I took a swig of Guinness to relax, breathed deep and said, “Hey, I think someone's calling you.”
That brought the skipper awake. He was a gleeful, potato-faced Irishman who'd been lying on a naugahyde bench, dozing through the tail end of a rough thirty-six hours, probably having been called out of a bar in Jersey to make an emergency run to Boston. He ambled over and picked up the mike. “Explorer.”
On the other end, a new voice had taken over. “It's Laughlin. We're coming in,” he said, loud and tense and dominating.
“Dogfuckers!” Debbie called in the background.
Withering disgust passed over the skipper's face; he wasn't in control of his own ship. The world's biggest asshole was running the show. “We're still out here,” he said.
The crewmen turned away from the TV and laughed.
“We have some special cargo to bring on board and we need to do it quickly and quietly,” Laughlin said, “we'll probably need a crane and a net.”
I tried to think of nonviolent ways to torture Laughlin to death.
“I think you guys better go,” Tom said.
“That's okay, I feel kind of sick anyway,” I said.
Bart shrugged, clueless but cooperative. We cleared out. I remembered to turn around at the last minute and check the channel they were using on the CB: Eleven.
On the ladder, I was ready to jump into the water to get there faster. Then I thought about what was being pumped out underneath us. If they were unloading enough poison to kill every bug in the Harbor, it must be incredibly concentrated in the vicinity of the ship. So I took the slow way down; when you're in a hurry, it takes a hell of a long time to descend a rope ladder. But by the time Bart got to the bottom I'd started the motor; by the time Tom had leaned over the rail to wave good-bye to us, we were a hundred feet away, invisible, picking up speed.
Next challenge: picking out the boat where Debbie was being held. The obvious thing was to hang around the Basco Explorer and wait. Then I got to thinking: what if Laughlin changed his mind and decided to dump her in the Harbor? I picked up our walkie-talkie to listen, then realized it didn't even receive channel eleven.
They had to be coming from the mainland. We knew they'd been beaching their boats somewhere along Dorchester Bay. That still left us with a lot of water to cover, but with the fifty-horse motor, this Zodiac absolutely kicked ass. I cranked it up and headed for Southie in a broad zigzag. I told Bart what we were looking for: a Boston Whaler ferrying Debbie and a pack of goons.
The bastards weren't using their running lights; we almost ran right over them. Bart noticed it first and grabbed my arm and then I saw the side of the boat, white fiberglass with a harpoon logo, right in our path. Jerked the motor to one side, came very close to capsizing the Zode, and blew a twenty-foot rooster tail of toxic brine over their transom.
When I brought it around I was expecting them to be blasting out of there, trying to get away from us - make my day, Laughlin - but they were dead in the water, rooting around for flashlights. Bart speared a beam into the Whaler and blinded some goons, but we saw no signs of Debbie. She must have seen us, and jumped out, and now she couldn't call out for help because they'd hear her too. Either that, or her head wasn't above water.
I picked up a flotation cushion and frisbeed it back into her general location, then picked a different place and waved the flashlight. “She's over there!” I shouted, loud enough to be heard, cranked the Zode and headed out into the middle of nowhere. Within seconds I heard them behind me. I brought the Zode around to a stop and aimed the light into the water again as they headed toward us with all the horsepower they had.
When I knew they were going to overshoot, I twitched the throttle again and blew out of their path, spun the boat and returned to where I'd thrown out the cushion.
It was still there, bobbing up and down on the clashing wakes of the boats, and Debbie was clinging to it.
Laughlin didn't have a chance. Debbie only weighed a hundred pounds and we had two scared-shitless men to haul her into the boat. We hardly even had to slow down. Then we were plowing a trench in the murdered Harbor, heading for the lights.
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, SLUDing 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 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. Call
ed 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.