Zodiac (39 page)

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. J. 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 Smirnoff.

“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 Pleshy, who was a Brahmin, who pissed on his leg whenever he spoke about the fishing industry. When I told Rory how Basco and Pleshy—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. “Laughlin 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.

Just on a hunch, I took the long way around to Basco. Hopped Rte. 1 up into Chelsea and then peeled off on the Revere Beach Parkway, which runs west through the heart of Everett and just south of Basco's kingdom. When I saw the Everett River Bridge coming up, I slowed down a little and flicked on the high beams.

An abandoned van was sitting on the shoulder of the highway—déjà vu—in exactly the same place where Gomez and I had stripped our old van after Wyman, the wacky terrorist, had left it there.

From here, you could get on the freeway, or you could slog across some toxic mudflats and boltcut your way onto Basco property, or you could go fifty feet up the shoulder, disappear under the bridge and mount an amphibian operation upstream into Basco's docking facilities. I could look straight across the flats from here and into the bridge of the
Basco Explorer
, now nestled into place in the shadow of the main plant. It was no more than a quarter of a mile away. Park a van on the shoulder here and you had a command outpost for any kind of attack on Basco.

What had Wyman been up to when he'd trashed our last van here? Was it a dress rehearsal, or a failed operation? Or had it been a real accident, one that had planted the seed of this idea to begin with?

I sure as hell wasn't going to park here. Didn't even slow down. I drove the van across the bridge until I was out of sight of Basco,
parked it on the shoulder and slogged down to the riverside under the bridge, carrying half my weight in various pieces of crap. Bart and his Townie friends were already there, smoking a reefer. They'd been joined by a couple of black derelicts who evidently lived here. Bart had fed them all of our Big Macs.

“Haven't you heard, man?” I said, “Just say no!” They were startled. Pot always made me more paranoid than I was to begin with; I couldn't understand how they'd want to smoke it here and now.

“Want a hit?” Bart croaked, waving the reefer around and trying to talk while holding his breath.

“See any action?” I asked.

“Big fuck-up over there,” Bart said, waving in the direction of the flats. “Bunch of cop cars showed up and arrested some guys. Then one of them got stuck in the mud.”

“It was great,” one of the derelicts said. “They had to ask the prisoners to get out so they could push it out of the shit.”

“So,” Bart said, “I guess we don't have to worry about this Smirnoff dude any more.”

“That was a diversion,” I said. “Smirnoff's a jackass, but he's not stupid. He sent some people in through the obvious route, with boltcutters. Ten to one they're unarmed and they'll get popped for trespass. Meanwhile he's got a diver somewhere in this river with the real package. A navy veteran.”

I wondered if the guy was an ex-SEAL. That would be great. What were my odds in man-to-man underwater combat in a dark sea of nerve gas with a SEAL? The only option was just to avoid the diver, find the mine and disconnect it. If Smirnoff had really rigged it up out of plastique, it had to be something pretty simple and obvious, probably timed with a Smurf wristwatch. Bart had brought the toolbox from his van and I grabbed wirecutters and a prybar.

“Did you get ahold of Boone?” I said, nodding at the walkie-talkie.

“Tried. Put out a call for Winchester, like you said, but no answer.”

“That's okay. He'll figure it out. Too risky to talk on the radio anyway.” I set down the box of putrescine and lifted the lid. “This is the bad stuff.”

Two bottles went into my goody bag and the rest into the Zodiac. We all squatted together on the riverbank and went over it one last time, and then I made myself incommunicado by turning on the air valve and strapping my head into the Darth Vader mask. Everyone watched this carefully; one of the derelicts' lips moved and then I could feel them all laughing. I waded into the river.

First I swam across and checked out the opposite bank. Definite tracks in the muck here. Big, triangular, flipper-shaped tracks. I started swimming toward the
Basco Explorer
.

Technically I was swimming upstream here, but the speed of the current was zero. There had been a mild smell of the poison, not nearly as bad as earlier tonight. But I had to figure they were poisoning this river too, since it led straight to Basco Central and they wouldn't want any trail of PCB bugs leading in here from the Harbor.

Sometimes I couldn't believe the shit I did for this job. But if I could pull something off here, I'd have a good excuse for taking a couple of days off. Debbie and I could climb into a waterbed somewhere and recuperate together, not get out of bed for about a week. If she'd have me. Go out to Buffalo, maybe, get back into that honeymoon suite, buy a shitload of donuts and a Sunday
L.A. Times
… .

About ten seconds of those thoughts and I got an erection and felt really drowsy and stupid. Hadn't taken enough speed. I checked the valve on the tank to make sure I was getting plenty of oxygen. Oxygen, oxygen, the ultimate addiction, better even than nitrous oxide. Tonight I needed lots. Had to keep alert, had to watch out for that SEAL. But it was such a boring trip, swimming through blackness and murk without a light. Easy to get scared, natural to fall into paranoia and despair. Every so often I broke the surface to check my direction and to see how close I was to the prow of the
Basco Explorer
. At first it was too far away, then, suddenly, it was much too close.

If I were a terrorist, where would I place my bomb? Probably right under the big dieseis, amidships. Even if it didn't sink the ship, this would do the most damage.