Ryan Jahn - The Dispatcher

Then he walks to the kitchen and puts oatmeal and water into a sauce pan, puts the pan on the stove, and turns on the gas. It is an old stove that does not self-light, but Diego does not light it either. The stove hisses, telling him to shhh.

He can hardly believe he is doing this, but doing it he is.

He walks back out to the living room. He thumbs a match to life and lights the flaccid candle sitting on the dining-room table. So long as no one digs through the ash too carefully this should do the job. He hopes so, anyway. It will look like Donald got up, put on some oatmeal and lay on the couch to wait for it to be ready when something happened. Something.

Diego blows out the candle and walks to the body. He moves it to a sitting position, puts a cigarette between its lips, and a lighter into its palm. Then he walks back to the candle and lights it once more. The smell of gas is strong now. He has to get out. He’s done what he could.

He thinks there might be hatchet marks on the bones that forensics people will eventually find, but this should buy Ian a few days. And with any luck there will be no evidence that Diego was here at all.

Diego heads out the front door, grabbing the hatchet on his way out, and closing and locking it behind him.

He walks to his car and gets into it, throwing the hatchet on the floor. He starts the engine and turns the car around. The tires crunch over gravel. As he drives away he glances into his rearview mirror, but the mobile home simply sits there, silent.

When he reaches Crouch Avenue, he turns left.

The explosion is loud and sudden and its force blows a wind through the surrounding trees and birds take flight. Diego’s heart pounds in his chest and his face feels hot. He looks out his window as he drives and sees smoke billowing behind the trees, a thick pillar of smoke holding up the sky.

When he reaches his house six minutes later the fire engines have still not left the station. Diego is glad. He wants the place to have a chance to burn.

Now to talk to Cordelia.

‘I wish you wouldn’t.’

‘He’s my friend, Cord.’

‘You have lots of friends.’

‘Ian doesn’t. I’ll be back in a few days.’

‘Shit.’

‘Don’t be like that, Cord.’

‘What if I told you don’t go?’

‘I wouldn’t go. Are you telling me that?’

Cordelia looks away for a long moment and then looks back. ‘Be safe.’

‘I will.’

Diego stops his car on the dirt shoulder of the road to allow two screaming fire engines to pass, and then he pulls back onto the asphalt and continues toward Interstate 10.

He looks at the smoke filling the sky and hopes he has made the right decision.

By the time he gets the fifth call from Diego, the one he decides to answer, Ian is about thirty minutes out of Comfort, Texas. The land on either side of him now is lined only with occasional feeder roads, private roads, lonesome-looking houses, and summer trees. But he likes the emptiness. He grew up in Los Angeles where his only escape from civilization was the sea, and he finds this unpeopled land beautiful.

He answers the phone. ‘I’ve decided you’re not gonna quit calling,’ he says.

‘You’ve decided right.’

‘Do I win a prize?’

‘Only if you guess where I am. You get one chance.’

‘Roberta’s.’

‘She don’t even open for another half hour.’

‘I bet she would for you. If you said please real nice and made puppy-dog eyes.’

‘I’m at a Shell station in Columbus,’ Diego says.

‘What the hell are you doing in Ohio?’

Despite the tone of their conversation, a cold feeling slides into Ian’s stomach like a blade. Diego knows where Ian is headed. He knows and he’s going to try to stop him before he can make Henry pay for what he’s done, before he can get Maggie back. He knows and he’s going to arrest him, have him arrested, for killing Donald Dean.

The FBI is probably already awaiting his arrival at a roadblock somewhere to the west.

He knew he should have cleaned Donald’s place up-he knew that-but by the time he was finished with him, he was simply finished. He had neither the mental nor the physical energy to dispose of Donald’s body. He did not know what to do with it, and even if he had, he’d just been shot: he barely managed to do what he’d gone there to do. And when he woke in the dark of morning he felt only a great urge to get on the road.

But that was a mistake. That Diego is calling him makes it obvious it was a mistake.

‘I’ve been to your apartment. And to Donald’s place.’

‘I know.’

He coughs into his open hand and tastes blood. He looks down at the catheter winding its way out from under his shirt and to the passenger-side floorboard where he put the satchel, and sees a knot of white liquid working its way down. He wonders what it means, this liquid in his lungs. He should have brought antibiotics with him. Grabbed some from his medicine cabinet. He had some left over from something or other. At least he got some pain meds stronger than Tylenol. They make him feel strange and drowsy, but he can function.

‘It’s not too late to straighten this out, Ian.’

‘I know,’ he says. ‘That’s what I’m trying to do. Straighten this out.’

‘I don’t think you’re going about this-’

‘Who else knows about Donald?’

A long pause, then: ‘No one.’

‘You didn’t report it?’

‘I’d be lying if I said that didn’t hurt my feelings. You’re my friend.’

‘I am, but-’

‘I’m loyal to my friends.’

‘Then turn around and go back to Bulls Mouth and let me finish this thing.’

‘I’m even loyal to my suicidal friends.’

‘What the hell does that mean?’

‘Henry will kill you.’

‘You don’t know that.’

‘I do know that, and so do you.’

‘He has my daughter, Diego. He stole my life.’

‘Your life is what you made it.’

Ian doesn’t respond for a long time. He knows what Diego says is true. He is what he is and has done what he’s done and it produced the life he lives. These are just facts and there is no point in pretending otherwise.

‘Ian?’

‘I know,’ he says. ‘You’re right. That’s why I’m doing this.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You don’t need to.’

‘It doesn’t have to happen like this. I burned Donald’s trailer. They’ll think he had an accident with the stove. We’ll get the FBI or somebody involved, tell them what’s going on, and then we-’

‘You did what?’

‘Come home. The FBI has resources. They can-’

‘The sheriff had resources too. I appreciate what you’re doing, Diego, you don’t know how much, I know you put yourself on the line here, but I’m not stopping.’

‘Ian, goddamn it, would you just listen to-’

‘Go home to Cordelia, Diego, and leave me alone.’

‘If you-’

‘I’m throwing this phone out the window now. Give my best to Cord.’

‘You selfish son of a bitch, would you fucking-’

He rolls the window down, the summer heat blowing into the car at sixty-eight miles per hour. He turns his face to it a brief moment, then throws his phone out the window. It seems to hang in the air a second, and then flies backwards, flipping end over end. In the rearview mirror he watches it hit asphalt and disintegrate, twisting and throwing off pieces of itself until there are no more pieces to throw off and it is gone. He rolls the window back up and turns on the radio.

He knows Diego. The man will keep coming after him. Ian just hopes he’ll be able to stay ahead of him and take care of what needs taking care of before Diego catches up. He doesn’t want to put anyone else in danger. He doesn’t want what happened to Bill Finch and Chief Davis to happen to anyone else.