The Waiting Hours

by Shandi Mitchell

  That was five years ago. Together, they’d had four live finds and three cadavers. They were catching up to Riley and Annabelle’s record. Kate stumbled and grabbed for a jutting metal rod. A cold-hot sliced through her leather glove. Zeus’s head turned, but she kept moving forward.

  Focus, she berated herself. Zeus trotted across a narrow plank, stopping at a fractured opening. His nostrils flared. He bowed and leaned into its space.

  “Wait.”

  Kneeling, she shone her flashlight into the hollow, checking the ceiling and walls for stability, and gave the all-clear. He belly-crawled down the incline. She suppressed the urge to call him back to her safety. She had raised him to be tough physically and mentally, able to withstand gruelling conditions: heat, sound, and ever-varying stimuli. It was the handlers who were the most difficult to train. Choosing to trust their own meagre senses over their dog’s acuity, thus missing obvious communications because of emotion, fear, ego, and fatigue. In the field, these mistakes could cost a life.

  She kept her flashlight trained on Zeus. Several mattresses and pallets were propped against the low, bunkered walls. He paused, considering the cross breezes. Honing in on a mattress in the corner, he bowed and barked his deepest voice. Loud. Strong. Certain. A hand emerged. Zeus’s backside swayed with joy. The mattress jostled aside, and seventeen-year-old Ben’s grinning, sweat-drenched face appeared. Riley’s son from his first marriage. He had his father’s eyes. Kate raised her fist.

  Found!

  Zeus bounded up the makeshift ramp and slammed against her chest. He pranced on her lap, his hot tongue licking her cheeks. She rewarded him with his favourite toy, a ball with a tether rope. She tugged and the ball squeaked, squeaked, squeaked. She wrapped her arms around his squirming body and held on longer than he needed.

  “Good boy,” she said.

  She pulled off her glove. Blood seeped from her palm and dripped down her fingers. She reached for his water bottle. Only then did she feel the pinch of pain.

  In her pocket, her phone vibrated. She checked the number and wondered why the hospital was calling.

  2

  “911. What is your emergency?”

  Tamara limbered her neck, rooted her feet, and settled into her ergonomic chair. Her hands hovered over the keyboard.

  “Ma’am, you need to calm down. I can’t understand you. 52 Sycamore Road. Are your doors locked?” Her fingers clattered across the keys, filling the requisite fields on the screen before her.

  “Did you see the gun?”

  She glanced at the monitor to her right. A map of the area and corresponding available units zoomed to the foreground. She tapped the screen and it telescoped closer. Her eyes mapped the route—left off Glendale, first right onto Maple, left onto Sycamore…the nearest car was three minutes away.

  “Ma’am, what’s your name? Denise what?”

  She typed in the name. To her left, Denise’s profile opened on the third monitor: seven domestic calls in twelve months; two children, aged five and eight; restraining order against the husband. The woman screamed at someone to shut off the TV.

  “Denise, talk to me.”

  Tamara leaned forward and listened intently to the background noise. She could hear children crying. The caller’s voice, nearing hysteria, cut in and out.

  “Denise, are your children with you? Keep them away from the windows. Have them sit on the floor.”

  The woman yelled at the kids to SIT DOWN. Tamara nudged the headset from her ear, then slid it back.

  “Denise, I need you to stay calm. Can you do that for me? Is he parked out front?”

  She typed in the Who, What, When, Where, How. Never the Why. She wasn’t interested in the Why. She nodded impatiently as the caller conveyed the Why.

  “Denise, what’s his name? Jamie.”

  She clicked the husband’s link under Denise’s profile and scanned the particulars as she typed.

  1:35 a.m. Domestic in progress. Restraining order. 52 Sycamore Road. Suspect James (Jamie) McIntyre. 5′9″ 140 lb. Blue pickup truck. Complainant ex-wife, Denise. Says he’s been drinking. Possibly armed. Weapon registered. Semi-automatic Winchester .308. Children in house. Aged 8 and 5.

  She pressed the Send button and craned to peer over her monitors to the adjacent cubicle. Colleen, on dispatch, sat up straighter. Message received. Tamara half listened to the relay: “All units in the vicinity of 52 Sycamore Road. Domestic in progress. Possibly armed…” This was the kind of call that could go bad fast.

  Her intake file scrolled to the top of the screen, taking priority above other active calls-in-progress. With the push of a button, her words were now streaming on the sidebars of every call-taker, dispatcher, supervisor, and on-duty police vehicle. The markers for car 245 and car 322 attached to her file. She looked at the map. The corresponding GPS tracking blips were converging on her quadrant.

  “Denise, the police are on the way. Is he still in the vehicle? Stay inside. No, I won’t hang up. They’ll be there soon. Tell me your children’s names.”

  She tilted her head to better catch the woman’s spilling words and visualized the unfolding scene. She imagined an anonymous suburban house tastefully decorated, betraying none of the chaos inside. The polished voice was strident and struggling to maintain composure, but still enunciating. The woman was educated and her job required manners. Retail or perhaps business. Appearances would matter. Blonde, shoulder-length hair. Professional but approachable. She would dress younger than her age, especially since the divorce. Crouched behind the sofa. Barefoot. Mascara running.

  “Denise, the police will be there any moment.”

  Tamara’s voice was calm, her register soothing. She coaxed the caller to stay with her. Stay connected. Stay alive.

  She wasn’t supposed to imagine the scene. She was supposed to keep the phone between her and the calls. Stay detached and unaffected. She had been extensively trained to remain objective, uninvolved, and efficient. She excelled at multi-tasking, crisis management, problem solving, communication, and risk assessment. With fourteen years on the job, she was considered a senior member. But there were others who had been there longer. Bob had twenty-three years and Wendy, twenty-one.

  “Do you hear the sirens, Denise? They’re just around the corner.”

  Car 322 would arrive first. It was making the turn at Maple. Soon, Tamara would no longer be part of this story. Taking a call was like reading the first chapter of a book and then having it snatched away. Occasionally, she would pull up the police reports to see how it ended, but not often. Most times it was better not to know. Sometimes, though, the story ended while the caller was still on the line.

  No amount of experience or training could help on the bad days. When the worst happened, someone would be available to talk you down. Supervisors constantly checked in, and there were professional crisis teams trained to debrief and decompress emotional trauma. There was a quiet room where you could close the door, and on a table, beside a fake leather chair, was a full box of Kleenex.

  “The police are going to help you now, Denise. Stay in the house until they come to get you, okay? Yes, you can hang up now if you want or I can stay with you.”

  The line went dead.

  Tamara removed her headset and slung it onto her neck. She rolled back her chair, pivoted around, stretched her legs, and took stock of the snack carousel’s inventory: jelly beans, chocolate bars, oranges, apples, chips—nothing that appealed to her. In five hours, her twelve-hour night shift would be over. Six p.m. to six a.m. Two days, two nights, three days off. It was a good schedule.

  She yawned and isolated the room’s one-sided conversations: the neutral reassurances of the call-takers, the staccato of police dispatch, and the silent waiting of fire. There were fifteen dispatchers and call-takers on shift tonight. The sounds lulled into a soft cooing.

  She gazed at the grey concrete walls, security-coded steel doors, fluorescent lighting, and bowed heads of her co-workers communing with t
heir monitors, and out to the triple-glazed windows that showed only that it was night. She rarely noticed the outside world, unless the weather pertained to the emergency. She gauged the passage of time more by the patterns and cycles of incoming calls.

  Intake volumes increased with weekends, holidays, daylight savings, and the full moon. Day shift clocked morning rush-hour accidents, after-lunch DUIs, mid-afternoon B&Es, and after-school vandalism-shoplifting-nuisance complaints. Evening rush-hour accidents led into supper-hour domestics.

  Night shift clocked drug busts, prostitution, robberies, public intoxication, mentally unstables, and the regulars, dubbed the Lonelies. Once the bars closed, assaults rose, followed by a sharp spike in domestics, and an hour after that, DUIs, these ones often the most lethal and catastrophic—yet rarely fatal for the drunk drivers. Midnight to three brought kitchen fires, overdoses, and the attempted and achieved suicides. And finally, between the twilight of three and six, came the Waiting Hours.

  These were the longest hours when everyone hoped there wouldn’t be a call, because a call then would mean something had gone very bad. If the phone didn’t ring, it meant people were just living their lives.

  The air conditioner droned. She wished someone would tell a joke, something particularly dark and inappropriate. Outsiders would call their humour ghoulish, but laughter kept them from being sucked into the other end of the line. They never joked about legitimate, life-altering calls. Their bile was reserved for drunk drivers, the stupid, and those who wasted their time.

  She stood and stretched her back. No other call-takers were waiting. Waiting was a strange empty place. Plugged into the console, tethered by the headset’s umbilical cord, active but standing by as emergencies whirled around you. She once thought of the act of waiting as passive, but she now knew it was active. She chose a bottle of water from the carousel. This was just a pause.

  There were times when the calls unnaturally stopped and everyone was forced to wait. That’s when the room’s mood became brittle. People paced more and complained more. The coffee was bitter, the snack bar lacking, the chair too high, too low, the headset too tight, the room too cold, too warm…Some tried to read, but their pages didn’t turn. Some fired emails to each other, though their stations were a mere arm’s length apart. Pizza? Others stared at their monitors waiting for something, anything, to move. Inevitably, someone would say, Are the phones working?

  You never commented on it being qu*et. Qu*et was a taboo word. You could say it was a good day or a good night. But to invoke the Q word guaranteed all hell breaking loose. Q periods always broke eventually, and when they did, the monitors would light up and it was always bad.

  Tamara sat back down, flexed her ankles, and worked on lowering her shoulders. She wondered if Robert would call. Robert was a Lonely. He called in often to report his impending suicide. The frequency of his calls increased with bad weather. When someone like Robert’s ID came up, the room groaned. Call-takers would ask to trade. They had all traded at one time or another.

  Hello, Robert. How are you tonight?

  I’m going to kill myself.

  Where are you, Robert?

  I’ve been waiting for my bus for over an hour and it’s friggin’ cold. I’m done. I’m doin’ it this time.

  Are you at the bus terminal, Robert?

  That’s what the GD lying sign says!

  I’m going to send an officer to check on you. You’ll be there?

  Where the hell else am I…? My bus is comin’, gotta go—

  Robert hadn’t called in a long time, not since late last winter. She liked Robert. He kept his calls brief. She hoped he hadn’t killed himself.

  She put her headset on and swung her chair around. She couldn’t actually say she had heard the atonal buzz of the incoming call. The sound was now as deeply a part of her unconscious as her own heart’s murmur.

  “911. What is your emergency?”

  3

  Mike was the first officer on the scene. He shut off his siren and lights on approach and parked tight to the curb, ten feet behind the blue half-ton. Licence plate MJD 4MB.

  Car 245 lurched to an abrupt stop behind his cruiser and he signalled to shut off the lights sweeping the neighbourhood red and blue. He wanted stressors minimized. Constable Peterson assumed the right flank, passenger side, to cover him. Neither officer spoke. They knew the protocol. As lead officer, it was his walk to the vehicle.

  He took inventory of the middle-class suburban houses. The street was empty and lights were on in the complainant’s home. In the vehicle was a lone male. Mike unstrapped his gun and Taser holsters. Stay alert, stay alive.

  His constricting bulletproof vest chafed his armpits. With each step in tight boots, his walkie slapped hard against his thigh, and his utility belt strained his back muscles. He should have hoisted it higher on his hips.

  It was a routine check, but they all knew domestic disturbances were never routine. Domestics and mentally unstables could go bad fast. He slowed and raised his flashlight with his non-weapon hand. Light swept over the pickup’s box. It was empty. Reflected in the side-view mirror, he could see the man. What was the name? James, Jamie. The man’s head was down and his window was lowered.

  Mike was sweating under his vest and shirt. It was the middle of the night and it was still too damn hot. He stopped short of the driver’s door. He couldn’t see the man’s hands.

  “Hi,” he said. “Are you Jamie?”

  The man’s head barely turned. Stubble shadowed his cheek. Caucasian, brown hair, medium build, black T-shirt, tattoo on his left bicep, partially obscured by his short sleeve. It could be a portrait. The man bowed his head again. His shoulders hunched.

  “I’m Officer Brandt,” Mike said. “How’re you doing tonight?”

  “I just want to see my kids.” Alcohol, sweet and sickly, seeped from the man’s pores.

  “It’s pretty late to see your kids. They should be in bed by now.”

  The man’s shoulder flinched.

  “You been drinking, Jamie?” His tone shifted, requiring an answer. “Jamie, have you been drinking?”

  “Had a few.”

  “That doesn’t usually help things, does it?”

  The man’s head dropped lower.

  “Jamie, I’d like to talk to you about what’s been going on, see if we can get you some help. You haven’t done anything wrong yet, so we can still sort this out.” His voice was calm, friendly, and in charge. His fingers loosened and tightened around the flashlight flooding the truck’s cab. “Jamie, I need you to put your hands on the steering wheel where I can see them.”

  The man remained motionless.

  “Jamie, put your hands on the wheel.”

  He glanced to the rear of the truck. Peterson had his weapon drawn with both hands on the grip and the barrel pointed to the pavement in a low ready. Mike shook his head.

  “I can’t,” the man slurred. He said something else.

  “I didn’t hear that, Jamie. You have to speak up.”

  “I got a gun.”

  He said “gun” as though it were a small child that he didn’t want to wake. Mike leaned forward, and in the side mirror he could see the man’s chin resting on the barrel.

  “Okay,” he said. “It’s good you told me.”

  He leaned back, so he wouldn’t be seen miming a gun under his chin. Peterson mouthed “fuck” and took a step out to widen his view of the cab.

  Mike became calmer. His back pain disappeared. His feet didn’t hurt. He wasn’t hot. He unholstered his weapon and held it loose against his leg. The world sharpened to just him and the man. He stepped forward until he could see him in the mirror. The man’s eyes were darting back and forth, looking for something to focus on, something on the dash that would make sense.

  He spoke to the man as though he was a friend. “Jamie, you can put the gun down.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You don’t want to do this here. Your kids will never get over
that. You don’t want to do that to your kids, do you, Jamie?”

  “No.” The word was soaked in phlegm.

  Mike took this as a good sign. The man was talking. He wasn’t committed. He was still listening. “You love your kids, right?”

  “Yes.” The word squeezed from his guts and tore at his throat.

  “I know that. You just want to see them and things haven’t been good lately. But this isn’t going to help.”

  The man’s shoulders shuddered.

  “This is just one bad day. You can have a thousand good ones once you get past this one.”

  The man was crying.

  “So let’s do the right thing here. All you have to do is set the gun down on the seat beside you. I’ll talk you through it, so we all know what everybody’s doing. Okay?” He didn’t wait for agreement. “Take your left hand and slowly extend it out the window.”

  The man’s breathing became more rapid. His forearm twitched.

  “You can do this, Jamie.” Don’t lose him now. “You can do this for your kids. They need their father. I know you’re a good man,” he lied. “It’s just a bad day.”

  “I’m a good man,” he slurred. His thumb slid from the trigger and he stretched his arm out the window. Mike took half a step back. The arm was trembling. The fingers were stained with nicotine. He was still wearing his wedding ring. Tattooed on his bicep was a monochrome portrait of a baby and a little girl wrapped in thorny tendrils. Ryan and Sofia.