under his arm, he saw his dad cutting off Moo’s head with a meat saw while Uncle Fred cut slits in the Achilles tendons and slid in a gambrel. They used a winch to hoist Moo into the air. Blood thick and dark and full of bubbles drained from her neck and into the dirt. It ran down the driveway in a stream. As Henry walked up the driveway his dad stuck a blade into the cow’s stomach and dragged it down toward the neck. He had never seen so much blood before in his life. It was frothy and rich as crude oil.

  As Flint falls to the floor and blood pours out of him Henry is reminded of that day.

  He reaches down and pulls the knife out of the man.

  He looks toward Beatrice. She is staring down at her lap and rocking herself gently and saying, ‘This isn’t happening, this isn’t happening, this isn’t happening.’

  But it is happening, of course, and it’s happening for Bee.

  He looks toward Naomi.

  Her face is white and her eyes are wide. She is very pretty, especially when frightened. Dishwater-blond hair, lips full, fine wide hips. It’s a shame, really, what he has to do. But he does have to do it.

  She is, apparently, frozen with shock. She has not made a sound since that first scream, nor has she moved. Her mouth is open slightly, and there is a strange twitch at the side of her left eye, but otherwise she is motionless.

  ‘I guess you know what’s next,’ Henry says. ‘I don’t suppose it’s no consolation, but we’re Christians and we’ll bury you with a prayer.’

  A small groan escapes Naomi’s throat.

  Then he rushes her.

  But something strange happens: halfway there his feet lose contact with the floor. His feet stop while the top half of his body continues forward. He flies through the air, turning midair from a vertical position to a horizontal one. And then he hits, chin first. His teeth clack and he bites the side of his tongue. The steak knife is knocked from his hand.

  He glances back over his shoulder with watery eyes and sees Sarah hunched beneath the table, one of her legs still extended.

  ‘Run,’ she shouts at Naomi. ‘Run and get help! Run before he gets you!’

  The words seem to snap the woman out of her paralysis.

  ‘Oh,’ she says.

  And then she turns and runs toward the back door, grabs the knob and pulls. The door doesn’t budge. She looks over her shoulder, eyes alive with fear, unlocks the door, pulls it open, and rushes through it, disappearing into the night.

  Henry pushes himself up and backhands Sarah.

  ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’

  The slap opens a split in her lip, and blood trickles down her chin, but she does not make a sound, nor does she look away. She simply stares at him and bleeds.

  He gets to his feet and drags her out from under the table. He raises a booted foot, fully intent on stomping her fucking face into mush. Stomping till she’s unrecognizable. That’ll teach her to pull shit like this. It’ll teach her to fuck with—

  ‘Henry!’

  Beatrice limps around the table and wraps her arms around Sarah and strokes her hair and says, ‘He didn’t mean it, Sarah.’ She looks up at him. ‘Tell her you didn’t mean it, Henry. Tell her you didn’t mean it.’

  ‘Don’t let her leave the house.’

  He turns around, grabs the bloody knife from the floor, and runs out the door after Naomi. If she makes it to a neighbor’s house the
y won’t be able to use Flint’s pickup truck, and he really doesn’t want to have to go through this shit again with someone else.

  He scans the horizon. In the distance a yellow light in a window. And running toward it, Naomi. She falls as she runs, then pulls herself to her feet, and continues on.

  Henry runs after her.

  Ian sits in darkness. A hatchet rests on his knees. His car is parked behind Donald’s trailer so that, when the man finally arrives in his El Camino, he will not be alerted to Ian’s presence. Ian now simply sits and waits. There was a time, and not long ago, when he would not have been capable of doing what he plans on doing here tonight, if he has to, but that time has gone, a small moment in his past that gets smaller as he moves further from it and into the future.

  He thinks of Andy Paulson, of realizing that he was capable of following through on his threat. Capable, yes, but he did not do it. This, he may follow through on. But even knowing what it will make him, he believes the price will be worth paying. He can’t be certain until he has actually paid the price, and held what he purchased in his hand, but he believes it will be.

  Car tires crunch on gravel outside. An engine goes silent. A door swings open and then slams shut. Footsteps come nearer, first on gravel and then on the steps outside the door. The doorknob rattles. The front door of the mobile home swings open and a shadow enters.

  Ian grabs the hatchet by the handle and gets to his feet. He turns the blunt edge of the hatchet forward and swings it down. It hits the shadow on the side of the head. A soft thunk, like someone tapping a melon to check ripeness.

  The shadow collapses to the floor with a dumb grunt.

  Ian reaches out to the wall and finds the light switch and flips it. An overhead light comes on. The light is in a ceiling fan. The fan’s blades spin lazily. Ian looks down at Donald. He’s lying unconscious on dirty green carpet, bleeding from a split in the skin just inside the hairline behind the left temple. He smells of cheap beer. Several flattened cardboard boxes he carried in are lying beneath him. Apparently he was planning on packing when he got home, packing and leaving town, most likely. That won’t be happening now.