The judge presented them with an oversized gold trophy. Kori performed an erotic dance accompanied by Abra’s piercing howls and leaps. I wept with pride.
I awoke confused in the early darkness of Sunday morning. The dream seemed almost plausible. Shaking my head, I giggled a little. Suddenly I felt a stab of sadness. Abra was still missing.
Then I rushed to the bathroom and threw up.
What the hell was wrong with me? I wanted to blame my nausea on the stress and bad diet of recent days. A vague fear gnawed at my consciousness. As usual I repressed it, took a long shower, and got on with business. I was relieved to discover that my arm hardly hurt at all.
Traditionally, Sunday is a work day for Realtors. A mighty important work day if you have Open Houses. Or if you’re an agent in a popular tourist location like Magnet Springs. Alas, the current down market had turned Sunday into a Realtor’s day of rest.
I needed a challenge. Something to occupy my mind and stretch my body. I wasn’t about to let little things like a gunshot wound, stomach trouble, or an economic depression slow me down. So, dressed in my most comfortable and ugly sweats, I headed straight to the office to catch up on whatever I had missed while in Indiana. And to wait for Jenx to give me my next assignment as volunteer deputy. She had promised to drop by later.
By eight AM, I was at my desk, shuffling every piece of paper I could find in search of phone messages, mail, or any evidence whatsoever that I had missed something while out of town on Friday and Saturday.
There was absolutely nothing new.
Bored, I made myself a pot of coffee. Bad coffee. So bad that it reminded me why I kept Tina Breen on staff. Though prone to distraction, disorganization, and extreme whining, Tina made consistently great java. I rarely drank her brew because we were located right across the street from the Goh Cup, where I liked to take my breaks and catch up on local gossip. Still, it was comforting to know I could get yummy coffee on demand from my own office manager if I ever wanted any.
By now it was almost nine o’clock; I was way too restless to do anything constructive like reorganize my files. Crossing the street to visit Peg and sip her coffee wasn’t an option. On Sundays she opened late. So did most other Main Street merchants.
What’s a semi-nauseated under-employed dog-less single woman to do? I started messing with the computer. To be specific, Tina’s computer. I’m not sure why I chose to play with hers instead of mine. I told myself it was because hers was located in the foyer, which gave me a view of the street. That way I’d have something else to look at if the internet proved boring.
But the internet didn’t prove boring. Far from it.
Chapter Forty-Two
Technically, it was Tina’s email that interested me, not the whole internet. I never got past her email.
When I’d glimpsed it on Friday, I was stunned by her assortment of saved spam, all of which bore subject lines related to, shall we say, “male enhancement.” Most of us don’t look at that stuff, let alone save it. I couldn’t imagine uptight, goody-two-shoes Tina reading emails from Shane Maverick, Constantine Braver, and Kong. Unless her boredom at work had turned her into a sexual voyeur. Not Tina. Not likely.
Then I got really nosy and discovered something else. Call me unethical, but the computer did, after all, belong to me. So I opened her spam emails and read them all. The subject lines had little or nothing to do with the actual messages.
Maybe that’s common spam practice, I thought: catch readers’ attention with a sleazy come-on and then sell ‘em what you’re really selling. Except these senders weren’t selling anything that I could see. Even if the messages sounded vaguely sexual, they contained no hyperlinks to other websites and mentioned no products or services for sale. Examples:
For a real big time
Kept me up all night long
Enlarge your demands
Compared to Chester or Brady, I had little computer savvy. But I knew that if I right-clicked the sender’s name, I should be able to see “properties”; i.e., the sender’s email address. Curious, I pointed my cursor at “E.Z. Manning” and clicked.
Imagine my surprise when I recognized the email address. Or, to be accurate, the domain. It was none other than mattimoerealty.com. But the bigger shock was what came before the @ sign: a name I didn’t know at all. Someone calling himself rocco@mattimoerealty.com was sending porn spam. Or something that looked like porn spam. And for some reason Tina Breen was reading it. Saving it, too. Another question bloomed in my brain.
I clicked on her “sent” files. Yup. Tina was not only reading this crap; she was replying to it. Well, not exactly replying, if by that we mean saying something. Tina’s replies were blank. And there were many of them.
Back to her inbox. When I checked the properties of “Rod Wunderly,” I uncovered another mattimoerealty.com address. Not rocco this time, but stuart. Trembling, I right-clicked all the porn spam senders. Every single one featured my company’s domain, yet each sender had a different name before the @ sign. I didn’t know any of them.
I returned to Tina’s sent files. She had answered every porn spam message with a blank message. What the hell? Knowing Tina, I wondered if this was her weird way of fighting back, of trying to make the world a cleaner place. Bored at work, had she decided to waste the spammers’ time and cram their inboxes? That might make sense if these were real spammers. But they couldn’t be. To paraphrase that classic horror-movie line, “The emails were coming from inside the house!”
Who were the senders, and what were they up to? What was Tina up to? Maybe this was nothing more than an innocent game played during dull work days by an employee or two who knew more about computers than I did. Someone who had figured out how to set up several email accounts for the purpose of cheap laughs.
But for me that didn’t wash. The Tina Breen I knew wouldn’t deign to play with smut. Not even make-believe smut.
So what the hell was going on?
I glanced up at the sound of the front door clicking open. There stood the potential answer to my question. If the potential answer was in a mood to cooperate. Since she was holding a gun, that seemed unlikely.
Pushing with my feet, I rolled the desk chair as far back from the computer as I could. As far from Tina Breen as I could. And I raised my hands in the universal sign for “I surrender.”
“That gun’s not real, is it?”
I stared at the weapon she held in her shaky right hand.
“I’m warning you, Whiskey. Don’t make me use this thing.” Tina’s voice cracked.
I kept my eyes on the small metal revolver. It was either a snub nose 22 or a toy. I decided to believe it was a toy. Totally bull-shitting, I said, “Come on Tina. I’ve seen Winston and Neville playing with that thing!”
“No, you haven’t!” she snapped. “I would never let my boys play with guns. Not even a toy like this.”
She winced and reluctantly dropped the replica into her handbag. It took a long moment for her to regain a sense of menace. Then she approached her computer screen and scanned it to see what I’d been reading. Her next comment caught me completely off guard.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“Me?! How about you? Why did you come in here with toy gun blazing?”
“If you’re half as smart as I hope you are, you’re going to pretend none of this happened,” Tina snarled. “You never pried into my email. And you didn’t see me this morning when I came in to clean out my desk.”