Ryan Jahn - The Dispatcher

And there’s only one reason Ian Hunt wouldn’t get the real police involved.

‘Motherfucker.’

‘Henry.’

‘Shut up, Bee.’

She looks at him a moment, then looks down at her lap. She flattens the fabric of her dress, rubs out the wrinkles, and stares down at the backs of her hands with an expression that suggests she doesn’t recognize them. Ever since last night she has not been acting herself. He’s never hidden what he is from her, but even so she has never seen the worst of what is in him. Not until last night. She has always loved him unconditionally, through drunken arrests and even through the times he lost his temper and maybe got too rough, but last night he thinks may have been too much for her. It happened right in front of her and she could not pretend she did not see it or did not understand it-and it might have been too much for her.

He sensed her troubled mind in the silent darkness last night after they went to bed, while they lay side by side, and he feels it now. He does not like the silence. It makes him nervous. Beatrice is not one to keep her thoughts to herself. But today she is almost without voice. What is she thinking? What’s going on in that head of hers? He’s going to have to make her understand that what he did last night was necessary. That he didn’t like it any better than she did, but it was necessary. Sometimes bloodletting is the only choice. All survivors know this.

The world is a hard place with lots of sharp corners, and sometimes to survive you have to put someone else between you and the worst of it. He doesn’t like it any more than she does. But he accepts it as the way things are.

He needed their truck. He needed their truck and Flint suspected something. From the very beginning Flint was suspicious of them. They simply couldn’t leave him alive. He would have called the police. With him dead, with him and his wife dead, they have a clean vehicle for the next two or three days. Long enough to get them to his older brother’s place in California.

Of course he’ll have to get rid of Ian Hunt at some point before they get there. He can do that. Maybe he can even do that today. He’ll just follow Hunt from a distance, hang back and follow. If he’s careful he can go unnoticed. The man doesn’t know he got in front of them. It might be difficult to remain unnoticed once traffic thins out and the land becomes more barren in West Texas, but even there it should be possible. He’ll follow Hunt, wait for the man to settle down for the night. Then he’ll make the fucker bleed.

He’ll make him sorry he didn’t die the first time.

And that’ll be the end of his troubles. After that they can lie low in California for a few months. Even if the police decide to nose around Ron’s house, there are places to hide. Ron has lots of places in which to wait out trouble. An underground bomb shelter with canned food and five hundred gallons of drinking water and a two-hundred-gallon gray-water tank. Abandoned buildings where he has stored supplies. According to his letters, once the iron mine dried up the town blew away with the dust and he’s one of only twenty or thirty residents left. And that was years ago. It could be he’s the last person in town. There will be plenty of shadows to hide in, even beneath the California sun. They’ll wait it out, wait till things cool off, and then head down to Mexico. Or maybe up to Canada. But probably Mexico.

It’ll be safer to cross the border in California than in Texas. And he’ll have a chance to get some money before they head down. He doesn’t want to be flat broke in Mexico. A different country will take some getting used to, but it’s better than the alternative. The important thing is staying out of prison, staying out of prison and staying together.

But first Ian Hunt has to die.

In the two hundred miles between Junction and Fort Stockton, Texas, the landscape changes. The trees give way to shrubbery and low yellow flowers. The yellow flowers stretch from dry earth or dead grass. Desert hills erupt from the flat earth like goiters, and Interstate 10 cuts through many of them, leaving dynamited and scraped cliffs butting up to the asphalt and stacked up beside you in multi-colored layers descending into the past. The moisture leaves the air, and cacti soak up the sun, their fat pads like the flippers of some lost exotic underwater creature waving at you from the side of the road. Ancient stripper-well pumpjacks like prehistoric birds peck at the ground in the Permian Basin oil fields, moving in slow, sleepy, repetitious motion. The traffic thins to nothing but the occasional Mack truck hauling a load from coast to coast, driver red eyed and tweaked out, or some other lonesome traveler. Occasional desert rabbits splatter the shoulders of the road, revealing their hearts to you. Past the halfway point between these two towns, somewhere around Bakersfield, great fields of windmills turn slowly in the distance like ceiling fans on a mild day. Everything seems to move slowly in this mean desert heat, even your vehicle with the needle past eighty. You drive and drive but never seem to get anywhere. Then you arrive in Fort Stockton and are greeted by a large statue of a roadrunner, the world’s largest, they say (every town needs a point of pride), standing behind a short brick wall faced with a sign welcoming you to town.

It’s two thirty when Hunt pulls off Interstate 10. Henry follows, glad to have a chance to step out of this hot fucking truck and stretch a bit. They’ve been on the road for hours, his back is killing him, and Bee’s complained of a leak in the canoe at least a half dozen times. Also, gas needle is south of the E, and he’s spent the last twenty minutes worrying about puttering to a stop on the side of the road, miles from a gas station.

Hunt pulls into a Chevron station on the corner of Front Street and US 285, and Henry pulls into a competing station across the street from it.

He watches the man step from his Mustang and stretch his arms. His left arm, anyway. His right arm doesn’t get above his shoulder. Arms stretched, he twists his neck around. There’s a satchel in his right hand and after he stretches he straps it over his shoulder.

Henry wonders what’s inside. Probably guns.

The man does not look like he was shot in the chest yesterday. He should be bedridden.

Well, it don’t matter. He’ll be dead by the time the sun kisses the horizon. By the time the sun shines on tomorrow at the latest.

Henry reaches for his pocket and finds it empty. He swallows back the sharp taste of stomach acid.

‘Can I pee now?’

‘Yeah, go ahead,’ he says. ‘Take Sarah with you, and don’t let her talk to nobody. You know what? Never mind. I’ll take her when you get back. She can sit with me for now. But get me some Rolaids or Tums or something like that.’ He pulls a sweaty five spot from the pocket of his Levis and hands it to Bee.

‘Okay,’ she says, taking the damp money in her fist and stepping from the truck. ‘Can I get something to drink?’

‘Sure.’

She limp-waddles toward the convenience store.

He watches her go. She isn’t the same since last night. She isn’t the same at all. He really needs to talk to her, but he doesn’t want to do it in front of Sarah. He doesn’t know why, but her presence makes him feel vulnerable, and he does not like to feel vulnerable. He does not like to talk about what he’s feeling or thinking under even the best of circumstances, and this ain’t the best of circumstances. He can ramble on about any nonsense you like, grinning and boozing and patting backs, but he cannot open his mouth and let out what he is really feeling without great effort. It wants to catch in his throat and stay there, hidden in darkness. But he needs to talk to Bee. He’s afraid he might lose her if he does not.