So I put the cell phone away. But I still had time before leaving for Luigi’s, so I decided to do something useful. I grabbed the paper I’d found in Ted’s cache, the one with the numbers I suspected were IP addresses, and carefully typed one of them into the address line of my browser.
My screen went black. Had my battery suddenly given out? No, it was the Web site’s background. Suddenly, the words, HOT! HORNY! XXXXXXXX!!! began flashing in red on my screen, accompanied by several grainy pictures of women doing things better left undescribed.
“Ick,” I said, and hit the BACK button to escape.
Instead of taking me back to Amazon, and Anna Floyd’s overripe but fully clothed heroine, hitting the BACK button brought me to another black page pocked with pornographic images and leering red captions. I hit the HOME button and sighed with relief, thinking I’d escaped - but within seconds, small windows began popping up all over my screen, like toadstools after a rain, showing suggestive corners of pictures or offering badly spelled links to a bewildering variety of perversions.
I finally had to turn the laptop off to end the barrage, and sat there looking at it, fighting an irrational urge to spray the keys of my laptop with disinfectant before I touched them again. And feeling a familiar anger - the same anger I’d felt when, as a teenager, I’d felt a tap on my shoulder in a movie theater and turned to find a man exposing himself. At least with the flasher I could lash but, breaking his nose with a backhanded punch before dumping a thirty-two-ounce Coke in his lap. What could I do to the distant, anonymous creator of a sleazy Web site?
“Cute, Ted. That was a nasty little piece of work,” I said aloud. “But what does it mean?”
There were half a dozen more IP addresses on the slip of paper. I shook my head as if to clear it. I’d have to check them out, of course; just because one of them was a porn site didn’t mean they all were. But I had a feeling they would be, and I wasn’t in the mood to face any more of them now.
I checked my voice mail. A message from Michael, reminding me to have my Dad check my head and promising to call me tomorrow if he didn’t hear from me tonight. A message from Dad, reporting that he was having dinner with the ME and would fill me in tomorrow if he learned anything new. A message from Rob, reporting that he was still on the lam and would see me tomorrow, from which I deduced that he was still out of jail and enjoying his status as prime suspect.
Excellent. No one expected to hear from me till tomorrow. I washed my face and hands and grabbed my purse. Time to head over to Luigi’s.
Even on a Tuesday night, Luigi’s was hopping. I didn’t see any of the Mutant Wizard crowd, so I loitered by the front counter till I could flag down one of the waitresses.
“I’m looking for the Mutant Wizards group,” I said.
“The what?” the waitress asked.
Apparently there were still a few people in Caerphilly who hadn’t heard about us. Possibly a good thing, under the circumstances.
“It’s an office get-together,” I said. “A bunch of people - probably guys, mostly, I really don’t know how many.”
“We got a couple groups,” she said. “You want to walk through the dining rooms, see if you spot them?”
Just then Roger strolled up.
“Roger, hi. Do you know where the - “
“Two,” Roger said to the waitress.
“Two?” I echoed.
“Two,” the waitress said. “Right this way.”
“Hang on,” I said to the waitress. “Two?” I repeated, turning to Roger. “I thought you said there was going to be a group having pizza here tonight.”
“No, I asked you to have pizza,” he said. “Two,” he added, to the waitress.
She looked back at me.
“Two, my sainted grandmother,” I said. “You did not say ‘Would you like to have a pizza with me.’ You said, and I quote, ‘We’re having pizza tonight. Luigi’s, seven-thirty.’ That is how you tell someone she’s welcome to join a group who already have plans. That is not how you ask someone out on a date.”
“You tell him, hon,” the waitress said, leaning against the counter and putting her hands on her hips.
“Well, you’re here now,” Roger said. “Why don’t we just have some pizza and -?”
“The hell we will!” I said.
“Is there a problem here?” said a man. The manager, presumably.