The Mangrove Coast (25 page)

As she typed she said, “We get his number, we’ll find out who he is.”

There was that fairy dust noise again.

The chair went tumbling backward when Amanda jumped to her feet. “The son-of-a-bitch. He set me up!”

My hands were shaking, but I had my arms out and around her now.

Behind me, I could hear Tomlinson making a strange whoofing noise. Was he groaning or fighting back nausea?

“Let it go,” I told her. “Let it go.”

“My mom wouldn’t have done that! My mom would never have done that! I don’t care what he says! You bastard!” She was yelling and now she smacked the screen with her open hand. “You filthy-minded creep!”

I pressed Amanda into Tomlinson’s arms as I took her spot in front of the computer and began to type a reply.

I could hear Amanda crying, still furious, as I waited for the fairy dust sound.

I was fighting it, trying hard not to get mad.

What then followed was a graphic litany of his sexual triumphs with Gail. Real or imagined, it was impossible to judge. But very specific. Each outrage was listed as a conquest.

I waited patiently. Then:

From behind me, Tomlinson said, “What the hell does that mean?”

He still had his arm around Amanda, reading along with me.

Gail73679
: Why so evasive? You’re a friend of Gail, we’re friends of Gail. So what’s the problem. What are you scared of?

Tomlinson said, “That’s the wrong approach, man. This guy wants to be in charge, let him be in charge. Don’t push him.”

Darkrume
: Why should I care about Gail? Already done everything I wanted to do to Gail. But I wouldn’t mind meeting you. Got any videos?

“This is a sick, sick person.”

“Yeah, man. He is truly and honestly twisted.”

“He’s not going to cooperate.”

“Nope, not a chance.”

“Then I’m done playing his game.”

“Don’t blame you. Fire away.”

Tomlinson said, “You’re getting to him.”

“Apparently. Let’s hope he’ll hang on until he lets some information slip.”

“There,” Tomlinson said, “we just learned something.”

In the long pause that followed, I suspect that he typed and erased a number of replies. I wish that I could have read them. Finally:

The Instant Message screen was suddenly filled with a series of strange figures.

Behind me I heard Tomlinson say, “What the hell … Hey … HEY!” He lunged over my shoulder, began to click the mouse frantically, but our cursor was now frozen.

“He’s pumping in some kind of … he’s uploading a file into our system. Look at that crap … it’s like taken complete control, shooting its way right in here….” Tomlinson slapped the desk with his hand. “Shit! Now he’s taken over the whole computer.”

The screen continued to pulse with line after line of figures:

Just before the screen froze, the last instant message from
Darkrume
read:

You lose! <: +))

“I appreciate the fact, man, that you’re trying to concentrate. Trying to pull off one of those total-recall deals. But do you really have to drive so slow?”

We were midway across Alligator Alley, the Everglades holding the horizon in all directions. Saw grass, globes of cypress shadow, gators baking mud gray on canal banks, black vultures cauldroning.

I’d asked Tomlinson to give me some silent time. Let me think about the few letters we’d had time to read.

“I suppose that means no radio, too.”

He’d been switching back and forth between WAXY 106 and ZADA 94. Miami and Lauderdale, all the old hard-rock classics.

“The radio’s fine. The radio I don’t have to think about.”

“Yeah, well … the radio doesn’t make you think ‘cause you weren’t the one who dated Janis Joplin. But don’t get me started on THAT weird episode.” He was tinkering with the dials. “Hey … you know, it wouldn’t kill you to have a tape player installed in this truck. Maybe a set of earphones for your noise-loving buddies.”

I just nodded.

What was it about the few letters I’d read and my exchange with
Darkrume
that I found so troubling?

Something. Couldn’t manage to nail it down. Perhaps it was tone or implication; a word or a phrase that nagged at
me. But if it was important, really important, why couldn’t I dredge it up out of the narrowest processing conduits of my brain?

I kept fumbling with it, going over and over what details I could remember. Not that there was any alternative. Whatever data
Darkrume
had uploaded into Gail’s computer had destroyed or garbled the entire program system.

A call into Bernie Yager had confirmed it. “So you sit there, don’t switch off the machine, and let someone invade you? Doc, the memory bits that were destroyed were in HER computer, you didn’t even have to be on-line at that point. Now you expect me to help? Believe me, if there was anything left to save, I’d do it. But the virus you just described, what’s left after something like that?”

Nothing, apparently.

“The piranha programs, I’ve heard you can buy, them from the heavy-duty hackers,” Tomlinson told me. “I’ve come across cyber punks who pretended to have them. Same kind of weird crap shoots across your screen. But this was the first time I ever saw anyone actually do it.”

Darkrume
had indeed done it. All trace of Gail’s correspondence was now gone.

So I’d spent my driving time trying to visualize the letters I’d read. Not easy because my brain kept slipping into a replay of the exchange with
Darkrume—It was your ugly daughter!
—and I became furious all over again.

Now Tomlinson said, “Maybe if you speed up to like seventy, it’ll bounce something loose in your noggin. Can’t hurt and might help.”

“Know what, Tomlinson? That was one of the cruelest things I’ve ever witnessed. What that guy did to Amanda. Gail Richardson must have extraordinarily bad judgment to get hooked up with someone like that. And to send him videos?”

“We’ve been through all this. Why keep going over it? Women in that situation, especially the nice ones, they’re just too damn vulnerable. Hey—you want me to drive? We
can pull over, take a whiz and let me get behind the wheel.”

Tomlinson was a tailgater, a lane-weaver, a terrible driver.

“Nope.”

“I wouldn’t mind getting to Dinkin’s Bay before sunset, man. Brewskies on the dock with the guides. Maybe order in some appetizers. Chicken wings, they’re sounding tasty.”

“I’ll go faster.”

“Man, I wish I had a bottle of beer for every car that’s passed us this trip. Sixty-five, man, that’s Winnebago speed. Zoom zoom zoom the cars just crackin’ past and us tooling along like two catheter cadets in a Caddy.”

He chuckled. The alliteration was unintentional and pleased him.

I started to remind Tomlinson that he’d promised me at least twenty minutes of silence, but I stopped in mid-sentence.

I said softly, “Straightaways.”

“Yeah, man, you go slow, no matter what. Dozens assed us.”

I changed the inflection. “Straight away. Straight
away.
“

“Uh-huh, which is embarrassing ‘cause a couple of those cars were from Ohio, Indiana, the neck-bender places. No offense.”

“In Merlot’s letter to Gail, what did he write? ‘I was so upset that when I left your house, I drove straight away to the beach.’ Something like that. You remember that?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“That’s more British than American. ‘Straight away,’ used like that. Or a phrase you might hear in the British colonies. Hong Kong, maybe Kuala Lumpur.”

“Sure, it jumped right out at me, man. But then I’m a scholar. Colonial English—Merlot’s sentences had that kind of weird syntax. And honor, the way he spelled things. He spelled it
H-O-N-O-U-R
like the Brits do.”

Was it true? I couldn’t remember.

I said, “He used British spelling as well? You’re sure?”

“Positive. There was this line where he said that the first thing he wanted to do was take her to the beach, some secluded harbour—he spelled it
O-U-R
—” Tomlinson stopped talking and looked at me, a new awareness in his expression.