The Dispatcher

by Jahn, Ryan David

  ‘You’re goddamn right it’ll never happen again.’

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’

  ‘I’m telling you, you dumb son of a bitch, that if you so much as touch a hair on Genevieve’s head again, I’ll kill you. You got me?’

  ‘She was trying to leave. She was gonna take Thalia. You of all people must understand that. She’s all I got and she was—’

  Ian slams the butt of his gun against Andy’s temple. Andy lets out a grunt of pain, and his knees buckle. Ian continues to hold him up by his throat. After a few choking gasps, Andy manages to get his feet back under him.

  ‘Hurts, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Listen, Ian—’

  ‘Shhh. I don’t care. She tries to leave again, you just let her leave. If she stays you’ll ruin that little girl. She’ll end up with some fuck-up like you. You love her, you let her out of your grip. You understand that?’

  ‘I’m trying not—’

  ‘There’s no trying here, Andy. I’ll kill you if you touch Genevieve again. I will kill you dead and put you where no one will ever find the body. Do you believe me?’

  Andy nods.

  ‘I want you to say it.’

  ‘I believe you.’

  ‘Good.’ And it is good, because though Ian only came here to frighten Andy, he finds that he is telling the truth. He has it in him to do what he is threatening. He could pull the trigger and simply be done with it. But he does not. He reholsters his weapon and takes a step back.

  ‘See you around,’ he says.

  When he gets home, he pulls out the phone book and sets it on his lap, flipping through it till he finds PAULSON, A. & G. He dials the number and waits. Genevieve picks up after four rings, and a tentative ‘Hello?’ escapes her mouth.

  ‘Genevieve,’ he says. ‘It’s Ian Hunt.’

  ‘Ian . . . ? Oh, hi, did . . . did something happen to Andy?’ Ian might be mistaken, but he believes he hears hope in her voice.

  ‘No,’ Ian says. ‘But I wanted you to know that if you should decide to leave, he won’t try and stop you. We had us a serious talk, and he knows better now than to do again what he did this morning.’

  With a saucepan in hand, he walks to the couch and sits down. He sets the pan on the table and stirs the ramen noodles inside before forking a dripping mass of them into his mouth. Then he grabs the files the sheriff’s department photocopied for him and sets them in his lap. He flips one open. Jamie Donovan was kidnapped from the bedroom of her home in Mencken in 2002. She was eleven. Her body was found in a ditch four days after she went missing. It had been posthumously sodomized and mutilated. There is a picture of her in the file, a color photocopy on a letter-size sheet of paper. Brunette. Sad brown eyes. Something timid in the way she held herself.

  His cell phone rings. His first thought is that it’s Jeffrey. He drops the fork into the pan and picks up his phone. He glances at the number. It isn’t Jeffrey.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Ian.’

  ‘Deb.’

  ‘How are you?’

  Ian scratches his face. His beard is growing in. It itches. ‘I don’t have any updates on Maggie. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Bill.’

  ‘Right. I guess he’d know.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So why are you calling?’

  Debbie doesn’t answer for a long time, though Ian can hear her breathing.

  After a while Ian says, ‘Are you and Bill fighting?’

  ‘No, it’s not that. Maybe I shouldn’t’ve called.’

  ‘It’s okay. I’m not busy.’

  ‘You never stopped believing she was alive, did you?’

  ‘I never stopped hoping she was alive.’

  ‘You never doubted?’

  ‘Of course I did.’

  ‘But you never gave up hope.’

  ‘No.’ Ian grabs a bottle of Guinness from the coffee table and takes a swallow.

  ‘How did you . . .’ More silence. Then: ‘I saw the way you looked at me yesterday.’

  ‘How did I look at you?’

  ‘Like you wanted to strangle me. Like you hated me.’

  ‘I didn’t mean—’

  ‘I guess I deserved it.’

  ‘You didn’t. You have a life—a new husband, the twins—and you have every right to want to live it. I shouldn’t blame you for that.’

  ‘But how did you—’

  ‘Because it’s all I have.’ He looks down at Jamie Donovan’s picture, and then closes the file on it. The image is still in his mind. He takes another swallow of his Guinness. The mental image changes. Maggie. She smiles at him. Then she looks over her shoulder. A man appears behind her. He is out of focus, so Ian cannot identify him. His face a blur, as if smudged out with a wet eraser. Maggie screams and turns back to look at him. ‘Help me,’ she says. ‘Daddy, please.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Debbie says.

  ‘ “Now I am dead you sing to me.” ’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. What else do I have, Deb?’

  ‘Are you drunk?’

  ‘I don’t get drunk anymore.’

  ‘You quit drinking?’

  ‘No. I just don’t get drunk.’

  Debbie is silent for a long time. Then: ‘Do you think if what happened with Maggie didn’t, hadn’t, do you think we would have made it? You and me, I mean.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not? We were good for a long time.’

  ‘Because something else would have happened. That’s life. One thing happens, then another thing happens, then another thing happens. Only looking back can you try to make sense of it. So something would have happened and we’d still have separated, and we’d still be where we are now, or somewhere like it, wondering what the fuck happened to us. Life happened. It happens to everyone. The lucky ones, anyway.’

  Not even breathing from the other end of the line: silence.

  ‘Deb?’

  ‘I’m glad she’s alive, you know.’

  ‘I know. You just wanted an answer and you gave yourself one. The only answer that made any sense, really. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred you would have been right. Seven days later it would have made sense to assume the worst. Seven years later it would have been insane to think anything else.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  She sniffles on the other end of the line. ‘Have you told Jeffrey?’ she says.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You should. He feels responsible, you know.’

  ‘I know, but I don’t know if he wants to hear from me.’

  ‘I don’t either,’ Debbie says, ‘but he needs to know and you need to tell him.’

  ‘I still love you, you know.’

  ‘But life happens.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Okay, Ian.’

  ‘Okay,’ he says, then hangs up the phone. He opens the next file.

  THREE

  Ian makes a right onto Crockett Street and heads north toward work. As he drives he passes the Skating Palace, Bulls Mouth Theater (where they play whatever was on most screens six months ago, the scratched film rolling through a projector that runs louder than the sound system), Wok House, Morton’s Steakhouse, a Dairy Queen, and several other places.

  He makes a left onto Crouch Avenue and drives past Interstate 10, Bulls Mouth Baptist Church, the petting zoo, and is rounding the bend that borders the north side of the Dean woods when he sees a police cruiser up ahead. It’s rolling in the opposite direction, headed toward him. Its horn honks and the driver’s side window comes down. The two cars stop side by side and Diego nods at him.

  A dachshund barks from the back seat.

  Ian nods toward it. ‘What’d he do?’

  ‘Tried to rob Sally’s Gun & Rifle.’

  ‘Then he deserved to get caught. Nobody with half a brain fucks with Sally.’

  ‘Not if they want to keep their
nuts.’

  ‘How much you make so far?’

  ‘Seventy.’

  ‘How many dogs still loose?’

  ‘Three or four, I think.’

  ‘I hope you’re reporting all this to the IRS.’

  ‘It’s not income. It’s beer money.’

  ‘You haven’t bought a drink in five years.’

  ‘Four. And that’s just for myself. I still buy for my friends. If you ever stopped into Roberta’s you’d know that.’

  ‘I don’t get drunk anymore.’

  ‘You buy a six pack every day from Bill’s.’

  ‘Six doesn’t get me drunk.’

  ‘So have six at Roberta’s.’

  ‘With that markup?’

  ‘I said I’d buy.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘You hear about Genevieve?’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘She finally left.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Ian says. ‘Good for her.’

  ‘Weird thing, though. When Andy showed up at Roberta’s last night, left side of his face was cut and bruised. Refused to talk about it.’

  ‘That is weird,’ Ian says.

  ‘It reminded me of what you said about maybe someone should do more than talk to him.’

  ‘I don’t remember saying that.’

  ‘Are you—’ Diego licks his lips—‘are you all right, Ian?’

  Ian looks at his watch. ‘I better get to work,’ he says. ‘Don’t wanna be late.’

  ‘Ian—’

  He rolls up his window, puts the Mustang into gear, and gets the car moving. He glances in his rearview mirror and sees Diego’s car still stopped in the street, taillights glowing red.

  In another seven minutes he pulls into work.

  At three o’clock he steps outside for no other reason than he wants a few minutes away from his desk. He reaches into his car and pulls a plug of cigar from the ashtray and lights it with a match, exhaling a cloud of blue smoke from the corner of his mouth. He squints at the horizon. Probably should get a bite to eat. Maybe he’ll see what’s floating around the fridge when he heads back in. Pretty good chance he left a carton of General Tso’s chicken in there on Monday, and if no one else got to it—a possibility with these barbarians—he’ll have that.

  While he’s out here he should make a call. He should make two calls, one leading directly to the other. Personal calls it would be better not to make from the office. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his cell phone, then scrolls through his contacts till he finds the one he’s looking for.

  It rings three times, then: ‘Hello?’

  It’s a strange thing: Ian does not miss Lisa, but hearing her voice makes him miss the past, a past in which his future, now past itself, was still ahead of him and filled with possibility. He met her when he was twenty-two.

  He’d already been married—and divorced—once, to a girl named Mitsuko he met on a train in Paris. They made eyes at each other while they shot through the darkness underground, and when the train stopped at rue du Sentier they both got off. Eventually it became obvious they were headed to the same place—Chartier—for dinner. They got a table on the second floor near the stairs and every time a waiter walked by he would have to tuck in his elbow to avoid getting bumped (and it happened often as against the wall opposite was the silverware cart). Ian would have been mad except every time it happened she laughed and said, ‘Your face.’ He didn’t know what was so funny about his face, but her laugh was adorable. Two weeks later Ian’s trip was over and, not wanting to separate from Mitsuko just yet, he proposed marriage. She flew to Los Angeles a week after him and they said their I dos at a quick-wedding spot in Torrance. And two months after that they were divorced. Mitsuko finally got the courage to call her parents in Japan and after twenty minutes of crying she said she was flying back home. Ian was eighteen when that happened, and in truth he was relieved. He wasn’t nearly as ready for marriage as he’d thought.

  But four years later, when he met Lisa on the sand in Venice Beach, he thought he was much older and wiser. He was twenty-two: no kid. She was beautiful and surfed better than half the guys in the water and had a smile that was all tomboy confidence. Looking at her beneath the Los Angeles sun he could imagine a future for himself. Before he even knew her name he could. A happy future with five kids and a house on the beach. His mom still owned Dad’s surf shop then (she hadn’t sold it to pay for the several cosmetic surgeries she was convinced would land her a new husband), but he ran it, and it seemed that as long as she had enough money to stay in vodka and cigarettes she was okay and happy to let him run it. He would have his house and his five kids and his father’s surf shop. The old man was five years dead by then, and it didn’t even hurt much to think about anymore. The future was as bright then as it had ever been. Everything seemed lined up in a row as he stood on the sand and watched her come out of the water soaking wet with a board under her arm.

  But now the future is past, and in the end he couldn’t see it clearly at all; it turned out so different.

  ‘Lisa, it’s Ian.’

  ‘Ian! God. Is it 1985 again? Please tell me it’s not. I’ve gotten rid of all my stonewashed jeans.’

  ‘No such luck.’

  ‘I take it from your tone this isn’t a nostalgia call.’

  ‘Afraid not. I was hoping you could tell me how to get hold of Jeffrey.’

  ‘Yeah, do you have a pen?’

  ‘I’ll remember it.’

  The phone rings five times. Ian is about to hang up when the sixth ring is cut off and replaced by a ‘Hello?’

  Ian licks his lips. His chest feels tight.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Jeffrey.’

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘Jeffrey, it’s me.’

  Now it’s Jeffrey’s turn to go silent. Then, finally, ‘Dad.’

  Ian nods. ‘Dad,’ he says.

  ‘How’d you get my number?’

  ‘I called your mom.’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘I have some news.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s Maggie.’ Jeffrey says nothing, so Ian continues: ‘She’s alive. I thought you should know.’

  Silence from the other end of the phone but for a sound like a desert wind.

  ‘Jeffrey?’

  ‘Alive?’

  ‘We still haven’t got her back, but she’s alive.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘She got to a phone day before yesterday, called for help. We’re working on finding her. But it was her and she’s alive.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘I know. Hard to wrap your head around.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘It wasn’t your fault, Jeffrey. I know you felt like I blamed you, and I know I’ve been a crummy dad. I’m sorry for that. But it wasn’t your fault.’

  Jeffrey does not respond.

  ‘Jeffrey?’

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘I missed your birthday last month.’

  ‘You’ve missed a few.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry. I’d like to—’

  ‘Listen, I’m at work. I should go.’

  ‘You got a job?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Of course is right: his son is the same age Ian was when he met Lisa. He had an apartment and worked at his dad’s surf shop and had already been married and divorced. He doesn’t know why he’s surprised to learn that his son is growing up. Part of him expected Jeffrey to stay frozen in time, waiting for Ian to be ready to act once more as a father. But that just isn’t the way things work. It never was.

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘I work on a reality TV show. One of those stupid dating shows. I’m an assistant editor. Mostly I just shuffle footage around on an AVID. But, look, I really don’t have time to talk. I’m glad you called and told me about Maggie.’

  ‘Okay,’ Ian says. Then: ‘Hey, remember that chess game we were playing?’

  ‘Yeah?�
��

  ‘Queen to b4. I promise to be much quicker about my next move.’

  ‘There is no next move, Dad. I put that game away years ago.’

  Click.

  Ian pulls the phone away from his ear and looks at it. The call’s duration is on the screen: 3:53. Less than four minutes.

  He should have said different things. He shouldn’t have mentioned that goddamn chess game. He should have said different things.

  He drops his cigar to the ground and snuffs it out with the heel of a shoe. He pockets his phone and heads back inside, straight to his desk. He’s decided not to have lunch after all.

  Maggie walks around to the back of the stairs. She sits on her haunches and looks at the darkness beneath the bottom step. She doesn’t want to reach in there. She is afraid to reach in there. She swallows and sticks her hand into the shadows. But she does not find the hand-made weapon. Her fingers brush cold concrete, nothing more. Her first thought is that Borden must have taken it. He must have taken it and hidden it from her or destroyed it or showed it to Henry who will now punish her with it. He’s going to make sure she is forever trapped in the Nightmare World, stuck here with him and the damp shadows that lay themselves over everything.

  But then she remembers that Borden is not real. He is not real. He is made up, and things that are made up cannot hurt you. Not unless you let them.

  But maybe Henry took it.

  Maybe he knew she was up to something and came down here last night and took it. He could even now have plans to punish her. He could come down here and tie her wrists with that bloody yellow rope and hang her from the punishment hook and drag the sharp edge of that shard of plate across her softest parts, across the flesh of her stomach and throat and—

  One two three four five six seven eight.

  Calm down. It has to be here.

  Nobody came down here last night. She would have woken up. No one came down here last night and no one took her weapon, so it has to be here.

  Her fingers brush across the wooden handle. She wraps them around it and pulls it from the shadows. She gets to her feet.

  It feels good in her grip. Good and solid and dangerous.

  Looking out the window she sees that the sun has already moved to the other side of the house. The shadows have begun to lay themselves out on the ground like picnic blankets. Midday has come and now it is leaving. It has begun its retreat. Before, she had always dreaded the sun passing to the other side of the world. All she knows is what she can see through the basement’s sole window and she has always wanted it lighted. But now she is anticipating the night. The sinking of the sun. The sound of the front door closing with Henry on the other side. His truck’s engine rumbling to life. The sound of its tires crunching on the gravel driveway and that sound fading.