Wizard of the Wind

by Don Keith

  Wizard Broadcasting had now purchased and were running eleven stations in six cities. Wizard Satellite Network was broadcasting four different formats with over three-hundred affiliates pulling the programming down from a geo-stationary satellite circling the planet twenty-two thousand miles above the northern hemisphere at the exact speed as the earth’s rotation. Each of them was duly and fittingly amazed by all the figures and projections, charts and graphs, pictures and slides, ratings and billing information, cash flow and inventory management systems.

  Jimmy knew Lulu Dooley and Clarice George did not understand any of it. That Greta Polanski, for her part, did not understand much English at all, much less the language that was being spoken that morning around the massive table in the company’s new conference room in the rich new office suite atop the glistening high-rise building.

  These people were not really clear on what the corporate restructuring that was being proposed actually meant. They understood even less after Richard Graffeo ran through the deal in a mad rush of legalese.

  The procedure took two minutes to accomplish.

  The George twins had told their mother to vote with Jimmy Gill, no matter what. She did not really pay much attention to what was happening anyway. She had tickets for the Grand Ole Opry that night. She simply said “yea” when Jimmy pointed at her. The secretary dutifully recorded the vote.

  Detroit sat quietly throughout the entire meeting, his head down as if studying all the papers in front of him, or examining the fine grain of the blonde wood in the new conference table’s shiny top. He knew "chairman emeritus" wasn't much of a functional title, but he could count votes as well as anyone. He had long since realized it was a done deal. And he had purposely avoided asking Jimmy about it. Somehow, he had convinced himself that it was not what he thought it was. That Jimmy would never do anything like that. On some level, he had hoped that it would all be made clear at the meeting.

  Well, it was clear all right. And Detroit still could not believe it was happening.

  When the vote came to Dee, he whispered "nay." Then he nodded to his aunt to do the same thing. She did, with her lip jutted out and a "go-to-hell" look in her eye when she looked to where Jimmy sat at the head of the massive table. The secretary made two marks in the other column on the sheet of paper in front of him.

  Mrs. Polanski voted “nay” also. But she looked confused when Lulu nudged her. She still had no idea what was going on.

  Three “nays.” One “yea.”

  Cleo had signed her paperwork in front of a notary in Pueblo, Colorado, and mailed it back without even reading it. She trusted Jimmy to vote her proxy the correct way. His own vote was tallied, too.

  Jerry Morrow’s appointment to the board of directors had passed unanimously earlier. Now Detroit Simmons knew why the time had come to finally reward the man for all his work and why Jimmy Gill had at last seen fit to propose it. Morrow gave a heart-felt “yea,” and it was over.

  The secretary said, “The motion is carried, four to three.” There was no other business. The meeting was adjourned.

  After the meeting broke, Detroit loitered for a moment under the spectacular new chandelier in the lobby. He had intended to wander back to his new office with the big windows. To maybe spend a few minutes at some busy work until his aunt and the other ladies were ready to go to North Nashville for lunch. But just then, Jimmy and Richard Graffeo walked out of the conference room, smiling and shaking hands. The attorney merely nodded and discreetly kept on walking toward the elevator lobby as Detroit pulled Jimmy aside.

  He had to say something and say it now, before the words festered inside him any longer. When he spoke, it was more with sadness than anger.

  "I remember when you fired the sales manager in Louisville over the telephone for practically nothing, Jimmy. And the day you fired that morning disk jockey while he was in the middle of his show and they had to get the engineer to play records until they could call somebody else to come in and finish the program. And I was there the day you cut loose the whole sales staff in Houston because they couldn't meet some silly, impossible quota, all to make a point to the rest of the chain. But I never thought I'd see the day you'd fire me like this. Through some damn lawyer and a stack of paperwork and a rigged vote."

  "Dee, I didn't fire you. You’re still my main man! We just have to streamline the way this puppy hunts or we're going to get out-foxed in the major markets. Everybody's going to get the same money cut as before, probably even more. We're going to have to take Wizard Broadcasting public very soon to raise the kind of capital we need to grow. And it'd be tough on Wall Street with the way we were structured. With the lack of business experience at the top. And when we go..."

  "Jimmy, you don't have to use your redneck analogies on me or come up with all the bullshit reasons. I know you better than anybody except maybe Cleo. And we are both worried about you. You're changing. You're getting away from the things that got you and me into this business in the first place. Take a step back, Jimmy, before it's too late. Look at yourself. At Wizard. Don't let the power and the greed blot out the magic of this medium, man. It's too special to mess it up."

  A couple of the satellite jocks walked past them then and nodded respectfully. Jimmy waited for them to get out of earshot before he spoke, his voice barely in control.

  "Look, you better come down off your high horse and..."

  But Detroit Simmons had already turned and was walking away slowly, ignoring what might be left of James Gill’s carefully rehearsed sales pitch. He let the door slam behind him when he stepped into his new office and workshop with all the new electronic toys lined up on the shelves, wall-to-wall.

  Detroit stood with his hands in his pockets at the big window with the wonderful view of the Cumberland River and downtown Nashville. He sadly watched the quickly disappearing sun as it fled the western sky, looking for a place to hide from the darkness for a while behind the distant brushy mountains.

  Thirty-one

  James Gill had never been to Miami before. It was not bright and sunny as he had expected. Everything about his arrival was foreboding, threatening. Dark storm clouds gathering out over the Atlantic Ocean waved an unfriendly welcome to him as he brought the Cessna King Air in from the west, over the Everglades, and touched down hard at Miami International Airport with a series of jarring, bouncing hops. A hostile head-wind and a few rattling spattering of hail on the windshield kept his attention riveted on the nose wheel and the plane's instrument panel. He had no chance to admire the palm trees and the sea of red tile roofs that stretched off into the distance toward Biscayne Bay. This was not going to be a sightseeing visit anyway.

  It felt funny not to have Detroit Simmons in the co-pilot’s seat next to him as usual. He missed him. The flight had been extra-long and lonely with only the chatter of the aircraft radio and the drone of the engines to keep him company. And Dee had become a damn good pilot, too. Much better than Jimmy could ever hope to be. He still scared himself sometimes. It was good to know Dee would be there to get him out of trouble.

  But Dee rarely traveled with him. In fact, he hardly spoke to Jimmy unless he was forced to by the necessity of business. Sometimes Jimmy would catch him down the hall or through his office door, simply standing there watching him as if he was trying to figure out what was going on in Jimmy's mind, reading him like one of Dee’s meters or oscilloscopes. He mostly kept to himself in his workshop. He would cryptically explain what purchases they needed to make or technical things they needed to do in terse, stunted memos, written in sullen pencil on the back of his old "President" letterhead. Jimmy strongly suspected that the choice of stationery was for effect, too.

  Detroit did not even go with him to Atlanta when they closed the sale on the pip-squeak AM in Homestead, just out of Miami. It was the first time Jimmy had done a closing without him. But it was just as well, since he did not have to explain to him why DeWayne George was there, too, hovering greedily over the proceedings like a
buzzard sizing up road kill.

  Jimmy parked the plane near the executive hangar and told the attendants to gas it up. That he would be back quickly to try to fly out ahead of the storm.

  “Better hurry, man,” one of them warned. “She’s coming on in pretty quick. We hear that they’ll be shutting down the airport tonight.”

  God knows he had better things to do than fly half the night to beat a hurricane into this muggy city. But there were things going on down there that scared the hell out of him. More frightening things than some gusts of wind and a few drops of rain. His name was on the license of a radio station that was being run by a psychopath. An outlaw doing God-knows-what under the banner of Wizard Broadcasting.

  Jimmy knew DeWayne George would not level with him if he came right out and asked him what was going on down there. He decided he had to go find out for himself. He told Cleo he was flying down to look at another property that they might be interested in buying. He left word for Sammie that he was going to be away on business for a day or so. Then he drove to the airport and filed a flight plan that took him directly into the mouth of a thundering Gulfstream squall.

  The automobile rental agency had only small foreign cars left on the lot. Local residents had rented everything else to flee northward, away from the storm in case it decided to become a hurricane. With nothing else to choose from, he was stuck with a tiny Toyota with no air conditioning. There was just enough rain falling in spits that he had to keep the window cranked up most of the way to stay dry, and it stayed hot and humid inside the boxy car. The blustering weather blew the damned thing all over the highway, too. He had to fight the toy car’s steering wheel harder than he had the stick of the King Air on the airport approach into the headwind.

  Then he got himself half-soaked in a quick downpour when he stopped at a convenience store to get directions to the station. The man behind the counter spoke only broken English. Jimmy knew no Spanish. They reverted to hand signals and gestures until the clerk finally understood where Jimmy was trying to go. He grinned and pointed to the south, along Highway 27, toward a hazy swamp and a bank of swirling, boiling storm clouds.

  After driving along about three more miles of arrow-straight blacktop, past scrubby pines and saw grass and brackish standing water, he finally spotted the squatty hundred-foot-tall tower he was looking for. And near it, a pastel-painted concrete block building hiding among the brush and pepper trees. A rusty sign next to the drive was mostly hidden by undergrowth. The station’s call letters painted on the front of the building had faded away to almost nothing. The narrow dirt driveway that led to the studio building was rutted and full of mud-holes. Wet limbs slapped both sides of the car as he inched cautiously along into a muddy clearing that passed for a parking lot for the station.

  Some radio station. Nine-thirty in the morning on a Monday, a business day, and there was not a soul in sight. Not another car was parked in the oyster-shell parking lot except for his Toyota. There were no lights on inside the building. A yellow bulb above the small porch at the entrance was turned off. The front door was locked tight. Bushes and small trees almost covered the entranceway. It looked as if it had not been used by anyone in years.

  Jimmy had tried to listen to the station’s weak signal ever since he had climbed into the Toyota at the airport rental lot. He fought with the steering wheel while twisting the radio's knob until he finally found it, almost lost among the high numbers and wavering voices on the far right side of the dial. Its audio sometimes sank completely below the deafening waves of electrical noise and static crashes. Then, when it faded back in more strongly, it would be blown away again by Spanish jabbering or a wheezing Pentecostal preacher from station nearby on the dial.

  He knew immediately that it was DeWayne’s station, though. Technically, Jimmy’s station. It was re-broadcasting the familiar programming from the Wizard Rock Network. But the station did not break a single time for the optional local commercial positions. It simply allowed the carefully timed fill-in music to roll on and on until the rest of the network joined back up.

  And when the mandatory cut-away came up, the station was silent for three minutes and ten seconds while everyone else on the network filled the void with local commercials. To Jimmy’s ears, that sounded like an hour of silence. The damn station was on automatic pilot all the way. No jingles except those on the network. No promotional announcements but the network’s. No local deejay. No commercials at all. Only the weak, muffled, tape-recorded voice of DeWayne George giving the legal identification at the top of the hour in his sleazy redneck accent. That was the only identification of what the station’s call letters were for anyone who might be listening and at all interested.

  At least that much of the operation was legal. They were doing the identification near the top of the hour. Small comfort.

  The rain slackened a bit as he carefully parked in the deserted lot, looking for a spot where he would not step into sandy mud or dark-brown standing water up to his ankles. He climbed from the car, parted the bushes, stepped up onto the porch, tried the front door, and confirmed it was not only locked but nailed shut. The fire marshal would love that.

  Jimmy peered through the dirty windows and saw nothing but junk office furniture, ancient electronic equipment, and mounds of trash and papers, piled on everything and stacked on the filthy floor. It was all covered with a fine sheen of dust, as if it had been entombed, undisturbed, for centuries.

  Weeds grew knee high around the sides of the building. Paint peeled from the mildewed wood trim around the windows. Green moss and small trees sprouted from the roof tiles and broken gutters.

  Jimmy stepped high as he left the porch and walked around the side of the building that seemed to be the least choked with vegetation, but his suit pants were immediately sodden and his legs were snatched and snagged by briars and thistles. A cooling-vent fan, probably for some kind of small transmitter, exhaled warm, dusty air out a louver at the side of the building and into his face. Except for the whoosh of the fan, there were no other sounds or signs of life. But at least that showed there was electricity to this place and something electronic inside that was creating heat.

  In the distance, a flock of egrets soared on the wind gusts at the edge of the overgrown field where the tower stood precariously. The rusty structure looked rickety and unsure, as if the blustering wind could easily have its way with the thing if it really wanted to. He thought he could almost see it swaying with the gale.

  In the other direction, low, approaching storm clouds bumped the horizon, kicking up sparks of lightning. The worst of the weather was coming on quickly now, threatening. He needed to find someone quickly. Learn what he needed to learn. Get back on his way.

  He called "hello" several times, but the undergrowth and wet, nervous wind swallowed his voice whole. Nobody answered.

  A back door to the building was also locked, though not nailed. He tried it but could not force it open. Then he found a rear window that was opened slightly, apparently for ventilation. It was not bolted. It took some effort to raise it, its casing swelled tightly from all the moisture, and it had been almost glued into place with rot. He managed to get it shoved up high enough to allow him to slip his slender body over the sill and to step into the small, dark room. Inside, the transmitter hummed and a small speaker on a shelf softly played the rock music beamed down from the satellite and retransmitted on the air.

  Jimmy stood straight up as soon as he was sure of his footing. He swiped at a sneaky spider web that tickled his cheek, and tried to get his bearings in the dense gloom. The room was lit by only a few status pilot lights from boxes that blinked on equipment in a rack. What little daylight that had made it through the storm clouds struggled past the filtering of the filthy, rain-streaked windows.

  The air in the room was hot, still, heavy. For an instant, he felt that this must be what it felt like to be in a crypt.

  Something flashed. Immediate thunder. Then the rain began to fall heav
ier outside. The wind whipped around the corner of the building, and he thought he could feel the whole place shudder.

  Jimmy noticed then that none of the meters on the transmitter seemed to be working. There was no remote control equipment in the rack. Damn! This station was illegal as hell. The FCC would pull the switch on it if they came in for an inspection. But Jimmy suspected the technical shortcomings were minute compared to what else might be going on there.

  Just then, he thought he saw a shadow dart quickly to his left. He turned to see who or what it was. Maybe a movement at the window. Someone coming. Or a bird, one of the egrets, trying to get in the open window to the warmth inside.

  Suddenly, quick as a bolt of lightning, a million stars exploded inside his head. There was only an instant of spiky pain at the base of his skull. A sensation of falling, falling.

  And then, nothing but warm, sticky darkness, washing over him like a hot, violent rain.

  Thirty-two

  "Jeemy? Jeemy Gill? You okay?"

  The raspy, nasal voice was swimming around out there somewhere in the middle of the swirling, painful darkness, almost washed away by the sick, roaring noise.

  "If old En-reeky had done his job the way he was supposed to, you'd be floatin' out yonder in the flats with the sharks and the jellyfish by now, buddy. You’re one lucky son of a bitch."

  Jimmy Gill’s head did not feel so damned lucky right then, and he was having trouble even opening his eyes, making his mouth work to ask what the hell was going on. The eyes seemed to be glued shut by white-hot pain and what had to be dried blood. He tasted something metallic.

  Someone was trying to wipe his face with something cold and damp and most likely filthy. But at least he was alive.