The Dispatcher Read online

  A few seconds later he’s slamming the thing into first and the tires are kicking up gravel as he takes the driveway north to Crouch Avenue.

  He drives west along the old cratered road, squinting left into his own woods, trying to see white skin or a snatch of blue dress between the trees. On the other side of the road is Pastor Warden’s place, alive with the sound of barking dogs. It sounds to Henry like a schoolyard during recess. Pastor Warden breeds dachshunds and sells them to pet shops in Mencken and other larger towns. Maybe even to some places in Houston. The goddamn dogs never shut up. Henry doesn’t know how Warden can stand it. Then again, after a few weep sessions with troubled parishioners laying their guilt on him, maybe the sound of dogs barking ain’t so bad.

  He makes it to Main Street without seeing Sarah, but that doesn’t really surprise him. She was heading west when she ran into the woods and unless she got disoriented there’d be no reason for her to come out on the north end. He makes a left and drives south, along the western edge of the woods.

  The gray strip of road stretches out before him, empty of life.

  A tight feeling in his chest, like his heart in a vise.

  If Sarah manages to get out of the woods and comes across someone and tells them what happened, that will be the end of his long and peaceful life here in Bulls Mouth. He knows everyone in town and everyone knows him. And mostly they like him. Sure, it’s because they don’t really know him, because he’s always smiling and patting backs and saying give my regards to the missus, Dave, but who really lets the world see their guts? Guts are ugly; that’s why we have skin. Take away the skin and what remains? Nothing you’d want to have a conversation with.

  As he drives south he looks left, hoping to see Sarah emerge from the trees.

  ‘Where are you, you little bitch?’

  And then he sees her. Not in the woods but in the road up ahead, running into the Main Street shopping center. At least he thinks it’s her. From this distance it could be anybody in a blue dress, but he thinks it’s her. He shifts from second to third and gasses it.

  ‘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?’

  Silence. She is gone.

  ‘Officer Peña, what’s your twenty? You ten-eight?’

  ‘Oak Street and Flatland. Good to go.’

  ‘You at Wal-Mart?’

  ‘Not even in the parking lot yet.’

  ‘Get over to the Main Street shopping center. Forty-one forty. Suspect is a tall white male in his sixties, gray hair, balding on top. Victim is a fourteen-year-old girl, Maggie Hunt, blond hair, green eyes, wearing a blue dress. Code three.’

  ‘Ten-four. I’m on it. Did you say the name of the victim was Maggie Hun—’

  ‘It’s my daughter,’ Ian says.

  Then, before Diego can respond, he pulls the headset off and leans down over a trashcan. His entire body is shaking, vibrating like sound, and he is covered in sweat. He feels as though he may vomit, but when he opens his mouth, nothing comes out. He spits a mouthful of sour saliva into the can and stares at a wadded-up piece of paper lying inside. The paper has been torn from a yellow legal pad. There is writing on it, and he knows that it is his, but he cannot remember what it says. It doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters now is that his daughter is alive. He stares at the paper for a very long time.

  She was kidnapped in the spring. Her older brother Jeffrey was supposed to be looking after her. Jeffrey is Ian’s son from his second marriage, Debbie being his third wife. Now his third ex-wife. Jeffrey’d flown down from Los Angeles to spend spring break here. He was fourteen when Maggie was kidnapped. Now he is twenty-two. He just turned twenty-two last month, in fact, on the twenty-seventh. Ian bought him neither card nor gift. For a few years after Maggie was kidnapped Ian and Jeffrey had some kind of relationship, tense though it often was, but eventually it dissolved till there was nothing left. A chess game they were playing over three years ago still sits unfinished on Ian’s coffee table. Two unsent birthday cards lie at the bottom of his sock drawer. Happy birthday, son. I love you. Ian tried to call Jeffrey just over two years ago, dialed and let the phone ring, but when his son picked up, hello, he could not get any words out. They caught like fishhooks in his throat.

  Maggie was kidnapped in the spring, and, while her kidnapper cannot possibly know it, Ian lost both his children that night, though it took a few years for the second loss to be finalized. It was a slower vanishing, that’s all.

  But it still began on that spring night. A Saturday with a full moon, bone-white and bloated, floating in the vast dark sea above.

  Ian was behind the wheel of his partially restored 1965 Mustang, a car his father had purchased for him when he was seventeen and they were living in Venice Beach. Dad thought they could rebuild the car together. He said it would be a fun project. They’d even made a couple trips to a junkyard in Downy and found a fender they needed, and a primer-gray trunk-lid, and a taillight. Unfortunately, Dad’s suicide got between them and their plans. Three months after buying the car the old man decided to smoke a shotgun. Ian found him on the floor in his bedroom when he came home from school.

  On this night, this spring night during which Maggie was kidnapped, he and Debbie were in the car with the windows down. The night air was cool and felt good blowing against his face. The radio was on and playing ‘Love Comes in Spurts’ by Richard Hell. Debbie was wearing a summer dress, and her large breasts were spilling out of the top of it. Ian reached over and stroked the inside of her thigh and she separated her knees slightly.

  ‘I’m glad we did this,’ he said as they drove north on Crockett Street, heading from Morton’s Steakhouse, where they’d had dinner, toward home. ‘It’s been a good night.’

  Debbie put her hand over the back of his hand and slid it up the inside of her leg until it was under her dress and pressed against her panties. He could feel her heat and her coarse pubic hair poking through the panties’ fabric and a pleasant sticky humidity.

  He thought of a time when he was eleven or twelve, in Venice Beach, where his dad had a surf shop, when he had headed down to the water to hang out and try to get one of the older guys to let him have a beer and he saw a girl in her twenties whose pubic hair was visible on either side of her bikini bottoms. She was wet and the fabric was molded to her body and he could see the dimpled mound between her legs. It was strange and foreign and exciting. It did things to him that he didn’t understand. He went into the water where no one would see him and he masturbated to the mental image while it was still fresh in his mind, and he shot a load into the water, and somehow that was sexy, too. Even now he is able to get excited thinking of that long-ago girl and that mysterious hint of sex he did not fully understand. He cannot remember the last name of the girl to whom he lost his virginity, Jennifer something, and he cannot picture her face, but he remembers every detail of that day on the beach four or five years earlier.

  He looked up at Debbie’s face.

  ‘The night’s not over,’ she said smiling. ‘It’s about to get better than good.’

  Ian rubbed her gently a moment before reluctantly pulling his hand from beneath her dress so he could turn right onto Crouch Avenue. Then left almost immediately onto Grapevine Circle. As he drove along he could see Bulls Mouth Reservoir to his right, reflecting the image of the fat moon and the stars like glowing fishes. Then Grapevine Circle bent sharply to the right, and as they made the turn a police car came into view. It was double-parked on the street, lights flashing in the night.

  ‘Is that—?’

  ‘Oh, shit.’

  ‘Stay calm,’ Debbie said. ‘It’s probably nothing.’

  ‘I am calm.’r />
  But even so he screeched along the street at a dangerous speed, then hauled the car to the right and two-footed the clutch and brake simultaneously when he reached 44 Grapevine Circle and the police car already parked there. He killed the engine by pulling his foot off the clutch and stalling the fucking thing, then yanked the key from the ignition and was out of the car. Debbie stepped from the passenger’s side.

  Beneath the hood the radiator hissed. The sound of traffic coming from Interstate 10. Usually you couldn’t hear it, but in the quiet night it became audible. The faint sound of Pastor Warden’s dogs barking in the west. A few neighbors were standing on their porches, looking this direction. Their mouths hung open. Ian hated each and every one of them. And himself. And Debbie.

  They never should have left Maggie and Jeffrey home alone. Ian had wanted to have a night out with Debbie, and Jeffrey was fourteen, old enough to babysit, but if anything had happened Ian would never—

  Jeffrey was standing on the front lawn, within the circle of the porch’s yellow light, talking to Chief Davis, who had thought whatever was happening was important enough he should crawl out of his whiskey-induced sleep and come out here himself. Davis was taking notes while Jeffrey talked. Jeffrey’s eyes were red and every so often he was wiping at his nose with the back of a wrist.

  ‘What happened?’ Ian said as he approached. ‘Where’s Maggie?’

  Jeffrey and Davis both turned toward him, but neither said anything.

  ‘Where’s Maggie?’

  More silence.

  Ian grabbed Jeffrey by the shoulders, fingers digging into the flesh of them, and shook him. ‘Where the fuck is Maggie?’ he said.

  ‘Honey,’ Debbie said, ‘don’t.’

  ‘Ian,’ Chief Davis said and put a hand on his shoulder.

  Ian turned on Davis and knocked his hand away with the swipe of an arm. The old man blinked like an owl behind his glasses and mustache but said nothing. He simply tilted his Stetson back on his head and hooked his thumbs in his pockets and rocked back on the heels of his boots and looked away. Debbie, though, did not look away.

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ Ian said to both of them and neither.

  Then he turned back to his son.

  ‘Jeffrey,’ he said, ‘where is Maggie?’

  Jeffrey looked up at him. Ian saw for the first time that there was something like terror in his eyes. They were alive with it. It danced in them like flame in a night window. Then, once more, he dropped his gaze to his feet. He had on a pair of slippers. They were blue corduroy, darkened by the damp grass. They were one of his Christmas presents from the year before. Deb had picked them up from a drugstore while grabbing a prescription for antibiotics and they’d tossed them into the box they mailed to California with the rest of his gifts, as well as a cordial if distant holiday card for Lisa, Jeffrey’s mother and Ian’s second wife.

  ‘She’s gone,’ Jeffrey said finally, staring down at those blue slippers.

  ‘Gone?’

  Ian was expecting an injury, a broken arm, fingers burned on the stovetop, a bad cut—but gone? For a moment his mind could not even process the word.

  Without looking up at him Jeffrey nodded.

  ‘Gone where?’

  A pathetic shrug.

  ‘I don’t . . . I put her to bed. I was watching David Letterman and . . . and I heard a noise in her bedroom like she was playing around. I yelled at her to calm down and go to sleep. I yelled at her. Then it got really quiet and I started to feel bad about yelling. I went back to make sure she was okay, to say sorry if I’d hurt her feelings or . . .’ A shrug. ‘But when I went to her bedroom . . . she was . . .’ He licked his lips. ‘She was gone.’ He glanced up once as he finished talking, but quickly looked down again.

  Ian walked past Jeffrey and Chief Davis, knocking against Davis’s shoulder, and into the house. Walked straight to Maggie’s room. To what was Maggie’s room. To what is now, in this different world, like that old world but not quite the same, the twins’ room: refurnished, repainted, re-carpeted, hardly the same room at all. It was empty. He walked to the bed and put the back of his hand against the dent in her pillow. It was cold. There was no warmth left in it at all. Beneath it, a tooth. Waiting for a tooth fairy that would never come. He walked to the window. It was open and a breeze was blowing against the curtains. The screen frame was still in the window but the screen had been cut out. A few loose strings still hung from the frame. The rest of it lay on the grass just outside. When the wind blew it shifted, looking like a living shadow.

  ‘Ian,’ Chief Davis said behind him, ‘you really shouldn’t be in here. I got Sheriff Sizemore sending down a couple people from Mencken to pull evidence.’

  Ian nodded but continued to stare out at the night. The wind blew. The screen shifted. After a few moments of silence he heard Chief Davis leave the room. And after a few more he turned away from the window and followed.

  He was thirty-eight then. Now he is forty-five, though he sometimes feels older. Three marriages, one abortion, two children (a son he hasn’t spoken to in over three years and a daughter he’s feared dead for twice as long), seven broken bones (four fingers, a collar-bone, his nose, and a toe), one gunshot wound, four car accidents, three dead pets, and two dead parents: yes, sometimes he feels older than his years.

  When you glance over your shoulder and look at what you’re pulling behind you in your red wagon it can be hard not to feel overwhelmed by the weight of it all.

  He wakes in the morning with a neck that won’t turn and a right hand that’s already beginning to feel arthritic, with a swollen right knee that won’t bend for the first hour of the day, with a sore back and a mind he wishes he could scrub the memories from. He wakes and showers and dresses. He shaves every other day. He’s blond and can get away with that one bit of laziness concerning his appearance. He eats two soft-boiled eggs (and sometimes a piece of toast). He drinks a pot of coffee. He goes to work, where he sits for eight hours and plays solitaire and answers calls. Occasionally he goes out on calls himself if someone needs backup and it’s close by (keeps a bubble light in his glove box). He is technically a police officer and wears the uniform every day. But that is the result of the city council not approving the hire of a civilian dispatcher and not a difference of job function. Mostly Ian simply sits in the office and takes calls. Sometimes the calls are ugly: husbands collapsed while feeding the horses, or maybe kicked in the head while changing a shoe; sons who accidentally severed a thumb while sawing wood; wives who spilled two gallons of simmering lye soap down the front of their dresses. And it seems those bad calls come one after another, piling up during the course of a day. Some black luck blown into town on the wind. By the time those days are over he feels hollow as a Halloween pumpkin. He drives to the Skyline Apartments and parks his car. He locks himself inside his apartment. He watches TV. Situation comedies. After a few hours of this, during which he drinks six bottles of Guinness and, if it’s Friday, one small glass of scotch (usually Laphroaig), never more, he falls asleep on the couch.

  Five or six hours later he wakes and repeats the process.

  But not today. Today is different. He would normally leave at four, but today he walks out the door at three fifteen.

  He gets to his feet and walks into the police station’s front room.

  Chief Davis is right where Ian thought he would be, leaning back in his chair with his boots kicked up on his desk, Stetson tipped over his eyes. He has a reputation for laziness, but he’s on call twenty-four hours a day, and is often out nights dealing with drunks and wife-beaters, so he catches naps when he can. Ian himself doesn’t count that as laziness.

  ‘Chief,’ he says.

  Chief Davis groans and wipes at a bit of drool at the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Chief.’

  Davis sits up and tilts back his Stetson. He knuckles his eyes, pulls his glasses from his pocket, and sets them on his nose. He rubs the palm of his hand down the front of his face, then looks u
p at Ian, blinking.

  ‘Ian.’

  ‘I just got a call.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘From Maggie.’

  ‘From—’ Blink, blink. ‘From your daughter?’

  Ian nods.

  ‘You sure?’

  Another nod. ‘She called from a pay phone front of Main Street shopping center. She’s alive. I sent Diego down just now, and county guys are on the way, but I’m going too. Maybe you could keep point on the phones?’

  Davis shakes his head.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘You know I gotta deal with Sizemore. Thompson can handle the phones.’

  Steve Thompson is Bulls Mouth’s other daytime police officer. He’s good police, so far as Ian can tell, when there’s something happening, but otherwise he tends to wander off. After four o’clock, there are only two officers on duty at a time—one of the three part timers to take calls and a guy in a radio car. And of course they call Chief Davis if necessary. Four to midnight is Armando Gonzales and one of the part timers. Used to be Diego Peña, but Peña switched to days a while back. Went from part time on the phones to full time to days in quick succession. From midnight to eight is Ray Watkins.

  Ian nods. ‘All right. Where’s he at?’

  ‘Out back washing my truck. Tell him to get on the phones and then let’s go.’

  Ian nods.

  ‘What are you wearing?’

  ‘What?’ She looks over her shoulder and can see Henry’s Ford Ranger speeding toward her, and behind the glass Henry’s large frame hunched over the wheel like a bear over its prey. ‘He’s coming!’ she says.

  ‘What are you wearing, Mags?’

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

  The truck pulls into the parking lot, tires screeching. Smoke wafts from burned rubber and the foul stink of it hangs in the air. The door swings open, engine still running. She can hear Henry’s footsteps behind her. She looks over her shoulder and he is making great steps toward her. He curses under his breath. His hands open and close at his sides as he walks.