Zodiac Page 15

  The sewer coming out of the Boner plant was much larger than four feet across, but we couldn’t construct a plate to go across. Why? Because it would have to go in via the man hole. So we’d have to use lots and lots of cement. Cement is more permanent anyway, and permanence was the key to this job. Those butterfly plugs are just media events. You put one in, with a big GEE logo painted across it, and the minicam crews hang around and film the seasick plant workers struggling to remove it. But this was underground and so there was no point in showing off. And the Boner waste was much too serious. Dioxin, man. Unacceptable stuff. Dump dioxin, you’re playing for keeps, you die.

  First I drove up to the Falls and looked for a hotel room. It’s funny. Everywhere I go, I like to rent the honeymoon suite. What the hell, GEE’s picking up the tab. And the honeymoon suite is the best place to unwind after a rough day of humping cement bags and being hauled around in manacles. You can sit around in the heart-shaped tub, you can romp on the waterbed. And now, here I was on the road to Niagara Falls, where every room was a honeymoon suite. All I had to do was pick the best one.

  Took a while, but I found it: lava lamps, eight-foot waterbed with fur, mirrored ceiling, view of the freeway. The manager hated my looks but liked the idea that I was going to stay for a while. I charged up a few days on the GEE gold card, told her I’d be back later and headed back toward Buffalo.

  Now the only thing on my mind was the pair of suits who’d been tailing me every since I’d left the train station. They were driving a Chevy Celebrity, conspicuous by its very dullness. My Subaru was smaller, more maneuverable, and probably just as fast, if the tranny didn’t fall out. Once we got back into Buffalo, I got to engage in my favorite sport.

  I topped off the tank first, checked the tire pressure, emptied my bladder, bought a six-pack of Jolt. Then I headed for the on-ramp and gave them a chance to line up behind me. They wouldn’t follow me directly onto the ramp because this was a covert tail. So I cruised up the ramp, cranking it as hard as it would go, then shut off my lights and braked onto the shoulder, using my handbrake so the taillights wouldn’t give me away.

  A few seconds later they shot past me, their brake lights blazing in embarrassment, and I took off and followed them.

  And followed them and followed them. For four hours I followed those stupid fucks. My car had a shorter range, but I’d just filled it up.

  Nothing’s more fun than following someone whose orders are to follow you. I could do it forever: cruising flamboyantly behind them, playing classic rock on the jury-rigged stereo and flicking cigar ashes out the window.

  They didn’t even figure it out for twenty minutes or so. They decided to play it cool and stay ahead of me for a while before gradually dropping back. But I wouldn’t let them. Finally they came to a full stop on the shoulder and waited. I stopped behind them and waited. They started up and pulled an illegal U-turn across the median strip. Obviously they weren’t cops, because cops are trained how to do that maneuver, and these guys had never done it before. I followed them through that exercise, after pausing on the shoulder to give them a little time.

  Then they went into the next phase: wondering what to do now. They got off at the next ramp and I followed them around downtown Buffalo, listening to three Zevon songs about hapless mercenaries, back-to-back, no commercial interruptions. I doubt they had classic rock and roll playing on their stereo. They had a regular discussion in progress, with lots of hand-waving and glancing back over their headrests at me.

  Finally they pulled off at an IHOP. I watched them through the windows until they had ordered coffee, then opened my door, peed on the asphalt, and reclined the seat so I was below window level. They came out in a few minutes and took off. I gave them a minute to think they’d finally made it, then pulled in behind them again.

  Then they knew they were fucked. They thought: this isn’t just a joke. This guy’s going to follow us until we have to report in, and then he’ll know who we are.

  Some bad driving ensued as they tried and failed to shake me. It’s hard to shake a tail in a totally deserted downtown. These guys had learned how to drive by watching “Hawaii Five-O” reruns: if our tires are squealing, we must be going fast.

  So they definitely weren’t cops. Cops or G-men would just stop the car and come up to me and say, “Okay, okay, very funny, asshole, now go home.” And they weren’t Mafia, or else I’d be bleeding in the dark. Some kind of cheap private dicks, or amateurs.

  If they were locals, they probably worked for Boner. If they’d followed me out from Boston, maybe they were connected to the PCP thing. Maybe we were talking about a drug lab, financed by yuppies, run by dustheads, and now that we’d gotten into this cloak-and-dagger stuff, the upper echelons didn’t know quite how to handle it.

  They realized too late that most of the gas stations in downtown Buffalo are closed at three in the morning. They ran out of gas right in the middle of a lane. I came up behind them, bumper to bumper, and shoved them into a parking space. But at the last minute, thinking of Scrounger, I downshifted, gunned it and shoved them right through the space and into the back of a parked car. The Celebrity’s power brakes didn’t work when the engine was dead.

  They were really ticked. They jumped out of the doors and came after me. I backed down the street a couple of blocks, letting them chase me, getting a good look at their adrenalin-flushed all-American faces, then blew them off and found a phone booth and dialed 911. There had been a fender bender downtown, I said, and the culprits had abandoned their car and run away from it, and I suspected that maybe the car was stolen. Yes, I’d be happy to give my name. Yes, I’d be there to give the police a statement.

  The cops were on the scene within two minutes. We had a huge, fortyish black cop with a pissed-off demeanor, and his younger, female partner. The two suits were loitering grimly nearby, huddled together in the dark like aborigines. When they coughed up their driver’s licenses, I got a peek over the woman cop’s shoulder. Massachusetts licenses. The pissed-off cop got on the radio and was kind enough to speak their names for me: David Kleinhoffer and Gary Dietrich. A couple of good Americo-Aryan rent-a-thugs.

  That was all I was going to learn out here. I went to a pay phone and called the car rental company. I used my flack voice.

  “Yes, this is Mr. Taylor. We’ve rented a vehicle from your office,” and I gave her the description and license plate number, “we’ve misplaced the rental agreement, and there seems to be some confusion as to which account it’s being charged to. I’m working in the accounting department and I need to know. Would you mind reading to me the impression from the charge slip?”

  She did. Turns out Kleinhoffer and Dietrich were working for a company named Biotronics.

  Now that I knew, it made sense. I should have guessed it. First Pöyzen Böyzen, then the Mafia, leaving me threats. And the Mafia thing didn’t start until right after I began worrying about it.

  Some assholes in fancy shoes had been trying to scare me. And for the most part they had done a damn fine job. But this bit with Scrounger was too fucking much.

  The tip was the computer. A Mafia goon would kick in the screen and say, that’s it, that sucker’s busted. Actually, monitor screens are cheap. The expensive part is the box underneath. Whoever trashed our place had known that much. He’d known about it, and cared. The thing with the freon, too. That was a pretty suburban way to trash a kitchen—letting the freon out of your fridge.

  Now that I’d seen the faces of the people who were trying to scare me, I was a lot less scared, and a lot more interested. Maybe they were really making PCP, or maybe they had some other nasty secret. When I got back from Buffalo I’d have to find out, and do these people some damage. In the meantime, I’d have to content myself with charging up tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of lingerie on their credit card number.

  18

  Still, the disappearing PCBs were keeping me awake at night. I’d gone over the whole thing a dozen times in my head,
trying to find my error. I wasn’t even sure which time I’d screwed up—on that first lone sample or on the whole batch we collected later.

  That’s the difference between being a toxic detective and some other kind. You’re a regular detective and you find a dead person on the floor, you know murder’s been committed; your eyes tell you. But if you’re a toxic detective, your eyes are a gas chromatograph, not always as reliable. If that mechanical eye tells you there are PCBs in this sample, you have to ask: how was the sample taken? Is the machine okay? Who else has been dicking around with it?

  For a second, I had an inspiration. Maybe someone had gotten to our samples overnight, while I was in getting massaged and drunk. They’d been sitting out in the back of the Omni, and high-tech goons could be just clever enough to get in there, dump out the samples, and replace them with fakes.

  But there were too many problems with that. First of all, it was just too implausible. Second, I remembered seeing a flash of red in one of my samples—a fragment of a Coke can—which I also saw again later, the next day. And most conclusive, when we plotted the results on the map, the samples showed an even, steady pattern of decreasing PCB levels as we headed toward Spectacle Island. That couldn’t be duplicated with fakes.

  My next inspiration: maybe the PCB spill was extremely localized. And maybe, just by dumb luck, I had come down into a hot spot on my first trip and gotten a really dirty sample by chance. This was just barely conceivable. Maybe there was some really big, old shark that had been hanging out in the Harbor for decades, eating bottom fish, building up incredibly high levels of bioconcentrated PCBs. Then it had croaked, settled to the bottom and decayed away to nothing, leaving a puddle of PCBs behind.,

  Stranger things had happened. When you’re being rational and scientific, you have to take into account that bizarre events can throw off your results. That’s why good scientists take a lot of samples and check their numbers before they go public. I could at least feel good about that.

  I snagged a few Z’s on the Blowfish and then went out and rented a U-Haul box truck. Debbie went out on the boat to plan the Niagara gig, while Alan and I, along with Frank, the largest member of the Blowfish crew, took the U-Haul outside of town to a big home-and-garden store. We filled the truck to its limit with hundred-pound sacks of dry cement and gravel and we also got ourselves some really vicious epoxy resin glue. Canvas gunny sacks we already had.

  We parked the truck near the marina for the time being and then I drove out to a nearby Indian reservation and met a guy named Jim Grandfather, whom I’d worked with before. He was shaped like me, in his forties, lived with his wife and dogs in a doublewide back in the trees, and drove a big old Dodge pickup with an Indianhead hood ornament that he’d lifted out of a junkyard somewhere. He had a couple of years of college and was the tribe’s historian, archivist, and preserver of weird knowledge. Whenever environmental issues came up, he was the point man for the tribe. I don’t know if he had an official position in the tribal government, or if he was appointed by consensus, or by himself, but that was definitely his role. When I showed up, he was out on the front yard throwing sticks and frisbees for his dogs. There were two dogs and only one frisbee and consequently I had to sit there and wait while a tug of war was waged across the middle of the road. Finally Jim shouted something in a language I’d never know, and they both dropped it simultaneously. He stalked up to the car with a big grin.

  “How’s the Granola James Bond?”

  “A little more toxic than last time, but good enough. How are you, dude?”

  “Check this out.” He opened his wallet and took out a folded piece of paper. It was a computer printout. A blood test.

  “What, they testing you for drugs or something?”

  “No, no, this is for cholesterol.” He pointed to one line with one of his stubby fingers. “Low normal.” He stepped back and held his hands off to his sides. “So? Does this look like a body with low cholesterol?”

  “Congratulations, Jim.”

  “Well, I thank you for it.” The last time I’d seen Jim was about a year ago, and I’d hassled him about the amount of greasy food he ate. He belonged to some kind of a pig raising and butchering co-op, so he hit the bacon and sausage very hard. His wife, Anna, started getting on his case too. He had gone in for a checkup and found out that his cholesterol level was pretty high. So this was quite a turnaround.

  “You been eating a lot of fish?”

  “You see any oceans around here?”

  “Tofu?”

  He snorted. He already knew my opinion of that. “Venison, baby. Lean and tough. Like me. Take some sausage to work every day.”

  “Why’d you do it?”

  “Shut my wife up.” Which might give you the wrong impression, because they loved each other.

  I parked my car half in the ditch and let his dogs smell me. At least I thought they were dogs.

  “How can you tell these things from wolves?” I said.

  “These have collars,” he explained. “Don’t worry, they’re checking you for dioxin.”

  They didn’t find any, so we wandered up toward his house.

  “Who’s this asshole in South Dakota?” he said.

  I almost asked how the hell he’d heard about that, but then caught myself. If we had a computer bulletin board, why couldn’t they? I’d seen this before, though. Go out to Alaska, California, talk to tribe officials, and it’s like they’ve been poring over my dossier. They kept in touch.

  “I don’t know him myself. You can probably expect the national office will fall all over itself trying to apologize.”

  “It’s no longer necessary. They made their point.”

  We sat down in his kitchen and he got me some coffee. “Anna’s in town shopping,” he said. “Soon as she gets back, we can take off.”

  “No hurry. I don’t have to be back until midnight.”

  He laughed. “Typical. Most people have appointments at noon. You have them at midnight.”

  “That’s when all the midnight dumping takes place.”

  “What’s up with you these days? What’s shaking in Boston?”

  “Who the fuck ever knows?” I explained the PCB/PCP story to him, and included my speculations from last night. He seemed to favor the grand conspiracy theory.

  “You don’t want to fuck around with the Mafia, do you?”

  “Not at all. They can do whatever they want. You think it’s the Mafia, Jim?”

  “Yeah. Something about the whole style of the operation.”

  “I disagree. Too wimpy.”

  He meditated on his coffee for a minute. “Well, look. If they get after you—if you get in trouble—get your ass to the Adirondacks.”

  “I don’t ski.”

  “Doesn’t even have to be there. Just any reservation. You go there and ask them for help and I’ll make sure you get taken care of.”

  “Yeah. I guess Sicilians stand out pretty bad on the res.”

  He let my flip comment sail right out the window. “If they’re suspicious, give them my name, have them call me or whatever. But don’t hang around and let yourself get greased.”

  I was surprised by his offer, and honored. It’s not as though I’d helped him out all that much. But a reservation would be a great place to disappear.

  We talked about the week’s operations, which were going to be split between grungy mechanic’s work and full-splatter media events. For the time being I was worried about the grungy part, in Buffalo, while Jim was going to be hanging around up at the Falls, looking noble for the cameras. Later, after the cement had hardened, I’d join him up there.

  While we were waiting for Anna, we wandered around his property a little. He had a shooting range out back, for both archery and guns, and we farted around there for an hour or so. “This is what you should be packing,” he recommended, hauling down a huge rifle with lots of scrollwork on it. “Lever-action. You seem like a lever-action kind of guy. Look at the size of that magazi
ne.”

  “What magazine?”

  “Jesus, S.T., the tube on the bottom is the magazine. Forget it.” He put the rifle back. “This is more your speed. We’ll set you up with a fucking bow and arrow.”

  He had a lot of those. He made them in the Nez Percé style, the Lakota style, the Iroquois style, you name it. He figured the only way to keep the knowledge from being lost was by using it. He could go into the woods armed with just a knife and make himself a birchbark canoe from scratch. “Only did it once, though,” he had explained, “took me two weeks. Anna had to keep coming out with coolers full of baloney sandwiches. I ended up with viral pneumonia.” Which sounded very humble, but he’d finished the canoe, and he still had it in his garage. The bows he made in his workshop, and he had no compunction about shaping them with a belt sander. “The idea,” he said, “is to keep the information in my hand, not to live like a caveman.”

  I couldn’t really use his bows, even if I’d wanted too. I could draw them but I couldn’t hold them steady long enough to sight in on the target. Also, I was nervous. The bowstrings were made of twisted horsehair. I was convinced that one of them would snap, and its ends whip into my eyeball at supersonic speed. Jim killed a few bales of hay for me, and that was about the time Anna came home.

  19

  The rest of the day was brute labor. We lined the back of the U-Haul with plastic and dumped the cement and the gravel in a big mound and stirred it together. Then I went out and found a bar. Around 11:30 I tore myself away from a ski-ball game and allowed myself to be picked up by Alan and Frank in the U-Haul. We drove down to the Boner plant, found the cul-de-sac, and backed the truck up to the manhole. The rest was simple, stupid and obvious. We lifted the lid. We didn’t have a manhole cracker, but a big strong guy like Frank can do it with a prybar and a chisel. We formed an assembly line, shoveling the cement and gravel mixture into the gunny sacks and stacking them in the sewer line until it was filled, top to bottom, side to side. Then we did it again so we had a double-thickness wall. We even pounded a few segments of rebar into it to make it all the stronger. By that time the sewer had backed up about halfway and dioxin-laden juices were oozing out between the sacks.