by Ben Rehder
“Well, that ain’t my fault,” DeWayne said. “You gone ess-cute me for that? That ain’t right.”
“DeWayne, ain’t but one way out,” the second man said. “We’re holding it open for you. All you gotta do is just walk right on out that door, son.”
The lawyer looked up and said, “What did you have in mind?”
The first man folded his arms and tilted his head toward the lawyer. “Your client is gonna set up a meeting with Clay and he’s gonna wear a wire, and he’s gonna get Clay to implicate himself and Bernie Dribbling in this whole thing.”
“In exchange for what?”
“Visiting hours instead of a visitation.”
The lawyer turned to his client. “Well, whaddya say? I think it’s your best option.”
DeWayne sat there for a while, stewing. These were some bad choices. Just like always. DeWayne never seemed to get any good choices to pick from, only crappy ones like these. It’d been like this ever since he was little, and there never seemed to be anything he could do to change it. But he didn’t think he oughta let his mama see him die with that big old needle stuck up in his leg that way, so he said, “When you want me to set it up?”
“Tomorrow night,” the first man said. “We’ll get you a room at the Magnolia Motor Inn. Have him meet you there.”
“What’m I s’posed to say?”
“Tell him you want another five or, no, ten thousand dollars for what you did. When he starts to squawk about it, tell him you have the master copy of that tape. Tell him you found it at the trailer when he sent you over there to look for it and that you kept it. And now you’ve decided that Clay and Bernie need to come up with a little more to square things away.”
Rick turned to Sheriff Jackson. “I’d sure like to be there to hear what Clay has to say.”
“I bet you would,” she said. “I’ll talk to ‘em.”
78.
Rick left the sheriff’s office and headed back to the station. He was in a good mood. He’d nailed this case and had fun doing it. The PI thing was an opportunity he’d hate himself for not taking, so he was going to take it along with the job in Vicksburg. He just hoped Traci would join him.
He got back to the station a little before five. Traci wasn’t at her desk and Rick silently prayed she was in the ladies room applying more blue eye shadow. He went to the production room and found a stack of spots he had to produce before he went on the air.
By five-thirty, just about everybody was gone for the weekend. Traci locked the front door then went down the hall to the production studio to find out what Rick had learned from Sheriff Jackson. He told her about the forensics while he dubbed the spots. Then he told her about the plan to have DeWayne wear a wire. “Unfortunately Sheriff Jackson said they won’t let me or you or anybody else be there,” he said.
“She say why?”
“Against MBI policy,” he said with obvious disappointment.
Traci looked at Rick, a little disappointed herself. She crossed her arms and said, “So you’re just going to sit around and wait to read about it in Sunday’s paper?”
Rick could hear the derision in her voice. He said, “I assume you’ve got a better idea.”
Traci stood and went to the door. “Come here,” she said.
Rick gestured at the production orders in front of him. “I’m kind of–”
“Now,” she said.
He got up and followed her down the hall. “Where are we going?”
“Just follow.” She led him into the news room and past the old teletype machine that still worked but was no longer used since the wire services now delivered news on-line. Traci stopped in front of a shelf on the far side of the room. She pointed at it and said, “What is that?”
Rick looked at it and shook his head. “I’ll be a son of a . . . son of a sailor.” He looked at Traci. “You know, if I ever do go looking for a partner, you’re the first person I’m going to call.”
“Partner?” Traci picked up the police scanner and said, “How about a supervisor?”
79.
Saturday afternoon Sheriff Jackson told Rick that the MBI had tried to set the meeting up earlier in the evening, but Clay had told DeWayne he couldn’t meet until ten and that was that. Stubblefield had seemed irritated that DeWayne was demanding to meet but he didn’t seem suspicious about anything. The sheriff said she’d call Rick as soon as Clay was under arrest. Rick said he’d be sitting by the phone.
Around eight-thirty, Rick and Traci were sitting in a booth at Kitty’s. After dinner they split a piece of pecan pie, then drove over to the Magnolia Motor Inn. Rick pulled into the Denny’s parking lot next door and backed his truck into a spot where they could see the doors to the motel rooms.
The Magnolia was a McRae landmark, a classic 1960's roadside motel, a two-story L-shaped building with a pool out front and a huge neon sign that gave off the sort of otherworldly nighttime glow that incandescent bulbs behind colored plastic could never achieve. The sign’s animated features included an enormous swooping arrow with rows of yellow neon tubes lighting in sequence as if it were plunging toward the pool. At the top of the sign an immense magnolia blossom pulsed off-and-on as though it were a heartbeat. This electric sculpture lured beleaguered travelers with promises of air conditioning and cocktails. Most of the citizens of McRae had never known this stretch of Bilbo Avenue without this flashing shrine. It was one of the town’s last distinctive artifacts, its final morsel of identity, stubbornly refusing to yield to the homogenizing forces.
Traci looked at the Magnolia fondly and said, “You know, my dad used to take us there for summer vacation when we were kids.”
Rick, who was fiddling with the police scanner, gave her a sideways glance. “Not exactly Six Flags,” he said.
“It was to us. Just getting to pack our little suitcases and come over here was like going to Disney World or something. We were so excited. Dad let my sister and me have our own room and we just thought we’d died and gone to heaven ‘cause we could jump on the beds like trampolines and not get yelled at.” Traci paused long enough to display a nostalgic smile. “And there was something about that ice machine down the hall that we thought was the most exotic thing ever created and I have no explanation for why, so don’t ask. But we always had a full bucket of ice and those glasses wrapped in that thin, crispy paper. I just loved that. We used to play alligator charge and Marco Polo at night in the pool under that neon light. We thought that was soooo cool.”
“Could you get out of the pool or did you have to keep some part of your body in the water at all times?”
“No, you could get out,” Traci said. “But if the person who was ‘it’ said ‘fish out of water’ while you were out, then you were ‘it.’” Traci reached over and took the police scanner from Rick. “Is that how you played?”
“No, for some reason we were pretty strict about having to stay in the pool.”
Traci hit a button on the scanner and it squawked, causing them both to jump. She turned the volume down and started dialing the frequency tuning nob. Having been cut out of the official loop, Rick and Traci were hoping to pick up MBI radio communications that might tell them what was going on inside the hotel. Traci wagged the scanner in her hand and said, “Where should I set this?”
“Police and fire are pretty low frequencies,” Rick said. “Probably around four, five hundred megahertz.”
Traci looked at the frequency display. “This thing tunes way below that.”
“That’s cabs and delivery trucks down there,” Rick said. “Much lower and I think you start getting in the neighborhood of garage door openers and baby monitors, things like that.”
“How do you know that kind of stuff?”
Rick indulged in a nostolgic smile. “Used to be that you had to have an FCC Third Class license to be on the air. You had to go to the nearest city where there was an FCC office and take a test which, for me, was New Orleans. The test was stuff about amplitude and frequency m
odulation and radio waves and all that kind of stuff.”
As they sat in the truck waiting for Clay to arrive, Traci kept scanning up and down the frequency band. She stopped now and then to listen to the chatter of the McRae Police and Fire departments. Tuning lower, she picked up a radio call for a taxi. Then, a little further down the band, they heard a voice say, “What if he’s got a gun?”
Rick turned and looked at Traci. He knew the voice. “That’s DeWayne,” he said, grabbing the scanner. “We’re picking up his transmitter.”
“We’re right next door,” another voice said. “He pulls a gun or anything, you just holler and we’re in there.” Right about then, Clay’s Crown Victoria turned off Bilbo Avenue into the motel. “Here we go,” the voice said.
80.
Clay cruised the length of the parking lot then turned around and came back. The car stopped but didn’t park. Rick assumed Clay was in front of the room where DeWayne had set the meeting. He said, “How come he’s not parking?”
Clay honked his horn a couple of times then waited.
“What’s he doing?” Traci asked.
Clay leaned on the horn again and DeWayne said something that came through the scanner but Rick couldn’t understand it. A moment later one of the motel room doors opened. DeWayne stepped out and leaned over so he could see into the car. Rick could see Clay gesturing for DeWayne to come out to where he was. The microphone was too far from Clay to pick up his words. But it got DeWayne saying, “No, you come on in here.” They went back and forth like this a couple of times before DeWayne gave up. He walked over and leaned down to the passenger window. “We was s’pposed to meet inside,” DeWayne said, gesturing back at the door to his room.
Clay said, “Damn, son, stop arguing and just get in. I gotta go take care of something. You can tell me whatever’s so damn important on the way. C’mon.”
“He sounds drunk,” Traci said. Rick nodded.
“Get in,” Clay said. “C’mon, let’s go. Ain’t got all night.”
DeWayne glanced back at the room next to his, like he didn’t know what to do and was hoping someone might signal him an answer. “C’mon!” Clay said. DeWayne just seemed to give up. He slumped a bit then got into the car. “Air ya go,” Clay said. Then he gassed the car and shot out onto Bilbo Avenue, heading east, DeWayne staring out the passenger window like a hopeless dog.
Rick started his truck. “I wonder if they were planning on this.” He pointed at the room next to the one DeWayne had been in. The door was open. It looked like a Chinese fire drill as MBI personnel spilled out and headed for their cars which were all parked a block away.
Rick gave Clay a few seconds to get down Bilbo before he pulled out and started following. “I hope they got a good transmitter on that thing,” he said. “Otherwise we’re gonna have to sit on Clay’s bumper to hear what they say.” Up ahead, Clay turned south and headed out of town. Rick looked at the scanner in Traci’s hand. “Did we lose ‘em?”
“I’m working on it.” Traci fiddled with the tuner until they heard DeWayne say, “I thought we was gonna meet in the room.”
“What the hell difference does it make? You can tell me just as good here as there,” Clay said. “And what’re you doin’ with a room at the Magnolia anyway?”
DeWayne said, “Huh? I dunno. Why not?”
“Shit, it don’t matter,” Clay said. “Hey, die ever tell you ‘bout that time this gal wanted me to come over to her motel room there and piss on her?”
Rick and Traci looked at each other and shook their heads. “He just purely loves tellin’ that story,” Traci said.
“Yeah,” DeWayne said. “I remember you tellin’ me about her before.”
“I tell you what, it was–” The sound of a ringing cell phone came over the scanner. “I swear!” Clay shouted. “If that’s Lori, I ‘m ‘onna thow the phone out the goddamn winda. The phone continued to ring. Clay said, “Shit, it’s her all right.”
“You ain’t gonna answer?”
“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.