For three hundred dollars Mr. Gash had procured the tape recording, raw and unedited. He set the conversation to Mozart’s Offertory in D Minor, “Misericordias Domini.”
caller: I’ve got an emergency!
dispatcher: Go ahead.
caller: My wife thinks I’m in Eau Claire!
dispatcher: Sir?
caller: But I’m eighteen thousand feet over Duluth and dropping like a fucking stone!
dispatcher: Sir, this is Duluth fire rescue. Please state your emergency.
caller: OK, here’s my emergency. I’m on an airplane that’s about to fucking crash. We lost an engine, maybe both engines—whoaaaaa, Jesus!—and we’re coming down, and my wife thinks I’m in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
dispatcher: You’re on a plane?
caller: Yes! Yes! I’m calling from a cellular.
dispatcher: And you’re in Duluth?
caller: No, but I’m getting closer every second. Oh God! Oh God, we’re ro—ro—rolling …
dispatcher: Hold on, sir, hold on…
caller: Please, you gotta call my wife. Tell her the company sent me upstate at the last minute. Tell her… I dunno, make something up, I don’t give a shit… anything!
dispatcher: Sir, I’m… sir, did your pilot have a heart attack?
caller: No! I’d let you talk to him but he’s kinda busy right now, trying to pull us outta this nosedive… whooaaaaa… Mother Mary… whooaaaaaaa!!!
dispatcher: What type of aircraft? Can you give me a flight number?
caller: I don’t know… Oh God, it’s so dizzy, so dizzy, oh Jesus… I think I see, uh, cornfields… My wife’s name is Miriam, OK? Phone number is area… uh, area code—
dispatcher: Cornfields? Anything else? Can you see Duluth yet?
caller: Oooooeeeeeeeehhhhh…
dispatcher: Sir, I need a location or I can’t assign units.
caller: It’s way too late for units, mister… Whoaaaaaaa… you just… whoaaaaaa, Jesus, you just tell ’em to look for the giant smoking hole in the ground. That’ll be us… Oh fuck me, FUCK MEEEEEEEEEE!…
dispatcher: Sir, I have to put you on hold but don’t hang up. Sir? You there?
Mr. Gash was tantalized by the call—the idea that a cheating husband aboard a crashing airplane would find the composure to dial 911 just to cover his doomed ass. What admirable futility! What charming desperation!
A dozen times he replayed the tape. Everything was on there, eighteen thousand feet of gut-heaving panic. Everything was there but the fatal impact and explosion.
Too late for units.
Man, thought Mr. Gash, was that poor bastard ever right.
Mr. Gash’s Duluth connection had enclosed a newspaper clipping with the cassette. The flight was a twin-engine commuter out of St. Paul. It went down in a farm field; twenty-one dead, no survivors. Local authorities didn’t release the name of the passenger who had placed the telephone call from the cabin; they said it would upset the relatives. The original 911 tape was turned over to the National Transportation Safety Board and sealed as evidence in the accident investigation. The version sent to Mr. Gash was a second-generation copy of high quality.
Suddenly he thought of something to make the recording even more dramatic: Redub it with a symphonic piece, one that ended with a crashlike crescendo of cymbals—a musical simulation of an aircraft breaking up as it smashes into the ground.
Sir? You there?
Boom, boooooom, KA-BOOOOOOOM!
“Oh, yeah,” Mr. Gash murmured. He got out of the car to stretch. It was nearly daylight on Toad Island, and still there was no sign of the troublemaker, the woman, the black dog or the Buick Roadmaster.
Mr. Gash went down the street to the bed-and-breakfast. He ambled up the porch steps and knocked. Mrs. Stinson called him around to the kitchen, where she was making muffins. At the screen door she greeted him warily, studying his oily spiked hair with unmasked disapproval.
Mr. Gash said, “I’m looking for a guy with a black dog.”
“Who’re you?”
“He’s driving a big station wagon. Might have a woman along.”
“I said, who are you?”
“The guy owes me some money,” said Mr. Gash. “He owes everybody money, so if I were you I’d be careful.”
Mrs. Stinson offered a chilly smile through the screen. “Well, he paid me cash. In advance.”
“I’ll be damned.”
“So get on outta here before I call the law. You two settle this some other time, ’cause I don’t allow no trouble.”