Zodiac: The Eco-Thriller

  “Just bow hunting,” Jim said. Which was news to me. I thought he'd killed all that venison with his big fancy rifle.

  “Well, that's real similar, in a lot of ways. You have to get close, because you're using a short-range weapon. And that means you have to be smart. Like Dolmacher.”

  I suppressed a groan. In this company, Dolmacher was probably considered an Einstein.

  “I thought you used guns,” Jim said.

  “Handguns. And they're all CO2-powered. So the effective range is pretty short. Here.”

  He unlocked a gun cabinet full of largish pistols. He showed us where the CO2 cartridge went in, and then showed us the ammunition: a squishy rubber ball, marble-sized, full of red paint.

  “This thing hits you and ploosh! You're marked. See, totally nonviolent. It's a game of strategy. That's why Dolmacher's so good at it. He's a master strategist.”

  We told the guy that we'd get back to him. When we got back to the parking lot, Boone was standing in a semicircle of awed survivalists, explaining how to defeat a Doberman Pinscher in single combat without hurting it.

  “Nice to see you're getting back to your old self,” I told him, when we finally dragged him back into the truck.

  “Those guys are troglodytes,” he said. “Their solution to everything is a high-powered rifle.”

  “Maybe we should start an institute on nonviolent terrorism.”

  “Catchy. But if it's not violent, there's no terror involved.”

  “Boone, you sound like those guys. There's more to life than firepower. I think it's possible to create some terror just by confronting people with their own sins.”

  “What's your problem, you grow up Catholic or something? Nobody gives a shit about their sins anymore. You think those corporate execs worry about sin?”

  “Well, they've poisoned people, they've broken the law, and when I show them up in the media, they get real bothered by it.”

  “That's just because it's bad for business. They don't really feel guilty.”

  By now Jim had us out on the highway. He pointed the silver Indian's face northwards and depressed the accelerator.

  “How about Pleshy?” Boone said. “You think he feels guilty? You think he's scared? Shit no.”

  “They're still human beings, Boone. I'll bet he's scared shitless. He created a disaster.”

  “Yeah, he's showing all the symptoms of a man paralyzed with fear,” Boone said, consulting one of his newspapers. “Let's see, ten o'clock, ax-throwing competition. Ten-thirty, grand marshal of log-rolling contest. He's running sacred all right.”

  “What do you expect him to do, run to Boston and hide? Look Boone, the guy is slick. He's got his gnomes working on the problem. Like Laughlin. Shit, I wonder what that bastard Laughlin's up to. Pleshy's job is to go around looking brave. But if someone confronted him, right in front of the TV cameras...”

  Boone and I locked eyes for about a quarter of a mile, until Jim got nervous and started looking over at us. “You guys are nuts,” he said, “you'll get popped. Or shot.”

  “But at the very least he'd break a sweat,” I said.

  “I'll buy that,” Boone said.

  “And we could publicize the whole thing.” I was remembering my last action in New Hampshire - at the Seabrook nuclear site, years ago. We all got arrested, never made it onto the site. Some of us even got the crap beat out of us. But we got it on the news. And the reactor was still sitting there, uncompleted, a decade later.

  “You'd have to get real close,” Jim said. “Secret Service, you know.”

  “They'll be totally loose,” Boone said. “What do they have to worry about? A dwarf like Pleshy - nobody even remembers the guy's name - early in the campaign, at an ax-throwing contest in New fuckin' Hampshire. Shit, if I was going to assassinate him, this is when I'd do it.”

  We found Dolmacher's car easily enough. The Lumbermen's Festival was staged in one of the many postage-stamp state parks scattered around New Hampshire, and there just weren't that many ways to get into it. We knew he wasn't going to park his car conspicuously, or illegally. He was going to park it like a proper Beantown leaf-peeper and then he was going to fade into the woods. And that was exactly what he'd done. We found it at a roadside camping/picnicking area, near the head of a nature-appreciation trail.

  “Very clever,” Jim said. “No one would expect him there.”

  I looked in the windows but didn't see much. One pharmaceuticals bottle, half-hidden under the seat. No ammo belts or open tubes of camouflage paint. Dolmacher was taking a remarkably buttoned-down approach to this totally insane mission.

  Maybe the bugs could affect your brain. The media had been speculating all week that my contact with toxic wastes had fried my cerebral cortex, turned me into a drooling terrorist. I felt pretty calm, but Dolmacher had gotten a much worse dose, and was less stable to begin with. He hadn't turned into a raving maniac. He was acting more like the psychotics you read about in the newspapers: calm, methodical, invisible.

  Jim was sitting in the truck, messing around with something, and Boone was watching intently. I went over, stood on the running board, and looked. Jim had pulled one of his homemade bows out from behind the seat.

  “This is the Nez Perce model,” he explained. “See, the limbs are strengthened with a membrane that comes from the inside of a ram's horn. They used bighorn sheep, but I get by using domesticateds.”

  “What the fuck are you going to do with that, Jim?”

  “What the fuck are you going to do when you catch Dolmacher, S.T.? Remember? Your gun's on the bottom of that lake.”

  “Wasn't planning on shooting him anyway.”

  “You're a real prize, you know that? What do you think we're doing here? It's my understanding that we're going after a psycho with a gun.”

  “Only because we have to have his knowledge. We won't have that if we fill him full of arrows.”

  “You underestimate me, S.T” Jim pulled a bundle of arrows out from behind the seat. The shafts were straight and smooth, feathers at the back as usual, but without heads.

  “Fishing arrows,” Boone said.

  Jim nodded and held one up for me. One short barb stuck backwards from the point, and a short perpendicular piece was lashed to the shaft about three inches behind that.

  “This keeps it from going all the way through the fish, the barb keeps it from pulling out. Now, a game arrow, with the big head, that kills by severing a lot of blood vessels. The animal bleeds to death. But this will just stick into a big animal and annoy him.”

  I guess I still looked skeptical.

  “Look, the guy said Dolmacher has a black belt in this game. If you think he's going to let us sneak up close enough to pluck the gun out of his hand, you're nuts.”

  “Okay. But if the Secret Service comes after us, you have to toss all that crap into the bushes.”

  “Obviously. Hell, this isn't for assassinations anyhow. It's the equivalent of a CO2 gun with paint pellets.”

  Zodiac

  29

  BOONE INSISTED that he was the one. “Hell, you just tried to blow the guy up a week ago,” he kept pointing out. “Your face is a 3-D wanted poster. They'll pop you. But everyone's forgotten about me. Unless Pleshy's secretly in the whaling business.”

  I couldn't argue with any of that. We agreed that Jim and I were going to hike up the trail and Boone was going to take the truck. He would swing around to the site of the Lumbermen's Festival and scope out the place. There wasn't any point in planning this out, because it was all random. If Pleshy happened to walk past him, he'd take the opportunity to stand up and state his case, get some media glare on Pleshy's reaction. If it was impossible to get near Pleshy, he'd forget about that, head for the back of the crowd and look for a tall, pale, psychotic nerd with his hand in his coat.

  “Maybe we should call the cops and tell them Dolmacher's out there,” Jim said at the last minute.

  This was not an idea that had occurred to me. F
rankly, if Pleshy ate a few bullets it was okay with me. I was worried about Dolmacher - probably the only guy in the world who knew how to stop this impending global catastrophe. He could easily get shot in the bargain. Even if he didn't, they'd truck him off to the loony bin where he wouldn't be of any use.

  “Screw Pleshy. We have to co-opt Dolmacher.”

  “If we warn them, they'll step up their security,” Boone said. “We won't be able to get close to Pleshy.”

  “We have plenty of time to chase down Dolmacher,” Jim explained. “And if we give the cops a complete description, they'll spend all their effort looking for him. That'll make it easier for anyone who doesn't look like Dolmacher to get close.”

  “Jim's right,” Boone said. “If this all falls apart and we get popped, and Dolmacher gets found, they'll want to know why we didn't warn them. They'll say we're all working together. If we warn them, we're set up as good guys.”

  So we drove half a mile down the road to a gas station with a payphone, and I called the cops. We decided it should be me, because whatever I said would get recorded, and it would look good if we had this proof that I was terribly concerned about Pleshy's welfare.

  “I can't give my identity because I'm being framed for a crime I didn't commit,” I said, “and which only an asshole would think I really did-” Boone kicked me in the leg “-but this should help prove my innocence. I think an attempt is going to be made on Alvin Pleshy's life today at the Lumbermen's Festival.” And I gave a complete description of Dolmacher, emphasizing all the ways he didn't look like Boone, and there were plenty of those.

  “Uh . . . okay. Okay. Okay,” the woman at the police station kept murmuring, all through the conversation. Definitely the shy type. Not equipped for presidential assassinations.

  Finally, then, Boone dropped us off at the trail and headed around for the Festival.

  Here I was totally incompetent, so I just followed Jim. He was wearing a kind of bulky, tattered overcoat that he kept in his truck for purposes like changing the oil. He had his bow underneath. It looked kind of stupid, but anything was better than brandishing a primitive weapon around the SS. He was half-running down the trail in kind of a crouch, keeping his head turned to one side. I was glad he knew bow hunting, that would help us. But I got to thinking about Dolmacher's black belt in survivalism, and I wondered just how clever and paranoid he was. There was only a mile, maybe a mile-and-a-half, of forest between us and the festival site: across some flats, up a ridge, down the other side. He had plenty of time. Wouldn't it make sense to go in a ways, then double back on the trail to see if we were being followed?

  Naah. Who would follow him, why would he worry?

  Because he'd been holding up drugstores. Maybe someone had gotten his license plate number. Maybe - I was just putting myself in his shoes, here - maybe his car had been noticed and they were sending in the cops.

  How would cops do it? A frontal assault. Dozens of men, spaced a few feet apart, combing the whole area. He couldn't gun them all down.

  Well, maybe he could, if he had a silenced weapon. And I wouldn't put it past Dolmacher to own a silencer, or even a submachine gun. He'd always had an obsession for Uzi's and MAC-10s and such in college; this had clearly continued into his wiser years, and now, God help him, he had enough income to supply an arsenal.

  Poor Dolmacher. All that priceless knowledge, that world-saving information about the bug, attached to a stunted personality. If we could stop him - not if, damn it, we were going to stop him - we'd have to deal with that personality for the next several days. A grim prospect either way.

  Next question: what would he do if a couple of individuals came after him? First of all, they'd never find him without a dog. Jim knew a few things about tracking, but I doubted he was that good. If they did find him, they'd be in danger. Witness Bathtub Man.

  Where the hell was Jim, anyway? I'd looked away and then he was gone. I went on for a few yards and stopped. Wouldn't be very smart to call out his name. There was kind of a gap in the foliage along the trail, so I stepped into it, wandered a few yards into the forest, and there he was, pissing on a tree.

  “He probably came this way,” Jim said.

  “I don't get it. How can you tell?” I've never understood trackers.

  He shrugged, continuing what was turning out to be an epic piss. “I can't tell. But the festival is off in this direction. There's an obvious opening in the trees here, it's just the easiest way to go. There are some tracks right there that look pretty fresh.”

  He nodded and I looked. The ground was wet and kind of muddy. Someone's size 13s had definitely passed through here. Not that Dolmacher was that tall. His wrists and ankles were like broomsticks. But his hands and feet belonged on a pro basketball player. Whoever it was, he'd been wearing those heavy-duty Vibram-soled running shoes that affluent people nowadays used instead of ten-ton waffle-stompers. Good traction combined with light weight.

  And either he didn't care about being followed, or else he wanted us to find these tracks. I looked around at the forest and suddenly it all looked dangerous. The undergrowth wasn't that thick. If you squatted down and hid yourself, you could see of a hundred yards, but you'd be invisible to within ten. It was no fair.

  “Change of plans,” I said. “What if Dolmacher's waiting for us?”

  “You know the guy, I don't.”

  “He's just the type who would do it. It wouldn't be complicated enough to just run through the woods and bore a few holes in Pleshy. He'd have to turn it into a war game.”

  “So? I thought you said you were smarter than this guy.”

  “Yowza, Jim! My eyes are watering.”

  Jim just shrugged.

  I said, “Let's just go to the festival site. Let's take kind of an indirect route. We've still got an hour. We don't have to track the guy, we already know where he's going, so the only thing we can do by following his tracks is fall into a trap.”

  “We can swing way around and avoid the ridge,” Jim said.

  “Which would put us on the highway.”

  He sighed. “Or go over the ridge up there.”

  “Are you up to it?”

  “We'll have to hurry.”

  “You have a watch, Jim?”

  “Do you?”

  “Shit no.”

  “Wonderful. We just have to go as fast as we can.”

  Time stretches out when you're in the woods and in a hurry. What seems like two hours is actually one. So if you have a deadline, you're always anxious about it. Usually you get there way ahead of time.

  That's what I kept telling myself, anyway. It didn't make me feel any better. Actually I just felt like an asshole. We'd gone in all hot to track Dolmacher down and then realized we were in mortal danger. Meanwhile, Boone was out on his own. He was easily a match for two dozen SS men, but I at least wanted to see it.

  When we got to the place where the ground went from flat to approximately vertical, we were already hurting. I was sick and starting to get cramps in the gut, and Jim had stepped in a hole and twisted his ankle.

  I was opening my mouth to suggest that we run back and hitchhike to the festival when I heard a crinkling noise. Jim was unfolding a tinfoil packet that he'd taken from his pocket.

  “Lunch already?” I said.

  “Most people associate hallucinogenic mushrooms with the Southwest,” he said, “but the Northwest tribes are familiar with fourteen varieties. I was there last summer.”

  “Studying their culture.”

  “That's for whiteys. I was taking my family to Expo in Vancouver. But I did stop in for a while, and look what I brought home.” He popped something dry and brown into his mouth. “Legal for me, but not for you.”

  “What the hell, I can't get much more illegal than I already am.”

  The shrooms didn't help much on the first part of the climb but on the last part they did wonderful things. We still felt awful, but we were thinking about other things. Everything got very bright - o
f course, we were gaining altitude - and we believed that our senses were sharper. We lost track of time. But as I already said, this happens anyway when you're in the woods, in a hurry. Especially when you have to keep doubling back and going around obstacles. But eventually we made it to the top, and then we simply didn't give a flying fuck anymore. Without the drug, I would have been paralyzed by fear of Dolmacher. With it, we just started to run. When it got too steep, we put our feet down and skidded through old, wet leaves. There were a few short earthen cliffs and we slid down those on our asses.

  Finally the ground leveled out, the woods got thick again and we realized that we were totally lost. Jim stayed cooler than I did and made us stand there for a while, getting our hearts and lungs under control. Eventually we were able to hear highway noises, in roughly one direction. Comparing that with a map and the location of the sun, we drew an approximate bead on the site of the ax-throwing competition. We spread out, about a hundred feet apart, and tried to move forward quietly.

  Which is a joke when you're knee-deep in last year's leaves. The wind was blowing in the treetops, covering our noise a little, but I still felt kind of conspicuous, as though I was driving a tank through the woods. But down here the trees were skinny and widely spaced and I was pretty confident that Dolmacher wasn't lurking anywhere, ready to spin out from camouflage, both hands wrapped around his pistol, drawing down on me. I didn't want that to be the last thing I ever saw.

  It got worse and worse. We saw brighter light up ahead and we knew there had to be a clearing. We heard a crowd, heard the cash register ringing at the concession stand. Dolmacher had to be between us and that. The undergrowth got a lot thicker and I came across a gully. Had to slide down one side and clamber up the other, helpless, white and stupid. I was thinking of those old World War II pictures of captives standing in the trenches, about to be gunned.

  My first handhold ripped loose and I did a semi-controlled plunge back to the floor of the gully. Now I was ankle-deep in mud, covered with dirt and leaves, and wet. I moved downstream a few yards, toward where Jim was supposed to be. But I hadn't heard or seen him in ten minutes. Finally the walls of the gully opened out a little bit and I found an obvious way to get out of it.