Zodiac Read online

  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—of 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.

  And Dolmacher had preceded me. I stood there in stoned amazement and traced his tracks right up to the top. And at the top there was a wild-raspberry cane sticking out across his path; it was still vibrating.

  Someone was moving around up there. I could hear him underneath the murmur of the crowd, the drone of the announcer. It was either Jim or Dolmacher or both. Then the sounds were all drowned out by the applause of the crowd.

  I took that as a free ticket out of the gully. I clambered most of the way up, making plenty of noise, and flopped onto my stomach on the top. No reason to expose myself; if Dolmacher knew I was right behind him, he’d be waiting.

  But he didn’t know. I saw the bastard, walking slowly, carefully, toward the clearing, not more than fifty feet away from me. Through gaps in the trees I made out an awning over a raised log bandstand and a waving American flag, and when I climbed up to my feet I could see the parking lot. That’s what I remember, because when you’ve been thrashing through mud and leaves for a while, nothing looks stranger than a bunch of cars glinting in the sunlight.

  I couldn’t see Jim anywhere. Had Dolmacher already taken him out? I turned around and checked the length of the gully, but no sign of Jim. He’d already made it across. He was somewhere out there, off to Dolmacher’s right.

  The Groveler was droning on about something through the P.A. system, but then there was a commotion. Dolmacher turned around and squatted behind a tree. Out at the edge of the clearing I could see a man in a trench coat appear from nowhere and run away from us.

  Dolmacher saw it too, jumped to his feet, and headed for the clearing at a dead run. He knew he had his opening. He knew he could make noise, at least for a minute, covered by the shouting match that was now going on over the P.A. system.

  “Let the man talk! Wait a minute, let’s hear what the man has to say,” Pleshy was shouting. “I have no qualms about my environmental record.”

  It was Boone. He’d done it. He was engaging Pleshy in mouth-to-mouth combat. And Pleshy was stupid enough to bite. Everyone remembered Reagan’s performance in New Hampshire years ago: “I paid for this microphone!” It had won him the election. Anyone with Pleshy’s instincts, and his reputation for being a wuss, would view Boone’s challenge as an opportunity to pull a Reagan on national TV.

  I got up and ran like hell. It looked like Dolmacher was making his move, but he slowed down when he was almost in the open, dropped back toward his crouch. If he turned around now I was screwed, because I’d dropped all caution and was just chugging along in the open, thirty feet behind him.

  He turned around. I froze; he saw me.

  He did it just like I�
�d expected him to: reached into his armpit, came up with the gun, clasped it in both hands, brought it down so all I could see was the barrel. I threw myself on the ground. But you can’t throw yourself the way you’d throw a baseball. The best you can do is drop yourself—take your legs out from under and wait for gravity to pull you down at thirty-two feet per second squared. If you’re falling off a bridge, that seems very fast. But if you trying to dodge a bullet, it’s worthless.

  Fortunately, at this point, Dolmacher got an arrow between his floating ribs; it went in three inches and stuck. He flinched, as though he’d been kicked, but he clearly didn’t really know what it was. He just turned around, the arrow whacking against a couple of birch trunks, and strode calmly and purposefully into the open, taking his knowledge of the toxic bugs with him, stored up there in his big, unprotected melon.

  The trench coat who’d left his position when Boone made his move was on his way back. Dolmacher nailed him with his Tazer, melted his nervous system, left him thrashing around quietly on the ground. Didn’t even break his stride. A bunch of folding chairs were set up for spectators and he stood up on one of those, at the back.

  “This is a hypothesis out of science fiction,” Pleshy was saying. “To release genetically engineered bacteria into the environment—why, that’s illegal!”

  Jim Grandfather cut off my view by stepping in front of me and drawing a bead on Dolmacher. The arrow got him in the left kidney just as he was pulling the trigger.

  On TV it’s amazing. Pleshy is standing there looking like a possum who has wandered onto an interstate. His eyes are wide open, his eyeglasses luminous in the TV lights, sweat breaking through the powder on his brow. He’s looking every which way. Boone is standing six feet away, a rock, talking calmly and quietly like a nursery school teacher handling an obstreperous child. They’re talking simultaneously about genetically engineered bacteria. But there’s rising commotion in the background and suddenly the camera swings drunkenly away from them. It happens just as Pleshy’s saying “Why, that’s illegal!” Everything goes dim and grey for a second because we don’t have the TV lights on our subject, but then the camera’s electronics adjust to it and we have Dolmacher, pale and righteous, standing on a chair, calmly drawing down on Pleshy just the way he drew down on me.

  If they stay on that camera you can actually see the arrow coming into the last frame. But if they cut to the other camera, the one that’s still on the podium, you see Pleshy looking at something else—he never even saw Dolmacher—and you see Boone, confused for just an instant, then focusing in on the man with the gun. And for a second, he actually thinks. That’s the amazing thing: you can see him thinking about it. Then he’s moving forward, he puts up one arm and clotheslines Pleshy. Pleshy falls away like a tin duck in a shooting gallery and Boone raises his hands, almost in triumph. Just as he’s turning to face Dolmacher, his face disappears, replaced by an eruption of red. It splatters everywhere—onto Pleshy’s notes, onto the lens of the camera, onto Pleshy’s stupid plaid mackinaw.

  Back to the other camera and we see Dolmacher giving himself up, two arrows still dangling out of his torso; overwhelmed by trench coats so that there’s nothing to see. Then back to the dais and we see Boone staggering around blind with his hands over his face, everyone up there standing with the expressions of developing shock you always see in assassination footage—eyebrows coming up and together, hands rising up from the sides, mouth forming into an O, but the body still stiff and unreactive. Boone is lost, out of control. Then he shakes his head, leans into the body of a local cop who has just run up to help him, and asks him for a hanky. He’s just been hit in the face by a pellet of red paint and it’s hurting his eyes.

  30

  Jim and I turned tail and ran. First we ran in a state of terror, but then, when we figured out that we weren’t being followed, drew closer together and started to skip and leap through the air, whooping, laughing like loons, like high school kids who’ve just egged the principal’s house. I wasn’t thinking, yet, about Dolmacher spending the rest of his life in the booby hatch, out of reach.

  Finally, toward the end, we ran very slowly and made moaning and puking noises. And when we found our way back to the trailhead, Boone was waiting for us. In a helicopter.

  It was a news chopper from one of the Boston stations. Boone had agreed to trade an exclusive interview for a lift back down to Boston.

  “I’m finished,” Jim Grandfather said. “I’m all done with this crap.”

  He went over to his pickup, leaned against it and breathed. I stood with my hands on my knees and did the same.

  “You know, for ten seconds,” I said, “I was sure you had saved my life.”

  “So was I.”

  “Let’s just say you did.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “I have a question for you,” I said. “If you’d been carrying a real arrow—a big-game arrow—would you have used it?”

  Jim stood up straight and shrugged. His big coat fell off his shoulders and his quiver tumbled out of it. All the fishing arrows had been used, but there were three in there with wide, razor-sharp heads. “No,” he said. “Too dangerous.”

  I laughed because I thought he was joking, but he wasn’t.

  “You’ve drawn my bow. If I used one of these, it would go all the way through Dolmacher’s body, out the other side and kill one or two other people.”

  “Well, I’m glad.”

  “Yeah. Considering that he was shooting blanks, I’d have felt like kind of a prick.”

  Jim and I hugged for a while, something I never do with another man, then Boone came out and they shook hands. Jim got in his truck and drove away. The copter’s engine started to rev up, so Boone and I had a few private moments while we walked back through the rotor wash.

  “What did you know,” I asked, “and when did you know it?”

  Boone gaped at me for a second, then laughed. “Shit. You don’t think I’d step between Pleshy and a bullet, do you?”

  We both laughed. I wasn’t really sure. I wasn’t convinced that he could recognize Dolmacher’s gun that quickly.

  “I always wanted to be a Secret Service agent,” he confessed. “Because then you’re the only person in the world who can knock down the president and get away with it.”

  We climbed into the chopper and Boone started giving a prolonged, monosyllabic, “aw shucks” interview about why he had put another man’s life before his own. He was claiming to be a Boston environmentalist named Daniel Winchester. I seized upon a cat-nap; it wasn’t that far back to Boston. I was hoping they’d swing over the yacht club, because I wanted to look down into our slip and see if Wes had gotten out the other Zodiac yet. If so, I’d probably be ripping it off sometime soon. I was in luck; they took us back to Logan itself.

  That was fine, since the Blue Line took us right in to the Aquarium stop. I was still too recognizable around the yacht club, so I had Boone saunter by there while I loitered at a McDonalds. I had one of those milkshakes that’s made from sweetened Wonder Bread dough extruded by a pneumatic machine. This, perhaps, would serve as a buffer against the toxic waste inside my system.

  When Boone emerged from traffic he wore a grin. The Zodiac was there, all right, but with a wimpy ten-horse motor, and even that was missing a few strategic parts. So before we did anything else, we prepared ourselves. At a marine supply place out on one of the piers we bought ourselves a fuel line, spark plugs and other small important items that Wes might have removed to make the Zodiac unstealable. Boone flaunted his stack of credit cards.

  We rode the Green Line to Kenmore Square and hopped a bus out to Watertown Square. Then it was a two-mile walk to Kelvin’s. My pant legs had turned into stiff tubes from being saturated with mud and then drying out, and at one point I had to climb down an embankment into some dead shrubs and broken glass and take a quick squat on the ground. While I was there I looked through my wallet and realized that all my credit cards belonged to a dead man
. My transformation into a derelict was almost complete. Jim had been supporting me through that bad week in New Hampshire, but now I was back in Boston, with nothing except a wicked case of diarrhea.

  “You should bow out too,” I said. “Shit, you’ve got your opportunity now. You’re a national hero. You can rehabilitate yourself, tell your story.”

  “I’ve been thinking about doing that,” Boone confessed.

  “Well don’t be shy. I can get along without you.”

  “I know. But this is more interesting.”

  “Whatever.” This was a useful word I’d picked up from Bart.

  “I’ll stick with it a little longer and see what’s happening.”

  “Whatever.”

  I’d been going through a lot of laxatives, trying to flush out my colon. It seemed to be working, because the nausea and cramps had subsided. Maybe I could ease off a little, get a Big Mac or something. Or if we could get to Hoa’s, I could eat some steamed rice.

  We got to Kelvin’s just about twelve hours after our first, midnight visit. Since it was daylight, we came in the front door and got the full family welcome: dogs poking their muzzles into our balls, kids showing us their new toys, Kelvin’s wife, Charlotte, fetching big tumblers of cranraz. All the kids were running around either naked or in diapers and pretty soon I joined them as Charlotte wouldn’t let me out of the foyer without removing my pants. All I managed to hang on to was my colored jockey shorts and my t-shirt. Boone had to give up his socks and his shirt. All of it went into the laundry. We wandered half-naked down into the basement.

  Charlotte’s sister had decorated Kelvin’s third-floor office just the way he wanted it—ergonomic furniture, a couple extra speakers wired into the main stereo, coffee maker, warm paneling. He went up there about an hour a week to write letters to his mother and balance the family checkbook. Then he spent about a hundred hours a week down here in this dank, dark, junk-filled basement. There was a workbench in the corner where he made stuff. There was a pool table in the middle where he relaxed. An old concrete laundry tub against one wall which he used as a urinal. He’d covered two entire walls with old blackboards he’d bought at flea markets. That was the only way he could think: on a blackboard, standing up. Sometimes it was long, gory strings of algebra, sometimes it was flowcharts from computer programs. Today there were a lot of hexagons and pentagons. Kelvin was doing organic chemistry, diagramming a lot of polycyclic stuff. Probably trying to figure out the energy balance of these bugs.