Wicked Game (42 page)

David speaks to me as he strides away. “Call Regina, tell her to get the location of everyone who can’t hear us.”

I head back to the bar, where Shane is onstage and on the phone. He pulls his head away from the phone, as if it’s delivering electric shocks.

I weave through the crowd to the edge of the stage, then mouth the word, “Regina?” to him. Shane nods. Good thing his eardrums are as immortal as the rest of him.

I signal for him to hand me the phone. He shakes his head but obliges. “Be careful!” he shouts.

I move away from the speakers to hear Regina. Unnecessary. Astronauts on the International Space Station can probably hear her.

“Hey, it’s me,” I say as calmly as I can. “David says to find out the locations of all the callers who can’t hear us.”

“Don’t you think I thought of that?” Regina’s voice is even harsher than usual. “They’re everywhere—D.C., Sherwood, Baltimore, Harrisburg, every town in between. This isn’t some half-assed pirate operation. Someone is fucking with me.”

“I doubt it’s personal. It’s probably just an anti-Halloween demonstration by religious wackos. David says he might find out who it is by looking on the Internet.”

There’s a long pause before her voice comes back, muted. “Really?”

Regina died in 1987, so her entire experience of the Internet consists of the Matthew Broderick movie
WarGames
. To her, the Web is omnipotent, able to produce tragedies and miracles with a few keywords.

“Go on with the show as if nothing’s happened,” I tell her, “and we’ll be at the station after the bar closes at two.”

She gives a tight sigh. “I wish I could figure out how to blame you for this.”

I hang up the phone as Jeremy approaches me, notebook in hand. “Everything okay?” he asks.

“Of course. Why?”

“The way you and the station manager were running around, it looks like there’s a crisis.”

“Nope.” I adjust my sunglasses. “No crisis.”

“You mean, other than the fact that no one can hear your broadcast?” In response to my stunned look, he holds up his own phone. “My roommate just texted me.”

Crap. How many other media outlets have noticed already? How many
advertisers
have noticed?

He steps closer, a new gleam in his eye. “Let me help you find the pirate.”

“I don’t think so.” That’s all we need, for him to snoop around and discover the real truth. “Thanks, anyway.” I pat his arm and turn toward the stage.

“This could be a huge story,” he says.

I stop. Visions of the station, the logo, maybe even Shane’s face, on the cover of
Rolling Stone
form a slide show in my head. Visions of solvency. Visions of survival.

I turn back to Jeremy. “Give us a day to put our own people on it. I’ll get you something Thursday morning.”

“Exclusive?”

“Through the weekend.”

“Good enough.” He tucks his notebook back into his pocket. “I’m going to drive back home to College Park and listen myself. I’ll call you Thursday.”

On my way back to the kitchen, I wing Shane’s cell phone toward the stage. He snags it with a deft maneuver.

In Stuart’s dim office, I find David leaning close to the monitor, his worried face aglow in the pale white light. He gives me a distracted glance as I pick my way through the piles of papers and stacks of shrink-wrapped Halloween bar napkins.

“Found something odd.” David points to the screen. “The FCC keeps a public record of every application. Here’s one for a translator construction permit from earlier this month right here in Sherwood.”

“A what construction?”

“Translator. It’s a two-way antenna that takes a radio signal and transmits it way outside the station’s original range. Let’s say we wanted to broadcast in Poughkeepsie. We’d build translator stations to relay the signal, and then everyone between here and there could hear us.”

“But we couldn’t trample on another station’s frequency, right?”

“Right. To stay legal, we’d have the translator change our frequency to one that’s available in our target area. If we’re 94.3 here, we might be 102.1 in Scranton.”

I squint at the browser to see what looks like an application from a Family Air Network, Inc. “But these people didn’t bother switching.”

“No, they bothered.” David highlights a box on the application. “Specifically requested our frequency.” He rips off his Springsteen headband and glares up at me. “They’re after us.”