The Dispatcher Read online

  Then he’s on his way. His goal for the day is fifty bucks.

  As he drives past College Avenue he sees Ian Hunt’s Mustang stopped at the intersection, waiting for traffic. They wave to one another, and then Diego is past and Ian’s Mustang is making a right onto Crockett behind him, presumably heading toward the police station, though that’s not where Diego is headed himself.

  Now that most of the alcohol is out of his system he’s hungry again.

  Ian pushes into the police station. Chief Davis is sitting at his desk flipping through paperwork. He looks up as Ian walks in and says, ‘Mornin’.’

  ‘Yup. What’s Diego working so early for?’

  ‘He’s not working.’

  ‘No?’

  Chief Davis shakes his head. ‘Someone crashed into Pastor Warden’s fence and all his dogs got out. Came into Roberta’s last night and offered ten bucks a head for their return.’

  Ian nods. ‘Any news about Maggie?’

  Chief Davis was smiling when talking about the dogs, but the smile’s gone now. ‘No. Old man at the shoe shop didn’t recognize any pictures and the rendering Sizemore’s boys got from him looks like a bald John Goodman. Useless old fucker. We’re still waiting on prints from the phone, though. Hopefully that’ll lead to something. Also, Sizemore’s got Bill Finch and John Nance looking through records of any missing kids in the county, seeing if he can find a connection between them.’

  ‘Finch?’

  Chief Davis shrugs. ‘Wasn’t my call.’

  ‘I know it.’ Ian turns toward the dispatch office, then turns back. ‘Think you could call Sizemore, see if we can’t get copies of those files they’re looking at? Maybe I can poke through them myself.’

  Chief Davis nods. ‘I’ll do that. Maybe send Thompson over to pick them up. By the way, you see this?’ He holds up a copy of the Tonkawa County Democrat. Ian walks over and grabs it. On the first page of the twenty-page broadsheet, above the fold, this:

  KIDNAPPED GIRL ONCE THOUGHT DEAD DISCOVERED ALIVE

  Ian begins reading the opening paragraph thinking she was discovered alive the same way a man punched in the nose discovers a fist.

  He reads about Maggie being kidnapped while her parents were ‘out of the house on a date’, about how she was declared dead, about how there was a funeral ‘despite a body never being discovered’. He reads a description of the kidnapper that could be a description of anybody of a certain age. He throws the paper onto Davis’s desk.

  ‘Did you call them?’

  Chief Davis shakes his head. ‘Sizemore. He made a statement to local news channels too. It got her picture out, and a description of her kidnapper. And it put his number in people’s faces. “If you have any information regarding the whereabouts of Magdalene Hunt or her kidnapper please call the Tonkawa County Sheriff’s Department.” You know the drill. We need it out there. Improves our odds.’

  ‘Kidnapped while both her parents were out of the house on a date.’ Ian shakes his head. ‘Makes it sound like we just left a seven-year-old alone to fend for herself.’

  ‘You weren’t there. It’s the truth, ain’t it?’

  ‘It’s the facts,’ Ian says. ‘It’s not the truth.’

  ‘It got her picture into the paper, anyway, and on the TV.’

  Ian nods, then walks to the dispatch office. At the doorway he says, ‘Don’t forget to call the sheriff for those files, huh?’

  ‘I won’t.’

  Ian walks to the coffee pot and gets it started, then to his desk where he falls into his chair. He exhales a heavy sigh and puts on his headset.

  Doing this feels strange. Wrong. He should be out looking for Maggie. He should be out finding her. That’s what he should be doing and it’s what he wants to be doing. But until there are some fingerprint matches with known criminals, or until he gets those files from the sheriff’s office, or until some piece of evidence reveals itself, there’s really nothing to go on. Here, at least, he can accomplish something. It’s a small town and often his days are slow, but in his time in Bulls Mouth he’s helped save more than one life. If he can’t save Maggie’s yet, well, maybe he can save someone else’s. It might help to expend some of this sick energy building in his gut that comes from needing to move forward while being simultaneously locked into place by circumstance. Like trying to fire a live round through a leaded barrel, he’s afraid the whole thing might blow up. If he can feel useful in some way maybe he can relieve a bit of the pressure, making the wait tolerable.

  ‘Nine-one-one,’ he says. ‘What is your emergency?’

  ‘I can’t find my car keys.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I’m late and I can’t find my car keys.’

  Ian sighs. ‘What do you want me to do about it, Thompson?’

  ‘I don’t know, look around.’

  ‘They’re not here or you couldn’t have driven home.’

  ‘Well, shit.’

  ‘Did you check your pocket?’

  ‘Did I . . .’ A startled laugh. ‘Well, I’ll be goddamned.’

  Ian pours himself a cup of coffee and drinks it in near silence, the only sound the swamp cooler rattling in the window.

  ‘Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?’

  ‘Hello.’ A small girl’s small voice.

  ‘Hello. Are you playing with the phone?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Who are you calling?’

  ‘I’m calling emburgancy.’

  ‘You are?’

  ‘Uh-huh. Are you emburgancy?’

  ‘Yes, I’m emergency. What’s your name?’

  ‘Thalia.’

  ‘Hi, Thalia, why are you calling emergency?’

  ‘My mommy.’

  ‘What’s wrong with your mommy?’

  ‘She won’t get up.’

  ‘What happened, Thalia?’

  ‘Daddy stopped her.’

  ‘Daddy stopped her?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘What did he stop her doing?’

  ‘Packing a suitcase.’

  ‘Was she trying to leave?’

  There is silence from the other end of the line.

  After a moment: ‘Thalia?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Did you just nod your head?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Mommy was trying to leave?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Mommy was packing a suitcase and Daddy stopped her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How did he stop her?’

  ‘He hitted her.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘He went to gone.’

  ‘He’s not at home anymore?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where’s Mommy, Thalia?’

  ‘She’s tired.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘In her bedroom.’

  ‘Is she asleep?’

  ‘Daddy hitted her and made her take a nap.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Before he went to gone. She won’t wake up. I’m hungry.’

  ‘Is Mommy bleeding?’

  ‘Is it okay to call emburgancy to be hungry?’

  ‘It’s fine, Thalia. Is Mommy bleeding?’

  ‘She stopped.’

  ‘Okay. I’m going to send a policeman over to say hello, okay? I want you to stay on the phone till he arrives.’

  ‘Police man is the good guys.’

  ‘Will you stay on the phone with me, Thalia?’

  ‘Okay.’

  Ian is looking through the files that the sheriff’s department photocopied for him when he hears Diego push into the station and mumble a greeting at Chief Davis. Ian takes off his headset, gets to his feet, and walks to the door connecting the dispatch office to the main department.

  Diego falls onto the couch which sits against the front wall. An unlit hand-rolled cigarette hangs from his face. He pushes his sunglasses up onto his head, pinning back his wavy hair. He looks very tired and his eyes are red. When he see
s Ian standing in the doorway he nods toward him and grunts a greeting.

  ‘How many you get?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Dogs.’

  ‘Oh, four. Was going for five, though.’

  ‘Warden pay up?’

  Diego nods, reaches into his front pocket, and pulls out two twenties. He holds them up a moment, then slides them back into his pocket.

  ‘She press charges?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Genevieve Paulson.’

  ‘Oh. No. One of these days Andy’s just gonna up and kill her. Shoulda seen her face.’

  ‘Bad?’

  ‘Looked like a plum with eyes.’

  ‘How was Thalia?’

  ‘Same as always. Full of smiles and hellos.’

  Ian shakes his head. It makes him sick to think of what having a dad like Andy Paulson will end up doing to that beautiful little girl. It will end up ruining her, turning her into just one more trailer-park wife whose husband beats her when the foreman at the warehouse gets on him for not loading the trucks fast enough or for not changing the tank on the forklift when it ran out of propane.

  ‘Someone should talk to Andy.’

  ‘I went to the feed store and did just that.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He was all sorrys and it’ll never happen agains.’

  ‘Same as always.’

  Diego nods. ‘Same as always.’

  ‘Warnings won’t ever fix him.’

  ‘No, he’s not a man responds to words,’ Diego says.

  ‘Maybe someone should do more than just talk then,’ Ian says.

  Maggie sits cross-legged on the mattress in the basement, her empty lunch plate on the floor near her. The light overhead is out and the sun has already passed over to the other side of the house, shadows now beginning to lay themselves out upon the ground. The light in the basement is thin and gray, and the shadows in the corners are dense. She watches them for movement. Borden has disappeared, as he does sometimes, and she doesn’t want him sneaking up on her. She doesn’t trust him after the things he said this morning. She hasn’t seen him since, though she has said aloud that she is not going to try a second escape. ‘It’s too risky,’ she said. ‘I think I’ll just stay down here.’ She said it as if she were talking to herself, but Borden was, of course, her real audience. She hopes that he was listening. She suspects that he is always listening. Maybe it will prevent him from telling.

  Even if it does she now knows he cannot be trusted. She thought he was on her side, but he is not on her side at all. He is on his own side and no one else’s. She’ll have to get out soon and she’ll have to be sneaky about her plans. Even when alone down here she’ll have to be sneaky. Because alone isn’t really.

  Tonight will mark the beginning of her escape. She won’t make her move yet. She needs to think things through. But tonight will mark the beginning. She will soon escape the Nightmare World. She doesn’t care if Borden can’t leave. In fact, she hopes it’s true. She never wants to see him again. Soon she will escape and she will stand beneath the light of the sun and she will not be afraid.

  ‘You’re going to make Beatrice sad.’

  She looks left, then right.

  He’s across the room, in the farthest corner, next to a stack of cardboard boxes. The boxes are full of Christmas ornaments, old magazines with pictures of naked ladies in them, cowboy novels, old clothes saved to be used as rags. He is mostly hidden in shadows, but some of him is visible. He stands very still.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘I know you’re still planning to leave.’

  ‘I’m . . . I’m not.’

  ‘You could stay.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Beatrice loves you, you know.’

  ‘No, she doesn’t.’

  ‘Of course she does.’

  ‘She loves someone named Sarah.’

  ‘You could be Sarah.’

  ‘But I’m not.’

  ‘You could be, you’ve been Sarah longer than you were anybody else. You could let Beatrice love you. If you let yourself be loved, you wouldn’t hate it here so much.’

  ‘But this isn’t where I belong.’

  ‘It is where you belong. That’s why you can’t escape.’

  ‘I—’ This is not a discussion she wants to have. ‘I’m not gonna try to escape,’ she says.

  ‘I can see your thoughts.’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘You know I’m not. I can see the darkest corners of your mind. There’s nothing you can hide from me.’

  Tears begin to well in her eyes. She knows what he says is true. He has responded to mere unexpressed thought before. Throughout the years he has done this: responded with echoes of her deepest fears, fears she never voiced aloud: your parents got a new daughter and don’t even think of you anymore, Henry’s going to put you on the punishment hook one day and never let you down, you’re going to die here.

  She blinks the tears away and wipes at her eyes. She stares across the room and into Borden’s glistening, rolling tar-pit eyes. His nostrils flare. His big square teeth form the shape of a smile. It is an ugly thing.

  ‘I know everything you’re thinking.’

  She wipes her eyes again.

  ‘Because you’re not real,’ she says. ‘That’s how you can do it. You’re not real.’

  ‘You can never leave.’

  ‘You don’t want me to leave because if I leave I won’t need you anymore.’

  ‘You can never leave.’

  ‘But I don’t need you anymore now.’

  ‘You can never leave.’

  ‘You’re not real.’

  ‘You can never, ever leave, Sarah.’

  She closes her eyes and tries to remember when she first saw Borden. It was before she ever came here. It was before she was kidnapped and brought here. She’s sure of it. It was at the petting zoo. She was seven years old and she had just lost a tooth and she was with Daddy and Jeffrey and the sun was out and the world was bright and beautiful. A ten-year-old boy with Chuck Taylor basketball shoes and cuffed Levis and a red button-up shirt that he kept tucked in was there. The shirt was rolled up to his elbows and his hands were in his pockets. She fed the last of her carrots to a miniature horse and the boy pulled a hand from his pocket and in his palm was a piece of celery and he handed it to her and said his name was Danny Borden and she said thank you and fed it to the horse. Danny Borden: a normal boy with freckles on his cheeks and brown eyes and bangs cut straight. This Borden is only a Nightmare World copy of him.

  Not the real thing. Not real at all.

  She looks up at him. He flickers a moment, vanishing from the room like an image on a TV that’s losing its signal in a storm, like a light just before it goes out. Then he returns. His eyes roll in their sockets and then lock on her.

  ‘You can never leave,’ he says.

  ‘You can’t scare me anymore,’ she says. ‘You’re not real.’

  Another flicker.

  ‘You can never, ever leave. If you try, I’ll tell on you.’

  ‘You can’t tell on me. You’re just pretend.’

  He takes a step toward her, a step out of the shadows. He flickers again and she can see through him. She can see the stack of boxes behind him. Then, once more, he is solid. Except he flickers now and then as he takes another step toward her. He seems to be falling apart. An arm becomes a smear before coming back together. A leg flickers out, then returns.

  ‘You can never—’

  ‘You’re not real.’

  She grabs the plate from the floor and lifts it over her head and throws it across the room. It arcs through the air wobbling like a poorly thrown Frisbee and if he were real it would strike him in the head, right between his eyes, but he is not real, so it flies through him, hits the cardboard boxes stacked against the wall, falls to the concrete, and shatters.

  Borden is gone.

  After a few minutes she gets to her feet. The
concrete is cold beneath them. She walks to where the pieces of shattered plate lie, spread outward from the point of impact. She walks with great deliberation, being very careful about where she sets each foot. She doesn’t want to cut herself. Once she is standing among the shards she looks down at them. She will probably get into trouble for breaking the plate.

  Don’t think about that. Nothing can be done about it, so don’t think about it.

  One two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve.

  She bends down and picks up the biggest shard of plate. It’s about nine inches long and forms a crescent, made mostly of the outer edge of the plate, and ends in a sharp point. It is lined with painted vines and at the tip a blue flower. If she has to she will plant it in Beatrice. But not tonight. She carries it to the back of the stairs. There is a cavity beneath the bottom step filled only with darkness. She sits on her haunches and reaches the shard toward it, to hide it there, but hesitates as she imagines a large claw emerging from the darkness and grabbing her wrist and pulling her bodily into the shadows. That’s silly, of course, and impossible. There is nothing in the shadows but more shadows. She knows that. Nothing bigger than a cat could even fit beneath that first step. Even so she simply sets the shard of plate on the concrete and pushes it into the shadows, not allowing her fingers to touch the darkness. She will have to reach into it to get the shard back out, but she’ll worry about that then. For now she just wants it hidden and she doesn’t think anybody will find it there. Not unless Borden is watching from the shadows.

  He’s not real.

  That’s right: Borden is not real and she does not have to worry about him.

  She is just getting to her feet when the door at the top of the stairs squeaks open and the light comes on. Feeling sick and guilty, caught, she walks around to the front of the stairs and looks up toward the door.

  Beatrice stands silent looking at the shattered plate on the floor. Her hair lies flat and dull on her head, framing a sad round face. Her wide-set eyes droop on the outside, her mouth at both corners. It’s like invisible hands are pressed against her cheeks and pulling down. Her shoulders are round, dresses always hanging from them lifelessly before catching on her heavy lower body and bulging outward with lumps and ripples, making her look to Maggie like a poorly stuffed toy animal.