Zodiac

21

REBECCA CAME AROUND for our appointment about half an hour after I got back. I'd forgotten about it. Damn it, I was still just stewing in my emotions, trying to wash Laughlin's perfume off my hand. I hadn't had time to consider anything. I wanted to tell all, but first I had to come up with a plan. I shoved my clippings under some other crap when I heard her voice approaching; she walked in and said she had some interesting stuff for me.

She did, but nothing better than what I'd already seen. There was another copy of that same picture. The intern had also discovered a vague little article from the late Sixties saying that Basco had put some "junk machinery" on the floor of the Harbor, giving the usual feeble excuse.

"They claim that this junk was going to become a habitat for marine life. You don't buy that?"

Bless her, she did know how to blow my lid. "Rebecca, goddammit, since the beginning of time, every corporation that has ever thrown any of its shit into the ocean has claimed that it was going to become a habitat for marine life. It's the goddamn ocean, Rebecca. That's where all the marine life is. Of course it's going to become a habitat for marine life."

"You think those things pose an environmental hazard today?"

"Nothing compared to those transformers. I've got Basco in my crosshairs, Rebecca."

"I don't think I can print that in the paper, S.T."

"I just don't have any ammunition in my magazine."

"Look. Do you want to do the article? S.T. on Fleshy?"

"Can't, Not yet. Have to figure out what's going on." I leaned forward and looked ponderous. "If I seem a little stressed out, well ... the FBI is after me."

"You're kidding, ST.!"

"Recess. I'll get back to you when Basco's in the grave."

When I'd gotten back from that lovely chat with Laughlin and Dolmacher, there'd been a message waiting for me, a worried message from Gallagher's wife. It was still early enough in the day to catch him on his boat, and I needed an excuse to get out on the water. I persuaded Rebecca to drive me downtown, got on the Zodiac, and buzzed around to Gallagher's berth in Southie. He was still out on the water somewhere. So I persuaded one of the neighboring boats to hail him on the CB, and in about twenty minutes I was screaming flat-out across calm water to intercept the Scoundrel, which was just returning from the Bay.

They' recognized me at a distance, since I'm the only one who travels in that way, and cut their engines so I could come up alongside.

"Jeez! You guys run into an oil slick?" I said when I got close enough to talk. Maybe it was the late-afternoon light, but they were all dark, greyish looking. They mumbled some kind of defiant, bullshit response. They sounded tired. I tossed one of them my bow line and then they helped me scramble on board.

They all stood around and stared at me, quieter than they'd ever been, sunk, depressed. The reason their skin was dark was that they were covered with chloracne.

"You guys have been into some bad chowder," I said in a weak murmur, but Gallagher, skipper of the plague ship Scoundrel, held up his hands and cut me off.

"Listen. Listen, S.T, we stopped setting our traps there. I swear to God we haven't touched any of them oily lobsters."

When was this damn thing going to start making any sense? Why did I feel like such an asshole? "You absolutely didn't eat any of those oily ones?"

"Only Billy. The guy you saw at Fenway."

"How's he doing?"

"Fine. He felt real sick and took a couple days off, stopped eating lobster."

Billy came up from below decks. He was pristine. A little residual scabbing from his old case of chloracne.

"But you guys have been eating lobster and you got sick."

"Yeah. Real bad, just in the last couple of days. So we switched to Big Macs."

"Good."

"But it's getting worse anyway. When I left this morning, S.T, I was okay, I really was. But now I feel like shit."

"The lobsters that you ate since the last time I talked to you-"

"Goddamn it, S.T, I'm telling you the God's truth. We looked at them all real careful and they didn't smell oily, they didn't taste oily."

"Where'd you get 'em?"

"All over the Harbor. Mostly Dorchester Bay."

That didn't help me at all. Dorchester Bay was a pocket of water below South Boston, ringed with sewer overflows- CSOs-but not much industry. It was three or four miles east-southeast of the area I'd been concentrating on.

"Have you pulled up any traps that were oily?"

"Yeah. We put one down near Spectacle, just as a test, you know. See, S.T, we're starting to become invironmintles. Pulled it up this morning. Check this out, S.T."

I knew it had to be bad because they had just chucked the whole thing into a Hefty bag and left it out on the fantail. I pulled it open and looked. There was no lobster in there, but the trap was still glistening with oil. It had all dripped off the trap and run down into one corner of the bag where I could grab it and squish it around and feel it through the plastic. Oily, but transparent. This trap had been dipped in PCBs.

This was orders of magnitude worse than the lobster Tanya had found-the lobster had just had a few drops of the stuff, built up slowly over time.

There was more to this business, but I had no idea what. Each new piece of evidence directly contradicted the last.

Billy ate oily lobsters and got poisoned. When he stopped eating them he got better. Fine. But the rest of the crew never did. They got poisoned anyway. They stopped eating them but it didn't help. Where were they getting PCBs?

"The only thing I can think is that you're absorbing them from traps like this one," I said. "You didn't try burning anything, did you? Any old traps or ropes?"

"Why would we do that?"

"Beats me. But let me just warn you that PCBs don't burn. They just turn into dioxin and escape into the air." Maybe someone was running a clandestine toxic waste incinerator in Southie. I just don't know.

"Activated charcoal," I said. "Go home and buy some aquarium charcoal. Grind it up fine, heat it up, and eat it. Give yourself an enema."

It took me a while to make them believe that. "Or you could grind up some briquets very fine. Don't use the self-lighting kind."

"Yeah, we're not dumb micks, S.T."

"Sorry. Ever hear of an activated charcoal filter? The carbon grabs onto organic molecules, anything that's reactive, and holds it long enough for your body to get rid of it."

Gallagher laughed. "Okay. I'll tell my wife we're getting an aquarium. Just what I need, more frickin' fish."

By the time I got the Zode back downtown, filled the gas tanks, made it back to the office, loaded myself down with diving equipment, got it all back to the yacht club and hit the water again it was dark and a little bit foggy. Which was fine by me. I was a little dark and foggy myself; I didn't even know what I was going to look for, or where.

The oily trap-now, that was evidence. No gas chromatograph was needed, just my trusty schnozz. It contradicted the evidence from the gas chromatograph at the university but, by now, contradictions seemed par for the course. I was willing to believe the most recent piece of evidence to drift past me.

I'd gotten Gallagher to show me, on a chart, exactly where he'd pulled that trap. A quarter-mile north of Spectacle Island, in sort of a depression in the sea floor. I could go down into it and look for puddles of oil. For fifty-five-gallon drums or old Basco transformers. We'd already sampled the area, though, and found nothing at all.

What would that prove anyway? It wouldn't help with the real mysteries-why my analysis was all fucked up; why Gallagher was sick.

Maybe it wasn't PCBs at all. Maybe some other form of organic chlorine, that didn't taste oily, didn't show up in our analysis. That was the only plausible way for those guys to get poisoned. I could be dealing with two separate problems here: a busted transformer dumped thirty years ago by Basco, causing oily traps, and some other kind of subtle, nasty waste-dumping, something really new and vicious. New technologies were being invented all the time out on Route 128, and new forms of toxic waste along with them. Maybe someone was using the CSO system to get rid of their corporate shit-flushing it down the toilet during heavy rains, knowing it would immediately overflow into the Harbor and never be noticed down at the sewage treatment plants. It was coming from one of Dorchester Bay CSOs and contaminating lobsters in that area.

That was the thing to look for, then. Take a sample from Dorchester Bay and analyze it. Analyze it every which way, look for every damn thing under the sun: bromine and fluorine and the other compounds that could mimic chlorine. If nothing else, it would help me rule out this new hypothesis. And if I found something, I could trace it to a particular CSO, and then I had the criminals by the balls. Each CSO drains a specific set of toilets in a specific part of town. By lifting the right manhole covers, paying a lot of attention to my sewer maps, I could trace the trail right back to the perpetrator.

This strategy had another advantage as well: I wouldn't have to dive as deep. Diving just isn't my thing. Under normal conditions it's scary enough, but diving at night, in murky water, with no backup-that was fucking stupid. I was only doing it because I knew I wouldn't be able to relax until I did something. So I anchored my Zodiac a hundred feet off the shore and worked from there.

First I just found the bottom and nosed around some. In front of me was a CSO that had littered the bottom with condoms, toilet paper and other sewage for at least half a mile out. Behind me, I suspected, was a huge PCB spill. In between was total confusion: lobsters saturated with poison, bottom sludge that was utterly clean, clean-looking lobsters that gave massive doses of chloracne to the people who ate them.

There was a lobster crawling on an old oil drum right in front of me. I gave the drum a poke with my knife and it crumbled; there couldn't be anything in there. Then the lobster and I did hand-to-hand combat. I pretended it was Laughlin. Couldn't smell it or taste it, but I had enough time to chop it open and find its liver.

It had no liver, just sacs of oil, like the one Tanya had found. I scooped its viscera into a jar and took it with me. Maybe it was PCBs, maybe something completely different. So I swam into the shallow water and mucked around a little, breaking the water every so often to get my bearings, until I'd located the CSO pipe. Thank God it wasn't raining.

Having taken a good jarful of sludge from right under the pipe, I surfaced, trod water and studied the shoreline. I needed to know which CSO I was dealing with here, triangulating off the positions of U. Mass, South Boston High, Summer Street, and other landmarks. When I was convinced I could pin this place down on a map, I decided to call it a day.

While I was heading for the Zodiac I heard a propeller, or maybe more than one, and that bothered me because when I broke the water earlier, I hadn't been able to see any running lights. Somebody was nearby, using the fog to hide, and I had to guess he was hiding from me.

So I started one very slow orbit, and that's how I found the Cigarette. Sitting there with its motor idling, just far enough away that I couldn't see it from the Zode. It could see me because it was running dark. But the lights on my

boat would splash against the surrounding fog and make it impossible for me to see them.

What now? I could try to get a close look at them. But they might have a negative attitude about that. Somehow I didn't relish my chances if they decided to chase me down. Besides, I was running out of air, and I couldn't stay underwater that much longer.

I could abandon the Zode and swim to shore on the surface, but why abandon ten thousand bucks worth of GEE equipment? These guys were just watching me. And they'd been watching me for a long time. I'd even provoked them once before, and all they did was run away. I didn't burn down my house when the FBI bugged it, did I?

So the only sensible idea was to go back to the Zode and proceed normally. But that's exactly what they were expecting me to do. It irritates the hell out of me to be in a situation where I'm forced to do exactly what's expected. But when you run out of air, you run out of air.

The best tactic was stealth. I swam back under the surface, broke the water on the far side of the Zode, in case they were using infrared, and started to take my stuff off while remaining in the water. My one concession to paranoia was dropping some gear: I just let the empty tank sink to the bottom because hauling it up into the Zode would be noisy and time consuming. Same with the clanky weight belt. It was just some chunks of lead and a nylon strap.

The problem was that I had to haul myself up into the boat. I weighed more than all that other crap together. Getting over the side of the Zode wasn't like hopping over a fence. It was more like sumo wrestling in a pool filled with Crisco.

So I tried to be quiet about it until I accidentally made a godawful amount of noise, and then I just tried to be quick about it. And at about the same time, I heard the Cigarette's engines rev up, heard it being thrown into gear. That scared the shit out of me and I waddled to the back of the Zode and began hauling on the ripcord, trying to start up the outboard. I hauled on it like a maniac about three times, felt something pop in my back, and then the Cigarette materialized like a ghost, shiny and blue and slippery, and I finally got to look

at the owners. They were wearing ski masks. One of them was driving and the other was staring at me through unnaturally large binoculars. These were high-tech, Route 128 thugs: they had me on infrared. The driver's eyes glinted pale blue; Kleinhoffer or Dietrich. The other one set his binocs down and aimed a gun at me.

I remembered having tried to pistol-shoot at Jim Grandfather's, noticing how hard it actually was, after having watched TV and movies my whole life, to actually hit something with a handgun. These guys were on a small boat and so was I. I didn't figure they were going to nail me with one shot. Which didn't prevent me from being scared shitless; when I saw the gun, I fell back on my ass, tipping the whole Zode up. The Cigarette overshot me and had to turn around for another pass.

That gave me time to notice a little surprise they'd left behind: a pair of small darts stuck into the side of my Zodiac, and they were sputtering at me, throwing off a transparent bluish light. I'd heard about this from Dolmacher. It was a Tazer. If I hadn't fallen back, those darts would be stuck in my skin and that electrical charge would be running through my nervous system. And I'd be unconscious, or wishing I was, long enough for them to rev up and run over me in their Cigarette at about eighty miles an hour. Sorry, officer, it was foggy.

The wake of the Cigarette was throwing the Zode around like a teeter-totter. Something heavy smashed into my foot. It was our big nautical strobe light. So when the Cigarette cruised by me for the second attempt, I turned the strobe on, held it over my head like a basketball, and made a three-point jump shot right into their cockpit.

"Nice second effort, boys!" I hollered. The light had half-blinded me, too, but I didn't need perfect vision to start the motor. They needed it to take a shot at me.

Time for another try at the motor. This time I did it right: set the throttle on START and choked it. Three more hauls on the ripcord and it started.

Then it died. I put the choke back in and hauled once more, getting a good start. I had to lean way over to shift it into forward gear and that's how I got tossed out of the boat.

Kleinhoffer and Dietrich weren't total losers. While they were clearing the purple spots out of their vision they could buzz me and throw me around with their thousand-horsepower wake. It had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. I had gotten the Zode into forward gear, but I got tangled up with the throttle handle when I was tumbling out, so now the motor was cocked all the way over to one side. It was puttering around in tight little circles, a little faster than I could swim. The Cigarette came around once more and I had to assume that Old Deadeye was using his infrared specs. If it had been calm they would have seen me instantly, but tonight, thank God, it was a little choppy.

The immediate problem was that my throat and nose were full of water and I hated to draw attention to myself by coughing and sneezing it out. So I tucked my head under the surface, blew some of it out and swallowed the rest. Yummy. Then I didn't have any air in my lungs so I had to come up and breathe.

My turn for a break. The Zodiac was spiraling in my direction. I just tried to present a small target, to look like a wave, and to dogpaddle toward it. The Cigarette was tearing back and forth, trying to locate my head with its propellers.

This went on maybe ten minutes. Between trying to breathe, trying to hide, coping with the tsunami wakes of the Cigarette and trying to get closer to the Zodiac, it was hard to keep track of time.

The Zodiac's bow rope brushed over my leg and I grabbed it. That was a nice reminder: if I let it trail behind me, it would get caught in the propeller. What other useful tips had Artemis given me? One thing for damn sure: take it reasonably easy; don't give it full throttle right off the bat or it would just do a backflip and toss me into the Harbor again.

Finally I got the prow of the Zodiac right up in my face, waited for the Cigarette to overshoot me, then threw myself up over the nose and into the boat. That was the theory, anyway. In reality it took a little longer than that so, as I was crawling on my hands and knees back toward the outboard, I looked up and saw the Cigarette cruising by me, slow and methodical, and I saw that Tazer gun pointed in my direction.

The gun didn't make any sound. I didn't even know I was hit until I felt a hot buzzing sensation in the arm of my wetsuit. But that was all I felt.

"You assholes," I shouted, "it's a rubber suit!"

Artemis would have been proud: I throttled it up slowly, establishing a stable attitude in the water. Then I ripped it open and blew right past the bow of the Cigarette. It was choppy, but not that bad, and I was aiming for Zodiac nirvana here: the boat airborne, just the screw in the water. At that speed, the water might as well be asphalt. The Cigarette slices through it, the Zodiac just skitters-like being dragged down a cobblestone street by forty rabid mustangs.

If I could just make it out of Dorchester Bay and out toward Castle Island Park, I could take dead aim at the heart of downtown. Then I'd cross a small channel, cut past navy territory, and then I'd be passing the ends of the south Boston piers, all in a nice line. The worst part was the first, where I had nothing to protect me, but I'd covered half of it by the time the Cigarette caught up. They came after me dark, running a zigzag search pattern through the fog and, when I was almost to Castle Island Park, they found me.

Then it was raw power versus maneuverability. They tried to cut across my bow and swamp me, but I spun away from them, did a two-hundred-seventy-degree turn, went airborne off their wake, half fell out of the boat and cut in behind them, the water clawing at my right leg. They recovered faster than they wanted to and ended up ahead of me- shades of Buffalo-so I fell back into the Zode, aimed for their asshole, and throttled it up. They headed into a * turn-a very fast turn, but slower than me. We turned and turned, me spiraling round right behind them, sticking to the calm spot in the center of their wake. They twisted it the other way, trying to shake me, and I followed them in the other direction until I saw the lights of downtown swinging past. Time to turn the corner. I broke out of the curve and drilled the throttle.

They tried to spin, got slapped around by their own wake for a little, then cranked it up to about twice my speed and came for me like a Sidewinder missile. They were trying the same attack, but this time I knew it. Jived left, spun right, cut directly in front of them, just missed being sliced in two by that samurai sword of a hull, and pulled the same trick: whipped around and cut behind them. They were trying to reverse direction so I blew them off and aimed for the skyscrapers.

The assholes should have realized I'd be wearing rubber. It was an excellent plan, though. Like something I would think up, if I was Laughlin.

ENVIRONMENTALIST DIES IN BIZARRE HIT-AND-RUN

BOATING ACCIDENT

SELF-STYLED MAVERICK WAS CAVALIER ABOUT SAFETY PROCEDURES

I faked them out by sprinting in the direction of the airport, half a mile away, and when they bit, I nipped a hairpin turn and shot past them in the opposite direction, close enough to see the whites of their eyes. That gave me enough room to make it across the navy channel, and they almost lost me again in the fog.

I'd made it to the piers of South Boston, goddamn it, and it was low tide. The low tide was going to save my life. The piers stood up on piles and I could squeeze between them.

Time for some serious Zodiac abuse. I was hanging onto the Zode in about six different ways because the piles kept trying to punch it out from under me. I was flying every which way, like riding a bronco, so the barnacles on those piles left a nice series of parallel gashes in my hands and arms. Long years of video-game experience were corning into play. I just kept worrying about the next set of piles, cutting and jiving through the gaps, ducking under the occasional strut. Cigarettes aren't made for that particular kind of abuse, so all they could do was parallel me and then try to cut me off when the piers came to an end and I had to emerge into the Harbor again.

But that was like a defensive lineman trying to stand in the way of a running back. A fake here, a fake there, and there's just no way to do it. I screamed past with them no more than ten feet away, because it's harder to draw a bead on something that's going by close and fast-ask any Indian circling a wagon train-and then I swung around, heading inland again. I was all done with Southie; downtown was a hundred yards away.

Paranoia is my way of life, and for a couple of weeks, some creeps had been shadowing me in a big powerful speedboat. I'd lost sleep, irritated Debbie and wasted a lot of gasoline because of these creeps. Instead of sleeping I had sprawled on my bed trying to think of what I would do if they ever came after me. In other words, I wasn't unprepared for this. I'd given it some thought.

So I knew exactly how to send these bastards to their graves: lead them into the Fort Point Channel at high velocity.

Boston used to be just a round island at the end of a sandbar. The airport, Back Bay, and much of Southie's waterfront are all artificial land. The bay between Southie and downtown Boston had been narrowed until it was just a slit-a canal, really-called Fort Point Channel. It was only a couple hundred yards wide, and it was no place to race speedboats. It was spanned with several bridges and completely fouled with old, half-rotten pilings. In its one-mile length it had more snags and shallows and lurking dangers than any hundred miles of the Mississippi. Like a riverboat pilot, I knew where all that shit was. I could navigate this channel at full speed with my eyes closed. Or so I'd bragged. This was my chance to find out.

First I got them excited, acted like I wanted to head home toward the yacht club, made a desperate break for the airport, got cut off both ways. Got them going very fast in the wrong direction, then broke the opposite way and just headed for the Channel at a flat sprint. Finally broke the motor in-hit full throttle-never thought I'd be that scared of anything. So I had a quarter of a mile lead before they even got turned around. I knew that Deadeye was looking right through the fog with his infrared specs, zeroing in on the heat signature of my motor, which must be blazing like a nova. He found me, probably fading fast, and his partner did exactly the right thing: leaned on the throttle, asked for all thousand horsepower, and got it. They hauled ass into the Channel, passed under the Northern Avenue Bridge, and I

led them right through the safe part so they wouldn't even know they were in mortal danger. They were driving right up my ass when I led them toward a picket fence of foot-thick pilings next to the Boston Tea Party ship. I pulled into a violent turn and the Zode went between them, on its side. Then I got out of the way.

They plowed into the pilings doing upwards of sixty miles an hour. Their sexy fiberglass hull shattered like a potato chip in a meat grinder. Those bjg oversize motors took a lot of gasoline and all of it exploded at once. I remember one of the big outboards tumbling through space like a comet, trailing pale blue flames, its screw cutting on air. The Cigarette was a big boat going fast, and it took a long time for all that crap to stop moving.

Myself, I crossed the Channel and got onto dry land at the Summer Street Bridge. I squatted on the shore for a while, watching the flames coming up off the water. Then I wandered up into civilization, stood in the road and flagged down a BMW. It overshot me a little bit so I got to see the SAVE THE WHALES sticker on the rear bumper. A young guy in a suit climbed out. "What's burning?" he said. "Are you okay?"

"I am. You got a tire patch kit in that thing?"

"You bet." The guy even knew my full name. We carried his kit down to the water and fixed the Tazer holes in my Zodiac. Then he got back in his BMW and drove away. I told him he didn't even have to think about donating more money to GEE this year.