by Don Keith
What sort of radio-frequency miracle would Detroit be able to pull off to help them find Cleo before it was too late? Dee seemed to anticipate the question before Jimmy even asked it.
"Here, take this, Jimmy, and we can get to work."
He had fetched the box with its length of cable and the aerial from his car. He held out toward Jimmy the spidery antenna and the pouch with the portable telephone in it.
"You’ve always been the one who was so damned quick to shinny up towers. Well, climb up this one as far as you can get before you play out of antenna cable for the monitor. When the son of a bitch calls back, answer the telephone, keep him talking, but look down toward me here at the bottom of the tower. I'll motion you which way to point the antenna. That’s the front of it there with the shorter elements. Keep him on the line as long as you can. We don’t have much chance, but we don’t have any chance at all if he decides to get short-winded on us now. Please, God, let them be somewhere between here and Madison and West Nashville, or else we are going to have to start this hunt from scratch again."
He helped Jimmy sling the telephone satchel over his shoulder then clipped the aluminum antenna to his belt with a twist of stiff wire. Dee opened the lock that held the gate to the tower fence shut and Jimmy began to climb upward, his face to the sky. Putting one hand over the other, stepping from rung to rung as fast as he could manage, he tried to get as high as he could before the telephone’s ringer went off or he ran out of cable for the aerial.
His hands were instantly wet with sweat. The tower ladder was slippery from dew, too. The dangling phone bag and the antenna he was dragging behind him made the climbing awkward. He almost lost his grip several times, banging his shins and knees painfully on the ladder rungs, grabbing for anything he could get his hands on.
He dared not stop to rest. He kept reaching for the next cross-member, then the next, pulling himself upward as hard and as fast as he could. He had no consideration for gravity.
It felt so natural. As if he had done it many times before. Climbing. Pushing upward into the cold, damp darkness. As if he belonged there on the side of the tower as surely as the lighting beacons, coax cable, and transmitting antennas.
Then the aerial's cable grew taut. He was as high as he could go. Jimmy stopped his ascent and got as comfortable as he could, sitting on a rung, wrapping a leg around the tower’s ladder, locked on with the other leg gripping the tower leg, keeping one hand free to answer the telephone if it ever rang again and the other to rotate the direction-sniffing antenna.
As far as he could see from the tower, streetlights twinkled like distant ground-locked stars. The beginnings of a moon had risen over the hills to the east of town. A mourning dove called softly from a tree several hundred yards down the valley. Jimmy remembered the old superstition about the bird's mournful song meaning imminent death for someone when the singing was close by.
The air was still, but the night’s coldness and the eerie bird's mourning caused his teeth to chatter. He shivered as he tightened his hold on the cold steel tower. Thousands slept peacefully down there below him. None of them suspected the drama going on above them. None knew that there were two men up there on the mountain trying to save someone's life. Someone special who was moving among them out there, lost somewhere amid the blanket of blinking diamonds.
Forty feet directly below Jimmy, Detroit had spread a topographic map of the area on top of the gravel driveway. His only illumination was from the security lights strapped to the transmitter building and the flashing beacon strobes stretched above him on a leg of the tower.
Detroit was keeping busy, trying to think, doing his best to keep his own hopes up. He knew what a long shot this was. Like finding a break in one color-coded wire in a hundred-pair cable. But it was the only shot they had. He looked up at Jimmy, clinging to the tower somewhere up there in the darkness. He could hardly make out his form.
Jimmy Gill, please hold on, he thought. Don’t lose your grip up there. I need you, buddy. I need you.
"I've got it set to scan all the local telephone channels," he yelled up to Jimmy. He hoped that nobody else would want to chit chat with somebody this time of night or they might lock up the scanner. And he wished to hell he had another thirty feet of coax cable. He still might not be high enough to get a decent signal from Cleo’s phone.
At that moment, Jimmy felt like he was plenty high, but he knew, too, that it would be difficult to pick up the soft signal from the mobile telephone. Several minutes had passed now since the last call and the thought occurred to him more than once that DeWayne George might have grown tired of playing his games. That he had simply gone ahead and done what he had set out to do. That Cleo was dead and George was on his way to some Caribbean island. Or that maybe he had driven by Jimmy’s place to include him more directly in his plan for revenge. Gone by and not found him there where he was supposed to be.
Then, just as he was beginning to fear the worst, the portable telephone on his shoulder sang so suddenly and so loudly in the cold quiet that he almost lost his grip on the tower’s ladder. He barely managed to catch the wet, slippery antenna as it almost slipped from his grasp.
"Ringing, Dee! It's ringing!"
"Let it ring several times," he shouted back up at him. "I think I got him locked already. It’s the only signal on the telephone channels, thank God. Swing it slowly from due east to north to the west while you talk to him. And watch me, Jimmy. Watch me!"
Jimmy clumsily pointed the antenna toward where he knew the sun would rise soon. The first hint of gray dawn was breaking the hold of blackness on that part of the night sky. Then, slowly, he began turning it back to his left, toward the north and downtown.
"Whoa! Back two hairs to the east!" Dee yelled up excitedly.
Jimmy could wait no longer. The telephone had rung five times already. He fumbled for the receiver, almost losing it his frenzied haste.
"Yes? DeWayne?"
"What took you so long, neighbor? You ain't takin' a nap while your sweetheart's about to meet her maker, are you? Maybe you got yourself another sweetie already."
He laughed uproariously for Cleo’s benefit. He was high, getting more and more wasted. His words were slurred. God knows what chemicals were driving him toward greater craziness!
"Take it out on me, you bastard,” Jimmy pleaded. “Leave her alone. She hasn't done anything to you. I'll come to wherever you are. I’ll get in my airplane right now and meet you anywhere. Take me instead. Let her go."
Below, in the eerie blue mercury light, he could see Detroit talking as quietly as he could into the walkie-talkie, putting his ear to its front to hear the reports back from his buddies out there somewhere in the pre-dawn darkness.
"Naw, I expect me or Duane'll come back for you some day after it all blows over. You never know when one of us is going to pop up and visit a while with you. We’ll go by and see old nigger Detroit, too. Just for old times."
"Do it now. I’ll make sure Simmons will be on the plane with me. Both of us will come. Leave Cleo out of this. She doesn’t know anything about our arrangement. Don't you see what a mess it'll be? She’s such a big star, there’ll be all kinds of..."
"All the better, Brother James. Some of them bad boys down yonder in South America will be wanting to make me king of my own country when they see what I did to the people who crossed me. Why, those folks respect a man who...hey! What the hell's that?"
The mourning dove that had been singing farther down the mountain had now lighted on the side of the tower, fifty feet above where Jimmy clung. Wrapped up in trying to keep DeWayne talking and aiming the antenna while watching Dee pointing and gesturing below, Jimmy had not noticed that the bird had joined him on the tower. Or that it had begun calling to its mate across the valley. Calling loudly, sorrowfully.
Jimmy pounded the tower ladder with the heel of his hand as forcefully as he could without losing his grip on the crossbar. The bird fluttered away.
"It’s only an
old dove in a tree out behind the house. I took the call out on the patio. Trying to get some air..."
DeWayne was breathing hard into the mouthpiece. The rushing sound had stopped. He apparently had pulled over to listen more carefully. Messed up as he was, he would never have noticed anything if it had not been for the damned bird.
"Something don't sound right. Your voice, the phone, something is different. Hell, it's going to be daylight in a little while, anyway. The next time you hear from me, I'll be letting you listen in as Miss Cleo Michaels sings her swan song, neighbor."
Detroit was jumping up and down, waving, shaking his head “No!” Dear God, he had not had time to draw a good line on them! The next call would come much too late. They would never be able to get to wherever DeWayne and Cleo were by the time they zeroed in on them.
Jesus, don't let him break the connection! Please don’t let him go! Jimmy thought. He searched his mind desperately for something, anything, to keep George talking.
"DeWayne, wait! I’ve got another offer for you. I can get money. Don’t hang up! Let's talk about this..."
DeWayne slammed the phone down brutally, cutting off all hope.
The call was over. They were gone. Cleo was gone.
Complete despair filled his soul then. Coldness seized his heart. He slowly banged his head against the tower leg in frustration. They had been so close, so damn close, but she had finally slipped away from him.
He stared up the length of the tower where the strobe lights blinked their eyes at him, probably within view of DeWayne and Cleo if they had only looked toward the mountaintop.
He slowly began the dreaded descent on the ladder. His mind was spinning, trying to come up with some solution, but despair was wiping out rational thought.
They could go ride around, he supposed. Maybe accidentally run across them. Couldn’t be much traffic this time of day.
But then, below him, he noticed that Detroit was animatedly speaking into and listening to the two-way radio, twisting knobs on the direction-finding monitor as if he could home in on a ghost signal that had long since departed the band.
"Jimmy! Wait! Climb back up and point that antenna about where it was when he was talking!"
He yelled so loud his words echoed off the nearby transmitter building, off the next mountain across the valley. Why the hell was he bothering? What was the use?
"He hung up, Detroit. It's gone. There’s no reason..."
"No, Jimmy, the telephone signal's still there. The receiver is off the hook! He thinks he hung up but I can still hear him talking to Cleo. I can't make out what he's saying over the wind noise, but there’s still a signal!"
Cleo’s phone. The malfunctioning hang-up that had so infuriated her.
Jimmy stopped his descent, quickly climbed back to where he had been nesting a few moments before. Then he lifted the aerial again and pointed it just to the left of the glow where the sun would be burning brightly in another few hours.
"A shade more to the north!"
Jimmy swung the antenna away from the pre-dawn glimmer, ignoring the pulsing cramp in his leg and arm from his death grip on the tower leg.
Detroit was drawing lines on the map, using a ruler for a straight edge.
"I-40, just coming past the I-65 split. That’s where they are. I know where they are and which direction they’re going!"
Detroit waved for Jimmy to move the direction-finding beam again, a bit more back to his right. Dee spoke into the box at his mouth.
"They are on I-40 heading toward the airport now. Let's go, Jimmy. Maybe we can catch up to them!"
Jimmy was perilously close to falling as he madly scurried down from the tower. It was amazing that Detroit managed to keep from plunging the car off the hairpin turns as he pushed the vehicle back down the side of the mountain. He took each curve in a blind slide, skewing sickeningly in the loose gravel and dust while fighting the steering wheel, talking into the microphone of the car’s mobile radio, and twisting the knobs on the monitor, all at the same time.
It was Jimmy’s job to lean halfway out the passenger window, holding tightly to the direction-finding beam, trying to keep it pointed in whatever direction Detroit dictated. He almost flew out the window several times, but he locked his knees against the door and held on.
"Buddy's talking with Metro police, but they are flying blind without any way to hear their signal. And they don’t know what kind of car DeWayne’s driving. No way to find out. They are just going to look for something unusual out there on the interstates east of town."
"God help us if he notices that the telephone's off the hook. We’re dead if he does, Dee."
"Yeah," Detroit said as he sawed again on the wheel to keep them from careening into a big oak tree that guarded a fork in the dirt road. Then they were finally onto solid pavement, the car's tires squalling as he fought it through the curves much too fast. As he gunned it down the freeway entrance ramp and onto the mostly deserted three-lane highway, still, thankfully, more than an hour before the morning rush would come along to slow their chase.
"Still going east," Buddy reported from the scratchy speaker on the ham radio hanging beneath the car’s dash. “Not going very fast, though. He doesn’t want to do anything to attract the police.”
"They've moved a few degrees off from where they were," Lacey next offered on the two-way. "The signal's picket-fencing, too. They may be off the freeway now, Dee."
"Roger that. Picket fencing means it’s fluttering rhythmically,” Dee explained. “The signal’s marginal. Lacey’s right. They are probably on a surface street now. They’ll be harder for the police to spot unless they accidentally happen up on them."
He turned quickly to look at Jimmy. Detroit had not meant to say anything now that might discourage him any more than he already was. He needed him to stay rational, to not give up, and to help. But Jimmy’s jaw was set firmly and there was something in his eyes that said he was solid. He would do whatever had to be done.
They took the ramp from I-65 northbound over to I-40 eastbound at close to a hundred miles an hour. Detroit gripped the wheel as tightly as he could to keep them on the road. Jimmy’s job was to maneuver the antenna so as to keep the meter on the front of the monitor in the red zone, pegged against its post, indicating the strongest signal. And he had to make damn certain that the antenna was aimed directly at the place where DeWayne held Cleo.
They met a police car coming toward them, its blue lights flashing. Detroit blinked his lights at him and the cop blinked back.
Then, before Jimmy knew it, they had hurtled past the turn-off for Chattanooga on I-24, then the Opryland and airport exits off the freeway. They zoomed past pickup trucks towing boats toward fishing on the Tennessee Valley Authority lake east of town. A couple of big trucks blew air horns at them when they swept past them at twice their speed.
But just then, Jimmy noticed that the signal meter showed full scale. It was pegged against the post on the meter, no matter which direction he turned the antenna.
Lord. Was the receiver broken? Had the rough trip down the tower and the wild driving busted something in the monitor or in the cable or antenna?
"Dee?"
Simmons looked at the meter quickly, while trying to keep an eye on the highway and the traffic ahead. He reached over and thumped the meter with his finger. Still pegged hard. Then, as soon as he had steered around a creeping pick-up truck, he clicked a switch on the front panel.
“Attenuator. Makes the receiver less sensitive,” Detroit said.
The needle had fallen to nothing. But then it rose again as Jimmy turned the beam directly out the right side of the car, perpendicular to the interstate highway.
"We're close. Damn close," Gill reported.
The next exit came up so suddenly Detroit had to lock the brakes and skid sickeningly in the loose gravel at the mouth of the egress, almost spinning around to face the way they had just come. Swerving dangerously, he somehow reclaimed control and slowed
as they rolled up the ramp to a T-intersection. The antenna still pointed the way to the right and behind them.
"Percy Priest Dam," Dee read from a sign. Of course. Close to the airport so George could do his deed and be gone.
Jimmy knew where they were. He and Cleo had been to the lake several times. They had talked of putting a houseboat into its cool waters sometime. Of having a place for escape on weekends. But it had only been a lark. They both knew neither would have the time to ever get the craft wet the way they were going. Much less spend any time skiing, hiding, or making love in some secluded slough or cove.
It was a special spot though. The dam, visible from the interstate highway, held back an otherwise feeble and puny Stones River. It backed up enough water to form a huge, beautiful lake that stretched in an arc around Nashville's southeast perimeter.
Now, in the first light of impending dawn, the dam stood directly in front of them. The highway crossed the concrete wall in a narrow ribbon that headed back toward Nashville after winding through a series of isolated parks. Detroit had the presence of mind to cut off the headlights. Suddenly, he reached to kill the ignition too, as they coasted into a small parking lot at the dam's edge. It was a paved-over area carved out just above the water of the reservoir for visitors to stop and view the lake, maybe enjoy a picnic lunch on some nearby tables or cast a fishing line into the water.
Jimmy and Cleo had parked there that one visit and made out like teenagers.
"There's a car stopped about half-way across the dam, over against the drop-off side," Detroit pointed out. Jimmy noticed it too. It was Cleo’s platinum-colored Mercedes.
Then, from the monitor receiver’s speaker, they could hear fumbling noises on the portable phone signal they had been following. There were curses, a cruel banging sound, and DeWayne George’s drug-smeared voice.
"Goddam telephone! Ain't working worth a..."