The Dispatcher (33 page)

‘Got Donald?’ Ron says. ‘You mean kilt him?’

Henry nods.

‘You think or you know?’

‘I think.’

Ron shakes his head. ‘No,’ he says, ‘he didn’t kill Donald.’

‘I think maybe—’

‘Donald’s the only one of us who’s any good. He couldn’t’ve got killed.’

‘I think he—’

‘Hush up and watch the sunset.’

‘I just—’

‘Hush up, Henry. You never did know when to keep your goddamned mouth shut.’

Henry picks up his beer and takes a swallow. He squints toward the sunset, then looks left at the gray road to the south leading from the interstate into town. It is empty.

 

 

 

By the time they each finish their second beer and grab their third Ron is smiling again.

‘I missed you, Henry.’

‘I missed you too.’

‘This kinda feels like fishing, don’t it?’

Henry nods. ‘It’s nice.’

But suddenly the smile is gone from Ron’s face and he is no longer looking at Henry but past him. He nods his head.

‘Look it.’

Henry looks left, to the south, and sees it. A dirty red car coming toward them. At this distance it looks like little more than a matchbox, a toy you could lose under your bed, but it’s Ian Hunt all right. And suddenly Henry’s heart is beating very fast in his chest, a percussive blood-drum pounding out the rhythm of his fear. And even now, even up here with his older brother, two rifles, and a couple boxes of ammunition, the sight of Hunt’s red car coming toward him does make him feel fear. He does not know why, but it does.

He finishes his warm beer, tosses the can aside, and drops into a prone firing position, up on his elbows, butt of the rifle in his shoulder, legs forming the number four behind him. He leads the red Mustang with the barrel of his gun. It grows larger as it comes nearer. A dusty old beater of a car.

He breathes in and out in tight, jerky fits. He’s going to have to get himself under control if he’s to make this shot count. A man has only one unexpected shot, and he’d do well to make it count. That means creating a calm in his center. At this distance a small shift can mean putting the bullet off target by a foot or two. The throbbing beat of his heart or a poorly timed inhalation and that is it: he’s missed.

Ron remains seated in his lawn chair. He takes a loud swallow of his beer, sets it down, then drops to a knee. Henry doesn’t see it, but he hears it, and he knows that’s the position Ron likes to shoot from, for some reason.

‘You got him?’

‘Hush it up,’ Henry says. ‘Lemme concentrate.’

‘So you got it.’

‘Yeah, now quiet.’

As the car gets nearer Hunt’s face becomes visible. As does the face of the man beside him. He is not alone. He brought someone with him. Henry is sure that he was alone when he saw him on the interstate yesterday. Somewhere along the way he picked someone up. He squints, trying to see if he recognizes the man in the passenger seat. Officer Peña. Diego Peña.

‘Oh, fuck,’ he says under his breath.

‘What is it?’

‘I said lemme concentrate.’

‘Then stop cursing and start concentrating.’

Did Hunt involve the police after all? No, that doesn’t make any sense. Peña’s just a city cop and this is way outside his jurisdiction. Peña doesn’t even count as a policeman this far west. He’s just another
si habla español
with a gun.

He looks past the Mustang and into the distance. There are no other vehicles within miles. Hunt and Peña are alone out here. They’re alone out here, and Henry has to make sure they never leave. He has to kill them. Then it’s over.

He licks his lips. He inhales and holds his breath. The world is a storm but he is its eye. He lines Ian up in his sights.

The cold metal of the trigger dents the pad of his finger as he puts pressure upon it, then it moves beneath that pressure.

It is nearly seven o’clock when Ian pulls the Mustang off the interstate; the sun is low in the sky and has lost much of its midday polish and the sky itself is reddening. They drive past a place called the Desert Cafe, and then past a shotgunned sign that says KAISER 8 MILES. Beyond the sign there is no evidence of human life save the road itself, the desert stretching out on either side of them dotted only with shrubbery and Joshua trees. A rattlesnake is stretched out on the other side of the road to catch the last of the day’s sun before slithering off for the night. The corpse of a jackrabbit half a mile past it.

Neither he nor Diego say anything for a long time.

Then Ian breaks the silence: ‘You don’t have to be here for this.’

‘But I do.’

‘You don’t. You have a wife and a son and you don’t have to be here for this.’

Diego looks at him a moment, and then out toward the desert to his right. Ian glances at him, but he is silent and his head is turned away.

‘When I was in grade school,’ Diego says after a while, still looking out his window, ‘around twelve or so, I was hanging out with these older kids at recess. They walked up to this kid sitting on one of the picnic benches next to the basketball courts, just this kid about my age reading a Stephen King novel or something, and started harassing him. ‘Nice shoes,’ someone said. They were the cheap plastic kind and the tops were already cracked. ‘Thank you,’ he said. You could hear the nervous tremor in his voice. I remember that very clearly, that nervous tremor. ‘You find ’em in the trash?’ That kind of thing. I just stood there. I might have even thrown out an insult of my own, you know, to fit in, but I felt ashamed of myself, Ian. My heart felt sick. I’ve never forgotten that.’

 

 

 

Ian slows down as they approach the town itself. To the right is an abandoned gas station with a tipped-over Coke machine lying dead in its parking lot. Civilization felled. Dead grass juts from cracks in the asphalt. Then they pass a grocery store, also abandoned.

‘Jesus,’ Diego says. ‘It’s like a preview of the end of the world.’

Ian nods. ‘Keep a lookout for any sign of them. I don’t like driving into this at—’

Thwack.

For a moment Ian has no idea what happened. Then he sees a small hole in the middle of the windshield. He looks to Diego. Diego looks back.

‘Your ear’s bleeding,’ Diego says.

Ian touches his right ear. It stings sharply and his fingers come away red. He glances to his seat’s headrest. A hole just big enough to stick your pinky finger into.

‘Put your head down,’ he says to Diego as he drops his own. Thwack.

Pieces of the windshield start to fall around them.

Ian puts his foot on the gas, panicking and trying to get them out of the line of fire, but accidentally stalls the engine after only ten or fifteen feet. He reaches out to the driver’s side door—he thinks the gunfire is coming from the school to the northeast and wants the car between him and any bullets flying toward him—and pushes it open.

Then he pushes himself out the car door and onto the road saying, ‘This way, Diego, and keep your fucking head down.’

He hits asphalt and a terrible pain rips through his chest.

He looks down. Red spreads quickly across his shirt. The tube tore out. He forgot about it and it tore out. It lies across his seat and hangs down the outside of the car and drips pink pus-blood onto the dirty asphalt. On the end of it, wrapped around it, is the black string that was once stitched through his skin, making the edges of the wound pucker like a tulip, and a pink triangle of the skin itself. When he breathes he hears that punctured-tire wheeze. He puts his hand over his chest to stop the air from leaking out that way. The last thing he needs right now is a collapsed lung.

Thwack. Thwack.

Two more bullets hit the car.

Diego drops to the road beside him.

‘Are you shot?’

Ian shakes his head.

‘I need plastic,’ he says.

‘Plastic?’

He closes his eyes and grimaces in pain. Then he opens them again. Diego sits on his haunches, ducked behind the Mustang and looking down at him.

‘In the car,’ Ian says. ‘On the floorboard. There should be a small sheet of plastic. Can you get it?’

Diego nods and climbs back into the car.

Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.

Silence from within the car.

‘Diego?’

More silence. He’s almost convinced himself that Diego was shot when he emerges with a rectangle of plastic about six inches long and three inches wide. It has two stickers on it. The first sticker marks it as a TUNA FISH AND CHEDDAR SANDWICH and the second has the price, $4.99, and a barcode.

‘This?’ Diego asks.

Ian nods. ‘That’s the one.’

He unbuttons his shirt with his right hand while holding his left over the hole in his chest.

‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Listen. I’m gonna pull my hand away from my chest. I need you to slap that piece of plastic over the hole.’

‘Okay.’

Ian licks his dry lips. ‘Okay.’

Ian pulls his hand away. He inhales and hears that terrible whistle. Then pressure and it stops. Diego is leaning over him, hand holding the plastic over the wound in his chest.

‘Okay,’ Ian says. ‘I got it.’

He puts his own hand over the piece of plastic.

‘Help me sit up and get this shirt off.’

They get Ian up and then get his right arm out of his shirt; then, after putting his right hand over the wound in his chest, his left arm.

‘Now,’ Ian says. ‘Let’s tie the shirt around me. Use it to hold the plastic in place.’

Diego nods. ‘Okay,’ he says.

He shakes the dust off the shirt, then slings it around Ian’s back.

 

 

 

Ian simply sits with his back against the car’s left front fender and catches his breath. Tears of pain stream down his face and his heart beats irregularly in his chest. He breathes in and out. He closes his eyes and opens them. The pain is tremendous. He reaches into his pocket, pulls out the bottle of tramadol. He thumbs the cap off the bottle and looks inside. Three pills left. He pours them into his mouth and dry swallows, then throws the bottle aside.

‘Are you gonna be okay?’

He shakes his head.

‘No,’ he says. ‘But we’re here and we’re doing this, so let’s finish it.’

‘Let’s.’

‘Get the guns from the back seat.’

Maggie is pulling her hand against the cuff, grimacing, unable to get the metal ring over the meat of her thumb, when she hears the first gunshot. Beatrice jumps at the sound and drops the bag of chips in her hand.

She leaves the chips where they lie and walks to the pistol Henry gave her and picks it up from the floor where she set it. She examines it, a confused look on her face, like she doesn’t know how it got into her hand, sets it down again, and walks to the window. The evening light splashes across her face.

Another gunshot sounds and Beatrice jumps again.

‘What can you see?’

‘Nothing,’ Beatrice says. ‘Just a baseball field.’

‘That’s my daddy,’ Maggie says. ‘Those gunshots mean my daddy’s here.’

‘Henry’s your daddy, Sarah.’

‘Henry will never be my daddy.’

Two more gunshots echo through the hollow school building, the sounds bouncing off the walls and repeating and repeating and repeating, but softer each time.

‘Henry will never be my daddy,’ she says again, ‘and you’ll never be my momma.’

Beatrice looks at her with wide, sad eyes, half her face lit by what is left of the day splashing in through the windows, the other half covered in shadows and seemingly younger as the shadows hide the lines in her face.

‘Why would you say such a thing, Sarah? We’re doing all this for you. To keep our family together. Family’s the most important thing there is and we’re doing this for you.’

‘I don’t want you to. I want to go back to my
real
family.’

‘We’re your real family now.’

Maggie shakes her head.

‘No,’ she says. ‘My daddy’s here. My real daddy. He’s my family. Him and my momma and Jeffrey. My daddy’s a policeman and he’s going to put you and Henry in jail forever and ever. He’s going to put you in jail and take me home and I’ll never have to see you again.’

‘Don’t talk like that, Sarah.’

Tears stream down Beatrice’s round face, but her eyes are ablaze with anger as well as sadness. Her hands form fists at her sides. She almost looks capable of violence.

Maggie has never spoken to her this way, mostly out of fear that Henry would find out and put her on the punishment hook, but also because she always felt a little bit sorry for her, she has always seemed so sad, but she does not feel sorry for her now, and she is no longer afraid of Henry. No longer so afraid of him that she is willing to remain silent. She simply wants to be home with her real family. That want burns hot within her chest. She thought she would never feel that again. She thought the sun that burns within her had died, but it did not die.

It was only nighttime.

Three more gunshots echo through the air one after the other in quick succession.

‘Henry’s probably dead now,’ Maggie says. ‘You’ll be in jail alone and Henry will be dead. No one will even write you any letters and no one will visit.’

‘Don’t
talk
like that,’ Beatrice says, pushing Maggie. The desk tilts, holds a moment, precariously balanced on two legs, and then crashes onto its side. Maggie’s elbow slams against the floor and pain vibrates through her body and a strange sensation shoots up her arm and her pinky and ring fingers go numb.

Beatrice rushes to her side and works to pull her and the desk up. It takes some doing, but she manages it. Maggie rubs at her elbow with her free hand. She thinks of pulling out of the handcuffs and grabbing the gun from the floor and running out of here. She knows her daddy is here, but she cannot just sit and wait to be saved. She waited trapped in the Nightmare World for a long time, and it was the longest night she has ever known, the longest night, she hopes, she will ever know, and she will not sit and wait ever again.