Off You Go Page 3

  She touched his fingers, and it seemed intentional. “You should take my number down, too,” she said, with a cunning man-eater smile. “Just in case you’re looking for another fantasy.”

  For reasons that Dewey couldn’t figure out, women had been hitting on him ever since he’d gotten married, and it was getting worse lately. He’d turned into a magnet for strong, aggressive women. Didn’t they see the ring?

  Dewey took her number down and got out of there like he was running from a gator.

  Ashton Whidbey, Dewey’s college roommate from back in the old days at the College of Charleston, welcomed Dewey into his office. They’d met working at the college radio station as freshmen and decided to move out to Folly Beach at the end of the school year, leaving the dorms for good. While Dewey double-majored in Philosophy and Music, Ashton dove into Computer Sciences, going on to start a website design company that had blown up. He now employed seventeen people, and their “shop,” as Ashton called it, was on the upper end of King Street, which was developing at a rapid pace. Back four hundred years ago, when Dewey and Ashton were students, upper King was a wasteland where you could easily get mugged. Now, any fashionable woman could easily spend a thousand bucks at her pick of any of the hoity-toity boutiques. Well, okay. So they were still mugging people on upper King. The thieves were just better dressed.

  Dewey handed Ashton a basket of his Cherokee Purples and said, “I brought payment. Need your help.”

  “Helping those in need is all the payment I require,” Ashton said, standing up to greet him.

  “Right, I’ll take these back then.”

  “No sense in having to drag them back home.” Ashton rubbed his little belly. “I’ll find ‘em a home.” He took the basket and went back behind his desk. At six-two, Ashton towered over Dewey by four inches and rarely missed an opportunity to remind Dewey of this fact. Dewey, in return, would often comment on Ashton’s protruding Adam’s apple and lack of taste apropos all art.

  This wasn’t the first time Ashton had helped Dewey out with some computer needs. Dewey had been doing unofficial detective work for almost as long as he’d been sober, and Ashton had been excited about helping him from the moment Dewey brought it up. It gave Ashton a break from his world of HTML, Flash, ExpressionEngine and whatever else Dewey didn’t understand. Where Dewey was into fantasy, Ashton loved comics, and this was his way of fighting evil. The two of them had definitely had their ups and downs, especially when Dewey’s drinking had taken him off the rails, but Ashton was the kind of friend who would always be there and would always forgive. In exchange for Ashton’s computer virtuosity, Dewey would bring him a basket of ‘maters, the currency of Deweyland.

  Ashton’s office looked like a NASA control center, the only difference being that just about every piece of hardware had an Apple logo on it. Some dance music played quietly and annoyingly in the background. Dewey pulled Gina’s Dell laptop out of the bag. Ashton snatched it out of his hands, flipped it open, and began to move through it like it was his own.

  “The girl that jumped off the bridge Friday night. Gina Callahan. This is hers,” Dewey said.

  “No kidding! Let’s do this.” Ashton made no effort to suppress his excitement—though he was one of those guys who seemed thrilled and curious about everything in life. You could tell him about a visit to see a relative in a nursing home, and he’d listen with bug eyes and enthusiastic nods like you were telling him about the newest Batman movie. Dewey liked that about him.

  With his Adam’s apple bouncing around like a pinball, Ashton said, “You’re getting the high-profile ones, now. What are we looking for?”

  “I’m trying to figure out who she was dating. He left no traces and no one seems to know who he is. Nothing on her phone. Nothing in her house.”

  “Oh, he can’t hide from Ashton the Almighty. You know that. In this world, I am King. I am the light and the darkness, the lie and the truth. The thief and the law.”

  “Okay, I get it.”Dewey sat and listened to the unnatural sounds of the dance music mix with the tapping of the keys as Ashton’s fingers ran miles a minute. Dewey pondered the popularity of electronic music. To him, he found no soul, nothing organic. It was a lifeless mishmash of obvious pop melodies floating on top of a repetitive thump. Ah, to be a traditionalist in the modern world. Dewey wouldn’t wish the burden upon his worst enemy.

  Ashton finally spoke up. “There you are. Come to papa, mamma mia!” He kept working for a couple more minutes, making strange noises with his mouth. Then, “You bad girl. Shame on you, Gina. Gina, Gina, Gina.” He made a tsk tsk sound. The printer started up.

  “How long are you going to keep me in the dark?” Dewey asked, removing his fedora and leaning forward. “Anything of interest?”

  “Only if you consider sexually explicit fetish games interesting.” Ashton was speaking as fast as he’d been typing, and that Adam’s apple was working overtime. “Looks like this chica had another Yahoo account and did a good job hiding it, but like I always tell you, once it’s on a computer, you can’t completely remove it. You can’t run from Ashton. No, no, you can’t.” He turned toward the printer and retrieved the small stack of papers. He handed them to Dewey and said, “She had a friend who called himself ‘Hungry Hippo’ and he’s a first class perv. There’s some pretty hot stuff on here.”

  “Do I need to go to church before I read?”

  “We should probably both go right now. My wife’s not going to know what hit her tonight.”

  “Does she ever?”

  “That’s enough, shorty. You and I both know where all the sorority girls were while you were locked up in your room with your hands all over that tiny little guitar.”

  “It’s a mandolin.”

  “Whatever.”

  Ashton made another remark, but Dewey had blocked him out and was now reading the e-mail exchanges. Gina had been writing this Hungry Hippo from a Yahoo address with the username Med Student. The notes were short but to the point. Extremely graphic and full of expletives. The common theme was that Hungry Hippo would pretend like he had certain illnesses, and it was up to the Med Student to cure him with sexual pleasures of the creative variety. From what Dewey had read so far, she was pretty good at it. Three weeks before, Hungry Hippo described having shortness of breath, lack of appetite, and heartburn. She assured him that receiving oral sex under a blanket on the beach in the dark would fix his problems. Seemed an awfully sandy procedure to Dewey, but he was no doctor.

  “Other than spam,” Ashton interrupted, “these are the only e-mails on the account. I left the login info in a Word document on the desktop.”

  “This is good work. You know what you’re doing.”

  “You don’t need to tell me that.”

  “Is there a way to figure out who Hungry Hippo is?”

  “That’s the thing with these large domain name e-mail accounts. Probably not. Sorry, bud. I didn’t read all of them, though…there might be something in there.”

  “This is a big help, Ashton. Thanks.”

  “My pleasure, Dewey Decimal System. I need to get back to work. You know where to find me.”

  Dewey walked back out onto King Street where the businesspeople were starting to look for a place to grab lunch. Dewey picked up a falafel pita to go and sat on the opened tailgate of his truck to eat. It was there on the back of that truck that he’d solved many a person’s problems. After the pita, he struck a match, cupped it from the wind, and lit a Spirit. As people strolled by with their shopping bags and briefcases, his mind raced.

  He still had some healthy leads: her father, her friends, her gym and the rock-climbing wall, but he needed things to happen quicker, before the trail went cold. It was obvious what he needed to do.

  “What if I e-mail Hungry Hippo from Gina’s account?” he asked himself. “Is that the move? I’ll pretend I’m Gina and say that I survived the fall.” Dewey smiled as he blew out a stream of smoke. “It could work, you crazy son of a bitch.
It could work.”

  5

  Back at his place, Dewey sank into the couch and began to comb through the e-mails, trying not to get excited as he looked for clues. (Excited about the case or about the specific content, you pick.)

  He and Erica had filled the place with furniture from garage sales and thrift stores. She had dragged him up and down the road for months searching for the perfect pieces. Recycling furniture was part of the “green” side of Erica; she was kind of a hippie, without smelling like patchouli and having dreads. Of course he’d loved spending time with Erica, but Dewey had not loved furniture shopping, even if it was inexpensive furniture. Now, nothing would make him happier. As long as Erica was by his side, Dewey vowed he would furniture shop like it was his job.

  A quick glance around the room could tell you a lot about the man Dewey Moses. An upright piano that he’d inherited from his grandmother stood to the left of the fireplace. His fiddle and mandolin rested on top. He’d been playing music since he was a boy, and they always said he was one of those that could play anything.

  He was also an amateur geography buff, and there was a nice collection of globes on most of the flat surfaces. Erica was not that keen on filling their other house with his little obsession, so he’d always kept them at the cabin. There were some maps on the walls as well, including many that had been created for some of the fictional worlds of the fantasies he so loved to read. Middle-earth, Westeros, Malazan, and other places most would never know—or care—about. On the subject of fantasies, he also collected hardcovers of his favorite works. The bookshelf on the wall near the entrance to his bedroom overflowed with books by authors like Stephen Erikson, Robert Jordan, Glen Cook, Robin Hobb, and even Mervyn Peake.

  Another of his hobbies was spread across the dining room table. He loved Euro board games and was currently playing one of his favorites, Settlers of Catan, created by the great Kraus Teuber in Germany. The game was only possible with multiple players, so he was playing as three different players, using three different strategies. Erica was the one who had gotten him into designer board games, and that was no doubt one of the first signs that Dewey had met his match. She could take him from time to time, and from what their mom had told him, now Sonya and Elizabeth were starting to show some skills.

  There was no time for pastimes today, though. He needed to get into the minds of the Hungry Hippo and the Med Student. He dove into the e-mails. After a while, he was frustrated. They were very careful not to reveal anything that could link them back to reality. Other than a couple mentions of a meeting (in an extremely vague fashion), the correspondence mostly consisted of this game they were playing.

  Dewey did pick up one bit of information that he’d already suspected. The Hungry Hippo had mentioned his leg cramps, and she suggested thrusting himself into a younger woman from behind. So he was an older man. Perhaps nothing disgusting, just a few years older. And yes, it was apparently a man, as thrusting isn’t exactly a lesbian maneuver.

  The other e-mails with symptoms and diagnoses gave away nothing but were quite entertaining. The Hippo’s head hurt, and she said the cure would involve covering both his “heads” in Vaseline and rubbing both of them in a clockwise motion until both came to fruition. Gina must have understood some black magic. Hippo was losing his hearing, and she recommended coming over immediately and banging her brains out. Dewey wondered what one had to do with the other, but again, he was no doctor or voodoo man. The Hungry Hippo’s back was bothering him, and she said she knew of a massage parlor run by a naughty med student who “supposedly” gave happy endings with whipped cream.

  And Dewey’s favorite: the Hungry Hippo had taken too much Viagra, and he was having a hard time (yes, he used the word “hard”) getting it to go down. The Med Student said she could suck the stiffness out of the Eiffel Tower if she wanted to and that ten minutes in her mouth would get things back to normal.

  “Whatever happened to good ol’ fashioned lovemaking?” Dewey asked himself. Feeling slightly dirty, he set the papers aside and set her computer on his lap. He got into her Yahoo account and started a new message. The closer he got to sending an e-mail, the more absurd it seemed. Impersonating a dead woman. That had to be a new low in his newly-found career. Still, you had to shake those trees.

  With the subject, I’m back, Dewey wrote, I’m alive. I need you now. Can we meet? I’ll explain everything. Please, I’m begging you.

  That was to the point enough. Assuming this man had heard about her death, he’d be beyond shocked but perhaps curious. After all, they still hadn’t found a body. Dewey hoped they didn’t for a little while longer.

  “Check your e-mail, my friend,” Dewey said. “That’s what I need you to do. Just give me a fighting chance.”

  Dewey tended to his garden, making sure the irrigation system had done its job, and then walked around talking to the plants, something he’d been doing ever since he’d moved out there. They were about all he had these days.

  At 4 p.m., he packed up his mandolin and made his way to the rehab joint in West Ashley that had brought him back from the dead. It had been ninety long days bunking it up with twenty of the dirtiest, roughest, and saddest individuals he’d ever encountered, but he’d walked out a new man and for that, he owed the place his life. Every Wednesday, he returned for a meeting, and somehow, they’d talked him into bringing his mandolin this time to do some entertaining afterwards. Anything to take their minds off the fight.

  He’d invited a banjoist named T.A. Reddick to join him. Reddick had just left the DEA, so he understood addiction. T.A. had gladly accepted, not knowing Dewey had another motive as well.

  Twenty-four men and women, all addicts of varying degrees, sat in folding chairs under the shade of an oak tree behind the two-story brick house that had been turned into a rehab/halfway house by an older addict who had been sober for twenty-something years. He had thrown a bunch of bunk beds into the bedrooms, six coffee makers into the kitchen, ashtrays on every stoop, and started inviting people. Dewey had heard about it at his first AA meeting, and it had done the trick.

  It was Mexico hot, and Dewey’s short sleeve button-down was showing perspiration. He’d put his fedora on the ground next to him. Everybody had the Big Book open in their laps, and more than half of them held burning cigarettes in their fingers, smoke rising into the air like lowcountry fog. After the Serenity Prayer, the experienced ones took turns reading and commenting. With a butt in between his fingers, Dewey read a bit about spirituality and talked about what it meant to him, how finding something to believe in had pulled him through. For Dewey, it was love. The love he felt for his family. He talked about Erica and Sonya and Elizabeth, and he wiped away tears as he spoke about the pain of not coming home to them every day.

  A young woman, maybe twenty, took the spotlight next and told her story. She looked too young to be there, but there were always a few of those. She pulled at her necklace as she spoke of her alcoholism and getting kicked out of her house at sixteen, and having a child when she was seventeen with a drug addict who still didn’t know she’d gotten pregnant. Not too long ago, she put a gun to her head. But before she pulled the trigger, her son walked in. It was at that moment that she woke up and realized that she couldn’t leave him alone. She found an AA meeting and checked into rehab that day. And she was now seventy-one days sober. No eyes were dry by the time she finished.

  T.A. Reddick pulled up in his old CJ7 Jeep as the meeting was finishing. Dewey asked for ten minutes and went over to say hello. The bluegrass world is a small one, and Dewey kept hearing T.A.’s name, but everyone said he never took the stage. Desperate for some musical companionship, Dewey had finally found someone who knew where T.A. lived and paid him a visit with a mandolin in his hand. T.A. invited him into his James Island home, they picked music on the dock overlooking the marsh late into the night, and a friendship began. That was five months ago.

  T.A. hopped down from his Jeep in cowboy boots and jeans. Dewey had neve
r seen him in anything else. The man was in good shape, built tough, but nothing was out of place and bulky. During their picking sessions, T.A. had shared stories of his life with the DEA, and it was a wonder he was still alive. You could see the scars of rough living. He’d left that all behind, though, and was now living off an inheritance from his murdered father and some good money he was making from writing country songs for well-known Nashville artists.

  “Thanks for coming.” Dewey reached out and shook his hand.

  “I’ll play for anybody willing to listen, brutha.” He pulled his banjo from the back. “How’s your jumper case?”

  “Jumper case?” Dewey asked.

  “The girl who jumped.”

  “Oh, coming along. Actually, I have a favor to ask you.” Dewey handed him a brown bag.

  “What’s this?”

  “A pregnancy test and a hairbrush.”

  “I appreciate it. You saved me a trip to the store.”

  Dewey laughed. “Do you think you could find out if the test was used by the same person who owned the hairbrush? I’m sure there is DNA, if not prints. Do you still have connections?”

  “I could probably make it happen.”

  “I’ll trade you for a basket of my veggies and a big bag of those Cajun boiled peanuts you like.”

  “Give me a day.”

  Dewey and T.A. tuned up and played for those lost souls of addiction for more than an hour, and it made their audience damn happy. It made Dewey happy, too. They both sang and played their asses off, performing like there was ten thousand people watching them, and as T.A. wrapped up the set with a “Shave and a Haircut” lick, Dewey looked at each one of those addicts with encouragement, hoping they would keep fighting the good fight. Keep fighting, keep hoping, and keep loving.