Radio Activity (The Rick Shannon series)

by Bill Fitzhugh

  “Hell, she can leave me a damn message,” Clay said just before it stopped ringing. “There! Thank you. I tell you what, that bitch is gettin’ harder to live with every day. Drivin’ me crazy and costin’ me good money every time she goes off on those damn shopping sprees uh hers. I swear, I am this close to havin’ you take care of her like you did those others.”

  They were past the city limits now. Traffic had thinned out and the county road was unlit. “Don’t get too close,” Traci said.

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” Rick said. “It’s too dark out here for him to tell if this is my truck or one of the ten thousand other trucks in this county.”

  “Where’re we goin’ way out here?” DeWayne asked.

  “Oh, I just gotta meet somebody about this deal,” Clay said. “Now tell me what was so goddam important that I had to meet you at the motel?”

  There was a long pause as DeWayne tried to figure out what he was going to say. He hoped that the headlights he could see behind them was the MBI and that he was still in range of their receiver. He decided he better just go for it. “I need more money for what I done for you.”

  There was another pause before Clay said, “Is ‘at right?”

  “Yeah. Uhhh, another ten thousand.”

  “DeWayne what’re you talkin’ about?”

  “Y’all didn’t pay me enough.”

  “Whaddya mean, y’all? I’m the only one ‘at paid you and-- what the hell’re you lookin’ at back air? Why you keep turning around like ‘at?”

  Traci and Rick could hear desperation, fear, and paranoia in both of their voices.

  “I need help, Clay. Real bad,” DeWayne said, snapping under the pressure. “They onto us and I didn’t know what else to do. They was with me all the time so I couldn’t call you and they made me do this.”

  “Do what? The hell’re you talkin’ about?”

  “This is gonna get ugly,” Traci said as she pulled out her cell phone. “I’m calling Sheriff Jackson.”

  “Hell, I didn’t wanna, but I couldn’t let my mama see me with that needle in my leg. So they made me wear this microphone and--”

  “You what!? You’re wearin’ a-- Goddammit! You dumb sonofabitch!” This was followed by a sound that Rick assumed was Clay punching DeWayne in the face or throat or chest, it was hard to tell, but the car swerved when it happened. Clay started cursing at the top of his lungs while DeWayne was screaming for him to stop it and help him out of the mess. That’s when Rick lost sight of Clay’s taillights. A second later, the scanner issued a jarring cacophony of human and machine noise and then the signal was gone.

  Rick was about to accelerate to close the distance, to get back in range of the transmitter, but then he saw the yellow traffic warning sign, a cartoon car on two wheels trying to negotiate a series of S-curves. Rick had to brake to stay on the road which curved and dipped and curved some more. The last bend in the road was a serious hairpin. Rick slowed and made the turn and, as the truck straightened out and they looked ahead, they could see where Clay’s car had come to rest in the ditch.

  81.

  Rick pulled to the side of the road and put on his flashers. He and Traci got out and approached the wreck. The headlights were still on and the doors and trunk were open but there was nobody in sight. Ding-ding-ding-ding, a chiming reminder that the keys were still in the ignition.

  Traci was on the phone with the 911 operator. “I don’t know exactly,” she said. “Out past French Camp Road somewhere. Just get the sheriff out here. They’ve gone into the woods.” Just then they heard the distinct sound of a shotgun blast. Traci held the phone out toward the trees. “Did you hear that? It was a shot! Hurry!” She hopped down into the ditch and looked inside Clay’s car while Rick went to the toolbox in the back of his truck and grabbed a couple of flashlights and his tire iron. “There’s blood in the car,” Traci said.

  Rick held up his hand. “Shhh!” They could hear Clay shouting for DeWayne to stop, that it wasn’t too late to take care of things. Rick said, “He’s going to kill him out there.”

  “Whatta we gonna do?”

  “I don’t know,” Rick said. “I’m new at this. And you’re the one who said you wanted to be the supervisor.” He turned on the two flashlights and checked their beams. He handed Traci the one with the better batteries and pointed off to his left. “You go that way, try to stay on that side of wherever he is and make a lot of noise, call his name, whatever, so he knows somebody else is out there.”

  “What good’s that going to do?”

  “Maybe it’ll make him think. Clay’s always slower when he has to think.”

  “What’re you gonna do?”

  “Same thing.” Rick gestured ahead with his tire iron. “Except I’m going this way.”

  “Be careful,” Traci said.

  They disappeared into the woods, heading in different directions. After about a hundred yards, Rick’s flashlight started going brown. Fifty yards later it completely crapped out on him. He tossed it and tried to follow the sound of Clay’s voice as he kept yelling for DeWayne to stop. The quarter moon hanging behind thick cloud cover made it hard to see. In the darkness Rick kept running into things. Low branches on skinny pines scraped his face and neck. Here and there he bumbled into thickets of stickers and brush that he’d have to back out of to find his way around. As he stumbled through the murky woods, he figured that by now, drunk or not, Clay had to know things were pretty much over for him. He had to realize how desperate his situation was and, in a classic case of shifting the blame, he had probably decided to kill the person he felt had put him in this position. Rick wondered if Clay would turn the gun on himself afterward or if he’d run, or, least likely, if he’d stay to face the music.

  As Rick picked his way through the trees, he considered the implications of what he figured was about to happen and whether he should put himself in harm’s way to try to stop it. A man that the state of Mississippi was keen on convicting of, and probably executing for, solicitation of murder, was hunting down the man he had hired to kill two people. The victims, both extortionists, weren’t exactly innocents, but neither, in Rick’s opinion, were they deserving of the deaths they had suffered. If Clay killed DeWayne and then himself, Rick thought, a fair sum of the taxpayers’ money would be saved, and, in a great many respects, justice would be served. True, it would be at the expense of issues like due process and innocent-until-proven-guilty, but, as had been pointed out many times by many people, life wasn’t fair and justice was blind, or at least she sometimes looked the other way. Besides, in addition to the evidence he had gathered in service of establishing guilt, Rick felt that Clay’s present behavior spoke for itself and certainly didn’t go very far in arguing his innocence. The only reason he could conjure for intervening was the possibility that Clay’s and DeWayne’s demise might lead to problems in convicting Bernie Dribbling, the man ultimately behind all the deaths.

  Rick’s meditation on the fitting consequences for capital offenses was interrupted by the sound of voices. He stopped to listen. He could hear Clay and DeWayne but he couldn’t tell how far away they were. He started to move ahead carefully, following their voices until he saw a light shining in the distance, moving back and forth across the trees. Rick knew it couldn’t be Traci, given the direction she’d set off in, so it had to be Clay.

  Rick imagined that after Clay had lost control and put his car in the ditch, DeWayne had jumped out, fueled by terror and adrenaline, and run into the woods. Clay, stoked on alcohol and dread, must have climbed out and gone to the trunk, where he had a flashlight and that Remington 870 Wingmaster shotgun.

  Looking ahead, Rick saw that the light had stopped moving. It was trained on the wide trunk of an old pine. He could hear Clay speaking. “Might as well step out and face it, DeWayne,” he said. “I’m this close and you know I ain’t gonna letcha just walk away. So what’s the point?”

  Following the voices and the flashlight beam, and trying to move
only when they spoke, Rick slipped from one tree to the next until he was only about fifteen feet behind Clay.

  “You ain’t gotta kill me,” DeWayne said. “I can just go away. I won’t testify to nothin’ and that’s the stomped down truth. I swear! They’ll never even find me.”

  “No good,” Clay said.

  Rick watched Clay move to his right to get an angle on DeWayne, but DeWayne just circled the other direction, keeping the tree between them.

  “How ‘bout this,” DeWayne proposed. “How ‘bout we make it look like we was all just set up on this thing? You said that Chief Dinkins could help if things got sticky. Well, things is sure sticky now.”

  “DeWayne, quit suckin’ eggs on this and be a man,” Clay said. “I’m damn sure sorry it’s gotta end this way but. . . that’s the way it is. We up against a stump.”

  For a moment no one spoke. The only sound was the buzzing of cicadas and crickets for miles around. Then, from the darkness of the woods to Rick’s left, Traci called out, “Hey!”

  It startled Clay so that he just turned and fired a shot in the direction of her voice. As the report echoed through the woods, Rick heard DeWayne turn and run and he figured Clay would take off after him. Rick knew he had to make his move now or start the chase all over so he charged out from behind his tree with his tire iron poised. He planned to bring it down on Clay’s forearm and break it clean, disarming him and leaving him in enough pain that Rick could grab the shotgun and end things without any more death.

  And he might have been able to do just that had he not tripped on this big pine branch he didn’t see. He landed face down at Clay’s feet.

  Clay didn’t know what to do or think. He wanted to go after DeWayne but he seemed frozen, startled, wondering who had just yelled from the woods and what the hell Rick was doing out here. As Clay turned and looked down, his posture brought the shotgun to an angle pointing straight at Rick’s head.

  Rick rolled over and looked up. He could see the last wisps of smoke coming from the end of the barrel. And, even though he wasn’t in much of a position to talk this way, he said, “Give it up, Clay.”

  “The hell’re you doin’?” was all Clay could come up with. He was looking down at Rick as if he’d fallen from the sky.

  “I found the tape,” Rick said. “I know everything that happened and so do the police.” “You did this?” Clay looked off in the direction he had fired the shot. “Who’s out there?”

  “It’s Traci. And I’ve got a camera,” she called out. “Whatever you do is gonna be on video. So you might as well just surrender. Sheriff’s on the way.”

  Clay looked back down at Rick and mumbled, “Goddamn tapes.” Rick started to get up but Clay pressed the shotgun to his neck and pushed him back down. “I told you not to nose around in my business.” He looked over in the direction of Traci’s voice and yelled, “I’ll take his head off, you don’t come out.”

  Rick yelled, “Don’t do it!”

  Clay waited a moment to see if she would come out. When she didn’t, he shrugged in defeat and leaned down toward Rick. “All right, Mr. DJ,” he said. “Got any last requests? Tch.”

  Rick closed his eyes momentarily then looked up at Clay. “I really hate to say this but . . . how about Stairway to Heaven?” Rick flashed an impish grin.

  Clay couldn’t help himself. As dumb and drunk and frightened as he was, he still got the joke and his head threw back in one final laugh. That’s when Rick swung the tire iron with all his might, catching Clay’s tibia in just the right spot to snap it in half. As the bone broke through the skin, the shotgun fired and Traci screamed, “Nooooooo!”

  82.

  The crickets and cicadas eventually resumed their undulated buzzing. Traci was sitting on the forest floor, leaning against a tree in the dark. She looked vaguely stunned. Rick’s head was in her lap, his eyes closed. Her hands were bloody from where she had been applying pressure to his neck.

  Clay lay unconscious nearby, the pain and shock of his compound fracture having proved too much for him.

  In the distance, Traci could hear sirens approaching. After a moment, Rick’s eyes opened and he looked up at Traci. “I hope those are for us,” he said.

  “Yeah.” Traci looked down with a numbed expression. “How you doin’?”

  “I’m okay,” Rick said. “A little woozy, maybe.”

  “You’ll be all right.” Traci rubbed his arm absently as she gazed out into the darkness.

  “I’ve just been lying here thinking about that PD job down in Vicksburg,” Rick said.

  It took a moment for Traci to understand his words. She said, “I thought you were getting out of radio.”

  “I said I was thinking about it.”

  Traci nodded slightly. “You make a decision?”

  “I thought I might take the gig while we work on the PI thing.”

  “We?”

  “I’m going to need a partner. You said so yourself.”

  Traci looked around the woods and said, “Yeah, well, that was before all this happened.” She had the sort of doubt in her voice that comes after being shot at for the second time in two days.

  But Rick couldn’t hear it, his ears were still ringing from their proximity to the shotgun blast. He had rolled to one side as he swung the tire iron and the tight pattern of buckshot at such close range had just caught the side his neck. The experience had an interesting effect on him. Giddy at having cheated death, and with a huge dose of adrenaline coursing through his system Rick became animated and optimistic. “I was also thinking that as the program director, I’d get to hire my on-air staff.”

  “Yeah, I suspect you will.”

  “So, naturally, I thought of you.”

  “Thought what about me?”

  “You said you wanted to work on the air, and I believe you also expressed some interest in moving to a place where you could pick the best parts of your past to tell people or where you could just make up something completely new,” Rick said. “You can just leave behind whatever you want. It’s your past.”

  But Traci was thinking about the future now. And she was thinking about it in a whole new light as she felt the blood coagulating on her hands. Tempting as it might be to rewrite her past, there was something she couldn’t leave behind. But she hadn’t told Rick about that and she didn’t think now was the time to spring it on him. She could tell him later. He’d understand.

  After a few minutes Traci heard the dogs barking. She glanced in their direction and saw what looked like fairy lights in the distance, dodging and blinking in the trees. “I think they found us,” she said.

  Now Rick could hear the dazed blankness in her voice. He couldn’t tell if she was hearing his words, let alone putting meaning to them. He figured it was a temporary response to the night’s events. She’ll be fine, he thought. “Of course you don’t have to answer now,” he said. “Just think about it. Let me know when you decide.”

  Absently stroking Rick’s hair, Traci said, “Yeah, I will.”

  83.

  They caught DeWayne later that night. The dogs treed him like a possum. DeWayne testified against Clay. Clay testified against Bernie. And Bernie said it was all a pack of lies. He was the Booster Club Man of the Year! All three were convicted in the deaths of Jack Carter and Holly Creel and were put in the care of the Mississippi State Department of Corrections.

  Once he’d settled in at Parchman Farm, Bernie decided he’d try to make the best of the situation. He formed a ‘finance company’ that arranged loans for the Aryan Brotherhood and other white supremacist prison gangs. He hired DeWayne as his vice president of collections and protection and they did all right for themselves, all things considered.

  Clay was initially welcomed to the institution where he was held in high regard as a prison yard raconteur. A couple of months later, however, after having told the story about the woman who invited him back to the motel for a golden shower one time too many, he was raped and killed. Guards found h
is urine-soaked body behind housing unit 25.

  Lori Stubblefield’s name was dragged through the mud on radio, television, and in the newspaper. She divorced Clay and moved with the kids to Dallas where she earned more press by marrying the alcoholic chief financial officer of an energy trading company who was later indicted for cooking the books. He fled the country, without Lori, and was convicted in absentia. After that, Lori got her name in the paper one last time when she was arrested for shoplifting a pair of Jimmy Choo pointed-toe slingbacks, in the petrol blue.

  Autumn received an A for her term paper on the station’s format change. It was titled: Grabbing the Gray: Impact of Format Change on P-1 Listeners in the 35 to 64 Demographic (Average Quarter Hour and Cume). Two weeks later her professor discovered that she had plagiarized large portions of the paper. Autumn was “asked to leave” CMU without benefit of a degree. This, however, didn’t prevent her from indicating on her resumé that she graduated cum laude. Autumn moved to Jackson and became the assistant communications director for a democratic state representative.

  After graduating from McRae High School, Rob enrolled in CMU’s Radio, TV, and Film program. Informed by his experience at WAOL, he opted for an emphasis in film. Two years later he dropped out and moved to Los Angeles to look for work in the film industry. Within a year, he was one of the top grossing waiters in Hollywood.

  Despite Rick’s glowing letter of recommendation, J.C. couldn’t find another radio gig. He started collecting unemployment while being paid under the table as a local nightclub DJ. He was fired eight months later and subsequently answered a want ad for a position as a nourishment transfer engineer. He delivered pizza and chicken wings to the residents of greater McRae for six months before moving up to management.