Zodiac

35

BEHIND US WE HEARD the asshole emptying his fat chrome revolver in frustration-kablam kablam kablam.

Debbie was writhing around in Bart's arms. I wanted to take his place pretty badly, but if he took mine at the tiller we'd all be swimming within a couple of seconds. She managed to get her face aimed over the side of the boat and then vomited a couple of times. Probably swallowed some brine when she jumped overboard.

When she rolled over on her back, her wrists glinted, and I realized that Laughlin had handcuffed her. I could feel my balls contract up into my body and then everything went black. It's possible to go into a drunken rage without even being drunk; it's possible to black out on emotion. I just sat there, hunched over like The Thinker, not looking where I was taking us. And I didn't even pay attention to Debbie, which is what I really should have done. This wasn't for her benefit, unfortunately, it was for mine. Thank God the gun was empty, because I was ready to go back, before Laughlin had time to reload, and make the front page of the Herald: FOUR DIE IN HARBOR BLOODBATH.

Things got a little confusing. Debbie was leaning back between my thighs and I was kissing her. Bart was reaching out from time to time, grabbing my arm, steadying the course. I didn't even know where we were going; certainly not to U.Mass-Boston, which is where we were headed. We decided to aim for the skyscrapers, maybe to the Aquarium docks. The people at the Aquarium needed to be warned anyway, since a lot of their fish breathed water from the Harbor.

"They loaded those drums onto vans," Debbie was saying. It seemed like she wasn't pissed at all about being kidnapped, handcuffed and almost killed. She was totally calm. Of course she was totally calm; she'd made it, she'd survived. "I followed one of the vans out west, across Roxbury and Brookline and Newton. Every so often they'd stop along the gutter. I figured out they were dumping into the sewers. The vans had pipes or something that dumped the wastes out the bottom."

"Did you get..."

"Yeah, I got samples. Scraped them up out of the gutter. Real bad-smelling stuff. Of course they've got 'em now. The camera too."

"How did they catch you?"

"The car phone rang. Stopped by the curb for a few minutes to talk and they came from behind and got me with guns."

For a minute I thought that was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard. "Who the hell was it from? You should've told them to call you back."

"Couldn't. It was from Wyman."

"Wyman? What did that silly fuck want?"

"He was tipping us off. He says Smimoff is going to do something tonight."

"Oh, shit."

"Going to blow up a big ship in Everett. He's got some plastic explosive."

"A Basco ship?"

"Yeah."

Water was streaming down her face, though by now she should have been wind-dried. She was sweating and shivering at the same time. In the dim, grey light coming off the city, I could see a trail of saliva roll out the corner of her mouth and down toward her ear.

"He's got a navy demolition man," she chattered.

"Debbie," I said, "did you swallow any of that water?"

She didn't answer.

"I love you, Debbie," I said, because it might be the last thing she'd ever hear.

We weren't going especially fast. I cranked the throttle back up and asked Bart to put some fingers down her throat. It wasn't necessary, though, because she was vomiting on her own. By the time we were in the Charles River Locks, north of downtown, the odor of shit and urine had mixed with the vomit and the bile, and her wrists were bleeding because she was convulsing in her handcuffs.

The Zode got us to within a couple hundred feet of the best hospital in the world, and then I put her over my shoulders in a fireman's carry and ran with her. Bart ran out onto Storrow Drive and stopped traffic for me. The Emergency Room doors were approaching, a rectangle of cool bluish light, and finally they sensed my presence and slid open.

The waiting room was full. All the benches and most of the floor were infested with dustheads, half handcuffed, half in convulsions. Someone had been handing out bad chowder at the Poyzen Boyzen concert.

This was no good. Debbie's nervous system was completely shorted out; she was thrashing so hard, like a woman possessed by Ashtoreth, that together Bart and I could hardly hold her.

"Organophosphate poisoning," I shouted. "Cholinesterase inhibitor."

"Drug related," said the nickel-plated nurse receptionist. "You'll have to wait your turn," she continued, as we blew past her and into the corridor.

We hauled Debbie from room to room, chased by a cortege of nurses and security guards, until I found the right one and kicked the door open.

Dr. J. turned around and was amazed. "Alright, S.T.! You have a new look! Thanks for coming around, man! I'm kind of busy now but ..."

"Jerry! Atropine! Now!" I screamed. And being Dr. J., he

had a syringe of atropine going into her arm within, maybe, fifteen seconds. And Debbie just deflated. We laid her out on the linoleum because a two-hundred-fifty pound Poyzen Boyzen fan was strapped to the table. Dr. J. began to check her signs. A lynch mob of ER nurses had gathered in the hallway.

"SLUD," Dr. J. said.

"What?"

"SLUD. Salivation, Lachrymation, Urination, and Defecation. The symptoms of a cholinesterase inhibitor. What, S.T., are you handling nerve gas now? Working for, like, the Iraqis or something?"

"These guys make the Iraqis look like fucking John Denver," I said.

"Well, that's a real drag. But your friend is going to be physically okay."

"Physically?"

"We have to check her brain functions," he said. "So I'm going to get a consult on this."

Pretty soon they brought a gurney and hauled her away to someplace I couldn't go. "We'll get word on this pretty soon," Dr. J. said, "so just chill out for a little."

He turned back to the Poyzen Boyzen on the table. Despite his size and PCP overdose, he'd been pretty quiet. Mostly because he was strapped down with six-point leather restraints. Not that he didn't want to kill us.

"Hey, check it out!" Dr. J. was pulling some slips of paper out of the guy's studded vest. "Tickets to a private party, man! Or ticket stubs, I should say. Up in Saugus. There's three of them. Hey, I'm off in fifteen minutes, let's check it out."

The patient protested the only way he could, by arching his back and slamming his ass into the table over and over again.

"I'll bet his old lady's still up there. Hey, I'll bet she's cute!"

The guy figured out how to use his vocal cords at some preverbal level and Dr. J. had to shout to be heard.

"Jeez, can you believe I already gave this guy twenty-five mils of Haldol? PCP is amazing stuff, man!"

"Dr. J.!" a nurse was screaming. "We have other patients!"

"His keychain's right there, man," Dr. ]. said, nodding to a big wad of chain hanging out of the guy's pocket. "Grab it and we can fuck around with his Harley."

This room was so loud that we fled into the hallway. "I hate these dusters," Dr. J. said.

A nurse was bearing down on me with a clipboard. I got to thinking about the bureaucratic problems that might arise. Which form do you fill out when a dead terrorist brings a handcuffed, SLUDding organophosphate victim in off the street? How many hours were we going to spend plowing through this question if I stuck around? So I didn't stick around. I told them Debbie had a Blue Cross card in her wallet, and then I split. Once we were a safe distance away, I called Tanya and told her to spread the word: Debbie was in the hospital and she could probably use some visitors. And some bodyguards.

Then I hung up. Bart and I were standing in the parking lot of the Charles River Shopping Center at three in the morning, in the Hub of the Universe, surrounded on all sides by toxic water. Boone was on a ship that was probably headed for Everett right now. When it got there, my favorite environmentalist, Smirnoff, was going to blow it up. Laughlin and the other bad guys would die. That was good. Our sailor friend, the skipper and Boone would probably die too, though. And the evidence we wanted so badly, the tank full of concentrated organophosphates down in the belly of the ship, would become shrapnel. The PCB bugs would be gone from the Harbor, with no way to trace them back to Basco. Pleshy would become president of the United States and eight-year-old schoolchildren would write him letters. My aunt would tell me what a great man he was and military bands would precede him everywhere. And, what really hurt: Hoa would say, well, maybe Canada needs some Vietnamese restaurants.

At least that's the way it seemed right then. I might have stretched a few things, but one thing was for damn sure: we had to stop Smimoff.

"Is this what they call being a workaholic?" I muttered as we jogged through the North End, heading for Bart's van, chewing on some benzedrine capsules. "I mean, any decent human should be sitting by Debbie's bed, holding her hand when she wakes up."

"Hum," Bart said.

"I would give anything to kiss her right now. Instead, she's going to wake up and say, 'Where is that fucker who claims he loves me?' I'm out working, that's where I am. I've been working for, what, ninety-six hours straight?"

"Forty-eight, maybe."

"And can I take time out to hold the hand of a sick woman? No. This is workaholism."

"Pretty soon the speed'll kick in," Bart explained, "and you'll feel better."

We found the van where he'd left it, but someone had broken in and ripped off the stereo and the battery. He'd parked on a flat space by the waterfront so I got to push-start it. That was fun. The speed helped there. "I wish we had the stereo," he said.

We headed south along Commercial street, running along all the piers, and when we looked to the east we could see the Basco Explorer churning its way northward, blending the poison into the Harbor with its screws. A major crime was taking place right out there, in full view of every downtown building, and there wasn't a single witness. Toxic criminals have it easy.

Eventually we got ourselves to Rory Gallagher's house in Southie. He was back from the hospital now, healthy enough to threaten us with physical harm for coming around at this time of night. We got him calmed down and asked him how we could get in touch with the other Gallaghers, the Charlestown branch of the family.

Here's the part where I could cast racial aspersions on the Irish and say that they have a natural fondness for acts of terrorism. I won't go that far. It's fairer to say that a lot of people have fucked them over and they don't take it kindly. Gallagher, he loved Kennedy and he loved Tip, but he'd always suspected Fleshy, who was a Brahmin, who pissed on his leg whenever he spoke about the fishing industry. When I told Rory how Basco and Fleshy-to him they were a single unit-had poisoned his body and many others, he turned completely red and responded just the right way. He responded as though he'd been raped.

"But we've pushed them," I explained, "pushed and pushed them and made them desperate, forced them into bigger crimes to cover up the old ones. That's why we need your brother."

So we got Joe on the phone. I let Rory argue with him for a while, so he'd be fully awake when I started my pitch. Then I just confiscated the telephone. "Joseph."

"Mr. Taylor."

"Remember all that garbage your grandpa dumped into the Harbor?"

"I don't want to hear any shit about that at this time of the morning...."

"Wake up, Joe. It's Yom Kippur, dude. The Day of Atonement is here."

I knew Rory's phone wasn't bugged, so we made all kinds of calls. We called an Aquarium person I knew and gave her the toxic Paul Revere. Called all the media people whose numbers I could remember, yanked them right out of bed. Called Dr. J. for an update on Debbie; she was doing okay. The Gallaghers made a couple of calls and inadvertently mobilized about half of the self-righteous anger in all of Southie and half of Charlestown. When we walked out Gallagher's front door to get back in Bart's van, we found, waiting in the front yard, a priest with chloracne, a fire engine, a minicam crew and five adolescents with baseball bats.

We borrowed a car battery from one of the adolescents and drove crosstown toward Cambridge, taking the two largest adolescents with us. Along the way, I gave Bart a brief lesson in how to run a Zodiac-one of the Townies kept saying "I know, I know"-and then dropped them all off on the Esplanade near Mass General.

Then I took the van to GEE headquarters. Gomez's Impala was there, and I met him in the stairway. "Thanks for the warning," I said. I'd had plenty of time to think about that voice on my answering machine-"your house has a huge fucking bomb in the basement. Get out, now."

"I'm sorry," he said.

"They probably came on to you real nice," I said. "Laughin seemed so decent. All they wanted was information. They'd never hurt anyone."

"Fuck that, man, you cost me a job. I just didn't want to see you get killed."

"We should talk later, Gomez. Right now I have business, and I don't want you to know anything about it." "I'm out of here."

He left, and I stood there in the dark until I heard his Impala start up and drive away.

Now was the time to use the most awesome weapon in my arsenal, a force so powerful I'd never dreamed of bringing it out. Locked up in a cheap, sheet-metal safe in my office, to which I alone had the combination, were a dozen bottles filled with 99% pure, 1,4-diamino butane. The stench of death itself distilled and concentrated through the magic of chemistry.

During the drive here I'd started to wonder whether this was a good idea, whether this stuff was as bad as I'd built it up to be in my mind. All doubt was removed when I opened the safe door. None of the bottles had leaked, but when I'd filled them, a month ago, I'd unavoidably smeared a few droplets on the lids, and all those putrescine molecules had been bouncing around inside of the safe ever since, looking for some nostrils to climb up. When they climbed up mine, I knew that this was a good plan.

I put the bottles into a box. I took my time about it and packed crumpled newspapers around the glass. Plastic would have been safer but the stuff would have diffused through the walls.

Then I grabbed my scuba gear. This was going to involve underwater work and, once the putrescine escaped, I'd need bottled air anyway. I got the Darth Vader Suit. I stole someone's SoHo root beer from the fridge and chugged the whole bottle. It was made from all natural ingredients.