The Dispatcher Read Online Free PDF

shit.’
    ‘Stay calm,’ Debbie said. ‘It’s probably nothing.’
    ‘I am calm.’
    But even so he screeched along the street at a dangerous speed, then hauled the car to the right and two-footed the clutch and brake simultaneously when he reached 44 Grapevine Circle and the police car already parked there. He killed the engine by pulling his foot off the clutch and stalling the fucking thing, then yanked the key from the ignition and was out of the car. Debbie stepped from the passenger’s side.
    Beneath the hood the radiator hissed. The sound of traffic coming from Interstate 10. Usually you couldn’t hear it, but in the quiet night it became audible. The faint sound of Pastor Warden’s dogs barking in the west. A few neighbors were standing on their porches, looking this direction. Their mouths hung open. Ian hated each and every one of them. And himself. And Debbie.
    They never should have left Maggie and Jeffrey home alone. Ian had wanted to have a night out with Debbie, and Jeffrey was fourteen, old enough to babysit, but if anything had happened Ian would never—
    Jeffrey was standing on the front lawn, within the circle of the porch’s yellow light, talking to Chief Davis, who had thought whatever was happening was important enough he should crawl out of his whiskey-induced sleep and come out here himself. Davis was taking notes while Jeffrey talked. Jeffrey’s eyes were red and every so often he was wiping at his nose with the back of a wrist.
    ‘What happened?’ Ian said as he approached. ‘Where’s Maggie?’
    Jeffrey and Davis both turned toward him, but neither said anything.
    ‘Where’s Maggie?’
    More silence.
    Ian grabbed Jeffrey by the shoulders, fingers digging into the flesh of them, and shook him. ‘Where the fuck is Maggie?’ he said.
    ‘Honey,’ Debbie said, ‘don’t.’
    ‘Ian,’ Chief Davis said and put a hand on his shoulder.
    Ian turned on Davis and knocked his hand away with the swipe of an arm. The old man blinked like an owl behind his glasses and mustache but said nothing. He simply tilted his Stetson back on his head and hooked his thumbs in his pockets and rocked back on the heels of his boots and looked away. Debbie, though, did not look away.
    ‘Don’t touch me,’ Ian said to both of them and neither.
    Then he turned back to his son.
    ‘Jeffrey,’ he said, ‘where is Maggie?’
    Jeffrey looked up at him. Ian saw for the first time that there was something like terror in his eyes. They were alive with it. It danced in them like flame in a night window. Then, once more, he dropped his gaze to his feet. He had on a pair of slippers. They were blue corduroy, darkened by the damp grass. They were one of his Christmas presents from the year before. Deb had picked them up from a drugstore while grabbing a prescription for antibiotics and they’d tossed them into the box they mailed to California with the rest of his gifts, as well as a cordial if distant holiday card for Lisa, Jeffrey’s mother and Ian’s second wife.
    ‘She’s gone,’ Jeffrey said finally, staring down at those blue slippers.
    ‘Gone?’
    Ian was expecting an injury, a broken arm, fingers burned on the stovetop, a bad cut—but gone? For a moment his mind could not even process the word.
    Without looking up at him Jeffrey nodded.
    ‘Gone where?’
    A pathetic shrug.
    ‘I don’t . . . I put her to bed. I was watching David Letterman and . . . and I heard a noise in her bedroom like she was playing around. I yelled at her to calm down and go to sleep. I yelled at her. Then it got really quiet and I started to feel bad about yelling. I went back to make sure she was okay, to say sorry if I’d hurt her feelings or . . .’ A shrug. ‘But when I went to her bedroom . . . she was . . .’ He licked his lips. ‘She was gone.’ He glanced up once as he finished talking, but quickly looked down again.
    Ian walked past Jeffrey and Chief Davis, knocking against Davis’s shoulder, and into the