Ryan Jahn - The Dispatcher

‘You better mind your behavior, too, Sarah, you hear?’

Her face goes hot. She feels as if she has been somehow caught. As if he has read her mind. As if he has shuffled through her thoughts like index cards and spied everything that was written there. As Borden so often did.

But Borden wasn’t real and Henry is.

Real enough to shoot her daddy, to leave him bleeding to death in a gravel driveway.

It’s her fault. If she hadn’t called him none of this would have happened. He wouldn’t have come and he wouldn’t have gotten shot. None of the policemen she saw would have gotten shot. They’d be eating dinner with their families instead of in the hospital or dead.

‘Sarah?’

She looks up at Henry.

‘You hear me?’

She nods.

‘If we go in there and take care of business and nothing goes wrong, whoever lives in that house will still be alive when we leave. But if you try any funny business, they’re dead, and you’re not any better off than when they was alive. You hear?’

She nods again.

‘Good.’

‘You’re not really gonna kill nobody, are you, Henry?’

‘Quiet, Bee.’

‘But Henry.’

‘I mean it. Hush up.’

Beatrice looks out her window.

Henry reaches into his pocket and comes out with a kerchief. He spits on it and thrusts it toward Maggie. She takes it hesitantly, not knowing what to do with it. She can smell his spit and it makes her stomach turn.

‘Clean your face up,’ he says. ‘We can’t roll in looking like something from a horror movie.’

Henry pulls off Interstate 10 and rolls down a single-lane stretch of gray asphalt. The window is cracked and though evening is coming on quick the air is still unpleasantly hot.

He pulls to a stop in front of the brick house. A gate blocks the driveway. He steps from the truck to swing it open, so he can drive on in, but the gate is padlocked. He walks back to the truck, reaches into the open door, and honks the horn. It sounds very loud in the still evening air. He’s unsure about what he will say to whoever’s on the other side of that door, especially about what happened to Beatrice, but he’ll think of something. He usually does.

He briefly considers tucking the Lupara into the back of his pants, but decides against it. He won’t need it. It can stay on the floor of the truck, beneath his seat, for now.

The front door swings open and a man of about thirty-five, fellow looks like a scarecrow in Levis and a T-shirt, comes out to the front porch in his stocking feet. He squints at the driveway. Henry raises a hand in greeting and smiles. The skinny guy waves back, then grabs his boots from the porch by the door and slips into them, hopping around on one foot then the other as he slides each heel down into place. That done, he walks out to greet his visitors. As he approaches a dart of brown tobacco juice shoots out from between his lips with a sound like a wet fart. The spit hits the dirt in a stream and the dirt absorbs it, forming a hard bead around the liquid.

Henry smiles and holds out his hand above the gate.

‘Howdy,’ he says.

‘Howdy,’ the man says and shakes the proffered hand. ‘You lost?’

‘Not hardly. Just run into a little trouble.’

The skinny guy takes a wary step back and squints at him. ‘What kinda trouble?’

‘Wife got herself hurt.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. We stopped at the side of the road so she could, well, so she could do her business, and she done fell over backwards. I laughed my ass off when I seen it-I know it ain’t nice to laugh at a fallen lady, but I done it-but turns out she cut her ankle pretty awful. Don’t even know on what. Didn’t stay to find out.’

‘Cut bad?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘All right, come on in.’

He unlocks the gate and lets it swing open on its own. It slides into a well-worn groove in the driveway and stops when it hits the edge of the driveway and the grass grown tall there. Then he walks away from them and toward the house, sparing but a single look at the sun sinking behind the horizon.

Henry wants to tell him to enjoy it; it’ll likely be his last.

The skinny man, whose name turns out to be Flint, helps Beatrice inside and kicks a wooden chair out from the dining table and gets her sitting in it. His wife Naomi, a pretty woman in her early- or mid-twenties, paces back and forth wringing her hands and then stops and says, ‘What can I do, Flint?’

‘Call Doc Peterson.’

‘No,’ Henry says, maybe a bit too forcefully.

Flint squints at him. ‘No?’

‘I. . I’d rather we just take care of it ourselves. Ain’t so bad it requires a doctor.’

Flint continues to squint at him for a moment, tongues the wad of tobacco tucked under his lip. He picks up a Coke can from the dining-room table and squirts a stream of brown spit into it. Then wipes at the bit that dribbled onto his chin and sets down the can.

‘How’d she really hurt her ankle, friend?’

‘Just like I said she did. You calling me a liar?’

‘I ain’t calling you anything.’

‘Sounds like you are.’

‘What d’you got against doctors?’

‘Can’t afford ’em.’

‘Peterson’s just a vet. Prolly won’t cost fifty bucks.’

‘If you got some needle and thread I’ll just stitch her up myself. Or even a fishhook and some line. Clip the barb off and it’ll work fine.’

‘I don’t know,’ Flint says.

‘Can you move your ankle, Bee?’

‘I think so.’

‘Try.’

Beatrice straightens her leg and tries to turn her ankle. She cringes, but she manages some movement as well. ‘Yeah,’ she says.

‘I still think she should see a doctor,’ Flint says.

‘I appreciate your help and all, Flint, but this ain’t a debate.’

Flint scratches his cheek. ‘Get my tackle box, Nam.’

Ian puts the off-white telephone into its cradle, letting it simply slip off his fingertips and rattle to a resting position. He feels numb.

‘What’s wrong?’ Debbie says.

He swallows. It hurts to swallow.

‘Help me up,’ he says. ‘I don’t have time to lie around.’

‘What did Diego say?’

‘He said Sheriff Sizemore released Henry Dean’s little brother. Didn’t find anything incriminated him at Henry’s house or the mobile home-at least not till lab results come back-and he didn’t slip under questioning so they let him go. Told him to stay in town in case anything came up, but that’s all.’ Ian pushes the blankets off himself and puts his legs over the edge of the bed. His feet feel very cold and look very white.

He looks around the room. ‘Do you know where my clothes are?’

‘Ian, you’ve been shot.’

‘Donald is lying. He as much as said it was his brother when I talked to him at the liquor store the day Maggie called. I should have realized it at the time. He knows something. I can’t just lie around waiting for someone to find Maggie’s mutilated body on the side of the road somewhere between here and-’

The words are cut off by coughing. It’s a deep lung-cough that brings up blood which splatters into his palm and runs down his chin. He looks at his palm, then wipes it off on the bedding. He wipes at his chin with the back of a wrist. The pain, though constant and worsened by the coughing, is tolerable. He must still be full of painkillers. His swimming mind is evidence of that. He closes his eyes to try to center himself.

‘Jesus,’ he says.

‘You should lie back down.’

He opens his eyes and looks to Debbie. ‘That’s not gonna happen.’

‘Ian.’

‘Do you know where my clothes are?’

‘They threw your clothes out. They cut your shirt off of you, and your pants were covered in blood.’