The Dispatcher (19 page)

‘I know, but he’ll slip. I’m wearing him down.’

‘Look, this is our case. A county case. You don’t have the resources. I agreed to the hour outta courtesy for what happened to Officer Hunt’s daughter. For what happened to the chief. I know it means something to you guys. And, yeah, I thought maybe you’d be able to get something we could use. But one of ours got shot too, died, and the fucking hour is up, Officer Diego.’

‘Officer Peña. And I just need another thirty minutes.’

‘You can’t have it.’

‘I can’t have it?’

‘Nope.’

‘Well, what the fuck?’

The sheriff shrugs, seeming suddenly bored by the conversation. ‘That’s just the way it is,’ he says. ‘I got a manhunt going on and I’m done letting you dance in circles with our only possible source of information.’

 

 

 

Diego watches Sheriff Sizemore lead the younger Dean to the back of his car and put him into it. Then Sizemore looks back at Diego and nods. Diego does not nod back. Sizemore gets into his vehicle and drives way, taking Donald to the sheriff’s office down the street.

Diego tries to roll a cigarette, but his hands are shaky. He cannot seem to keep the tobacco in his paper. It shakes from the paper and falls to the asphalt. Finally, after his third try, he balls the rolling paper in his fist and throws it to the ground. He turns around and heads inside.

Didn’t really want a cigarette, anyway.

Picture a calm sea of oily black. Horizon to horizon: only this sea, flat and featureless. An entire planet covered in liquid midnight. A moon overhead like a silver dollar, and a few stars, but nothing more. There are no islands or trees. No fish or whales. Just a dead calm. Nothing other than one man floating on his back in the middle of it: Ian. Ian, floating in darkness. Arms and legs spread like the Vitruvian Man. Eyes open. He looks toward the heavens expecting God, but all he gets is the voice of the darkness between the stars: a hollow call like a desert wind.

Then something touches his left hand. Some
one
touches his left hand. It is human. He is not alone. He tries to turn his head to the left but he cannot. Someone is stroking the web between thumb and index finger.

He doesn’t understand why he can’t turn his head to the left.

Open your eyes.

They are open: the moon like a silver dollar and the points of stars.

Open your eyes.

He does and the night sky gives way to a white ceiling, first out of focus and soft, then gaining sharpness. He blinks several times and turns his head to the left.

Debbie looks up from her lap. Her face is thin. She looks old, somehow, and tired. He has never thought that of her before, but he thinks it now. She is not wearing makeup and her eyes are red and the skin beneath them is blotchy and dark gray and the corners of her mouth are turned down.

‘Hi,’ he says, but it is little more than a whisper.

She says nothing at first, just looks at him. She wipes her nose, her red-rimmed nostrils, with the back of her wrist. Finally: ‘Bill’s dead.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Then he coughs, and there is that strange feeling like trying to breathe underwater. He coughs and coughs, and feels like phlegm or something should come up, but nothing does. His muscles tighten as he coughs and pain ripples through his body from the dropped-pebble point where the bullet said hello. He hears a strange liquid sucking sound from beneath a thin blanket which covers his torso. He lifts the blanket. A clear tube, a catheter about as big around as a woman’s pinky finger, sutured into his chest just under his armpit. Thread stitched through his flesh and then wrapped around the catheter to hold it into place. The skin pursed around it like lips around a straw, like some strange alien tulip. In the tube, blood and pus combined to form a thick pink liquid. A knot of it flows down the catheter to a small box on the floor with PLEUR-EVAC written on it.

He coughs again, and more liquid flows from his chest and into the tube. It hurts to cough. It hurts even to breathe.

‘Jesus,’ he says when he gets his breath back.

‘You were shot.’

After a moment, after he manages to get his breath back, he says, ‘I know.’

‘You had a collapsed lung.’

Ian nods.

Debbie frowns and looks down at her lap once more.

‘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.

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.