The Dispatcher (23 page)

By just past seven he is back on the road.

Maggie sits on the ground behind the house, Beatrice beside her. They silently watch Henry cover Flint and Naomi with dirt. It took him a long time to dig the hole into which he dumped them, grunting and levering out hard chunks of earth, but the filling of it goes quickly. His shirt is off and tucked into the back pocket of his Levis, and he’s covered with an oily layer of sweat and dripping with it. His face is red. He digs the shovel into his pile of dirt and dumps it over the bodies, one load of dirt after another.

Maggie feels sad. She could not bear to watch Henry dragging Flint and Naomi to the hole; to see how Flint’s arm flopped lifelessly as Henry rolled him into it; to see Naomi stare blankly with one eye, the other covered in blood from a knife wound in her forehead; to hear the potato-sack thud-thud of the bodies hitting the bottom of the hole. She has seen so much death lately. She never wants to see it again. And she liked Flint and Naomi. They helped when they didn’t have to. You don’t repay someone who helped you by killing them.

Henry told her if she kept her mouth shut they would not be killed, but she did keep her mouth shut and they were killed anyway. Henry lied.

He finishes covering the hole and pounds the dirt down with the flat of the shovel, and then throws his shovel into the bed of his Ford Ranger, which he drove around back of the house earlier this morning.

After that, but before digging the hole that would become Flint and Naomi’s grave, he removed the license plates from the Ford and threw them out into the field. Now he pulls open the door and takes out a pair of guns, and puts them into Flint’s Dodge Ram. He puts the long rifle behind the seats and tucks another smaller gun under the driver’s seat. Then he takes the boxes from the bed of his truck and puts them into the bed of the other.

When he’s done he takes his T-shirt from the back pocket of his Levis and wipes his sweaty face on it, and then slips back into it. It is covered with moisture and smeared with dirt.

Maggie wants to run—if she could just get away everything would be okay—but she feels certain Henry would catch her.

He caught Naomi. He caught Naomi and she was a grown up. He caught her and he stabbed her in the face and the neck and the chest, and he dragged her to the back of the house by her hair and dropped her and kicked her even though she was dead, and covered her with a blue tarp that he pulled from a stack of cordwood and dropped pieces of that wood onto the corners of the tarp to keep the wind from blowing it off the body. She watched him through a window, working in the circle of the back-porch light. There was blood on his hands when he was finished and he reached down and scooped up a handful of dirt and rolled his hands around in it before dusting himself off and coming inside. He pulled the steak knife from his back pocket and dropped it into the sink as if nothing had happened. As if the blood on it did not belong to a man and a woman who had never done anything but help them. As if nothing terrible had just happened at all.

It didn’t take him five minutes to return with Naomi after he ran out the back door. Not five minutes. When he left she was alive, when he returned she was dead. Maggie had tried to help save her. She had tried. Not for herself. It only occurred to her later, after Naomi was out the door and running, that if Naomi could get to help maybe that help would come here and rescue her. But when she did it, when she tripped Henry and yelled at her to go, it didn’t even cross her mind. She just wanted to help save the woman from Henry. But she did not save her.

Maggie wants to run, but she’s afraid of meeting the same fate.

She knew that if she tried to escape the Nightmare World Henry might kill her, but yesterday morning the idea of death was just that: an idea. She has seen death since, though, and she is not okay with it. She wants to live. She does not want the light inside her to go out.

And Henry is scared. She can see it in his face. He is scared of getting caught, and that makes him more likely to kill her if she causes too much trouble. Cornered animals lash out. Her daddy told her that once and she has never seen a reason to disbelieve it. Cornered animals are the most dangerous kind.

If she’s to run again she must pick her moment carefully; she must be certain of getting away. As certain as possible.

She nods to herself.

She’ll wait for her moment, then run.

Henry trudges over to them, wiping sweat from his brow. He blows his nose with his fingers, then shakes snot off his hand and wipes his hand off on his Levis. He squints at her and Beatrice sitting beside one another.

‘Well,’ he says, ‘let’s get the fuck out of here.’

Diego knocks on Ian’s front door. There’s a smear of burgundy on the white-painted wood by the brass doorknob and a bloody thumbprint on the knob itself. From Diego’s perspective the bloody thumbprint on the knob appears to have been smashed into the left cheek of his distorted reflection.

When Ian does not answer his door Diego knocks again.

‘Ian?’

Still only silence from the other side.

‘Ian?’

Diego grabs the knob and jiggles it. It is locked but not dead-bolted, and the door is loosely fitted. He turns the knob as far as the lock allows and jerks toward the hinges and presses his shoulder against the door. The first time it does not give, but the second time, with some minor cracking of the doorjamb, it swings open.

‘Ian?’

And still nothing, no response: a response in itself.

Earlier this morning when he called her Debbie would not tell him where Ian was. She said she didn’t know, but Diego did not believe her, nor does he now. And he is worried. Ian left the hospital last night, and Donald Dean did not show up at Bill’s Liquor this morning. Diego thinks Debbie knows something about the connection between those two events, but she isn’t talking, and he is unwilling to push it. The woman just lost her husband (wife-stealing asshole though Bill Finch was, may he rest in peace), and Maggie is as much her daughter as she is Ian’s. And Maggie’s reappearance may be harder on her in a way: she believed her daughter dead.

He steps into the apartment and closes the door behind him. He looks around.

Just to his left is a hat rack with a never-worn Stetson hanging upon it, as well as an Anaheim Angels cap that, as far as Diego knows, Ian wore only during the 2002 World Series (and for which he would have been taunted, except nobody in town really gave much of a shit about the Giants either). To his right, the kitchen: tile counter top, stainless-steel sink, small white refrigerator with a couple pictures of Maggie stuck to its door with magnets. Straight ahead, the living room: blue couch, coffee table on which a chess board and a few empty Guinness bottles sit, a television set.

There is a smear of blood on the arm of the couch.

‘Ian?’

Silence.

He walks down the bookshelf-lined hallway to the bedroom. The bed is made but looks as though it has been lain upon. The blankets are wrinkled and there is a dent in its middle. Within the dent is more blood. And on the floor between the bed and Diego a hospital gown in a pile.

A dresser drawer has been left open. A shirt hangs from it.

Blood. Signs that Ian was here but left in a hurry, and no sign of Ian himself.

And Donald is missing.

He has to go to the Dean place.

 

 

 

On his way he tries to call Ian’s cell phone for the third or fourth time this morning and, as happened before, the call goes to voicemail after five rings. He thumbs the button to end the call without bothering to leave a message, and then pockets his phone.

 

 

 

Rolling down the driveway is a surreal experience. All around are traces of what happened yesterday. Gravel stained red. Yellow tape cordoning off the house. A .22 casing missed by the county boys at the foot of the stairs, catching a glint of sunlight.

Diego drives past this to the single-wide mobile home behind the main house. It’s sitting on blocks, the axles and wheels long ago rusted, the tires rotted away and lying on the dead grass beneath like prehistoric serpents. Steps made of plywood and two-by-fours weathered to a pale gray, the dull copper of rusted nail heads dotting them.

The mobile home itself is a powder green, the metal siding dented in several places, tattered and torn window screens hanging from their frames like the flags of those who lost the war. An antenna juts above the asphalt shingles that line the roof.

He parks next to Donald’s El Camino and steps from his car.

‘All right, Diego,’ he says to himself, and unsnaps his holster with the twitch of a thumb. He walks up the steps—heel-toe, clunk-clunk—stopping at the narrow metal front door. He looks down. He is standing upon a welcome mat with Yosemite Sam on it, aiming a gun up at him from the ground. Hasn’t even announced himself yet and already there’s a gun pointed at his face.

‘Pow,’ he says, then presses the doorbell to the left of the door.

It ding-dongs inside. He waits. When, after several beats, he does not get an answer, he bangs on the hollow metal door. It rattles in its frame.

‘Donald, it’s Diego. Officer Peña. Open up.’

Donald does not open up.

Diego draws his SIG with his right hand and with his left grabs the doorknob. He turns it gently to see if it will give and it does. He pushes a bit. Waits, exhales, and shoves the door open with his back to the wall just left of it.

He looks in quickly, not long enough for someone to take aim, and pulls out again. The place is dark and hot. The curtains are drawn. Only one light is on, a dim lamp in the lazily spinning fan in the ceiling. The wood-paneled room feels sick and claustrophobic. Flies dot the ceiling.

‘Donald, it’s the police.’

No response.

After another breath he steps into the living room. At first he sees nothing out of the ordinary, but this is only because he does not see what’s on the other side of the open door. All he can see is what’s to the left of him and what’s to the left of him is a single man’s living quarters. A sagging chair, a sagging couch, a dinner tray, empty beer cans littering the floor, a nudie-magazine centerfold thumb-tacked to the wall.

But then he takes another step into the place, clearing the front door, and can see into the dining room. The first thing he sees is a dining table stacked with papers, a few loose socks, pens and pencils, a set of keys, a yellow legal pad smeared with bloody fingerprints. A single white candle made flaccid in the summer heat sits upon it, and a glass bowl filled with a soup of brown water and clumps of something wrapped in pieces of paper towel. Then he sees what is between him and the table, a wooden chair tipped on its side and a man within it. The man is Donald. He has no fingers or toes. It is strange how inhuman a hand looks with no fingers, just red stumps with bone-white cores. Flies crawl on his face. They crawl on his blank staring eyes. They crawl on the stumps where his digits once were, laying their eggs.

Diego swallows back sick. His friend did this. A man who has eaten dinner with him and his family. A man who has slept on his couch. A man who has played video games with Elias. It seems somehow unbelievable.

He walks to the glass bowl on the table and looks down into it. He swallows. After a brief hesitation he reaches into the brown soup and pulls out a wad of paper towel. It is heavier than he expected. He unwraps it and is soon looking at a grown man’s pinky finger. A white core surrounded by red meat and cased in wrinkled skin that reminds Diego of pickled pigs’ feet.

He drops the finger back into the brown soup.

His friend did this. Ian did this.

Ian came to get information that neither Diego nor the sheriff could manage to pry from Donald, and he worked hard for that information. He killed for it. What Diego can’t tell, what the room will not reveal to him, is whether Ian managed to get it. He worked for it, but that doesn’t prove anything. People work for things they don’t attain every day, and attain things they didn’t work for with equal frequency.

Diego arms sweat from his forehead.

He looks at the legal pad on the table smeared with bloody finger prints. Shouldn’t the bloody prints mean it was used during or after what happened here last night? He picks up a pencil and holds it sideways and brushes it gently across the page. As he does this he finds an address revealed in relief.

 

He tears the top sheet from the legal pad, folds it into quarters, and pockets it. Then he glances at the glass bowl of brown soup just to his right, and then the body on the floor. He can’t help but feel this is partly his fault. If he had held on to Donald the man would be safe in a cell right now. Diego might even have managed to get the information out of him himself without resorting to . . . what happened here. What happened here.

Diego is a fairly intelligent man, graduated high school with a good GPA and got his AA from the community college in Mencken without any trouble at all, spending most of his time falling madly into and out of love with various coeds, and what happened here would be obvious even to a very dumb man. What happened here was murder, plain and simple.

And after he was done killing Donald, Ian went home for a while, changed clothes, grabbed a gun maybe, and got into his car and headed west. Headed toward Kaiser, California, with a catheter threaded into his lung meat and a bullet hole punched clean through him. Headed toward, based on Henry’s shooting, what will almost certainly be his own death.

If Diego had just managed to get that information out of the son of a bitch Ian wouldn’t—

If Sheriff Sizemore hadn’t let him—

He needs to think this thing through. He’s got an address now. He knows where both Henry and Ian are headed. He could get the federal law involved. They’re almost certainly involved as it is. A kidnapped girl in the possession of a murderer on the run. Feds are probably at the Tonkawa County Sheriff’s Office in Mencken right now, getting whatever information Sizemore has and collecting his files to take back to the Houston field office. He could simply call them. That might be the smart thing to do. Except that Ian killed a man. Ian tortured a man for information and killed him, and though this is something that Diego could never have done himself, he knows that Ian did it out of desperation, and out of love, and he understands these things. The horror before him reveals just how ugly even the purest of emotions can be—but he understands them. Besides which, Ian is his friend. The man has slept on his couch, shared his meals, played videogames with Elias. He let Diego see him cry when Debbie kicked him out. He was drunk and probably doesn’t even remember it, and Diego would never mention it to him, never embarrass him with it, but it happened all the same. If he gets the FBI involved they’ll come poking around, and they will uncover what happened here last night.