The Dispatcher by Ryan David Jahn Read Free Book Online

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