The Dispatcher (24 page)

But if he stays silent the FBI might not even come in here. Their focus will be on finding Henry. Field agents will be everywhere but here. Here is where they know he isn’t.

But what if he covered the scene up here and called them? Or made up a story and got them involved?

Goddamn it, Ian, why did you have to leave such a fucking mess behind?

But Diego knows why. Ian wasn’t, and isn’t, concerned about anything but getting his daughter back. Everything else is peripheral.

He can’t cover the scene up enough to ensure he doesn’t leave evidence behind—evidence that might incriminate him. And he doesn’t want the FBI questioning him about how he came upon the address in California. He understands why Ian did what he did, even if he could not do such a thing himself, and he’s not going to throw him to the wolves for doing it. Maybe he should, but he won’t.

He can’t cover up the scene and contact the FBI, but he can’t just leave it as it is either, can he? There’s a chance no one will come by for a long time, but there’s also a chance someone will come by tomorrow, and that someone would find what Diego found.

‘Goddamn it, Ian,’ he says.

He closes his eyes to think. Then opens them and gets to work.

He puts on gloves and untapes Donald from the chair. He drags him to his couch and lays him across it. He unwraps the digits cut from Donald, and lays them out so the corpse discovered will look whole (having to rush to the bathroom to be sick once). He washes the murder weapon and sets it by the door. He picks up the chair and puts it back into place. He walks through the mobile home, making sure all the windows are closed and locked.

Then he walks to the kitchen and puts oatmeal and water into a sauce pan, puts the pan on the stove, and turns on the gas. It is an old stove that does not self-light, but Diego does not light it either. The stove hisses, telling him to shhh.

He can hardly believe he is doing this, but doing it he is.

He walks back out to the living room. He thumbs a match to life and lights the flaccid candle sitting on the dining-room table. So long as no one digs through the ash too carefully this should do the job. He hopes so, anyway. It will look like Donald got up, put on some oatmeal and lay on the couch to wait for it to be ready when something happened. Something.

Diego blows out the candle and walks to the body. He moves it to a sitting position, puts a cigarette between its lips, and a lighter into its palm. Then he walks back to the candle and lights it once more. The smell of gas is strong now. He has to get out. He’s done what he could.

He thinks there might be hatchet marks on the bones that forensics people will eventually find, but this should buy Ian a few days. And with any luck there will be no evidence that Diego was here at all.

Diego heads out the front door, grabbing the hatchet on his way out, and closing and locking it behind him.

He walks to his car and gets into it, throwing the hatchet on the floor. He starts the engine and turns the car around. The tires crunch over gravel. As he drives away he glances into his rearview mirror, but the mobile home simply sits there, silent.

When he reaches Crouch Avenue, he turns left.

 

 

 

The explosion is loud and sudden and its force blows a wind through the surrounding trees and birds take flight. Diego’s heart pounds in his chest and his face feels hot. He looks out his window as he drives and sees smoke billowing behind the trees, a thick pillar of smoke holding up the sky.

When he reaches his house six minutes later the fire engines have still not left the station. Diego is glad. He wants the place to have a chance to burn.

Now to talk to Cordelia.

 

 

 

‘I wish you wouldn’t.’

‘He’s my friend, Cord.’

‘You have lots of friends.’

‘Ian doesn’t. I’ll be back in a few days.’

‘Shit.’

‘Don’t be like that, Cord.’

‘What if I told you don’t go?’

‘I wouldn’t go. Are you telling me that?’

Cordelia looks away for a long moment and then looks back. ‘Be safe.’

‘I will.’

 

 

 

Diego stops his car on the dirt shoulder of the road to allow two screaming fire engines to pass, and then he pulls back onto the asphalt and continues toward Interstate 10.

He looks at the smoke filling the sky and hopes he has made the right decision.

By the time he gets the fifth call from Diego, the one he decides to answer, Ian is about thirty minutes out of Comfort, Texas. The land on either side of him now is lined only with occasional feeder roads, private roads, lonesome-looking houses, and summer trees. But he likes the emptiness. He grew up in Los Angeles where his only escape from civilization was the sea, and he finds this unpeopled land beautiful.

He answers the phone. ‘I’ve decided you’re not gonna quit calling,’ he says.

‘You’ve decided right.’

‘Do I win a prize?’

‘Only if you guess where I am. You get one chance.’

‘Roberta’s.’

‘She don’t even open for another half hour.’

‘I bet she would for you. If you said please real nice and made puppy-dog eyes.’

‘I’m at a Shell station in Columbus,’ Diego says.

‘What the hell are you doing in Ohio?’

Despite the tone of their conversation, a cold feeling slides into Ian’s stomach like a blade. Diego knows where Ian is headed. He knows and he’s going to try to stop him before he can make Henry pay for what he’s done, before he can get Maggie back. He knows and he’s going to arrest him, have him arrested, for killing Donald Dean.

The FBI is probably already awaiting his arrival at a roadblock somewhere to the west.

He knew he should have cleaned Donald’s place up—he knew that—but by the time he was finished with him, he was simply finished. He had neither the mental nor the physical energy to dispose of Donald’s body. He did not know what to do with it, and even if he had, he’d just been shot: he barely managed to do what he’d gone there to do. And when he woke in the dark of morning he felt only a great urge to get on the road.

But that was a mistake. That Diego is calling him makes it obvious it was a mistake.

‘I’ve been to your apartment. And to Donald’s place.’

‘I know.’

He coughs into his open hand and tastes blood. He looks down at the catheter winding its way out from under his shirt and to the passenger-side floorboard where he put the satchel, and sees a knot of white liquid working its way down. He wonders what it means, this liquid in his lungs. He should have brought antibiotics with him. Grabbed some from his medicine cabinet. He had some left over from something or other. At least he got some pain meds stronger than Tylenol. They make him feel strange and drowsy, but he can function.

‘It’s not too late to straighten this out, Ian.’

‘I know,’ he says. ‘That’s what I’m trying to do. Straighten this out.’

‘I don’t think you’re going about this—’

‘Who else knows about Donald?’

A long pause, then: ‘No one.’

‘You didn’t report it?’

‘I’d be lying if I said that didn’t hurt my feelings. You’re my friend.’

‘I am, but—’

‘I’m loyal to my friends.’

‘Then turn around and go back to Bulls Mouth and let me finish this thing.’

‘I’m even loyal to my suicidal friends.’

‘What the hell does that mean?’

‘Henry will kill you.’

‘You don’t know that.’

‘I do know that, and so do you.’

‘He has my daughter, Diego. He stole my life.’

‘Your life is what you made it.’

Ian doesn’t respond for a long time. He knows what Diego says is true. He is what he is and has done what he’s done and it produced the life he lives. These are just facts and there is no point in pretending otherwise.

‘Ian?’

‘I know,’ he says. ‘You’re right. That’s why I’m doing this.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You don’t need to.’

‘It doesn’t have to happen like this. I burned Donald’s trailer. They’ll think he had an accident with the stove. We’ll get the FBI or somebody involved, tell them what’s going on, and then we—’

‘You did what?’

‘Come home. The FBI has resources. They can—’

‘The sheriff had resources too. I appreciate what you’re doing, Diego, you don’t know how much, I know you put yourself on the line here, but I’m not stopping.’

‘Ian, goddamn it, would you just listen to—’

‘Go home to Cordelia, Diego, and leave me alone.’

‘If you—’

‘I’m throwing this phone out the window now. Give my best to Cord.’

‘You selfish son of a bitch, would you fucking—’

He rolls the window down, the summer heat blowing into the car at sixty-eight miles per hour. He turns his face to it a brief moment, then throws his phone out the window. It seems to hang in the air a second, and then flies backwards, flipping end over end. In the rearview mirror he watches it hit asphalt and disintegrate, twisting and throwing off pieces of itself until there are no more pieces to throw off and it is gone. He rolls the window back up and turns on the radio.

He knows Diego. The man will keep coming after him. Ian just hopes he’ll be able to stay ahead of him and take care of what needs taking care of before Diego catches up. He doesn’t want to put anyone else in danger. He doesn’t want what happened to Bill Finch and Chief Davis to happen to anyone else.

Nor does he want what happened to him to happen to anyone else.

Diego is a good man with a loving wife and a beautiful boy he is raising as his son. He should remain a good man with a loving wife and a beautiful boy he is raising as his son. For that to happen he needs to keep his distance. Which means Ian has to stay ahead of him and take care of Henry on his own.

When he decided how far he was willing to go with Donald—all the way—he knew it was a negation of things he had believed all his life, of things he still believes, but he did not care, nor does he now. His only want was for the information he knew Donald had and he was willing to do everything to get it. He knew the cost going in and he was willing to pay it. He knows there will be greater costs ahead. He will pay those too. He is getting Maggie back. He knows he won’t get his life back with her, but that doesn’t matter: it will make his life mean something again. And that does matter.

He looks out at the unpeopled land to his left and his right. He imagines his daughter in a yellow dress with the wind blowing through her golden hair. Just her and the landscape. She is beautiful. She is everything that ever meant anything in this entire fucked-up world, all of it within those green eyes. Everything his heart ever needed in four words from her lips: I love you, Daddy.

And that does matter.

Maggie sits between Henry and Beatrice in a gray Dodge Ram pickup truck, sweat trickling down her face. The cab smells of their sweat, a dense odor that makes Maggie’s eyes water. Henry will not turn on the air conditioner. He refuses to do so, saying it’ll ruin their gas mileage and he doesn’t want to be stopping to fill up every hundred miles.

They’re about an hour out of San Antonio now. Maggie thinks it’s been about an hour, anyway. She counted to four-thousand-two, four-thousand-three, four-thousand-four, and there are only three thousand six hundred seconds in an hour, so unless she was counting far too fast, it should have been just over an hour.

She thought that she might have a chance to escape while there, but she did not. They stopped and got fast-food sandwiches for breakfast, and ate them in the truck, Maggie the entire time squeezed between Henry and Beatrice.

Every time she took a bite she would think of the people Henry buried earlier this morning. They would never eat again. She doesn’t understand why Henry had to do that. He didn’t have to do that. He said he had to because he needed their truck, he said he didn’t have a choice, but Maggie thinks that is a lie. Maybe a lie he believes himself, but a lie nonetheless. There had to have been ways of getting a new vehicle without killing anybody. Maggie thinks that maybe Henry likes to—

‘I’ll be goddamned,’ Henry says.

‘What?’ Beatrice says.

‘Look.’ He points through the bug-spattered windshield.

‘A Volkswagen?’

‘No, just in front of it.’

Now Maggie sees it too: a 1965 Mustang. It could be Daddy’s. It almost has to be Daddy’s. It’s red except for the trunk, which is primer gray.

She remembers riding with Daddy in his Mustang. Sometimes he would let her shift the car if they were alone and no one else was on the road. He’d push down on the crutch—clutch, Mags, with an L—and she would move the shifter, jamming it into gear. It was fun and exciting: she could feel the whole car’s power in the black knob at the end of the shifter, and it vibrated into her body through the palm of her hand. That made it scary, too, but that was part of why she liked it, part of why it was fun. Sometimes he let her sit in his lap and steer. She would swerve all over the road, laughing and honking the horn, and when it was over Daddy would be covered in sweat and saying she was the bravest person he ever met or the craziest. And she would stick out her tongue and shake her head and make crazy noises and laugh.

‘Well,’ Daddy would say, ‘that answers that.’

Henry closes the distance between the Dodge pickup and the Mustang. He has to change lanes and pass the Volkswagen and then swing in front of it to do so, and the driver of the Volkswagen honks and Henry waves his middle finger at him through the truck’s rear window.

Maggie looks at the Mustang in front of them. It is Daddy. She can tell by the back of his head, the shape of it, the thin blond hair. It is him. She was afraid it might not be, she was afraid that he was dead and it couldn’t be him, but he isn’t dead and it is him. After yesterday, with all that blood, with the way he just lay on the gravel after Henry kicked him in the head, with the way his head fell limp and he just lay there, she was so afraid he was dead. She told herself he wasn’t, but she was afraid he was.