The Dispatcher

by Jahn, Ryan David

  ‘Okay,’ Monica says. ‘Do you mind if I still sit with you?’

  ‘No,’ Ian says. ‘In fact, I’d like that.’

  He’s just eating the last of his dinner when a local news program comes on. After some talk of little or no import a brunette woman with her hair in a bun, big brown eyes, and a tight-fitting blouse says, ‘Just under three hours ago, on Interstate 10, outside the small Texas town of Sierra Blanca, a Hudspeth County Sheriff ’s Deputy, Deputy Pagana, was killed during a routine stop. The incident was captured by the deputy’s dashboard-mounted camera. Police have released the footage to the media in the hopes that it will lead to information on the whereabouts of the perpetrator of this crime. We would like to warn you that the following footage is of a disturbing nature and may be inappropriate for children.’

  An awkward pause during which the newswoman blinks at the camera, and then a cut to grainy footage seen through a dirty windshield. The footage is in color, and has audio, though the audio is tinny and hard to hear. Mostly just background noise with the occasional rumblings of a voice you can’t understand. It is dated and time coded. For a moment all that’s visible is the back of a gray Dodge Ram pickup truck. Ian can see Maggie through the rear window. She is looking back at the car, seemingly at the camera, at him, then a hand, Henry’s hand, grabs her and turns her around. A uniformed sheriff ’s deputy then walks along the left side of the frame. He reaches the truck. Ian’s Mustang passes by on the road behind him. There is some talking. Then, without warning, the deputy pulls out his gun. He steps back. He looks scared. He yells. He pulls open the truck’s door and yells some more. He wipes sweat off his face with his shoulder. And then a flash from the truck. A red explosion from the deputy’s hip. He staggers backwards several steps, out of frame. A red mist hangs in the air. Then another flash from the truck. Henry steps into the daylight, breaks open his sawed-off shotgun and pulls shells from it. He drops them to the asphalt. He reloads, points the gun at something out of frame, and yells. Sounds like he’s telling someone to get out of their car. He curses and the curses are censored by beeps. He walks out of frame toward the person at whom he was yelling. A moment later Maggie slides out of the truck and onto the asphalt. There she is, the bravest person he has ever met. She looks around with frantic eyes, and then runs around the front of the truck and disappears. The gray truck wobbles slightly. Perhaps someone getting out of the passenger side. That side is not in frame. A woman’s voice tells someone named Sarah to stop. Henry runs across the frame and around the front of the truck. Toward Maggie. The program cuts back to the woman at the news desk. She looks very serious.

  ‘Police believe Deputy Pagana’s killer is a man named Henry Dean,’ she says, ‘who is already wanted for questioning in connection with several kidnappings and murders in Tonkawa County, Texas. He is believed to be traveling with his wife, Beatrice Dean, and a young girl named Magdalene Hunt, who, police believe, Mr Dean kidnapped from her home over seven years ago. If you have any information as to the whereabouts of Mr Dean, please call Detective Roderick with the Hudspeth County Sheriff’s Department or Detective Sanchez at the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s El Paso field office.’

  Phone numbers appear onscreen.

  Ian steps out into the dying light. He walks to his car, grabs a duffel bag with clothes in it and the sawed-off shotgun he got from the police station. He squints out at the gray asphalt of the interstate and past it to the desert landscape.

  The entire right side of his body throbs with pain. He feels sweaty and sticky and dirty and sick.

  After a moment he turns away from the road and makes his way around back of Motel/Food to find his room.

  Picture yourself standing on a road beneath the white sun. Sweat trickles down your face. Your skin is overheated and itchy. Your clothes are damp and they stick to your skin. How you got here is irrelevant: you’re here. And you are looking to the northeast, toward Sierra Blanca. You’re looking that way because that’s where it’s happening . . .

  A blond girl in a dress runs through tall dead grass. She is barefoot, you can see that as her heels kick above the grass, and her feet kick up sprays of dirt as she runs. If the frame included only her bare feet cutting through the grass the scene could be a happy one: a girl running toward her one true love. It would all depend on the soundtrack. But this is a long shot and you see much more than just the feet, and the soundtrack is raspy breathing and feet pounding against dirt. Behind the girl is a fat older man. You’ve never met him but you know his name. Henry Dean. He runs after the girl. For every two steps she takes, the man requires only one. The distance between them shrinks and shrinks and shrinks, and she screams for help as she nears the town, but help does not come. Then the man is upon her, and he swings with a heavy arm and his fist hits the side of her head like a swinging club, and she is off her feet, in the air, still moving forward, but also sideways with the force of the blow. Then she falls, vanishing into the tall grass.

  The ground rushes up at her, oh God how did this happen, I was supposed to get away, and her head smashes against a rock in the ground, and the blow switches off her consciousness like a light—click—and in the dark room of her mind she has only some small sense of what is happening. Warmth against her body: the hot ground upon which she lies. A breeze blows and the tall dead grass rustles around her making sounds like whispers. Hush. Something sticky running into the bowls of her closed eyes. Someone picks her up. A grunt, not her own, for she is silent and silent and silent.

  She tries to open her eyes but she cannot. She tries to speak but she cannot. She is locked in the dark room of her mind and cannot see an EXIT sign anywhere, nor a door.

  Henry walks back toward Beatrice with Sarah sagging unconscious in his arms. Bee is standing there with dirt on her knees looking at him with her mouth open. Her toes point at one another. Her arms hang at her sides.

  ‘I got her,’ he says. ‘I got her for you.’

  ‘You shouldn’t’ve hit her.’

  ‘She would’ve got away.’

  ‘You shouldn’t’ve hit her. You shouldn’t’ve hit her and you shouldn’t’ve shot them people and you shouldn’t . . .’ Her voice breaks and she stops. Finally she looks up at him once more and says, ‘You shouldn’t’ve hit her.’

  His first instinct is to tell her to shut her mouth, don’t be stupid, I couldn’t let her get into town, Bee, but he does not tell her that. He closes his eyes and exhales in a long sigh and opens his eyes and says, ‘You’re right. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Now let’s get to the truck and get out of here.’

  ‘Her head is bleeding.’

  ‘She fell on a rock.’

  ‘Will she be okay?’

  ‘How the hell should I—’

  Several cars are stopped on the interstate. People are talking loudly, panic in their voices, surrounding the dead deputy. A woman is on her phone with the police, practically screaming about a murder. The blond woman he almost shot is pointing at them, and other people are now looking. He thinks of the life they left in Bulls Mouth and the few belongings they took with them. Up in the Dodge Ram. It is all lost. Don’t look over your shoulder at what you left behind. It’s best to forget what cannot be recovered.

  Henry tastes bile at the back of his throat and swallows it away.

  ‘Turn around and walk,’ Henry says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Turn around and walk away.’

  Nobody follows.

  They walk along a dirt road. Henry is looking around for a car or truck left unattended and with keys in the ignition. They’ve walked by five vehicles so far, but all of them were locked. He is getting very nervous. He wants to get into something and on the road before more police arrive, or, at the very least, before the cops have a chance to set up a roadblock. He needs to get out of Texas, but New Mexico is still a couple hours off. If the Texas police get hold of him now, after everything he’s done to Texas lawmen, spending his li
fe in prison will be the least of his worries. He’ll be looking at a death injection.

  ‘My ankle hurts.’

  ‘I know it, Bee.’

  Up ahead on the left he sees a rusted-out Chevy flatbed poking from a barn that looks about ready to collapse. He nods toward it.

  ‘Let’s see if we can get out of town in that.’

  ‘It’s kind of big.’

  ‘We’re not shopping around, Bee. We gotta take what’s handy.’

  He looks around, but the dirt road appears to be empty of life. Sirens wail in the distance and grow louder. Their time is short.

  They walk toward the truck.

  ‘Check it,’ Henry says as they get near.

  Beatrice limps to the truck and grabs the handle and thumbs the button and pulls open the door. Flakes of rust fall to the ground. She leans in and looks.

  ‘There’s a key.’

  Henry turns it. The truck’s engine groans. He gives it a little gas. The exhaust pipe spits black smoke. The engine starts. He puts the truck into gear and it rumbles out of the barn and onto the dirt road. He glances at Beatrice. She has Sarah leaning against her arm and she is stroking the girl’s blond hair, combing her fingers through it. Then Beatrice lifts the skirt of her own dress, revealing sweaty cotton panties, and wipes at the blood on Sarah’s face.

  ‘She’ll be okay,’ Henry says.

  ‘You shouldn’t’ve hit her,’ Bee says.

  Henry drives south along a road that does not appear to have a name. After a block he reaches the Interstate 10 feeder road and turns right. He can see the interstate up ahead, several police cars—and a county SUV—parked on the side of the road, lights flashing. He’s never going to get past all those cops. It just isn’t going to happen. He should have . . . well, should have what? In another half hour cops will be all over Sierra Blanca. News of what happened here will move through town like brushfire. He’s lived in a small town all his life and knows how quickly news spreads. He has to get away from here as fast as possible, and there is only one place for him to go. There is nobody he can count on but his big brother.

  As he drives onto the interstate he sees the right lane is completely blocked off by flares and traffic is backed up several cars as sheriff’s deputies wave cars through one by one.

  After everything that’s happened, this is where it ends; in some spit-smear of a town in West Texas with the sun beating down on him. He puts on his turn signal and merges into the left lane. He reaches into his shirt pocket and pulls out a roll of antacids and thumbs one into his mouth and chews it.

  There are five cars in front of him. Deputies stop each car and ask questions before allowing them through.

  This is where it ends.

  Henry looks in the rearview mirror as he drives away from the scene of his most recent crime. His chest feels tight, but the further he gets from it, the smaller the scene appears in his rearview mirror, the less his heart seems squeezed. He can barely believe he made it through.

  ‘Where you headed?’

  ‘My brother’s place in California.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Pick up a car he don’t want no more.’

  ‘Brought the whole family?’

  ‘Why not? You don’t get to go to California every day.’

  ‘Where you traveling from?’

  ‘Houston.’

  ‘You live in Houston?’

  ‘If you wanna call it living.’

  ‘What kinda car?’

  ‘Fifty-six Buick Special. Gonna restore it.’

  ‘Hobby of yours?’

  ‘Man needs a hobby.’

  ‘All right, go on.’

  ‘Thank ya.’

  A smiling salute, and that was it. He was sure they’d ask him for identification. But maybe nobody with authority has arrived yet. Maybe they were just looking for suspicious behavior and if everything seemed cool they’d move on to the next. Doesn’t matter.

  He slipped through.

  The gray road stretches out before them. The cab is silent but for the rattling of the truck itself. Beatrice looks out the window while Sarah leans against her, asleep. Henry glances over trying to read her expression in the reflection on the glass, but it is blank. Her eyes dull, her mouth hanging open slightly. He does not like the silence between them. He is doing all of this for her and he refuses to lose her to it.

  ‘What are you thinking, Bee?’

  ‘Nothing.’ She does not even glance toward him when she speaks the word, simply continues to stare out at the emptiness.

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You must be thinking something.’

  No response.

  He licks his lips. ‘You know I love you, right, Bee?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I know some of the stuff that’s happened last two days upset you.’

  ‘It didn’t happen. You done it.’

  ‘I had to do it. I did it for you.’

  She turns now and there are tears in her eyes. ‘Well, you shouldn’t’ve.’

  ‘But, Bee—’

  She cuts him off with the silent but vehement shaking of her head. Tears roll down her cheeks. ‘You shouldn’t’ve.’

  ‘There was no choice, Bee.’

  ‘There’s always a choice.’

  ‘Do you want to go to prison, Bee?’

  She wipes at her eyes. ‘What would I go to prison for?’ ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Sarah. She’s why we had to leave Bulls Mouth. She’s why we’re on the road now. She’s why we needed to get rid of our truck. Why Flint and his woman had to die. Don’t you act like you don’t know what’s going on, and don’t you act like it’s got nothing to do with you. That ain’t fair and you know it.’

  ‘Henry, I—’

  ‘You know what happened to the other Sarahs, Bee. You know what we done. We both done it. I did what I had to do to make you happy, but you let me. You knew and you wanted it so I done it. Don’t act like you wasn’t a part of all this.’

  ‘But . . . I needed—’

  Henry nods. ‘I know it,’ he says. ‘That’s why I done it.’ ‘But what you done to that nice couple and to that cop was—’

  ‘Was what I had to do to get us out of a tight spot Sarah got us into.’

  ‘You . . . you killed—’

  ‘I did what I had to to keep our family together.’

  Bee sniffles and sits silent a long moment. She licks her lips. Then she looks at him with wide hopeful eyes. ‘You had to?’

  Henry nods. ‘I couldn’t let nobody tear our family apart, could I?’

  ‘They wanted to take Sarah away?’

  ‘That’s right. We couldn’t let them do that.’

  ‘Family’s the most important thing there is.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘You didn’t really want to stomp on Sarah last night?’

  ‘I was just mad, Bee. I would never hurt Sarah. Not on purpose.’

  ‘Because she’s family.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And family’s the most important thing there is.’

  He nods.

  ‘I love you too, Henry.’

  ‘I know it,’ Henry says. ‘Now wipe your eyes. I hate to see you cry.’

  Ian stands motionless under the hot spray of the shower. His eyes are closed and all he can see is that which exists within his mind and his mind for the moment is empty. These moments are rare and he holds on to them as long as possible, which is never long. As soon as a part of his mind becomes aware of the silence within, it is no longer silent.

  The catheter twists out of his chest just below and to the right of his pectoral muscle, and then curls down to the drainage system sitting on the floor just outside the bathtub in which he is standing. It is still in the satchel. He saw no reason to remove it. His body is turned slightly to the right so the shower water does not hit the wounds in his chest.

  He open
s his eyes and grabs a small bar of single-use soap from the window sill where it was resting. He rips the paper from it and wets it and washes himself.

  Outside, through the window, he can see the sun sinking into the ground. A wind blows a swirl of dust across the lot, toward the restaurant in front of which his car is parked. He left it there before coming to his motel room, which is not a motel room at all, but half a single-wide mobile home. Where there should be a hallway leading to the back half there is only a slab of unpainted dry wall. His room consists of what would normally be the kitchen and living room, though the kitchen has been converted into a bathroom and the living room into a bedroom. The bedroom consists of small bed, a chest of drawers, a mirror, and a table on which rests a small TV. An ancient fan wobbles in a ceiling decorated by fat black flies, its five blades cutting through the hot air without cooling it in the least.

  Ian rinses and shuts off the water.

  He pushes the plastic shower curtain aside and steps from the tub, slipping on the linoleum floor and having to catch himself on the counter.

  Something in his back tears as he reaches out to catch himself and he curses through gritted teeth, goddamn it, and closes his eyes in pain. Tears stream down his face. After a moment he opens his eyes. The pain begins to recede. It is still there, and severe, but it becomes almost tolerable. He grabs a towel from the counter and dries himself off. Arms and legs and back and fa—

  The towel is covered in blood.

  There are several drops of it on the linoleum floor. And now he can feel it running down his back. He picks up the satchel from the floor by the tub and walks naked to the living room where a mirror sits upon the chest of drawers. He turns around and looks at himself over his shoulder. Several of the stitches have been torn from the wound in his back—which is larger than he would have guessed, the bullet having taken its pound of flesh with it as it left—and blood is bubbling from it, frothy and seemingly thick as honey.

  ‘Shit.’

  He stands motionless for a long time as blood drips to the carpet, and then he walks to the phone and dials the manager’s office.