Ryan Jahn - The Dispatcher

‘What happened?’

‘She fell.’

‘Is she bleeding?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘How’d she fall?’

‘She tripped. How else do people fall?’

Beatrice does not respond. He walks past her, kicks open the basement door, and carries Maggie down the stairs.

Ian slides into his Mustang and pulls the door shut behind him.

A three-inch plug of cigar pokes from the ashtray. He grabs it, grinds his teeth into the sloppy end, and lights it, sucking on it while watching with crossed eyes as the other end glows bright orange and smokes. He rolls down his window and exhales a thin stream of blue smoke. He spits a piece of tobacco off the end of his tongue, jabs the cigar back into his mouth, rolls it between his teeth, and starts the car.

The radio comes on, but Ian isn’t in the mood for music. He turns it off immediately. Then grabs his sunglasses from his shirt, large mirrored things-cop sunglasses, you get them when you graduate academy-and slides them onto his face.

Sweat trickles down his cheek and drips onto his shirt. The white sun overhead imbedded in the blue-glass sky. He reaches down and grabs the shifter, sliding it into reverse, and burns his hand on the knob. He pulls his hand away and shakes it. Every day he does this. You’d think he’d learn. He looks over his shoulder and backs out of his spot, handling the wheel as gently as possible, so he doesn’t get burned on it, but it’s hard to handle a car with a light touch when you don’t have power steering.

He arms sweat off his forehead, shifts, and drives out onto the street.

He’s not even sure why he’s going to the Main Street shopping center. Chief Davis heading there makes sense. He’ll have to liaise with Sheriff Sizemore. The Tonkawa County Sheriff’s Department handles any major crimes, with the city police department at its disposal. The county has access to labs, detectives, forensics guys, and can pull strings when necessary. The city has nine cops (three of them part time), three police cruisers bought from Houston when they were taken out of commission there and given an oil change and a paint job, and a police station smaller than most houses, with but a single holding cell.

And Ian hasn’t been real police in over a decade, not since he took a bullet in the knee and Debbie talked him into moving them to Bulls Mouth, her hometown, where things would be quieter and calmer than in Los Angeles, where Maggie would be safe and they could live a peaceful life, where he would not have to worry about getting shot a second time.

There will almost certainly be nothing for Ian to do when he gets there.

But that doesn’t seem to matter. He wants to stand where his daughter recently stood. He’s certain he will sense her presence, like a scent hanging in the air, despite the fact that she was GOA, gone on arrival, when Diego pulled into the lot. He has feared her dead for a very long time, and he wants to feel her presence. To know she’s alive.

He drives along Crouch Avenue till he comes to Wallace Street, where he makes a right. He drives past the post office and the firehouse and Bulls Mouth High School, shut down for the summer, and makes a left onto Hackberry. In another five minutes he is pulling into the Main Street shopping center’s parking lot, bringing his car to a stop next to Diego’s cruiser and behind a sign that marks the spot:

FOR DRY CLEANING PICK UP ONLY VIOLATORS WILL BE TOWED.

Diego Peña is simply standing in front of the pay phone rolling a cigarette. He’s a thin man, half Spanish, half Apache, with wavy black hair and sun-baked skin. He’s got a series of tight little knot-like scars running across his face as well, the results of a domestic disturbance call he took five years ago, back when he was working nights.

Jimmy Block and his wife Roberta used to share a house in the south part of town, just off Clamp Avenue. A neighbor called about a ruckus. Diego knocked on the door and Roberta answered it. The lower half of her face was a mask of blood and a purple crescent in the shape of the moon was swelling around her left eye and said eye was swimming in tears. Jimmy was sitting quietly at the dining-room table. Diego went to get him, intent on putting him in jail overnight so he couldn’t do any more wife-beating-this was his third call to the house in a month-and Jimmy grabbed a roll of barbed wire he had sitting on the table-he’d planned on fencing in the earthworm farm behind his bait shop the next day, apparently, to make it harder for kids on their way to the reservoir to snatch handfuls of them-and flung it into Diego’s face. One of the barbs came within a centimeter of taking out his left eye. Instead of overnight, Jimmy Block was in jail for the next six months.

Roberta used the time to change all the locks in the house and file for divorce.

Ian steps from his car and into the heat of the day. He taps ash off the end of his cigar and jams it back into his face. He grinds it between his teeth.

Chief Davis pulls in behind Ian and parks.

Diego squints at Ian. ‘You okay?’

‘No. Guarding the phone?’

‘Yeah. Thought it might have fingerprints or something on it and figured the sheriff would have county boys coming down from Mencken to brush it.’

‘Anyone try to use it?’

Diego shakes his head. ‘You wanna come over for dinner? Cordelia’d love to have you.’

‘No, I’m not much for socializing right now.’

‘Sure you wanna be alone tonight?’

‘Yeah.’

Chief Davis steps up beside Ian and puts a hand on his shoulder.

‘I’ll see what I can see about witnesses before Sizemore gets here and ruins them.’

‘I’ll come with you.’

He drops his cigar to the asphalt and grinds it out with his heel.

‘It’s an open invitation,’ Diego says.

‘Thanks, anyway.’

Then he glances past Diego to the phone. He has a strange urge to lift the receiver and put it to his ear and listen, as if he might be able to hear Maggie’s voice once more. She was just here today. She called him from that phone.

‘Well,’ Chief Davis says, ‘let’s ask some questions.’

They walk into the shoe repair shop first. Lining the walls are wooden racks on which rest shoes dropped off for repair but never picked up again: white leather loafers with gold buckles, snakeskin cowboy boots, resoled wingtips, resoled ropers.

There are white stickers on them with prices scrawled in blue ink.

Behind the wood counter at the back of the narrow store stands an old man with hunched shoulders and a face like an apple core left in the sun. He smiles, revealing very white unfitted dentures. His smile is open-mouthed and the top row of teeth starts to slip from his gums, and he slams his uppers and lowers together with a clack and works his jaw, getting the dentures back into place. His hands rest on the counter. Black shoe polish has stained the fine spaces between the whorls of his thumbs and built up beneath his fingernails. A polish-stained rag lies on the counter near to hand, beside a tin and a pair of buffed shoes.

He finishes working his jaw and says, ‘How can I help you gentlemen?’

As the cobbler speaks his gaze drops from their faces to their feet, to their shoes, the thing by which, it is clear, he measures all men. His frown makes it clear that neither Ian nor Chief Davis meet his minimal standards.

‘A quick polish, perhaps?’ he says.

‘You hear a ruckus out front ’bout ten-fifteen minutes ago?’ Chief Davis says.

‘Ruckus?’

‘Noise.’

‘Scuffle,’ Ian says. ‘Maybe a scream.’

The cobbler shakes his head.

‘Nothing, huh?’

‘’Fraid not.’

Ian pulls his wallet from his right hip pocket and in it finds a photograph of Maggie. The edges are torn and browned from frequent handling. He looks at it a moment himself, at his grinning daughter’s first-grade yearbook photo, and then turns it around and sets it on the counter and pushes it toward the cobbler.