Welcome back ladies and germs to your favorite hang left of the dial, The Speed Shack. You friendly neighborhood host and retired-everything Nic Ridgefield here just where you left me on 98.5 FM WHOL, here with another howling good time from days of yore.
Now I keep gettin’ calls about this left-n-right so I figured it was about time I popped everyone’s cherry on the subject: how’d I get this gig? Between working technical for our armed forces to shredding with my hot-rodding pals in Metröpolis, how’d I squeeze time for some radio-anything?
The truth is I’ve always wanted a show. Always wanted one since I was a 20-something cutting metal records for all y’all out in Radioland. But believe it or not, my black ass couldn’t get an interview back in the day thanks to all my happy Hell Patrol horseshit. With all the crooks to catch and the evenings only free for shredding on stage for some extra credits, what’s a wolf with the bug for disk-jockeying to do?
Easy: I saved the station’s ass. Well me and the usual bunch did.
Now I’m gonna have to cut straight to the chase on this one because this shit was weird as all get-out.
There’d been a rash of killings out here in ye olde desert (what’s new), but these weren’t your five-n-dime stickups or the melon-crushing fun of idiots in hot rods minting Rockatanskys one dead wife at a time. These poor critters went out ears-first. A buncha hounds (around seven total) within the Central Region were found dead in their homes. Eyes dilated, eardrums busted, with two solid streaks of blood down their cheeks.
The common denominator: each one of them had their radio on. Each radio was tuned to 98.5 FM, but Hell Patrol’s much-cherished coroners clocked their deaths at 2:05 AM which is well after WHOL’s midnight sign-off. You don’t gotta be a rocket scientist to figure some lunatic found himself a sweet killing sound and was doing one of two things with it: hacking the tower’s signal, or sneaking in after hours to fuck with folks.
Of course, leave it to the dear Commissioner to sic the heavy metal band on the case. Not even Brett was left outta the picture thanks to his unique sensitivity to sound. Not that our fine tan friend was some uberwölf weirdo with built-in quadraphonic, but he’d been the fella doing atmospheric sounds on our first album as a foursome. I figured he’d have some ideas of the kinds of sounds that could shred a hound’s ears for six. And boy did he.
“Either he hit a dog-whistle frequency with the gain at full blast,” he explained on the drive over to the station, “or he pulled off a lil’ something I read about called ‘machine-gunning.’ White noise at full volume with a bitch’s death cry mixed in, chopped up at the same intervals of emptying a full magazine.”
“Wouldn’t ya think they’d keep military grade shit like this underwraps?” I asked over the radio.
“In the Old World, yeah!” Harry chimed in from his rat rod. “But Pop told me after the bombs got most of the old military bunkers, you could just find all sorts of psyop shit lying around in the rubble. He once found a paper on the kinda shit they dumped into the water to mellow hounds out. Worked for all of five seconds, but they realized they’d gotten the doses wrong. So now you had a heapa hepcats running around just stoned off their ass.”
Leave it to our rockabilly wundermutt in the good pinstriped shirt to bring the Cold War context, but I welcomed it. It was kinda freaky knowing all the clandestine shit in the world was just floating around for assholes like this killer to play with, but hey, that’s what our stakeout was for.
Oh yeah, and Rory was in the mix there too, just not in the conversation. He’d gotten a new set of custom headphones from one of our techies, the fellas who kept our amps from evaporating at the volumes we played. Above the collective roar of four engines–two V8s across a Ford pickup and a roadster, a straight-four in my Hilux, and the Harley’s jackrabbit V-twin for those playing at home–was the pounding drums and banshee shrieks of a black metal album. On top of that, our bare-chested white biker screaming along like a cat getting railed in an alleyway. As appetizing as that all sounds, I could never get into the stuff myself so I left it to him and his industrial-strength headphones.
All that is to say it was a usual commute from Doc’s Oasis to our stakeout for the day, the WHOL studio. Home to a half-dozen music shows, four gold standard radio dramas and the best record collection in a 100-mile radius. We got there mid-afternoon on a Thursday, during DJ Don “Danger” Blackman’s rock block and were met outside by one of the studio engineers. She was a sweet dish alright, a lithe gray who looked more country girl than techie with her plaid crop-top and cutoffs.
Unfortunately, Harry, Rory, and I all had our chicks and I honestly couldn’t do the sleeping around thing anymore after Lita came to town a few months ago. Not that it went bad, but because she was so damn good. Either way, that left her to Brett if he wanted her, which of course he didn’t. The chivalrous bastard’s too damn professional for his own good.
“Name’s Mariah Spain,” she said, shaking our hands. “Thanks for coming. I get that the real action’ll happen tonight, but I’m happy to give you lay of the land.”
“Just don’t introduce us as Patrol alright?” I whispered. “You’re too cute to do shit like what we’re investigating,” (which got a chuckle out of her) “but I know it isn’t exactly rocket science to load up the right audio file into the system, probably through the local emergency backup for a software crash. Just treat us like Metröpolis, whatever cachet that brings.”
It only just dawned on me that, even though we’d had shows broadcast over WHOL, we’d never actually scored a radio interview as a band. Yet here we were, keeping eyes on potential suspects implicated in some late night aural terrorism.
She walked us through the glass door of the one-story building, an old-world bank retooled for broadcast. What knocked all four of us out was how clean it was. I mean you gotta understand folks, we grew up out in the sticks in trailer parks and all our favorite bars got old-ass wood held together with wax, varnish and prayers. So the carpet floor, the big glass windows, the slick desks, it was like stepping inside a future we ain’t ever known. Not even the fucking record labels we’d signed with looked this good.
Our marveling at modernity notwithstanding, we saw there were two booths where the magic happened. Don was in Booth 1, your standard rig with a nice table, the mix board, turntable, room for five around the desk (DJ included), and all the computer gear at his back. The monitor displaying the programming block, the servers where all the cool shit was, and yes, that disc tray where you put the “please hold” music on.
Don was a black wolf alright, just a shade lighter than yours truly. He was shorter though and cut the profile of a classic newsman rather than a DJ. Pinstripe button-up, sleeves rolled up and ready for action and a slick pair of gold-tinted, see-thru Aviators.
Other colorful characters included the office of Arthur “Art” Walker, a rather plump gray who was head of drama. Knowing that was the fella who signed Stan Winshaw and wound up with a Friday night hit like Alan Firedale meant he was easy to rule out on-site. Besides, his office where he was flying in and out didn’t come packed with nothing more than an intercom. There were also some other techies like Mariah, but they were gray fellas in jeans, kicks, and T-shirts working from monitors behind the front desk.
The second studio was empty and much larger, a proper performance space for bands to pull up and play live gigs on-air. If he brought any gear to help him out, he’d have shacked up in that room for sure.
It was about halfway through “the band’s tour” of the station that Danger himself rocked up and gave us the usual rigmarole. “Hey, one of our hot bands, how ya doing, you free to do a surprise sesh on the air?” He spoke with that crisp clean broadcaster voice. Kind of like Received Pronunciation, just swap the Brits for Old World Michiganders. And honestly, he was a charming enough dude that we said “sure thing.”
What followed had to be one of the funniest half-hours in broadcast history because us unkempt assholes would swear like sailors on shore leave and this wasn’t after safe harbor like our lovely ol’ Shack here at 10 PM. So we’d be rapping along, chatting about the fun of playing gigs, where we got our ideas from, all the happy horseshit they usually ask us for blogs or promo spots, but we’d be mag-dumping so many pisses and shits, it was like Don was having a Mexican standoff with his swear-jar button that censors everything. On one hand, he thought it was the funniest shit, him slapping the big red button around like a game show. On the other, he just wanted to cover his black-ass since he knew “customer complaints” out here could be served by soccer moms with .357s instead of mean ol’ letters like the old days.
It was during the quarter-hour of tunes that followed that something dawned on me; the sound of the bleep censor. That kind of full sine wave sound, when played with in pitch or fattened the way Brett mentioned, could be a built-in mechanism our killer could play with.
Now did we suspect dear ol’ Danger Man Dan as our killer? For all of five seconds, yeah. But the fella was chill, and more importantly, didn’t show any of the tics we usually caught with our killers. Twitch of the eyes, the ears. A half-chub when you mentioned some of the more violent goings-on in the world around ya. Nah, our black-furred disc jockey didn’t have anything but the hits on his mind.
All told, it made the daytime half of this dull as dishwater, but we knew that when night fell, that was when the real stakeout would take shape. The radio tower itself, the stuff beaming all that good electric kush, was within sight from the parking lot. It was all in the open, but we had a bunch of old bushes on the back side of the lot to tuck our rides behind. We shed Brett’s pickup and Rory’s bike and went in twos: Brett rode with me, Rory with Harry. Our homegrown mutt and the Aryan basket case kept eyes on the tower a hundred yards down the petrified hedgerow while me and Navajo Joe kept eyes on the station, waiting and watching everyone leave.
DJ Dan left in a cheap-n-cheerful Peugeot, the two gray engineers in a basic-bitch work van, Art in a sweet Dodge pickup, and Mariah in a slender green Charger. Lucky bitch. By 12:33, the whole lot was cleaned out.
At least from where I sat.
“There’s a Cosmo still here,” Brett chimed in, pulling his fringed jacket tight to him. He pointed down to the lot’s furthest edge and sure enough, there was the Mazda in question. A second-gen as boxy and beige and mid-70s as ever.
The slam of those lead-heavy car doors jolted Harry and Rory awake, but when they turned to me, I shook my head. With two fingers like a first-time typist, I tapped out a message on my screen as quietly as I could and sent it to Harry’s module.
“Stay on the tower. We got this guy.”
Harry nodded and sent his stock reply.
“Got it, Speed.”
In the time it took me to get the message out, Brett caught the silver glimpses of a tuning fork from out of the slick Mazda’s trunk. A rather long tuning fork matched by a shotgun mic three-quarters its size. The hound himself was built like a mobster, from his leather jacket to his polished loafers. But between his broad-brimmed hat, the gloves, the parking lot’s low light, we couldn’t make out the breed, countenance, the works. Again, thoughts of Don’s wardrobe flashed across my mind, but I’d literally seen the hound leave not 20 minutes earlier.
This fella took his sweet time with the kit too. By 1:12, he’d got his mic, his tuning fork, a box of tiny oscillators, and a little plastic brick with a button on it. It was soft, but even with all the shit we’d done to ‘em, our ears still worked as well as any other wolf and Brett and I cocked ours towards the device.
Our mystery hound in question was cycling through sounds. Godawful sounds at that. A mother’s cry, a harrowed shriek, a child’s nightmare. Not gross sounds but a grotesque collection of wolven misery all wrapped in a hunk of plastic. It was only when he popped the top off that we realized it also doubled as a thumb drive.
So here was our hound, and when I looked back to the boys, they shook their heads about anything being there by the radio tower. Now we had to plan our move. We could’ve done it guns blazing, but frankly, a fella who makes plans like these deserves something a little more intricate.
First we let him get in around 1:30. He was a sharp hand with a lock pick which meant he either didn’t work there or wanted to make it seem like a break-in. We knew he’d want to hit his signal on the button and he was allowing himself 35 minutes of prep time. He also didn’t lock the door behind him.
By 1:35, Brett and Rory were covering the door while Harry and I loaded our revolvers and slowly made our way across the lot. Gentle as a lamb, I pulled the door open. Not a squeak between the hinges or our cowboy boots as we strolled through.
Sure enough, I was right about Studio 2 and its live setup being the boss for the kinds of weird science this bastard was pulling off. The mic was pointed at the tuning fork, but he ran the thumb-drive sounds off the board.
He wasn’t paying any of us mind, though whenever he swung our way, Harry and I ducked our heads down and flattened our ears to lower the profile even further. We crouched our way towards the door and put ourselves flush against the wall’s lower half. We couldn’t do our usual full-body lean because of the obvious; the windows would give us away dead.
By 1:50, Harry and I were getting antsy as the shadow of a hound hadn’t done shit for a while. No ringing the fork, no adjustments, no testing. He just sat there. Again, we didn’t want to just blow his head off, but it might have to come to that if we couldn’t get him where we needed him. So we did an old favorite: we threw something across the room.
Or rather Rory came tearing in through the front door screaming like a sonofabitch with a scorpion stuck in on his back.
Good a distraction as any as that fucker came flying through the door, gun in hand, only for me to grab his legs and for Harry to cold-cock him with the butt of his Remington revolver. He dropped right on the spot and was out cold. When he was, I got all the lights on, bellowed at Brett outside to “GET THAT FUCKING THING OFF THE MAN’S BACK!” (which miracle of miracles, didn’t undo Harry’s handiwork) and took a look at the maniac’s rig in full.
The fader where the thumb-drive was plugged in was up to the max, as was the hijacked mic signal. Both get sent out over the airwaves, and so floweth the raspberry jam out everyone’s ears. When I got a chance to look at the thumb-drive, it turned out there were only a few sounds total, numbered via an old LCD display on the front with some looping text cycling through.
It was tiny as shit, but when I made out “3. Atom B.,” I realized he went for something explosive tonight. I figured the rig would all make for a nice poetic closer, but the truth was I knew it couldn’t work. I’d kill the fucker sure, but if I wanted to use what he had setup, I’d still risk some asshole having left his radio on at this hour and I was on a strict no-collateral diet going forward.
Let’s just say rookie mistakes were once made.
So I had all the gear to give the perp a send-off, but no way of doing it without hurting someone in the process.
Until I remembered our walkies. Specifically tuned to a single channel unique to the set. The interference might mess with getting the sonic warfare right, and we’d need something to boost the bass, but since one fella spent his evening’s experimenting on poor wolves’ eardrums, he can donate his to science for compensation.
Oh yeah, we never did find out who he was in all of this. He left only a card in his coat that said “MK” with a little picture of this wonky Old World fruit. Art-arti...shit, artichoke, that was it. Weird, green, scaly S.O.B. by the looks of it. Make of all that what you will.
So what followed (after getting some anti-venom from my first-aid kit for Rory) was getting the bastard tied up inside his Mazda. We taped a walkie-talkie to the dashboard and plugged the devil into his stereo system. I cranked the bass up the max. The car was on so we could use the electrics, but I made sure the keys were out the ignition and the stereo was set to that retro-fitted auxiliary cable.
Now, the problem we had was that the tuning fork was easy to get rigged in front of the walkie, but that sample feature on the thumb-drive just didn’t have the gain to go. And I sure as shit didn’t want to hear this crap for myself.
So then Harry gets a nasty idea. He carries his guitar and amp everywhere he goes.
We’re in the live room of a radio studio. When you crank that amp up to our volume, on top of the synergy of that tuning fork hum, the sound would be immense.
This exciting new execution has been brought to you by the maniac motherfucker who turned one of his old guitar bodies into a laser-gun. And of course from listeners like you.
That said, he didn’t want to play the solo. He handed the gear off to Brett.
I can only guess our guitar-god-in-residence wanted to have a sorta proper initiation ritual for Brett. He was on the assignment, he joined the stakeout, he should have his first kill. Our tan-furred blueshound wasn’t shy about capping asses, but he ain’t ever done an execution before. It felt weird at first, but I got him a stool, Harry and Rory got the rig setup and everything cranked to 11, and then he just sat there and looked at the rig.
“Who wants to tap the tuning fork?” he asked plainly.
“Let Rory do it,” Harry chuckled, “He’s the bastard with the best triangle game.”
Sure enough, that white-furred biker stood straight as an arrow on end before bowing down, opening the channel on the walkie and tapping the fork. He held himself there for a moment before Brett asked the obvious question.
“You wanna get out of the way?”
Rory smiled like a sweetheart and simply said, “I’ve played with my ears glued to stacks bigger than that tag-along amp of Harry’s. Just play the fucker to death.”
And so Brett obliged.
Between the fork and the power chord, the inside of that Mazda was painted like a Pollock. It took an awful lotta cleaning to get my walkie back in order, but it got there in the end.
Needless to say, heading a serial killer off at the pass like this got us in good sway with the Commissioner, but full-on hero status at the station. We got plenty of interviews from them and others for a while, and played some sessions there on the air. Kinda odd how it all came together, but it finally got our asses on the airwaves. And one day, when I knew I could make the time for it and I wanted to tell y’all some of these whack-ass stories, well I was given the best blank check of my life. And so here we are. And here we’re gonna be as long as I got air in my lungs, lead in my boots, and a bottomless supply of whiskey to help keep this shit straight.
We’ll be back after these messages on 98.5 WHOL. Now don’t you touch that fucking dial on me now.