The Dispatcher Read online

  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.’

  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 up 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.

  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.