Off You Go (4 page)

***

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.”

CHAPTER 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.