The Dispatcher Page 4

  Open and close, open and close, open and—

  ‘Do you know the man’s name?’

  ‘It’s H—’

  But that’s all and that’s it. Henry grabs her around the waist. She screams. Henry puts his hand over her mouth. He pulls her away from the phone. She tries to hold on to it, to maintain her connection to Daddy, oh God, Daddy, please, but her hands are too sweaty and it slips away and swings down on its cord and bangs against a phone book hanging from a metal ring. She tries to scream again but to no end. The hand over her mouth keeps the sound trapped in her throat.

  Henry carries her while she kicks and claws at him. She grabs his fingers and tries to pull them away from her. She tries to contort her body so that she can bite him. Nothing works.

  ‘You little bitch,’ he says, ‘don’t you ever run from me again.’

  He throws her into the truck through the open driver’s side door. She lands lengthwise across the beige vinyl bench seat and hits her head on the passenger door. She pulls herself up to a sitting position and looks around in a daze. She is disoriented and for a moment lost. Everything feels unreal to her. Then she sees the open door and knows once more where she is and what she must do. She crawls toward escape.

  Then Henry’s large frame fills the opening and he slides into the truck. He pulls the door shut behind him and releases the hand brake. The truck turns toward the street. Maggie looks out the window to the phone. It is still swinging from its cord. Daddy.

  She grabs the passenger’s side door handle and pushes open the door, trying to jump out before the truck gains speed, but as the truck turns out onto the street, the momentum forces the door shut again. She has to pull her hand away so that it isn’t slammed between the door and the frame. Then Henry grabs the back of her dress and pulls her away from it. And slaps the side of her head.

  ‘Stop it, goddamn you! Just fucking stop it!’

  Tears of pain and defeat and rage stream down her face.

  ‘I hate you!’ she says.

  ‘Shut the fuck up, Sarah.’

  ‘That’s not my name.’

  ‘I said shut—up.’ He punctuates the last word with yet another angry slap at her head.

  ‘No, you shut up.’

  And she attacks him. She tries to claw at his stupid face. She punches at his chest and neck. He fights her off with one hand while steering with the other. He tries to grab her by the neck. She sinks her teeth into the web between his thumb and index finger. He hollers in pain and yanks his hand away. She spits out the salty taste of his sweat and blood, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, and goes at him again. He shoves her away with great force and she flies backwards and hits her head against the window.

  The truck swerves as they reach Crouch Avenue, travels another fifty yards, weaving back and forth across the two-lane asphalt, and then crashes through the fence behind which Pastor Warden keeps his dachshunds. The chain-link fence peels open where two sections were held together only by baling wire, curling in either direction like a sardine can lid, and there’s a great scratching sound. Then the brakes lock, Maggie is thrown against the dashboard, and falls down to the floorboard.

  The truck slides along the ground another ten or fifteen feet before coming to a stop.

  Henry puts the truck into reverse and backs out to the street. There is more metal on metal scraping, a few serious jerks as the truck rolls once more over the shoulder of the road, and then they are on asphalt again.

  Maggie pulls herself off the floor and goes for Henry once more.

  Henry shoves her away again, and she hits her head on the passenger’s side window for the second time. It hurts and makes her feel dizzy and sick. Her vision goes wonky and she loses her equilibrium. She thinks she might vomit. The skin is split and she feels blood trickling down the back of her head.

  She is reaching back to touch the wound when she is hit again. Henry simply fists the side of her head above the ear. Just behind the temple. He likes to hit her where Beatrice won’t see the bruises. There is a strange sensation like sinking into thick liquid, and then there is no sensation at all. Everything goes dark.

  Henry puts the truck into gear and gasses it. It gets rolling. He glances in his rearview mirror and sees what must be two dozen dachshunds escaping through the hole his truck punched through the fence. He figures there’s a good chance of it coming back to him. His truck is scratched all to hell. If it does come back to him he’ll just say he got a little too drunk. He’ll smile big and apologize and if it’s Chief Davis who comes knocking he’ll say, ‘You know how it is. Anyway, maybe I’ll be trading this thing in now it’s not prime no more. Maybe you’ll see me down at the dealership. Tell Pastor Warden I’m real sorry. Tell him I’ll pay for the damage. You got any good deals, any new used trucks in?’ That will, in all likelihood, take care of the situation with the fence. If it even becomes a situation. It might not.

  What really worries him is witnesses at the Main Street shopping center. What happened there could not be explained away.

  Horizon Video is almost surely nothing to worry about. The kids who work there do nothing but sit in the back and smoke weed and watch pornographic films unless they hear the front door’s bell chime, at which point one of them cuts through the curtain of smoke and walks to the counter and stands around while browsers browse. The barber shop is closed Sundays and Mondays, so there was no one there. That leaves the old cobbler who has a shop next to Horizon Video, the dry-cleaning place, and Bill’s Liquor. Bill’s Liquor is also, unless a customer was in, nothing to worry about. It’s possible—just—that no one saw him.

  But he can’t worry about it. Either someone saw him or no one did. He’ll find out which soon enough. Fretting over it won’t change a goddamn thing.

  Acid bubbles up at the back of his throat and he reaches into his shirt pocket and pulls out a roll of antacids. He picks lint off the top of the roll, peels back the foil, and thumbs two tablets into his mouth. They are chalky and flavorless. He chews them slowly.

  Then glances over to Sarah. She’s unconscious, head leaning against the glass of the window, a thin smear of blood just above her, a few drops of it splashed onto the beige armrest. As he looks at her another drop of blood splashes onto the vinyl.

  ‘You little bitch,’ he says. ‘Don’t even think I’m finished with you.’

  He tongues chalky antacid from a molar and downshifts to second. He hits his turn-signal lever—click-click, click-click—and turns right into his gravel driveway.

  The tires kick small stones out into the street.

  He carries Sarah into the house. Beatrice is standing over a bowl of raw hamburger, grating carrots into it. When he walks into the kitchen she looks at him, and then at Sarah draped limp in his arms. A worried grunt escapes her throat.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘She fell.’

  ‘Is she bleeding?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘How’d she fall?’

  ‘She tripped. How else do people fall?’

  Beatrice does not respond. He walks past her, kicks open the basement door, and carries Maggie down the stairs.

  Ian slides into his Mustang and pulls the door shut behind him.

  A three-inch plug of cigar pokes from the ashtray. He grabs it, grinds his teeth into the sloppy end, and lights it, sucking on it while watching with crossed eyes as the other end glows bright orange and smokes. He rolls down his window and exhales a thin stream of blue smoke. He spits a piece of tobacco off the end of his tongue, jabs the cigar back into his mouth, rolls it between his teeth, and starts the car.

  The radio comes on, but Ian isn’t in the mood for music. He turns it off immediately. Then grabs his sunglasses from his shirt, large mirrored things—cop sunglasses, you get them when you graduate academy—and slides them onto his face.

  Sweat trickles down his cheek and drips onto his shirt. The white sun overhead imbedded in the blue-glass sky. He reaches down and grabs the shifter, s
liding it into reverse, and burns his hand on the knob. He pulls his hand away and shakes it. Every day he does this. You’d think he’d learn. He looks over his shoulder and backs out of his spot, handling the wheel as gently as possible, so he doesn’t get burned on it, but it’s hard to handle a car with a light touch when you don’t have power steering.

  He arms sweat off his forehead, shifts, and drives out onto the street.

  He’s not even sure why he’s going to the Main Street shopping center. Chief Davis heading there makes sense. He’ll have to liaise with Sheriff Sizemore. The Tonkawa County Sheriff’s Department handles any major crimes, with the city police department at its disposal. The county has access to labs, detectives, forensics guys, and can pull strings when necessary. The city has nine cops (three of them part time), three police cruisers bought from Houston when they were taken out of commission there and given an oil change and a paint job, and a police station smaller than most houses, with but a single holding cell.

  And Ian hasn’t been real police in over a decade, not since he took a bullet in the knee and Debbie talked him into moving them to Bulls Mouth, her hometown, where things would be quieter and calmer than in Los Angeles, where Maggie would be safe and they could live a peaceful life, where he would not have to worry about getting shot a second time.

  There will almost certainly be nothing for Ian to do when he gets there.

  But that doesn’t seem to matter. He wants to stand where his daughter recently stood. He’s certain he will sense her presence, like a scent hanging in the air, despite the fact that she was GOA, gone on arrival, when Diego pulled into the lot. He has feared her dead for a very long time, and he wants to feel her presence. To know she’s alive.

  He drives along Crouch Avenue till he comes to Wallace Street, where he makes a right. He drives past the post office and the firehouse and Bulls Mouth High School, shut down for the summer, and makes a left onto Hackberry. In another five minutes he is pulling into the Main Street shopping center’s parking lot, bringing his car to a stop next to Diego’s cruiser and behind a sign that marks the spot:

  FOR DRY CLEANING PICK UP ONLY VIOLATORS WILL BE TOWED.

  Diego Peña is simply standing in front of the pay phone rolling a cigarette. He’s a thin man, half Spanish, half Apache, with wavy black hair and sun-baked skin. He’s got a series of tight little knot-like scars running across his face as well, the results of a domestic disturbance call he took five years ago, back when he was working nights.

  Jimmy Block and his wife Roberta used to share a house in the south part of town, just off Clamp Avenue. A neighbor called about a ruckus. Diego knocked on the door and Roberta answered it. The lower half of her face was a mask of blood and a purple crescent in the shape of the moon was swelling around her left eye and said eye was swimming in tears. Jimmy was sitting quietly at the dining-room table. Diego went to get him, intent on putting him in jail overnight so he couldn’t do any more wife-beating—this was his third call to the house in a month—and Jimmy grabbed a roll of barbed wire he had sitting on the table—he’d planned on fencing in the earthworm farm behind his bait shop the next day, apparently, to make it harder for kids on their way to the reservoir to snatch handfuls of them—and flung it into Diego’s face. One of the barbs came within a centimeter of taking out his left eye. Instead of overnight, Jimmy Block was in jail for the next six months.

  Roberta used the time to change all the locks in the house and file for divorce.

  Ian steps from his car and into the heat of the day. He taps ash off the end of his cigar and jams it back into his face. He grinds it between his teeth.

  Chief Davis pulls in behind Ian and parks.

  Diego squints at Ian. ‘You okay?’

  ‘No. Guarding the phone?’

  ‘Yeah. Thought it might have fingerprints or something on it and figured the sheriff would have county boys coming down from Mencken to brush it.’

  ‘Anyone try to use it?’

  Diego shakes his head. ‘You wanna come over for dinner? Cordelia’d love to have you.’

  ‘No, I’m not much for socializing right now.’

  ‘Sure you wanna be alone tonight?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Chief Davis steps up beside Ian and puts a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘I’ll see what I can see about witnesses before Sizemore gets here and ruins them.’

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  He drops his cigar to the asphalt and grinds it out with his heel.

  ‘It’s an open invitation,’ Diego says.

  ‘Thanks, anyway.’

  Then he glances past Diego to the phone. He has a strange urge to lift the receiver and put it to his ear and listen, as if he might be able to hear Maggie’s voice once more. She was just here today. She called him from that phone.

  ‘Well,’ Chief Davis says, ‘let’s ask some questions.’

  They walk into the shoe repair shop first. Lining the walls are wooden racks on which rest shoes dropped off for repair but never picked up again: white leather loafers with gold buckles, snakeskin cowboy boots, resoled wingtips, resoled ropers.

  There are white stickers on them with prices scrawled in blue ink.

  Behind the wood counter at the back of the narrow store stands an old man with hunched shoulders and a face like an apple core left in the sun. He smiles, revealing very white unfitted dentures. His smile is open-mouthed and the top row of teeth starts to slip from his gums, and he slams his uppers and lowers together with a clack and works his jaw, getting the dentures back into place. His hands rest on the counter. Black shoe polish has stained the fine spaces between the whorls of his thumbs and built up beneath his fingernails. A polish-stained rag lies on the counter near to hand, beside a tin and a pair of buffed shoes.

  He finishes working his jaw and says, ‘How can I help you gentlemen?’

  As the cobbler speaks his gaze drops from their faces to their feet, to their shoes, the thing by which, it is clear, he measures all men. His frown makes it clear that neither Ian nor Chief Davis meet his minimal standards.

  ‘A quick polish, perhaps?’ he says.

  ‘You hear a ruckus out front ’bout ten-fifteen minutes ago?’ Chief Davis says.

  ‘Ruckus?’

  ‘Noise.’

  ‘Scuffle,’ Ian says. ‘Maybe a scream.’

  The cobbler shakes his head.

  ‘Nothing, huh?’

  ‘’Fraid not.’

  Ian pulls his wallet from his right hip pocket and in it finds a photograph of Maggie. The edges are torn and browned from frequent handling. He looks at it a moment himself, at his grinning daughter’s first-grade yearbook photo, and then turns it around and sets it on the counter and pushes it toward the cobbler.

  ‘Ever seen this girl before?’

  The cobbler shakes his head without so much as a glance at the picture. His eyes remain dull and unfixed, looking toward some nothing in the middle of the room.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘Ain’t seen nothing.’

  ‘You didn’t even hear nothing?’ Chief Davis asks again. The cobbler shakes his head, then taps the hearing aid hooked around the back of his ear. ‘Maybe the battery’s dying.’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘You don’t seem to be having much trouble hearing us,’ Ian says.

  ‘Well.’

  ‘Look at the goddamn picture.’

  ‘I already told you I didn’t—’

  Ian hits the counter with the flat of his palm, creating a loud clap, and the cobbler recoils like he’s been hit.

  ‘You haven’t even bothered to fucking look yet.’

  ‘Hey,’ Chief Davis says, putting a hand on Ian’s shoulder, ‘man’s got no reason to lie.’

  Ian ignores this. He leans on the counter and glares at the cobbler, forcing him to meet his eye. The cobbler looks uncomfortable, but he stares back for a couple seconds before his gaze drops to Ian’s chest.

  ‘This is my daughter. She’s been mis
sing for more than seven years. The picture was taken before she went missing, so she’d look different now. She’s fourteen, fifteen in September. She made a call from the pay phone out front not twenty minutes ago. Now look at the goddamn picture and tell me did you see her.’

  The cobbler looks down at the photograph. After a moment of silence he reaches out and touches it with a black-stained fingertip. He touches it gently. Ian has to fight the urge to snatch it away from the man. Instead he puts his hands behind his back. The cobbler’s face softens and his eyes find focus as he looks at the picture. He scratches his cheek.

  Without looking up he says, ‘I didn’t get a good look at the girl but this might’ve been her.’

  ‘Did you see the man she was with?’

  ‘The one who took her?’

  ‘The one who took her.’

  The cobbler nods. ‘I don’t know him. But I only been in town four years and don’t meet nobody unless they come in the shop.’

  ‘You didn’t recognize him?’

  ‘Not to name,’ the cobbler says, ‘but I think I seen him at Albertsons a few times.’

  ‘So you’d recognize a picture?’

  The cobbler nods. ‘Think so.’

  ‘In his sixties, gray hair, bald on top, busted capillaries in his nose, and about my size?’

  ‘He’s fatter’n you, but about the same height, I reckon.’ He holds his hand up to measure. ‘You know who done it?’

  Ian shakes his head. ‘She told me what he looked like.’

  ‘Was he on foot?’ Chief Davis asks.

  The cobbler pauses a moment, then says, ‘No. I heard a engine running, but I didn’t see it. Must’ve parked to one side or the other.’

  ‘Car or truck?’ Ian says.

  ‘He said he didn’t see it. He couldn’t tell you just by—’