Wizard of the Wind

by Don Keith

  "The last cut on side two of the new album says everything I want to say to you right now, Jimmy. And I love you. No matter what happens..."

  There was a sharp yelp from her that could only have come from hurt. Then Jimmy heard the sound of the mobile telephone’s receiver being ripped from her hand. The cruel, oily voice of DeWayne George took over.

  "How ya doin', neighbor? How's Brother James this fine evenin'?"

  "You hurt her and I'll kill..."

  "What? You'll do what? Play me a request on the damned radio, Mister Deejay? Spin one for ole DeWayne George and his little girlfriend while we are out ridin' around on this beautiful evenin'? While we are rockin' and rollin’ to the sounds of Brother James-on-the-radio?"

  "What's it going to accomplish for you to hurt her, DeWayne? She doesn't have anything to do with what's between you and me."

  "I know what you done, Brother James! I know you and the nigger have already gone and give a tape you made to the fuckin’ DEA. I ain't dodged them bastards as long as I have without knowing everything that goes on with them."

  Again, panic spread throughout Jimmy like the hot breath of the Devil. His five-page affidavit and a copy of the tape had been delivered before noon that morning to the Drug Enforcement Administration office in the Federal Courthouse on Broadway in Nashville. DeWayne George had found out about it before the day was over.

  "Don't matter none, neighbor. I was going to invite Miss Michaels out for a nice ride anyways. Even before y’all screwed me. Me and Duane have had your old buddy Enrique keeping up with her whereabouts for a few days now, just in case we wanted to catch her act. But, hey! I ain't going to kill her just yet. I'm going to ride around and enjoy the cool air and the moonlight with her for a while. Maybe I’ll show her some of the countryside. That’ll give you some time to sit there and think about what her pretty little body will look like when they find it someday. And that will be a long time after I'm gone to some place where the sun shines all the time and the D. E. A. can't touch my ass! And you, Brother James, get to look over your shoulder from this moment on. Maybe one day me or somebody who's loyal to me will put a knife blade between your third and fourth ribs. And somebody will make that ‘coon partner of yours dance at the end of a rope like his kin-folk used to do when we knew how to keep ‘em in their place."

  Jimmy Gill’s tongue was tied fast with dread and frustration. Words wouldn't come. DeWayne went on, half-yelling to overcome the roar of the rushing wind.

  "It wasn’t the way I had planned to finish it out, Brother James. But I figure I’ve got plenty of money to last down there for the rest of my life. Oh, and neighbor? There is no use in you calling the law. You ain't likely to find me, not knowin' where in the whole country we might be right now. It is a big old country, ain't it? But we can still pick up one of our radio stations out here. Can't we, Miss Cleo Michaels?"

  There it was. Amid the rush of the wind that changed pitch in the background as he sped up and slowed down the car. He could just make out the sounds of rock and roll on the car's radio. The sound of the Wizard network. Blue Oyster Cult. “Don’t Fear the Reaper” was the song. The programming originated from downtown Nashville, ten miles from where Jimmy trembled in rage. But the mad man could be listening to any one of seventy-five radio stations, practically anywhere in the United States. In the broad footprint of the satellite. Seventy-five stations, all with their satellite dishes turned upward like massive hands cupped to giant ears to catch the signal.

  "I'll call you back directly, Brother James. I want you to hear Miss Cleo sing a real sad song when I start to whittle on her a little bit!"

  George slammed the portable phone down hard with a horrible crash.

  Jimmy shook even more violently now as he held the receiver tightly to his ear, hoping somehow that he could still hear them on the now-dead line. Instead he was startled when the painfully loud dial tone replaced crackling silence.

  Keep calm, he kept telling himself. Don’t panic. Dear God, don’t panic. He had to keep his head or he would lose Cleo for sure just as he had finally understood what it would take to get her back.

  Pretend it was only another big deal coming down. Negotiating to buy another radio station. Closing a deal to sign a bunch of stations to a long-term contract. He could do it. He had done it many times before, against big-time, stony-mountain odds. But if one of those deals fell through, what the hell? Nobody died. He simply regrouped and closed it some other way the next day.

  Instinctively, Jimmy began to dial police emergency but something stopped him. As if acting automatically, he fumbled through punching in Detroit Simmons's number and counted six, seven, eight rings.

  He had to be there! He needed Dee more than ever now!

  Then there was a pick-up, a sleepy fumbling with the receiver, the rattle of its being dropped to the floor, and finally an angry female voice spoke, spitting at him.

  "Chris, he’s already told you he'll fix it first thing in the morning! Work around it ‘til then!"

  It was Rachel with the irritated greeting, clearly upset with whomever she thought it was calling Detroit about some technical screw-up at the stations.

  "Rachel? It's Jimmy. I'm sorry..."

  "Jimmy? Damn, I'm the one that's sorry. I thought it was the night girl on the rock network with her headphones acting up again. She's already called..."

  "Please, honey. Let me talk with Dee. Quickly."

  "Something wrong, Jimmy? Are you okay?"

  She must have heard the knife-edge fear in the way he was pleading for Dee. She did not wait for him to answer her questions and had Detroit on the line in a second.

  "What's up, Jimmy Gill?" He was sleepy-voiced, but the concern Rachel had conveyed to him was there, too.

  "DeWayne's got Cleo. I don't know how he found her. I didn't even know where she was but he did. He knows we spilled everything to the DEA. He says he's going to..."

  And he lost it. Jimmy Gill sobbed into his free hand.

  "Jimmy! Jimmy! Listen to me, Jimmy!"

  He barely heard Dee’s yells buzzing from the phone receiver. Barely heard him over his own gasping cries. He put the telephone back to his ear while he wiped away his tears with a crumpled corner of bed sheet.

  "Dammit, Jimmy! We got to keep it together if we’re going to figure out how to get her back. Did you talk to her? Where are they now?"

  "I don't know, Dee. I could hear the rock network on the car radio but that could put them in any one of six dozen markets. Cities."

  "They were in a car, though? On a car telephone?"

  Jimmy was amazed Detroit could think so clearly, having just been rudely jarred awake in the middle of the night.

  All Jimmy could do was sit there on the edge of the bed, stunned by the horror of what that animal might do to the woman he loved so much. Detroit had more questions.

  "Could you hear any noises you recognized, any sound that might give us any idea where they were? Anything on the line that might sound like long distance noises...an echo, static or something? We don't know where Cleo was going to be at all, do we? Did she say anything that might be a clue?"

  Jimmy shook his head to all the questions, as if Dee could actually see him through the miles of telephone cable. And then, through the haze of horror, something clicked in Jimmy’s mind.

  She had said it to him as clearly as she dared. She had begged him to hear her. But what was it? What had she said to him that she so desperately wanted him to hear?

  “Last cut on side two says all I want to say...”

  Last cut, side two!

  "Hold on, Dee! I've got to listen to a record."

  No doubt Detroit Simmons was sitting there in the dark, employing that slack-jawed “man, he's crazy” look. Jimmy dropped the telephone and sprinted to his record shelf, rifling through all the disks, searching frantically for Cleo's newest album. It was not on the shelf. Not in the stack of records littering the floor. Not piled with all the promotional copies of other a
lbums, resting on the dining room table where they usually went unplayed these days.

  He had not listened to music in months. Only side one of her album the night before. At her place. But where was his copy?

  Then, there it was, waiting for him on the dusty turntable. He had meant to listen to it ever since she had given him a copy. He had been too damn busy.

  The power for the stereo system was always on. His hand shook as he flipped the disk over, lifted the tone arm, and placed it expertly in the groove on the last cut on the record. Jimmy ran up the volume on the amplifier and listened intently, praying out loud that her message would come through clearly to him. He hoped whatever it was it would give him some kind of clue with which they could save her life.

  He knew the song instantly. It was a happy up-tempo number with almost a bluegrass feel to it. One she had tried out on him when she was putting the finishing touches on it months before. One she had written, she said, when she had been on a lonely stretch of road “between somewhere and somewhere else” and had grown so homesick she had “cried musical notes and haunting lyrics instead of tears.” That’s why Cleo was such a great songwriter. She wrote the way she talked, in poetry that could easily be set to music.

  Her words on the disk rang out strongly, mocking the happiness of the mandolin and the banjo that swapped licks with each other from opposing speakers. Her words that sang of dew-washed mornings, mimosa trees strung like a necklace against the bosom of the nearby mountains, the mist that mellowed the sharpest bends of the meandering Cumberland River.

  It was there. It was clear! Thank God! He only needed a few words of "Cumberland Coming Home" to divine what she was trying to tell him. He dashed back to the telephone and screamed at Detroit.

  "They're right here, Dee! Right here in Nashville!"

  Forty

  It was an awful moment. Jimmy could do nothing more than listen to Detroit as he silently considered the situation. He realized that even knowing that Cleo and DeWayne George were right there, somewhere in town, still might not be enough to save her.

  Please have an idea, Jimmy was thinking silently to himself. Please help her. Finally, Dee spoke.

  “We’ll come up with something, Jimmy Gill. We’ll come up with something. I promise you that. Get dressed and I’ll be there in a minute.”

  Lord. He had nothing at all. DeWayne George called back as soon as he hung up with Detroit.

  "You still up, neighbor? Man, you are going to be a real bear at work tomorrow, ain't you?"

  "DeWayne, no matter what they get you for, it won't be as bad as murder. Let her go and then you can get going to wherever you're running to."

  "Well, there’s one little flaw in your logic, there, Brother James. If they do too much lookin', they might find out that me and old Duane have already had to kill off some folks. Could be they’re getting close to us anyway and your little treason just pushed us into executing our getaway a little early. Hey, Mr. Deejay. Speaking of executions, you want to hear your little songbird yodel?"

  He could hear a sharp slap and a quick squeal of pain. Jimmy groaned, hurting for her, and crushed the telephone with his hand as if he might squeeze it in half.

  "It's all right, Jimmy," she yelled over the wind noise in the car. "He's not hurting me. He’s only...."

  "My, my, neighbor. She's such a fine looking woman. I sure would like to hear her hum a little something in my ear while I played her like a bass fiddle."

  "I swear, George, if you..."

  "Now, now, now. I know your poor old grandmaw told you not to be swearing. Me and my new girlfriend, Miss Cleo Michaels, will be talking to you again in a few minutes, Brother James. We got some more sightseeing to do right this instant. This is old DeWayne, signing off."

  And again, he slammed the portable phone down with a hard thunk!

  Jimmy was pacing, panting, almost raving by the time Detroit Simmons slid his car sideways into the driveway of the house. Jimmy met him on the walkway out front and they embraced as loving brothers. It helped. Jimmy took some strength from the sincere, heartfelt hug. Then he told Dee about the latest call.

  “You’re sure he’s calling on a mobile telephone? Not just saying it to throw us off?”

  “Yeah. You can hear it. The road noise and static and all. And he says they are riding around.”

  "Do you have call-forwarding on your telephone here?"

  "Yeah. I always send my calls to Cleo’s place when I’m over there. Why?"

  "Forward your telephone to my mobile phone number and let's get going."

  Jimmy did not ask more questions. Somehow he fumbled through punching in all the digits and then fretted that he might have missed some or may have misdialed in his frenzy. But Detroit was not going to take the time to re-do the operation. It had to be right. They jumped into Detroit’s four-wheel-drive utility vehicle and peeled out of the driveway. Once underway, Jimmy got enough breath to ask.

  "Where are we going?"

  "A mobile telephone's nothing more than a radio transceiver. We can maybe do ourselves some fox hunting." Detroit pointed to a box covered with knobs and dials in the back seat of the car. A coil of cable was hitched to the box on one end and the other went to an aerial of some type that was propped in the back floorboard. “We got a bunch of us ham radio operators who do this kind of stuff all the time. Sometimes just for fun. One of us will hide out in an unlikely place and the first one to find him wins. Or we’ll track down somebody whose microphone switch has gotten stuck on. But sometimes they use it to catch thieves who steal their radios and are stupid enough to actually transmit on them.”

  Dee was obviously telling Jimmy far more than he wanted to know. But he could also see that Jimmy was dangerously near panic. He had to keep his mind off what might be happening at that very moment or he might lose him. He steered the vehicle around a curve much too fast for any rational physical law of motion, teetering on two wheels.

  Jimmy did not seem to care. He only wanted to find Cleo. His eyes told Dee to break any law necessary.

  "We got to get to the highest place around here to try to pick up their signal when they call again. I suppose The River's tower site will be the best we can do on short notice," Detroit continued, as much to himself as to Jimmy Gill. "We have to try to home in on the signal being transmitted from their phone with the directional antenna. Not the repeater at the telephone tower that picks it up and re-transmits it. The portable telephone has a transmitter that puts out only a watt or two of power at the most. It's going to be hard as hell to pull that little signal out of the mud, even if they are within line of sight...a direct shot to the tower. And I’m not even sure of the frequency they use on those things exactly. But, damn! It's our only chance, Jimmy."

  His face was screwed up with tension in the dim lights from the dash, and again, Jimmy Gill could almost hear the man’s mind working.

  "I got a ham radio buddy from WSM Radio who should already be climbing halfway up their FM tower in West Nashville with a walkie-talkie. And I got another buddy at Channel 32's stick up north of town in Madison. We are going to do our best to tri-angulate the bastard!"

  Just then his telephone, resting in its pouch between them, jingled to life, shocking them both as if a jolt of lightning had struck. Detroit waved him away from answering it until he could slam on his brakes and skew the car to the side of the road and kill the engine.

  "Now get it. As far as he knows, you are still sitting at home, frustrated, stewing helplessly about this whole thing. But try to get him to call back later."

  Jimmy took a breath, tried to calm his beating heart, and answered the telephone before DeWayne gave up or got suspicious.

  “George?”

  "Man, it's going to be a shame to mess up such a pretty woman as Miss Cleo Michaels,” the twin growled. "Lucky she's left us so many fine recordings to remember her by, ain’t it, neighbor? Record company’s going to be rich selling all her fine material when she’s a corpse."

&nb
sp; Jimmy started to beg again, but DeWayne interrupted.

  "Too bad I can't get you and your nigger tonight, too. But I suspect seeing this pretty thing lyin' dead in that casket will be worse than dying for you won’t it, Mister Radio. Especially knowing that basically it was you that was the cause of it all."

  DeWayne again slammed the receiver down, leaving Jimmy with his mouth wide open in silent anguish, with nothing at all to say. He could only pound the dash while Detroit grabbed his shoulder, popped the clutch, and kicked gravel as they sped on up the winding mountain road, stopping only to open the padlocked gate, and then climb some more.

  “He’ll call back again,” Dee said, as reassuringly as he could manage. He hoped he was right in assuming that DeWayne would want to goad Jimmy some more before he did whatever he was going to do to Cleo.

  They jumped from the car as quickly as they could after Dee skidded to a stop in a circle of mercury vapor light near the base of the massive steel tower. It was the same one he and Jimmy had visited on their very first trip to Nashville. There was no time for nostalgia this night, though.

  Taking a small black box from a clip on his belt, Detroit pushed a button on its side and spoke into its front.

  "Lacey, this is Dee. Do you copy me?"

  "Yeah, Dee. You are a little scratchy," a tinny voice said from inside the box. "But I got you five-by-five."

  "I can hear you both okay, Dee," another voice interrupted to say. “You’re noisy but perfectly readable up here, too.”

  "Roger, Buddy. Thanks! I don’t know about the batteries in this thing so I’ll keep it short."

  Jimmy was shivering again, as much from the cloying tension as the chill night air on the mountaintop. From somewhere inside the building, he could hear the exhaust fans pumping cool air over their FM transmitter. He could also hear the pulsing of some rock music from a monitor speaker. Frenetic music that seemed to provide a score for the whole adventure, making it seem to Jimmy all the more like an unreal movie instead of a true life-or-death drama.

  Outside the building, there were only the sounds of crickets and the squawking back and forth of Detroit and his buddies, the shrill distant whistle of an L&N freight train, and the hum of light traffic on the freeway several hundred feet below where they stood.