Wizard of the Wind

by Don Keith

  Then the signal disappeared. The meter on the monitor dropped away, but in a second it was back again, with the tweeting of tones as DeWayne dialed a number. Detroit reached to turn down the chatter on the two-way radio and click off the monitor receiver. He knew there would be feedback if he left the volume up when Jimmy pulled the telephone from its pouch and answered it. It began ringing two seconds later, as they knew it would.

  "DeWayne, it's not going to work," Jimmy answered, fighting to control the shaking in his voice.

  They were so close. So damn close.

  "Nothing you can do to stop me now, neighbor. I got Miss Country Music right here on the edge of my knife blade. I want you to hear her strangle on her own blood when I cut her beautiful throat, Brother James. You hear me? I want you to listen to your woman die."

  Slowly, quietly, Jimmy slid out the open door of the car. He ignored Dee's wild motions urging him to stay put, to wait until the other guys could give the police the bearings on where they were. Dee could not tell them the precise location until DeWayne hung up.

  But Jimmy ignored him. This was his score to settle. And there might not be time to wait. Whatever, he could not risk it.

  Jimmy walked quickly along the roadway, heading across the dam to where DeWayne held Cleo. In the distance, to his right, he could see traffic scurrying along the freeway. People were going about their early-morning business as if there was nothing at all wrong in the world.

  Another blue-lighted police car zipped along the highway. But it was going the wrong way, toward downtown, away from the exit to the dam. Somewhere off to Jimmy’s left, way in the distance, a solitary motorboat made its way along the lake's calm, hazy surface. It was a fisherman, probably getting ready to try his luck at hooking some crappie or bass with the first daylight.

  "No, DeWayne. It's not going to work the way you thought it would."

  "Or maybe I won't cut her too bad at first, Brother James. So you can hear her scream when I drop her off this little bluff we got here. Hear her scream all the way to the damn bottom."

  He laughed again. A phlegmy laugh. He was losing it. Whatever he was taking had made him even wilder. Bolder. He would not be much longer about his meanness. His evil voice was harsh and grating in the earpiece.

  Jimmy heard Cleo crying quietly.

  Then, he could see them clearly in the dawn's light. DeWayne held her around the waist, she with her back to him. He had a shiny knife at her throat. They were standing beyond and below the open door of her Mercedes, past the edge of the roadway that ran across the dam. Jimmy was sure there should be some kind of protective fence there.

  There was, but a gaping bite had been cut out. There would be nothing but open air down the long cement backside of the dam all the way to the small creek that was the Stones River. At the bottom were giant granite boulders that kept the land from eroding when the flood gates were opened. All of that four-hundred feet straight down from where DeWayne held Cleo.

  "Might as well give it up, DeWayne," Jimmy said into the telephone’s mouthpiece. He tried to be as forceful as he could. He knew DeWayne could hear him just as well across the short distance that remained between them as he could over the telephone.

  "Where the hell are you, man...?"

  DeWayne turned abruptly and saw Jimmy, walking slowly toward him along the dam, the telephone to his ear as if he still needed it to communicate. Even in the dim light, Jimmy could see the stunned look of shock cross the twin’s twisted face. Strangely, a huge, leering smile took over, and Jimmy Gill felt the chill of the man’s evil go cleanly through him like a blast of cold wind.

  DeWayne took Cleo’s telephone receiver away from his ear slowly, looked at it as if it had bitten him, and then gave it a quick toss over the edge. All three of them watched it twist and flutter as it plunged to the rocks below the dam. When it hit, it shattered noiselessly into dozens of pieces.

  Jimmy kept walking toward them, letting the strap on Dee's telephone slide from his shoulder. He gently laid it down on the asphalt roadway, doing nothing sudden that might cause George to increase the pressure of the knife at Cleo's throat.

  Jimmy realized he had no plan. He supposed he could only hope to stall the crazed twin until the police found their way here. Then it would all be over.

  He only knew that short term, he had to keep the bastard from hurting Cleo. How, exactly, he was not sure.

  "Damn, man. I don't know how you did it, but this little development just makes it all the more perfect."

  "What do you mean, DeWayne?"

  That would be the plan then. He had to keep him talking until some kind of real plan revealed itself it to him. Until maybe the Metro police would come rolling up to save the day. He prayed the bastard was no so whacked out that he was beyond reason.

  "You get to watch her go over the edge and then you can follow the bitch all the way to hell!"

  Slowly, DeWayne reached into his belt and pulled out a pistol. He brought it to eye level and pointed it straight at Jimmy. Cleo struggled, but the knife at her neck brought a little blood and enough pain to cause her to catch her breath with a groan.

  “Jimmy, don’t. Stay back,” she begged.

  “Shut up, Miss Country Music. Come on with me, darling.”

  He dragged her down the short hill, even closer to the gap in the fence, his snake-skin cowboy boots slipping slightly on the loose gravel at their feet. DeWayne staggered, maybe from the narcotic swirling through his veins, maybe from the weight of Cleo Michaels. Both almost fell through the hole in the chain-link fence, and down. Down forever.

  Jimmy screamed. Then he took a sudden, instinctive step toward them, to try to catch her before she went through and followed the crazy man down.

  The gun in George’s hand barked once.

  Something hot and heavy slapped Jimmy Gill hard on the right shoulder and sent him spinning around and down to the ground in an awkward dance. Blood instantly pulsed from the tear in his shirt near the collarbone. Somehow, though, he managed to quickly stand again.

  "One more step and you get to go first, Brother Jimmy. If I hadn’t been smokin’ meth all night, I might have got you the first time."

  As the first ray of sun slid along the length of the dam, Jimmy saw that DeWayne now stood with the toes of his boots at the very edge of the drop-off. Only the grip of his arm on Cleo’s waist supported her over the chasm. One quick release. A second’s relaxation. That’s all it would take, and she would be spinning to the cold, gray rocks below.

  Time froze as Jimmy watched helplessly. The crazy son of a bitch was ready to drop her if he tried to get any closer to them. Or he would shoot him again. Or maybe both.

  Jimmy closed his eyes. He tried to blot out the scene. All the sounds were amplified by the stillness of the air at sunrise. He was dizzy. When he opened his eyes again, blackness seemed to be claiming the corners of his vision.

  He heard Cleo's soft whimper above the maddening drone of the motorboat, still buzzing along somewhere out there on the misty lake. Off in the distance, there was the reedy hooting of another solitary mourning dove.

  There was no doubt at all now about what the damned bird was proclaiming across the chilly waters of the lake.

  Forty-one

  Cleo Michaels had dared to love Jimmy Gill. She had the poor judgment to stay with him. And now it was almost certainly going to cost her life.

  DeWayne had been right. It was Jimmy’s fault, after all. He should have shoved her away roughly long before this. But he had been too selfish. He had loved her too much.

  "Too bad you won't even get to kiss her 'goodbye', Brother James!"

  DeWayne George seemed to have been reading Jimmy’s mind. He was panting, straining to support Cleo’s weight over nothingness. Breathing heavily from the chemical he had been ingesting. But his face was still split with an evil grin. He was clearly elated from the sheer mad control he held over her, over Jimmy Gill, over the entire situation.

  Jimmy’s head
spun. The strength was leaving his legs as if someone had pulled a plug and it was being quickly drained out of him. The pounding ache in his right shoulder pulled him down toward the asphalt like an unseen weight. He tried to fight gravity, pain, weakness, terror, all simply to stay standing, to try to get close enough to do something to help save Cleo.

  But he could not move. He was nailed to the same spot. His body was suddenly not obedient to his commands.

  With no warning at all, a screaming, bellowing noise split the air with such force that Jimmy was knocked back two full steps and pushed down hard on the pavement. Startled, DeWayne staggered drunkenly. For an awful instant, he almost staggered over the edge, almost let go his hold on Cleo and let her fall as he scrambled for a foothold.

  Somehow he managed to spin back up the steep slope a few feet. He fell hard on top of her, looking around wildly for whatever had caused the deafening blast.

  A set of air horns on a tall pole just above and behind DeWayne and Cleo screamed a harsh, shrill warning. Jimmy was disoriented by the screeching, the pain, the dizziness, but he knew what the siren was. The horns were only the signal that the dam’s flood gates were about to automatically open, dumping tons of water out of the reservoir into the gorge behind. They were designed to give fishermen near the intakes at the front of the dam a warning that they needed to move away, as well as alert those who might be behind the dam to stay away from the rocks and the river's edge where the torrent was about to be set free.

  Jimmy knew, too, that the blasting horns gave him the opportunity to seize on DeWayne's distraction and get to him. He tried to climb back to his feet, to lunge forward, but something pulled him back. He slipped down to his knees while some giant hand held him in place, forbidding him to move. No matter how hard he searched, he could not find the strength to get back up. When he tried to brace himself with his hands, he keeled over onto his right side. When he rolled back over again, he could only get to his knees. He fought sudden vertigo to carefully balance himself on his haunches. The dam, the lake, the dawn sky all spun around him on their own axis, completely out of control. The horrible ache in his shoulder threatened to slap out of him what little awareness he had left, to send him tumbling to his back again.

  He had to help her. He could not.

  He saw through all the spinning and whirling and creeping blackness that DeWayne George had managed to struggle to his feet again.

  He now straddled Cleo as she lay there in the gravel on the sharp slope, gasping to catch the breath he had crushed from her when he fell on top of her.

  DeWayne frantically reached for the collar of her shirt, trying to regain his hold on her as she squirmed and spun and tried to get away from.

  Frustrated with the fight she was putting up, DeWayne took the gun and raised it back high over his head, then brought it down quick and hard. The butt of the pistol caught Cleo directly behind the ear. Her struggling stopped. She was still.

  The blaring air horns covered Jimmy's weak screams.

  Suddenly, warm, yellow morning sunlight got free of a row of trees across the lake and broke brilliantly across the dam.

  There was movement of some kind, too, from behind the Mercedes. Quick movement by someone who should not have been there. Detroit Simmons stepped from behind the car into a patch of the sunlight. He edged gingerly down the grade toward the spot where DeWayne and Cleo had been struggling. He was spinning something above his head. Something square and dark and heavy was tethered to a long, black cord. He was whirling whatever it was like the home-made sling-shots he and Jimmy had once played with in the woods behind the duplex in Birmingham.

  Jimmy could see what it was. The heavy monitor radio that they had been using for the direction-finding. He was swinging it on the end of a ten foot length of the coax cable! The near-end of the cable, the part that had been attached to the antenna, was wrapped, snake-like, around Dee’s arm up the shoulder so he would not lose his grip on it while he spun it around in a growing arc, playing out the cable a little bit at a time.

  The weight of the radio caused him to have trouble keeping his balance on the steep slope and loose stone.

  DeWayne once again grabbed Cleo's belt. He was dragging her dead weight back toward the hole in the fence. The gun was in his other hand, still aimed at Jimmy, making sure he no longer posed him any threat.

  But something—maybe a shadow in the new sunlight—made DeWayne turn suddenly and look up. He saw Detroit before he had a chance to hit him with the whirling box.

  It was all happening in slow motion as far as Jimmy Gill was concerned. Black borders were rapidly closing in on all that he saw.

  The whirling radio as it struck DeWayne's right arm solidly, somewhere near the elbow. Striking him with more than enough force to break bones and to send the gun sailing into free air and down the dam's backside.

  But DeWayne's anger, determination, meanness, or maybe the dope he had been taking, let him ignore what must have been intense pain. It also gave him the quickness and strength to grab hold of the radio and its cable. To wrap the cord around his arm several times. And then he began to drag Detroit down the slope toward him. To drag him slowly, cruelly, crazily, nearer to the edge of the precipice while he held Cleo with the other arm.

  "Let go, Dee!" Jimmy screamed, pleading. He realized the weak words had hardly escaped his own lips, that they had no chance of overcoming the clamor of the air horn. No one could hear him. It would not do any good anyway. The cable was wrapped so tightly around Dee’s arm that he could not let go, even if he wanted to.

  Detroit was not even trying to resist DeWayne’s tugging, though. He was allowing himself to be reeled in, dragged as he slid in the loose gravel, down the steep embankment closer and closer to DeWayne's knife blade and the edge of the dam.

  Then, when he was barely five feet away, Detroit suddenly pitched forward toward DeWayne, as if he had purposely taken a dive. Dee landed hard on his face and began slipping and sliding directly toward the gap in the fence.

  DeWayne fell backward when the tether suddenly slackened. He lost his grip on Cleo’s belt. He staggered two, three steps backward, teetering on the edge of the dam. Even in his rage, his drugged haze, he must have realized then that he was going over. He dropped the knife, waved his arms wildly in the air, furiously seeking some kind of balance.

  Then DeWayne George disappeared, screaming, into the mist billowing up from the roaring water pouring through the dam's flood gates below.

  Detroit was still sliding. The weight of DeWayne George pulled him rapidly toward the brink. Detroit was tied securely by the radio and coax cable to the man who had fallen over the side of the dam.

  Dee tried to brace himself with his feet against the fencepost at the gap in the chain link fence. It would not hold long. DeWayne’s weight dangling on the end of the cable dragged Detroit sideways, out over the edge where there was nothing to grab.

  All he could do was reach out with his free hand. Reach out and try to wrap the arm around the post, to hold on and get enough leverage to support the heavy, struggling weight below him until he could unwrap himself from the cable.

  Dee’s body was already half off the bluff, his face horribly contorted from the pain in his right arm and shoulder and the effort to hang on to the fencepost with the other.

  Still slumped on his knees, twenty feet away up the hill, Jimmy could see the sweat pouring from Dee’s face as he fought to hold his grip. But he could also see that Dee was losing the battle a fraction of an inch at a time. DeWayne's weight and struggling was relentlessly pulling Detroit over the edge after him.

  When Jimmy tried again to get up and help him, he fell flat on his face. He tried to slide on his belly. Maybe he could get there and give Dee just enough support so he could free himself from the coaxial cable.

  But Jimmy’s own strength was flagging. He was leaving a broad stripe of bright red blood.

  Nothing he could do to make his good arm or his useless legs obey his command
s. Just raising his head to look was almost more than he could manage.

  Then he watched as Cleo moved, sat up, scooted along on her backside down to Dee, her momentum almost taking her past him, over the edge. Jimmy saw her grab the loose fencepost as Detroit had to keep from falling. With the weight of two people, it was clearly about to be ripped away.

  Cleo lay flat across Detroit, held a handful of his shirt for leverage, and reached out over the emptiness. Then she began to hack away at the taut cable with DeWayne’s knife.

  She was sawing away on the coax as furiously as she could, as vigorously as she dared without upsetting the tenuous balance they had there on the edge of death.

  All the time, they were slipping together now, sliding maddening inches at a time.

  Jimmy saw that Cleo was leaning so far out to try to cut the cable, reaching so far down the length of Detroit's stretched arm, that any sudden tug from DeWayne would pull both of them over with him.

  They were so far over the edge that even if Detroit was somehow hacked free they might not be able to scramble back away safely.

  Jimmy was no longer able to hold his head up, to keep his eyes open. He dropped his face to the pavement, fighting to stave off the blackness that washed over him.

  There was a sudden silence so loud it was deafening. The blaring of the warning signal, blasting away the past two endless minutes, had ceased. Its eerie echo rolled off across Percy Priest Lake like a fading sonic boom.

  At that moment, another awful sound ripped apart the sudden quietness. It was a horrible siren of death, a falling, fading scream that was instantly lost, washed away in the roar of the rushing waters below the dam.

  Sign Off

  The day begins early, especially in summer, when the sun obeys the rooster down the road and comes up early. That means the morning deejay has to be ready to go well before first light, regardless of the time on the Big Ben on his nightstand.

  No matter the season, he hates leaving his wife’s bed. Her warmth, her nearness, is such a comfort to him. Sometimes, in her half-sleep, she clings to him when he tries to slide away, refusing to let him go from her. He has to tickle her for a release, and then kiss her as an apology.