Ryan Jahn - The Dispatcher

‘All right.’

The policeman licks his lips. He looks confused. He takes a step back and then a step forward. He licks his lips again.

Henry is leaning forward with his right arm underneath his seat. He moves slowly, pulling away from there. Maggie thinks he has a gun under the seat.

‘I said freeze!’ the policeman says. ‘That means don’t move.’

‘I’m froze, sir,’ Henry says. ‘I’m a fucking popsicle.’

‘Shut your mouth.’

‘You’re making a mistake, officer.’

‘I said shut up.’

The policeman reaches to the truck door and pulls it open. He licks his lips again. He looks very scared and Maggie feels kind of sorry for him. She’s afraid that he won’t be able to stop Henry. She’s afraid that Henry will kill him. Should she open her mouth and tell the policeman that Henry has a gun? Will that make him panic? Will it make Henry panic? Maybe Henry will just pull his empty hand from under the seat. But she thought in hopeful maybes last night and two people got killed.

‘Okay,’ he says to Henry. ‘Pull your hand out from under that seat. Slow.’

‘Okay.’

‘Your hand better be empty.’

‘Okay.’ Henry pulls his hand out from under the seat. Slowly.

Sweat trickles down the policeman’s face. Keeping both hands gripped around his service pistol, he wipes his face off on his shoulder, shrugging the sweat away.

Maggie opens her mouth to speak, but too late.

Henry pulls out a gun.

Henry can feel the wooden grip of the Lupara in his sweaty palm. It feels grimy there and foreign. His face is hot. He looks to his left and can see the deputy aiming his service weapon at him. He can’t be more than thirty-five, and he’s scared, which makes Henry nervous. Scared people are jumpy and jumpy people are dangerous.

Henry’s eyes feel hot in their sockets. They sting. Sweat trickles down the bridge of his nose and drips from the end of it. He can feel the rhythm of his heart in his temples. He swallows back bile and wishes he could chew an antacid.

Did the cop recognize him? One second the guy was cool and the next he was pointing a gun in Henry’s face. Something happened. Did he recognize him? Did Sarah signal him in some way? Did Beatrice?

He wants to believe that Bee would never do anything like that, but he does not. She might. She has not been herself. If she has become scared of him she might do something like that. He doesn’t want it to be the case, but he knows it’s a possibility.

Stop. Focus.

It is silent now but for the sound of his heart beating. Slowly he pulls the weapon from under the seat. Waiting for his moment. Waiting for his-

The deputy shrugs a trickle of sweat off the side of his face.

Now.

Henry whips the Lupara from under the seat of the truck. It almost catches on something, he feels it bang against a metal bar, but it does not catch. He brings it around quickly without raising it, just turns it in his fist, and pulls the trigger with his thumb.

The first shot hits the deputy in the hip and spins him around. Maggie screams and the smell of gun smoke fills the cab. He pulls the Lupara up and gives the deputy the second barrel. It takes away the left side of his chest, simply wipes it off like the skin from a rotten peach, revealing the meat beneath. He staggers backwards and then falls to the asphalt.

A screeching of brakes.

Henry looks left and sees a red Chevy sedan coming to a stop, turning sidewise on its locked tires and leaving a trail of burned rubber behind it. It comes to a stop only inches from the stricken deputy who even now is exhaling his last two or three breaths from colorless lips.

Henry opens the break and pulls out the spent shells, dropping them to the asphalt (there’s no point in pretending he needs to be careful now), and reloads the Lupara with shells from his Levis. He aims the shotgun at the blond woman behind the wheel of the Chevy and says, ‘Get the fuck out the car right now or I’ll shoot you dead.’

He looks to see how many cars are around and finds the road mercifully empty. For the moment, anyway.

The woman behind the wheel is frozen in place, staring at him with wide cow’s eyes.

‘Get the fuck out now! Do you wanna die?’

Still she does not move.

Henry walks to the car and yanks open the door and pulls the woman out. He throws her to the ground, and is taking aim when he hears Beatrice’s voice.

‘Sarah, get back here!’

He looks toward the truck. It is empty.

Beatrice is limping pathetically after Sarah as she runs across the flat, dry West Texas landscape toward the low, weathered buildings of Sierra Blanca.

‘Sarah, no!’ Bee says. ‘Come back!’

Henry runs after them, saying, ‘Sarah, stop, goddamn you!’

Beatrice trips and falls and lets out a wounded-animal yelp.

Henry runs, feeling heavy and uncoordinated, and as he does the Lupara slips from the grip of his sweaty hand and drops to the ground. He stops for it, looking around. It is lost in tall dead grass. He cannot see the goddamn thing anywhere and-

‘Henry! Henry, get Sarah!’

He looks toward Beatrice. She is still sitting where she fell. If he lets Sarah go, Bee will never forgive him. He can see it in her face.

He nods, leaves the Lupara-he can get it on the way back to the truck-and runs after the small girl frantically fleeing across the scrublands toward the white and brown buildings of Sierra Blanca, which are scattered across the ground like a child’s forgotten toy blocks.

Two and a half hours after passing through Sierra Blanca Ian reaches his limit. He has driven through the seemingly alien landscape of far West Texas, reaching Sparks and Southview and other suburbs of El Paso, then plowed through the city itself, Mexico visible on his left as Interstate 10 scooped down near the border, passing Holy Family Church America-side and Doniphan Park in Juarez. He left the city behind, tempted to stop only once, as he passed a place called Rudy’s Country Store amp; BarBQ near a hotel, the thought of a hot meal and a soft bed in a cool room briefly causing him to pull his foot from the gas pedal. But he was tired of Texas-it seemed to stretch on forever, and after fourteen hours on the road just getting across the state line became a goal-so he continued on, into New Mexico, and through Las Cruces and a closed border checkpoint. And now, after having passed through it, with airplanes flying overhead, landing at and taking off from Las Cruces International Airport just to his north (he can’t see it, but he knows it’s there to his right because he saw a sign pointing him that way), he is finished. He has made it through Texas and into New Mexico. He hasn’t seen the gray truck since Sierra Blanca, and he has convinced himself that it wasn’t Henry at all. Henry is on the road up ahead. And by tomorrow he will be waiting for Ian in a town called Kaiser, California, and that is where Ian will kill him. Ian will kill him and he will get Maggie back. That is the plan.

But that is for tomorrow.

The orange sun is sinking into the ground for another night. The sky is turning gray, the color spreading in the clear sky like a cloud of kicked-up mud in a once-clear pool of water, and soon the entire dome will be tainted by night.

He is done. Done and done.

He pulls off Interstate 10 and cruises along on an unnamed county road that runs parallel for half a mile before pulling into a dirt parking lot in front of a place that seems only to be called Motel/Food. The sign is hand-painted in white on the front of a rotting wood facade, behind which, he assumes, the food is served. The motel part of the operation looks to be about a dozen mobile homes parked willy-nilly behind the restaurant.

His tires kick up a cloud of dust as he brings the car to a stop. He kills the engine and waits for the dust to settle. With his lung in its current state he doesn’t think it’s a good idea to breathe it in. But once the air is clear he pushes open his car door and steps out into the hot day. He pulls his soggy cigar from his mouth and spits into the sand. He puts the cigar into the front pocket of his shirt and squints out at the interstate.