They found what they needed in the Central Mall, off Rogers Avenue, a dark cathedral to consumerism. One of the hushed devotional niches in the long corridor was dedicated to cellular phones, pagers, faxes and other new-age information technology. They entered and in a second Bob had selected the wannest and palest of the young men there to chat with, soon snaring him in fatherly power and sheer Marine Corps sergeant charisma.
“Now, see, here’s our problem,” said Bob. “We were hunting in the woods, and we come across this here phone. Now I’m thinking, some important man needs this phone. I’d sure like to know how to return it to him. You have any ideas there, young man?”
The boy took the phone and examined it: a Motorola NC-50, the very latest and most expensive thing.
“Have you tried autodial?” asked the young man.
“No, and I haven’t tried that redial either. Now, if I tapped that redial button, wouldn’t that connect me with his last phone call?”
“It would,” said the young man. “Why don’t you just call and see what you get?”
“Hmmm,” said Bob, “that would work, wouldn’t it? Let me ask you another thing. You been working around phones long?”
“Ah, a couple of years,” said the boy. “I’m sort of into phones. Very interesting stuff.”
“Know what?” said Bob, squinting up his eyes as if he’d just come up with a hell of an idea. “Bet if I hit redial and you listened to them tones as the number played out, you could read them for us, couldn’t you? You know the numerical values of the tones, right?”
The boy looked a little uncomfortable.
“I think that’s against the law,” he said.
“Is it?” said Bob. “Damn, I didn’t realize that.”
“It’s just to return the phone, right?” said the boy.
“Yes, indeed. We definitely want to return the phone to its rightful owner.”
The boy took the phone, held it close to his ear and pushed Redial.
The phone issued a bleat of beep music, a chatter of robot tones. Before the call could connect, he broke it off.
“Okay,” he said, “it’s an 800 number. Let me try again and concentrate on the last seven numbers.”
He hit it again.
“I get 045-1643. Let me try it again.”
The beeps poured out.
“That’s it. 1-800-045-1643.”
“What does that tell you?”
“Ah—nothing. I never heard of an 045 exchange. I never heard of an exchange beginning with a zero. It’s not from around here. I never heard of that exchange.”
“Do you have a CD phone disk?” asked Russ.
The boy nodded his head, really into it by now.
“Let’s see what we get,” he said.
This took a bit of time, but in a minute or so, at a computer terminal the young man had a phone-finder running on CD-ROM and quickly learned that the 045 exchange was wholly unlisted anywhere in the United States.
“What would that mean?” said Bob.
“Well, these disks have a lot of unlisted numbers on them, but ever since deregulation, private exchanges, private companies, private information networks have sprung up all over the place, only lightly monitored by the FCC. My guess is this is somebody’s most private line, not immediately accessible to the public or maybe even to the government. It’s just a very, very private number. I still say: just call it.”
“Well, for now, we don’t want to do that. Listen, thanks so much.”
“Sure, not a problem.”
They left the mall.
“It was too much to hope,” said Russ. “He wouldn’t have been so sloppy as to leave something at risk that would point the finger straight at him.”
“Damn,” said Bob. “What else do we know about this bird?”
“Well, he must be rich, powerful and connected. If he was able to get Jed Posey paroled, if he was able to put together a team of hotshots, if he was able to get Jack Preece on the job, he’s got a lot of clout. He—he has an airplane!”
Russ wasn’t sure where that popped out of; it just issued from his deep subconscious.
“He has an airplane,” said Bob. “Presumably from around here. Now, if he’s in the air the day of the big shootout, didn’t he file a flight plan?”
“Yes, he’d have to.”
“That’s a public document, isn’t it?”
“Uh, I think,” said Russ.
“Now, whyn’t we go out to the airport and see if there’s someway we can get into the FAA records for that day. Maybe on that flight plan, he’s got to list a phone number. Maybe it’s this one or close to it?”
“Goddamn,” said Russ.
“Goddamn yourself, Russ. He has an airplane. You’re a goddamned genius.”
At the airport, Russ himself did the deed. He went into the FAA regional office, pulled his Daily Oklahoman press card and explained that he was doing a big takeout on civil aviation, particularly the conflict between private plane owners and the commercial carriers in crowded aviation corridors. He spent an hour taking notes as a droning administrator explained the government’s position to him, two or three times in case he missed anything. Russ finally told the man that one way to do such a story would be to set it into the context of a single day in the American air (why hadn’t he thought of this before?) and it might be nice to profile who was in the air at a given moment as a kind of cross section of the problem. He seemed to pluck a date out of his memory, which was in fact the date of the shoot-out on the Taliblue. He wondered if he could examine the records of that day and get in touch with some private plane owners who were aloft?
Again, the minutes ground by, but in time he had a thick file of flight plans fetched from the files, and he peeled through them, recognizing nothing, until at last he came to a Cessna 425 Conquest twin-engine job, CN13467, registered to Redline Trucking, whose pilot had filed for Oklahoma City that day, leaving at 10:25 . and landing at 5:20 . That was very interesting, but what really caught Russ’s attention was the phone number that the pilot had listed on the plan: It was 045-1640, only three numbers off the mystery number and it had the strange 0 prefix.
Russ realized that Redline Trucking must lease or own a whole bank of 1600 numbers for its various enterprises, under a private 045 exchange, of which 1643 would have to be one. He looked at the pilot’s name.
“Bama,” he said the name aloud. “Randall Bama.”
The next day, much rested after an eighteen-hour blast of sleep in a Ramada Inn south of Fort Smith, Russ and Bob went to the Fort Smith Municipal Library, where they accessed all the information that was in the record about Randall “Red” Bama of Fort Smith, Bama Construction, Redline Trucking, the Bama Group Real Estate Development, Hardscrabble Country Club, the Chamber of Commerce (president 1991-93 and 1987-88), the Rotary, the Opera Guild, and so forth and so on.
It explained a lot: how three carloads of professional shooters and a deputy sheriff and a world-class sniper could be set up to hunt them down. But did it explain enough?
They went back through the stacks and found as many references to his father, the great and notorious Ray Bama (1916-75), pawn king of Fort Smith, denizen of Nancy’s Flamingo Lounge, known compatriot of the big Little Rock and Hot Springs mob and rumored mob kingpin with ties to Santo Trafficante and Carlos Marcello in New Orleans and Big Jim Westwood in Dallas, whose life was ended in a mysterious car bomb in 1975.
But by late in the afternoon, when they reached the end of the research, they still had nothing but speculation which led them to a certain conclusion: that somehow, someway, Earl Lee Swagger had learned something about the old gangster and was therefore targeted for elimination. But nothing in the last weeks of Earl’s life made any sense along those lines: he was a rural state police sergeant, a good one, but not an organized crime investigator or a member, as far as could be determined, of any elite unit of investigators, county, state, federal or otherwise, that could be moving against Ray Bama, then at the start of his burgeoning career.