The Dispatcher Read online

  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, sliding 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 fre
quent 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 missing 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-’

  ‘Truck,’ the cobbler says, then nods to himself as if getting internal confirmation. ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘definitely a truck.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Ian says. ‘You’ve been a big help. Someone will probably come down with a book of arrest photos for you to look through, and maybe even ask you to Mencken to help reconstruct a picture if you don’t recognize him in the book.’

  He reaches across the counter and picks up Maggie’s photograph. He slips it into his wallet, folds his wallet, and slips it back into his hip pocket.

  ‘And if you see him again,’ Ian says, ‘I want you to call nine-one-one.’

  ‘Okay,’ the man says.

  When they get outside Chief Davis says, ‘Goddamn, Ian, if you ever get tired of being a dispatcher, I tell you what, I’ll give you a job down at the dealership in a second. You can just bully folks into buying cars. I’ll sell out in a week.’

  ‘Thanks, Chief.’

  Cora Hanscomb at the dry-cleaning place next door claims to have neither seen nor heard anything. She says this without looking away from the TV upon which her gaze is fixed. She sits in a metal fold-out chair behind the counter and moves popcorn from a bag in her lap to her mouth. The backs of her fingers are glazed yellow with imitation butter and several pieces of popcorn lie on the floor around her chair and in her lap.

  ‘Nothing?’ Ian says again.

  ‘Huh-uh.’

  ‘Too busy watching the tube to pay attention to a kidnapping?’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘Can’t bother even to look at the people talking to you?’

  ‘Huh-uh.’

  ‘Right,’ Ian says. ‘Thanks a fucking lot.’

  ‘Watch your mouth.’ She says even this without looking away from the TV, her voice a droning monotone.

  ‘Get fucked,’ Ian says, and pushes his way out the door.

  They walk into Bill’s Liquor. Ian glances left to Donald Dean. He’s standing behind an orange Formica counter looking bored. A scruffy guy, maybe forty-five, maybe fifty, with oily brown hair and a patchy beard that makes his face look like it was mauled by a large cat. Above the beard, high on his cheeks, acne scars. He’s thin as a stick and pale, and his smile, when he smiles, looks like a grimace. Teeth crammed together like he’s got a few too many. He nods at Ian and reaches over to a tub of red vines, which is sitting between a tub of pickled pigs’ feet and a tub of beef jerky, pulls one out, and chews on it awhile.

  Chief Davis walks over to him.

  Ian turns right. He walks to the refrigerator at the back, scans the shelves, opens a glass door, which immediately fogs up, and pulls out a six pack of Guinness. The door swings shut behind him as he turns around and walks to where Donald and Chief Davis are standing at the counter.

  ‘-at all?’ Davis is saying.

  ‘Huh-uh.’

  Davis turns to Ian and says, ‘He didn’t hear nothing either.’ ‘Maybe the battery in his hearing aid is dying too.’

  ‘What? I don’t-’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Ian sets the beer on the counter.

  Donald rings it up and says, ‘That all?’

  Ian scans the shelves behind him, looking just below the rows of hard liquor, to several boxes of cigars and cigarettes.

  After a moment he says, ‘Gimme a couple of them Camachos.’

  Donald turns around and looks for them.

  ‘Diploma?’

  ‘Maduro. Bottom shelf, to your right.’

  He grabs them and rings them up. Then he grabs a black plastic bag and loads Ian’s purchases into it. Ian knows the cigars will be dry and probably taste like smoking dog turds. The middle of summer and they’ve been sitting out since the spring. He doesn’t care. He’s used to smoking cigars past their prime.

  While Donald loads the bag Ian pulls out his wallet and removes Maggie’s photo from it. He holds it up in front of Donald.

  ‘You remember my daughter?’

  Donald nods. ‘’Course.’

  ‘You didn’t see anyone resembling her today?’

  ‘Huh-uh,’ he says with his mouth hanging open. Ian can see bits of red vine ground into his molars like wax fillings.

  ‘And you didn’t hear anything?’

  He shakes his head. ‘Like I told Chief Davis.’

  ‘What about a guy in his sixties? Tall, gray hair, balding on top, busted capillaries in his nose. Heavy.’

  Donald lets out a strange giggle and grins with his too-many teeth, but when Ian gives him a dead pan the smile vanishes, and he stares down at the counter nervously and scratches at something sticking to it, part of a price sticker looks like, with a dirty fingernail.

  ‘What’s funny?’

  Donald shakes his head. ‘Nothing, it’s just, you know, you
described damn near half the fat old alcoholics in town.’ He looks from Chief Davis to Ian and a smile grows once more on his face. ‘Hell,’ he says, ‘you just described my brother Henry.’

  Chief Davis snorts once.

  ‘True enough,’ he says. ‘How is Henry, anyway? I haven’t said much more than hello to him since high school, I reckon.’

  ‘He’s okay, I guess.’

  ‘Still working at the community college?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Donald nods.

  ‘If you see anyone looks like my daughter, I want you to call. I’d rather a false alarm than to miss our chance.’

  ‘I will,’ Donald says. He wipes the sweat from his upper lip with a downward swipe of his palm, and then wipes his sweaty palm onto the leg of his pants. ‘I will,’ he says again.

  Ian and Chief Davis step into the daylight. It seems bright even after Ian puts his sunglasses back on. An oppressive wall of heat surrounds them. Ian reaches into his bag and pulls out one of his cigars. He bites the end off, spits it to the parking lot asphalt, plugs the stick into his mouth. He lights it, looking past it to Diego. Diego standing with his arms crossed, watching one of the boys from Mencken pulling fingerprints.

  Then the sheriff himself pulls up in the Ford Expedition Tonkawa County provides for him and screeches to a stop. He steps from the thing, all five feet five of him, all two hundred and sixty pounds of him. He walks toward Ian and Chief Davis, belly swinging before him like a wrecking ball.

  Ian glances at his watch.

  ‘I’ll let you talk to the sheriff,’ he says. ‘I need to tell Deb. Call if there’s any developments.’

  ‘I will. And Ian,’ he says, patting him on the shoulder. ‘Stop in at Roberta’s tonight, okay? You shouldn’t be alone through this.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ Ian says, knowing he won’t.

  Maggie opened her eyes and saw white white white: the ceiling. She tongued the place where her loose tooth should have been, but all that was there now was smooth wet gum and a bloody divot that tasted vaguely of metal.

  Someone took it, she thought. Tooth fairy took it and didn’t pay. Stole it.

  Then it occurred to her that maybe the tooth fairy had paid. She flipped over in bed and tossed the pillow aside, but the only thing beneath it was wrinkled sheet. There was no green dollar bill awaiting discovery. Not even a lousy quarter. She couldn’t believe the tooth fairy would sneak into her bedroom in the dark of night and yank her tooth from her mouth. What a butthole. She briefly considered putting a fake tooth beneath her pillow-a piece of chalk, maybe, or else a white stone if she could find one of the right size-and pretending to sleep so that when the tooth fairy came she could grab him and force him to pay for what he had taken from her.