Page 8 of When He Calls

He'll call again because I'm the only thing left.

The entry for Milo Ashford is already longer than any other entry in the notebook. One night. One call. More ink than any of the others.

The others are records, ghosts on a page.

This entry is alive, the ink still wet. My body made the decision before my brain caught up, before the browser tab opened, before the address appeared, before the photo landed on the desktop with his hand gripping the table.

This one stays.

The clock says 4:07 a.m., my shift ends at 6. The phones stay dark. Mark comes back from the break room with two coffees and sets one on my desk without asking, the way he does on slow nights, the gesture so habitual it's almost invisible.

An hour passes. Two more calls. A woman in her forties, insomnia and anxiety, eighteen minutes, resolved. A man in his twenties, relationship crisis, twelve minutes, referred to a therapist. Both calls go in the system, then briefly into my notebook. The voices pass through and leave nothing behind, no residue, no friction, just the smooth process of taking a call and logging it and moving on.

My body didn't react to either of them.

At six on the dot, I log off and head to the parking lot, to my car, sliding in and shutting the door before the key is in the ignition.

The piece of paper is in my wallet. The address is on the east side. Twelve minutes if I hurry.

Left turn goes home. Right turn goes east.

The car sits idling. The exhaust fogs in the October cold.

Right turn.

The roads are empty and every light is green. The drive takes eleven minutes and the neighborhood arrives in pieces, streetlights fading, the sky going from black to a gray with nothing in it. His building is brown siding, two stories, a metal fire escape on the north end. Six parking spaces in the back, a dumpster, and a front entrance with a glass lobby door.

I park on the street two houses down, at an angle that gives me a line on the second floor. Four windows on this side. Third from the left has a light on, soft tone, a lamp, not an overhead.

His light came on at 7:34.

The house next door is Ellis's. The yard is what the voice on the phone described, the world that drives Milo inside and keeps him there. The skeleton is dormant without motion triggers, jaw frozen open, LEDs dark, a forty-dollar piece of plastic that sent a twenty-seven-year-old man to the floor. Around it, the full October spread: foam gravestones along the walkway, a spiderweb between the porch pillars, two jack-o'-lanterns with slack faces, and a white fabric ghost hanging from the porch beam that sways in the breeze with the weight and rhythm of something that used to be alive.

The walkway from Milo's building to the sidewalk runs within three feet of Ellis's yard. The skeleton's motion sensor covers the full width of the path. There is no route from Milo's front door to anywhere that doesn't pass through the sensor's range.

And the dog has to go out numerous times a day.

At 8:02, a shadow moves behind the glass. A body passing between the lamp and the window. The shadow goes through me at the base of my spine, travels upward. I have to put both hands on the steering wheel to keep them where they belong.

My grip is even, ten and two, but my knuckles are white. My tendons are straining beneath my skin. The grip in the headshot, the one on the table edge. The parallel registers somewhere below thinking.

At 8:41, the front door opens. A man comes down the steps with a small dog on a leash, the dog pulling ahead, nose to the ground, feet clicking on the concrete. The man is wearing a gray hoodie, head down, shoulders held high and tight, like a person crossing open ground under fire. The dog pulls toward Ellis's yard, and the man's arm goes taut on the leash, redirecting, his body angling away from the decorations without breaking stride.

The skeleton goes off. The four-second laugh, the red LEDs, the plastic jaw. The man's shoulders climb another inch toward his ears. His pace doubles. The dog tries to stop at a bush and gets pulled forward, and the twelve feet of sidewalk past Ellis's yard happen in three seconds of panic he's learned to walk through.

That's him, the voice and the body and the fear and the dog, all of it right there, twenty yards away, alive and afraid of a walk past his neighbor's yard.

The pen is in my hand. The cap is off and my hand is writing on the piece of paper from my wallet: Gray hoodie for walks. Small dog, wire-haired mutt, pulls. Head down. Walks past skeleton as fast as possible. Shoulders high, tight. Does not look at yard. Dog tried to stop, pulled forward. Leaves building 8:41 AM.

They loop the block in seven minutes. I track him at intervals, the hoodie visible between houses, the dog stopping to investigate every surface. He comes back from the opposite direction and his pace slows once he's past the skeleton's range, the shoulders dropping half an inch, the grip on the leash loosening. The dog trots up the steps. The door shuts.

8:52 and I've seen enough.

I head home and shower to wash away this feeling building inside me. Then the kitchen, wet hair, the notebook open on the counter, the entry growing. The building gets its own section. The yard gets its own section. The dog walk gets its own section: departure time, route, duration, the specific choreography of a man navigating a sidewalk that terrifies him because the animal at the end of the leash needs to piss.

I eat a protein bar standing at the counter, staring at the notebook. Two full pages. More than any other entry by a factor of three. The pen is still uncapped in my hand because I'm not done.

October has fourteen days left. He'll call because there's nobody else, and when he calls, I'll be on shift.