He sits on the toilet lid and puts his elbows on his legs and his face in his hands.
He has taken all of Donald’s toes and the man has still not talked. He has to start on the fingers next. But first a moment of peace.
He sits silently and thinks about nothing.
Somewhere a tumbleweed rolls through desert sands.
‘Okay,’ he says after a few minutes, and gets to his feet. He opens the medicine cabinet and looks through the bottles there, knocking several into the sink below before finding some 50-milligram tramadol tablets in an orange prescription bottle. ‘Take one tablet by mouth every four hours, as needed, for pain.’ He thumbs the cap off and pours three or four pills into his mouth. Then turns on the water, brings a palmful to his lips, and swallows. He pockets the bottle and wipes at his chin before heading back out to the living room where Donald waits and bleeds.
‘For all I know he went down to Florida to try to catch a fishing boat to Cuba.’
That’s the sentence that loses Donald the pinky finger on his right hand-the hatchet also cutting halfway through his ring finger. He swings the hatchet down into the arm of the chair, taking off a small chunk of wood along with the finger. The finger drops to the carpet like a dead bird.
Donald groans and clenches his teeth and grimaces with cracked, bloody lips. The groan stretches out, becoming a sob. Tears stream down his face.
Ian picks up the finger, rolls it in paper towel, and sets it among the other digits. The ice is beginning to melt, making a bloody soup in which pieces of Donald float. Ian thinks of going to the fair when he was a kid, of bobbing for apples. His stomach clenches.
Turning back around to Donald he says, ‘Did you try that one on the police, too?’
Donald doesn’t respond. He simply glares at Ian through bloodshot eyes.
‘Do you want to try again?’ Ian says.
‘You’re no better than he is,’ Donald says between labored breaths as tears stream down his face from bloodshot eyes. ‘You’re no better than he is.’
‘Then you know what he is.’
‘He’s my brother.’
‘He’s a piece of shit.’
‘What are you?’
‘I’m a man trying to get his daughter back.’
Donald actually laughs. Taped to a chair, toes hacked off, fingers on his right hand now gone too, naked in a pool of his own blood-he laughs. ‘You think Henry doesn’t have justifications for what he’s done? You’re everything he is.’
‘And you?’
‘I’ve done nothing. I’m just a man protecting his brother.’
‘Then you made your choice too.’
Ian brings the hatchet down on the left arm of the chair, taking off the two middle fingers on Donald’s left hand. Donald clenches his teeth. Blood merely oozes from the wounds. When Ian began this thing there was much more bleeding, but now most of the blood is already on the outside, and what little Donald has left is hesitant to leave him. Each new wound bleeds less than the one before. Donald is pale. Weak and pale. He’s already momentarily lost consciousness once. Ian doesn’t know how much longer the man can hold up. But he’ll find out.
Donald glares up at him, defiant.
‘Tell me where he is and I’ll call an ambulance.’
‘Don’t try to lay what you are on me.’
‘What?’
‘You motherfucker,’ Donald says. ‘You relentless, heartless motherfucker. Don’t you try to lay on me what you are. Saying I made my choice. I didn’t choose for you to come in here with a hatchet. I didn’t choose to be bound to a chair. I didn’t even choose to have Henry for a brother. At least admit what you are. You’re. .’ he stops talking, breathing hard, and his chin drops briefly to his chest before snapping up again, ‘you’re no better than he is. You’re just as willing to. . just as willing to hurt. . I hate. . Fuck you both.’
Donald’s chin drops to his chest again, but just as it drops his head snaps up once more. For a moment his eyes are lost. Then they find focus, and Ian, and Donald glares at him.
‘I’m not the same as your brother,’ Ian says.
‘You’re no different.’
‘My daughter is an innocent. All those little girls were innocents. You’re no innocent. You might try to tell yourself you are, that you never did anything, but we both know different. You know what he is. You probably have always known. But you never stopped him. You could’ve stopped him but you never did. That makes you an accomplice. He stole my daughter, my life, and you knew. You knew and you did nothing. Every day I saw you and you said nothing-for years.’
‘That doesn’t make you right.’
‘I don’t care if I’m right,’ Ian says. ‘I want my daughter back.’
Donald’s eyes flutter and start to roll back in his head, but he manages to hold on to consciousness. Just barely, by all appearances.
‘I gave her books. I even gave her lessons when I could. History, math. I checked on her. To make sure she was okay.’
‘But you didn’t do what you should have.’
‘I did what I could without betraying my brother.’
‘I want her back.’
Silence for a long time, then: ‘Fine.’
‘Fine what?’
‘I’ll tell you. He doesn’t. . he doesn’t deserve to be protected from the consequences of what he. . I’ll tell you where he’s headed, but you have to tell me some-’ He stops here a moment, closing his eyes and swallowing. ‘You have to tell me something.’
‘What?’
‘You were gonna kill me no matter what I said, weren’t you?’
Ian is silent for a long time, in part because he is not certain of the answer. He knows he told himself he would only go this far if he absolutely had to, but he doesn’t know whether or not he was lying.
You were gonna kill me no matter what I said, weren’t you?
He licks his lips, and after a while he nods. ‘Yes,’ he says.
FOUR
Ian is on the road before first light. He lay down last night after he was finished with Donald, after he had gotten what he needed from the man; he was exhausted and in pain and did not have any choice in the matter, it was lie down or fall down, but he set the alarm for four o’clock and is after Henry before the morning sun breaches the horizon.
After the first five minutes on the interstate, during which Bulls Mouth lies to his left like a pile of tangled Christmas lights, most of which are broken, the town is history and he sees little more than the gray strip of asphalt that is the road rolling out before him. The lights of the small town are replaced by a vast flat nowhere decorated occasionally by scatterings of trees that can barely be seen in the darkness. Fireflies dot the air here and there, and Ian drives through them. They splatter on his windshield, and his wipers leave glowing streaks smeared across the glass. He cannot see much of anything beyond the road. It is pleasant to drive that way. It shrinks your world to nothing but the road in front of you: everything there is is what your headlights splash across. Everything before you is comprehensible. The drone of the tires is pleasant: a song to send you to sleep. There are no other cars on the road.
He drives this way for some time, time itself nonexistent. Time means nothing when every moment is like the one that just passed. He stops for gas at a Citgo in Schulenburg at some point, but as soon as he’s back on the road, it’s as if it didn’t happen, like a dream after waking. Then, around six thirty, with the sunrise on the flat line of the horizon behind him splashing into his rearview mirror, something to signify that minutes and hours have gone by, he arrives in San Antonio, passing the Shady Acre Tavern, Lone Star Truck Equipment, Southern Tire Mart, and a couple dozen other businesses that skirt the city. He finds a Denny’s on Frederickburg and eats a Grand Slam Breakfast and drinks five cups of coffee. When he is done he tips his waitress, Doris, twenty percent.
By just past seven he is back on the road.
Maggie sits on the ground behind the house, Beatr
ice beside her. They silently watch Henry cover Flint and Naomi with dirt. It took him a long time to dig the hole into which he dumped them, grunting and levering out hard chunks of earth, but the filling of it goes quickly. His shirt is off and tucked into the back pocket of his Levis, and he’s covered with an oily layer of sweat and dripping with it. His face is red. He digs the shovel into his pile of dirt and dumps it over the bodies, one load of dirt after another.
Maggie feels sad. She could not bear to watch Henry dragging Flint and Naomi to the hole; to see how Flint’s arm flopped lifelessly as Henry rolled him into it; to see Naomi stare blankly with one eye, the other covered in blood from a knife wound in her forehead; to hear the potato-sack thud-thud of the bodies hitting the bottom of the hole. She has seen so much death lately. She never wants to see it again. And she liked Flint and Naomi. They helped when they didn’t have to. You don’t repay someone who helped you by killing them.
Henry told her if she kept her mouth shut they would not be killed, but she did keep her mouth shut and they were killed anyway. Henry lied.
He finishes covering the hole and pounds the dirt down with the flat of the shovel, and then throws his shovel into the bed of his Ford Ranger, which he drove around back of the house earlier this morning.
After that, but before digging the hole that would become Flint and Naomi’s grave, he removed the license plates from the Ford and threw them out into the field. Now he pulls open the door and takes out a pair of guns, and puts them into Flint’s Dodge Ram. He puts the long rifle behind the seats and tucks another smaller gun under the driver’s seat. Then he takes the boxes from the bed of his truck and puts them into the bed of the other.
When he’s done he takes his T-shirt from the back pocket of his Levis and wipes his sweaty face on it, and then slips back into it. It is covered with moisture and smeared with dirt.
Maggie wants to run-if she could just get away everything would be okay-but she feels certain Henry would catch her.
He caught Naomi. He caught Naomi and she was a grown up. He caught her and he stabbed her in the face and the neck and the chest, and he dragged her to the back of the house by her hair and dropped her and kicked her even though she was dead, and covered her with a blue tarp that he pulled from a stack of cordwood and dropped pieces of that wood onto the corners of the tarp to keep the wind from blowing it off the body. She watched him through a window, working in the circle of the back-porch light. There was blood on his hands when he was finished and he reached down and scooped up a handful of dirt and rolled his hands around in it before dusting himself off and coming inside. He pulled the steak knife from his back pocket and dropped it into the sink as if nothing had happened. As if the blood on it did not belong to a man and a woman who had never done anything but help them. As if nothing terrible had just happened at all.
It didn’t take him five minutes to return with Naomi after he ran out the back door. Not five minutes. When he left she was alive, when he returned she was dead. Maggie had tried to help save her. She had tried. Not for herself. It only occurred to her later, after Naomi was out the door and running, that if Naomi could get to help maybe that help would come here and rescue her. But when she did it, when she tripped Henry and yelled at her to go, it didn’t even cross her mind. She just wanted to help save the woman from Henry. But she did not save her.
Maggie wants to run, but she’s afraid of meeting the same fate.
She knew that if she tried to escape the Nightmare World Henry might kill her, but yesterday morning the idea of death was just that: an idea. She has seen death since, though, and she is not okay with it. She wants to live. She does not want the light inside her to go out.
And Henry is scared. She can see it in his face. He is scared of getting caught, and that makes him more likely to kill her if she causes too much trouble. Cornered animals lash out. Her daddy told her that once and she has never seen a reason to disbelieve it. Cornered animals are the most dangerous kind.
If she’s to run again she must pick her moment carefully; she must be certain of getting away. As certain as possible.
She nods to herself.
She’ll wait for her moment, then run.
Henry trudges over to them, wiping sweat from his brow. He blows his nose with his fingers, then shakes snot off his hand and wipes his hand off on his Levis. He squints at her and Beatrice sitting beside one another.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘let’s get the fuck out of here.’
Diego knocks on Ian’s front door. There’s a smear of burgundy on the white-painted wood by the brass doorknob and a bloody thumbprint on the knob itself. From Diego’s perspective the bloody thumbprint on the knob appears to have been smashed into the left cheek of his distorted reflection.
When Ian does not answer his door Diego knocks again.
‘Ian?’
Still only silence from the other side.
‘Ian?’
Diego grabs the knob and jiggles it. It is locked but not dead-bolted, and the door is loosely fitted. He turns the knob as far as the lock allows and jerks toward the hinges and presses his shoulder against the door. The first time it does not give, but the second time, with some minor cracking of the doorjamb, it swings open.
‘Ian?’
And still nothing, no response: a response in itself.
Earlier this morning when he called her Debbie would not tell him where Ian was. She said she didn’t know, but Diego did not believe her, nor does he now. And he is worried. Ian left the hospital last night, and Donald Dean did not show up at Bill’s Liquor this morning. Diego thinks Debbie knows something about the connection between those two events, but she isn’t talking, and he is unwilling to push it. The woman just lost her husband (wife-stealing asshole though Bill Finch was, may he rest in peace), and Maggie is as much her daughter as she is Ian’s. And Maggie’s reappearance may be harder on her in a way: she believed her daughter dead.
He steps into the apartment and closes the door behind him. He looks around.
Just to his left is a hat rack with a never-worn Stetson hanging upon it, as well as an Anaheim Angels cap that, as far as Diego knows, Ian wore only during the 2002 World Series (and for which he would have been taunted, except nobody in town really gave much of a shit about the Giants either). To his right, the kitchen: tile counter top, stainless-steel sink, small white refrigerator with a couple pictures of Maggie stuck to its door with magnets. Straight ahead, the living room: blue couch, coffee table on which a chess board and a few empty Guinness bottles sit, a television set.
There is a smear of blood on the arm of the couch.
‘Ian?’
Silence.
He walks down the bookshelf-lined hallway to the bedroom. The bed is made but looks as though it has been lain upon. The blankets are wrinkled and there is a dent in its middle. Within the dent is more blood. And on the floor between the bed and Diego a hospital gown in a pile.
A dresser drawer has been left open. A shirt hangs from it.
Blood. Signs that Ian was here but left in a hurry, and no sign of Ian himself.
And Donald is missing.
He has to go to the Dean place.
On his way he tries to call Ian’s cell phone for the third or fourth time this morning and, as happened before, the call goes to voicemail after five rings. He thumbs the button to end the call without bothering to leave a message, and then pockets his phone.
Rolling down the driveway is a surreal experience. All around are traces of what happened yesterday. Gravel stained red. Yellow tape cordoning off the house. A.22 casing missed by the county boys at the foot of the stairs, catching a glint of sunlight.
Diego drives past this to the single-wide mobile home behind the main house. It’s sitting on blocks, the axles and wheels long ago rusted, the tires rotted away and lying on the dead grass beneath like prehistoric serpents. Steps made of plywood and two-by-fours weathered to a pale gray, the dull copper of rusted nail heads dotting them.
>
The mobile home itself is a powder green, the metal siding dented in several places, tattered and torn window screens hanging from their frames like the flags of those who lost the war. An antenna juts above the asphalt shingles that line the roof.
He parks next to Donald’s El Camino and steps from his car.
‘All right, Diego,’ he says to himself, and unsnaps his holster with the twitch of a thumb. He walks up the steps-heel-toe, clunk-clunk-stopping at the narrow metal front door. He looks down. He is standing upon a welcome mat with Yosemite Sam on it, aiming a gun up at him from the ground. Hasn’t even announced himself yet and already there’s a gun pointed at his face.
‘Pow,’ he says, then presses the doorbell to the left of the door.
It ding-dongs inside. He waits. When, after several beats, he does not get an answer, he bangs on the hollow metal door. It rattles in its frame.
‘Donald, it’s Diego. Officer Peña. Open up.’
Donald does not open up.
Diego draws his SIG with his right hand and with his left grabs the doorknob. He turns it gently to see if it will give and it does. He pushes a bit. Waits, exhales, and shoves the door open with his back to the wall just left of it.
He looks in quickly, not long enough for someone to take aim, and pulls out again. The place is dark and hot. The curtains are drawn. Only one light is on, a dim lamp in the lazily spinning fan in the ceiling. The wood-paneled room feels sick and claustrophobic. Flies dot the ceiling.
‘Donald, it’s the police.’
No response.
After another breath he steps into the living room. At first he sees nothing out of the ordinary, but this is only because he does not see what’s on the other side of the open door. All he can see is what’s to the left of him and what’s to the left of him is a single man’s living quarters. A sagging chair, a sagging couch, a dinner tray, empty beer cans littering the floor, a nudie-magazine centerfold thumb-tacked to the wall.
The Dispatcher Page 17
