The Dispatcher (34 page)

‘I’m sorry, Sarah,’ Beatrice says. ‘I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry.’ She strokes Maggie’s hair and pulls Maggie’s head to her fat belly and presses her head against it. ‘I’m sorry.’

Maggie pulls her head away.

‘Just leave me alone.’

‘You’ll feel better when all this is over,’ Beatrice says.

‘I don’t want to talk to you anymore.’

Beatrice wipes at her eyes. She walks to the window and looks out again.

‘You shouldn’t say things you don’t mean.’

‘I
do
mean it.’

Beatrice looks at her once more, and then turns back to the window. She simply stares out into the fading light of evening.

Maggie looks down at her wrist and tries once more to pull her hand through the cuff. It slides fine until the meat of her thumb, and there it stays no matter how hard she pulls, the metal digging deeper and deeper into her flesh.

Frustrated, she hits the top of the desk with her free hand. The other end tilts into the air and slams back down. It is loose. Eyeing Beatrice to make sure the woman is not looking at her, she pushes up on the desk. She lifts the top of the desk as far as it will go. Two of the screws have been stripped from the fiberboard underside. Maybe by the fall. She can almost slide the cuff wrapped around the desk right off. She doesn’t have to free her hand. All she has to do is pull off the top of the desk. She just has to get the final screw out, and she can slide the cuff right off.

Beatrice is still staring sadly out the window. Maggie is stung by another pang of pity for her. Her face just hangs there looking so lonesome. Even after everything there is a part of her that wants to give Beatrice the love she so obviously needs. But Maggie cannot love her. Maggie cannot even like her. She can only feel a strange combination of pity and hatred.

She pushes up on the top of the desk, trying to pry it loose.

Henry lies prone on the roof of the high school. He squints down at the car on the street below, but has seen no movement for some time. He has no idea what they’re doing back there. His arms are cramping. He’s not going to be able to lie like this much longer. And their silence is making him nervous. They cannot just wait there forever. They have to do something. Why aren’t they shooting back? If they were returning fire he might be able to locate them and finish them off. Just one or two shots would be enough. Then he would know where they were—and when they popped up to shoot again that would be it.

Maybe he already has finished them off and that’s why they aren’t moving. Except he knows better than that. That’s the kind of thinking that will get him into trouble. If he lets his guard down he’ll get himself killed.

‘Can you see anything?’ he says to Ron, who is behind him, crouched down on one knee, rifle at the ready.

‘No,’ he says. ‘What the fuck are they waiting for?’

‘I dunno,’ Henry says. ‘But I don’t like it.’

That’s when he sees the driver’s seat slide forward and tilt toward the steering wheel.

He sees movement behind it—an arm reaching into the back seat, he thinks. It’s hard to tell for certain. But it is movement.

Inhale. Hold the breath. Take aim. Steady.

The world is a storm but he is its eye.

Exhale.

Squeeze the trigger.

Ian hears the bullet slam into his car and flinches, but Diego does not. Diego simply reaches into the back seat and comes out first with the rifled Remington 11-87 and the sawed-off Remington 870, and then with the .308 and the duffel bag in which the boxes of ammunition are stored. Ian pulls the duffel bag toward him and unzips it. He tosses Diego the shells for the .308. Then pulls out shells for himself and gets to loading the two shotguns.

Once they’re loaded he slides to the front of the car and looks around the bumper trying to spot Henry, trying to spot movement of any kind. He knows the shots are coming from across the wide street, and from the north, and from a good distance, by the sound of it.

‘Where are you, you son of a—’

He pulls his head back quickly and a moment later there is the sound of a gunshot and the dirt three feet behind the place where his face was kicks up a cloud of dust, and a few pebbles from the ground throw themselves against the right leg of his Levis.

‘They’re on the roof of the school,’ he says. ‘About fifty, sixty yards away.’

Diego nods. ‘What do you want to do?’

Ian closes his eyes a moment, thinking. He did not want to get Diego involved in this way. He did not want to ask of him what he is about to ask of him. Even now he wishes he had talked Diego into heading back to Bulls Mouth. If Diego was not here he would have to think of something else. But Diego is here. He opens his eyes and looks at his friend. This will change him. What he is about to ask of his friend will change him forever.

‘How’s your long-distance shooting?’ he says.

 

 

 

Ian sits on his haunches behind the Mustang. To his right Diego is readying himself for a run toward what once was a hardware store. If he can get behind it, he can make his way in relative safety to the top floor of a three-storey hotel called the Jackrabbit Inn about three hundred yards further on. From that vantage point he should have clear shots at Henry Dean and his brother on the roof of the school.

‘You ready?’ he says.

Diego nods.

Ian exhales and his exhalation turns into a deep cough. Liquid gags up from his lungs like muddy water from a well-pump and he spits it to the asphalt between his feet. Tears stream down his face. He leans his head against the car fender before him and spits once more. His chest is throbbing with pain. Last time he tried to do this he was shot. What is it they say about doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results?

‘One,’ he says, looking toward Diego.

‘You sure you’re—’

‘Two,’ he says, cutting off the question.

Diego nods briefly. The nod tells Ian that he accepts that as an answer.

‘Three.’

Diego takes off running.

Ian jumps to his feet, swinging the shotgun up and into the crook of his shoulder, and he fires at the roof of the schoolhouse. The pain is incredible. Concrete explodes less than a foot below the place where Henry is crouched. A white shell flies from the shotgun, arcs in a blur through the air, and hits the asphalt to his right. He fires again and again and again. Both Henry and his brother drop down, becoming invisible from this angle.

But Ian remains standing, squinting toward the school, watching the flat line of the roof and waiting.

Blood runs down his sweaty belly from the hole in his chest, which is throbbing with pain. His breaths are quick and shallow, as he can manage nothing but shallow breaths any longer. Any time he tries to breathe deep it turns into a painful coughing fit. He knows what is happening. With the tube removed from his lung he is drowning in his own blood. It is beyond a feeling of drowning now; it is the actual thing.

A flash of movement from the roof of the school. He fires. Concrete explodes.

The movement ceases.

Ian glances behind him.

Diego is out of sight.

Good. Black dots are swimming before Ian’s eyes and he doesn’t think he’ll be able to remain standing much longer.

He fires off the last three rounds in the 11-87’s magazine, listening to the shells clink to the asphalt to his right between shots, and then allows himself to sink to the ground behind the car, out of breath and in pain. Every shot sent a terrible force through his right shoulder and his wounds are now screaming. Sweat runs down his face and drips from the end of his nose. He blinks several times, and then looks for Diego.

He does not see him, nor does he hear him.

The air is silent and still but for the sound of his own breathing.

And then he does hear him. He hears the rapid rhythm of his boots. He hears running. He is far away and getting farther.

Ian nods. Good.

He grabs the box of deer slugs and starts reloading.

Maggie slides the handcuffs down the length of the arm of the desk, being careful they don’t rattle too much. She slides them beneath the wooden desktop, now detached from the frame, and then she is loose. The cuff slides off and dangles from her wrist. It is strange: a tightness in her chest seems to uncoil with the simple knowledge that her arm is free.

Her arm is free.

She looks up at Beatrice.

Beatrice does not look back.

The gun sits on the floor next to a pile of chips and candy bars.

Maggie slides out of the desk, eyes on Beatrice, and makes her way silently across the room. She is barefoot, so it is not difficult to be silent. But Beatrice must see her movements out of the corner of her eye, in her periphery, because she turns to look at her and says, ‘Sarah, what are you doing? Henry said to stay here.’

Maggie runs to the gun and picks it up.

Beatrice walks toward her, but stops when Maggie points the gun at her.

‘I don’t want to shoot you,’ she says with a shaky voice. ‘But I will.’

Beatrice is silent. She simply stares at Maggie with her wide, glistening eyes. Tears once more roll down her round face. Her chin trembles. Her shoulders sag with defeat.

‘We’re never gonna be a family again, are we?’

‘We never were,’ Maggie says.

Beatrice leans back against the wall and slides down it to a sitting position, with her knees up and her arms on her knees. She looks down at her lap. Maggie can see her cotton panties. Somehow that makes her seem very much like a little girl. Tears drip off her face and splash against her dress.

‘We never were,’ Beatrice says, eyes focused on nothing, and it seems as if she is speaking a foreign phrase for the first time. A foreign phrase whose meaning she does not quite understand.

She looks up at Maggie as Maggie backs her way out of the room.

‘We never were,’ Beatrice says again. Then: ‘But I loved you.’

‘I didn’t love you,’ Maggie says.

Then she turns around and runs out into the corridor, looking for a way out.

The first shot from above thwacks into the roof just to the left of Henry’s legs. He can feel the displaced air ripple outward and press itself against his body and he hears the bullet connect with the roof, an almost wet crack like a bone breaking open and spilling its marrow, and several splinters are thrown against his Levis.

‘Where the fuck did that come from?’

Ron behind him scanning the surrounding buildings, looking for the source of the gunshot whose bang still echoes through the empty streets of the town.

‘I don’t know,’ Henry says. ‘It had to come from above. The angle is wrong for—’

The second shot hits less than a foot shy of the place where Ron is crouched, and splinters fly from the roof and into his face. He falls backwards with a curse, blinking as tears stream down his face, about a dozen bleeding pin-prick holes in his cheeks.

Henry looks back toward the street. The shooter, which has to be Peña because Hunt is still trapped behind his now bullet-riddled car, has to be in the Jackrabbit Inn, it’s the only building taller than the schoolhouse, but Henry can’t see him anywhere. He doesn’t see him on the roof, and while several of the windows on the third floor are open, all he can see behind those windows is darkness. The sun is setting behind the building, lighting Henry and his brother while keeping the east side of the Jackrabbit Inn in shadows. And it’s the east side of the hotel he and Ron are facing.

‘We have to get off the roof,’ he says. ‘Ron, we gotta get off the—’

Ron is sitting up, rubbing his eyes, when a third shot is fired. A red dot presses itself into the center of Ron’s left hand. He pulls it away from his face and looks at it.

But the bullet continued through the hand, and there is another dot in his left cheekbone and his left eye is filling with blood and a slow trickle runs from his right nostril, down onto his lip, and then along the top of his lip, drawing a red mustache there before dripping from his face.

‘Ron?’

Ron looks up from his hand to Henry.

‘Something happened to my . . . hand.’

He holds it up for Henry to see, blinks several times, and falls over sideways.

‘Ron?’

Henry gets to his feet and turns in a full circle, confused somehow—this isn’t how it was supposed to happen. It was supposed to be easy. It was supposed to be easy and quick, a few shots and finished. He glances toward the Jackrabbit Inn and again sees only darkness in the windows there. He turns and runs toward the hatch in the roof as the fourth shot cuts through the air. He drops down the ladder and lands in the janitor’s closet and falls backwards against a shelf full of cleaning supplies.

What the fuck just happened?

He tries to accept what he saw, but his mind keeps rejecting it. He cannot have just seen his brother get killed. That’s impossible. It’s impossible.

It happened.

First his younger brother, then his older brother.

Hunt has to pay for that if for nothing else. He knows Donald would never give him up unless he was forced to. He knows he would never—

He closes his eyes and tries to get his mind right.

He has to finish this.

He opens his eyes and walks out of the janitor’s closet and down a wide flight of stairs to the first floor. He walks down the corridor, and is about to pass the classroom that Beatrice and Sarah are waiting in when Sarah runs out of it, into the corridor. A gun hangs from her right hand, the handcuffs still wrapped around her wrist clinking against its barrel.

She looks left and sees him, and there is a moment of terror in her eyes, but only a moment of it. Then she lifts the pistol in her hand and points it at him.

‘Don’t move,’ she says.