Zodiac Read online

  “What’s your problem with Pleshy? He was on your side.”

  If it hadn’t been his own restaurant, he would have spat on the floor. “Gutless,” he said. “Didn’t know how to fight. Thought he could win war with chemicals. All it did was make him rich. He make those chemicals in his own company, you know.”

  “Yeah. Well, we think it’s pretty likely that Pleshy will get in a lot of trouble for this.”

  “You have to make him pay!” Hoa said.

  It reminded me of Hoa’s brother, a couple of months ago, when he’d gotten upset about people who came into the Pearl and wasted food. Serene and cheery on the surface, but when they got pissed about something, they really got pissed. They let you know about it. They had long memories.

  “We think we can trace this bad stuff through the sewers, back to a plant that’s owned by Basco,” I said, “and the guy who shot at Pleshy today also has evidence. I would say that Pleshy’s in deep shit.” But I didn’t believe it for a minute. The man was a vampire. Only the light of a minicam could hurt him. Boone had winged him earlier today.

  Tonight we had to drive a stake through his chest, or he’d recover. He’d appoint Laughlin his interior secretary, and use Laughlin’s magic bug to bring more covalent chlorine into all of our bodies.

  “I can help in any way, you will tell me,” Hoa ordered. “This meal is for free. On the house.”

  “That’s okay, Hoa, I’ve actually got cash tonight.”

  “No. Free.” And he got up and went away, soundlessly as always, without displacing any air. For some reason it came into my head to wonder how many people Hoa had killed.

  “Some of these immigrants were actually big honchos in South Vietnam, you know,” Boone said. “I wonder if he knew Pleshy personally?”

  “I don’t think Pleshy’s that hateful in person,” I said. “To really dislike the man you have to be standing under an Agent Orange drop.”

  “That’s right,” Boone mused. “He’s kind of a wimp in person.”

  “What did he say to you, anyway? I never got a chance to hear your conversation. I was too scared of Dolmacher.”

  “Well, he came right out and challenged me. He said, there’s no bacteria like you describe. Go ahead and test the Harbor. Try me.”

  “So what do you conclude from that?”

  “I conclude he was kept in the dark by his underlings. Like Reagan back during the Contra thing. He didn’t know what was going on.” “How charitable you are.”

  “Otherwise, why would he say something like that?”

  I didn’t figure Bart would be using his van while he was watching the concert, so we took a cab out to Boston Garden and cruised the local parking areas until we found it. I slid underneath and got his spare key. We got in and did some nitrous. Then we drove out to Debbie’s place in Cambridge, a nice rent-controlled complex between Harvard and MIT. She wasn’t there, so I left a note in her mailbox telling her we were going out on the water, and if she wanted to get together she should go out to Castle Island Park and build a fire or something and we’d circle back and pick her up.

  We cut across Cambridge to the GEE office, where they hadn’t bothered to change the locks. We loaded up on any kind of equipment that might come in handy—scuba gear, sampling jars, giant magnets, strobe lights, distress flares, radios—and threw it into the van and cruised back to the Garden. We got there just as the doors were opening up to spill a plume of black-clad Pöyzen Böyzen fans onto the streets of the North End. Dustheads galore.

  Bart’s old space had been taken so we just cruised around and made a nuisance of ourselves until he showed up.

  “Hey, S.T., thanks for pistol-whipping me.”

  “I’m sorry about that, Bart, but—”

  “You met my girlfriend, Amy?”

  “Yeah, we’ve met.”

  “Hi, S.T.,” Amy said, popping her gum explosively. Heavy metal, drugs and sexual passion had dissolved her brain to a certain point where she no longer distinguished between dead and living persons.

  “Hop in,” I said.

  Boone introduced himself. They didn’t take much notice of him. Amy wanted to know where we were all going.

  “We’re going to Spectacle Island,” I said. By “we” I meant me and Boone and just possibly Bart, but Bart and Amy took it the other way.

  “Alright!” he said. “That is going to be brutal tonight.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” I said. “A lot of Pöyzen Böyzen fans out there?”

  “Tonight they are, man. It’s going to be an all night party. I know someone who’s got a boat.”

  “Christopher Laughlin?”

  “Yeah, how’d you know?”

  “It’s okay. We have our own boat.”

  32

  “Alright, man. A motley crew,” Bart observed as we made our way across the piers to the GEE slip.

  He had a point. There weren’t deck shoes or yachting cap among us. We had walkie-talkies and Liquid Skin instead of Brie and baguettes. If there were any loose cops in the Boston area we’d be arrested on the spot. Fortunately they were all out in the streets training firehoses on Pöyzen Böyzen fans.

  Amy found the trip down the ladder to the Zode extremely exciting. Bart had to help her down, using some holds he’d picked up as a high school wrestler in Oklahoma. Meanwhile, Boone and I were down there operating on the ten-horse. Wes had taken out the plugs. We didn’t know what kind of plugs it took so we’d bought about twelve boxes of different types. Also we didn’t know how to gap them. New plugs have to be gapped.

  “It doesn’t matter anyway because we don’t have a gauge,” Boone pointed out. But I was already one-upping him by whipping a set of leaf gauges out of my wallet.

  “No wonder your fucking wallet’s an inch thick,” Boone said. We guessed thirty-five thousandths on the plug gap and bent the electrodes accordingly.

  The net result is that the motor started on the first pull. By this time Amy had mounted the prow like a sadomasochistic figurehead and Bart was thudding up and down the ladder loading the Zode with our war supplies. This included a nice stack of Big Macs and pseudo-shakes we’d picked up at the McDonald’s. No telling how long we were going to be out. I shifted into forward and Boone cracked open a Guinness. Bart leaned back between Amy’s thighs and trailed one of his hands in the black brine. For some reason I felt formidable.

  With this worthless motor, the trip from downtown to Spectacle Island took almost an hour. I was expecting Amy to get bored and petulant, or at least seasick, but I underestimated her. She actually kind of liked it out here. She’d never seen Boston from the water, few people have, so we basically spent half the time telling her where shit was. The 747s were coming down fast and thick at Logan and that was a sight. Bart had a Walkman with stereo minispeakers that you could plug into it, so we listened to an old Led Zep tape and later to a Sox game, in California, on the radio. Boone told some kind of interminable story about hand-to-hand combat with a Canadian helicopter in Labrador. I kept an eye on Castle Island Park, hoping Debbie would show up and give me a sign, but she didn’t.

  Spectacle Island was easy to find in the dark, because half of it appeared to be on fire. If I shut off the motor, we could hear the stereos from a distance of three miles. We had the slowest boat in the harbor and everyone else had gotten there first. Small boats occasionally crossed our line of sight and made silhouettes against the light.

  Somehow I doubted they had all brought firewood along. They were probably burning whatever was at hand. There must be some great toxins in the air tonight. Before long we smelled them, a profoundly nasty and foul odor drifting toward us on a southeasterly wind.

  “I guess we picked the wrong night,” I said.

  Amy didn’t understand. She thought that I wasn’t sufficiently impressed by this party. Bart finally had to break the news to her: “They’re not coming to party. They’re coming to—” his silhouette turned to look at me “—just why the fuck are you com
ing?”

  “Chris Laughlin ever tell you about his dad?”

  “Yeah, he told me all about that fucking bastard.”

  “Remember my enemy at Fotex? Who fell into the pond?”

  “Oh, yeah, the rotating knives?”

  “Yeah. That’s roughly what we’re going to do to Chris Laughlin’s dad.”

  “And what will that involve?”

  “Beats me. Boone and I will just have to scope it out.”

  “Looks like you’ll have plenty of light.”

  Amy was temporarily depressed that we were actually coming out to test a scientific theory, but she got over it. Meanwhile I was noticing something interesting, namely a big shadow that was blocking off about half of our view of Spectacle. We were getting to the point where we could make out some running lights, and eventually, Boone and I started aiming our humongous flashlights into that shadow, checking it out with binoculars. I already had an intuition about it. So did he, I guess, because we aimed our beams at the same place: high on the bow, where the name of the ship is written. It stood out nicely in rust-stained white: Basco Explorer.

  “It’s not going anywhere,” he said. And when we got a little closer we could definitely see its anchor chains, coming out the hawsepipes up on the prow, descending straight into the water. The Basco Explorer, the toxic Death Star, was anchored about half a mile off Spectacle Island.

  “Poyzen fans,” Bart said.

  But Boone and I were just looking. He reached over and shut off the radio, and I dropped the motor to an idle.

  “Spray paint,” I said.

  Boone rummaged through one of our bags and came up with a can of black Rustoleum we’d picked up with the spark plugs. Bart shook it up and blacked out the GEE lettering on the sides of the Zode.

  Most of those boat silhouettes were heading to or from Spectacle Island. But when we noticed one that was going sideways, headed for the Basco Explorer, I cranked up the motor so that we didn’t look suspiciously slow. We buzzed across the ship’s bow, giving it a hundred yards of clearance, and checked out the other side, which was glowing an almost imperceptible red from the fires on the island. We had to look straight at it for a minute or two before our eyes adjusted. We asked Bart and Amy to look the other way, because anyone might feel nervous if four people on a Zodiac were staring them down.

  A small boat, a Boston Whaler, was bobbing alongside. One of the Basco Explorer’s davits was active, lowering a drum of some godawful cargo toward the boat.

  “Déjá vu,” Boone said. “Just like the old days. Except the little boat’s on their side.”

  That any of those Pöyzen Böyzen fans could tolerate Spectacle Island was amazing. The stench nauseated. Maybe the smoke was rising off the island so they didn’t notice it, drifting downwind, hitting an inversion layer, and spreading out close to the water.

  Bart was tugging on my sleeve, pointing in the opposite direction, toward the mainland. A small strobe light was flashing away on Castle Island Park.

  I turned my back to the Basco Explorer and hunched over our walkie-talkie. This was just a guess, because I hadn’t asked Debbie to bring a walkie-talkie along. But I thought she might. I switched to the channel we’d used in Blue Kills and punched the mike button.

  “Tainted Meat to Modern Girl,” I said. “Tainted Meat to Modern Girl. You there, toots?”

  “This is Modern Girl,” Debbie said, quoting the song: “I got my radio on.”

  “Nice to hear you, Modern Girl.”

  “Very nice to hear you, Tainted. Where are you? I can hear the little Merc.”

  “Right in front of you. Listen, you driving what I think you’re driving?”

  “What else?”

  “How’d you get it started?”

  “The guy who stole it put in a new coil wire.”

  I made a mental note of that; just another reason to kill Laughlin. No one should know that much about me.

  “Checked the oil recently?”

  “Just had it changed, asshole.”

  “Listen.” This part was going to be tricky; if Basco was listening to the frequency, they’d get suspicious. “Seen much traffic in your area? Whalers, maybe?”

  “I understand.”

  That was nice, but I didn’t know how much she understood.

  “We won’t be able to swing by and get you for awhile. Until then, do you think you can entertain yourself? Go out for a drive and listen to some tapes, maybe?”

  “Yeah. Maybe take some snapshots. Boston at night.”

  Fantastic. She had a camera. More importantly, she knew how to use it.

  “Ten-four on that, Modern Girl. We’ll catch you later. Drive safely.”

  “Always. Bye, Tainted Meat.”

  The idea of sending Debbie out by herself at night to follow and take pictures of Basco goons was a little troublesome. But she’d been on some wild gigs and had always handled herself well. She was good at this sport. As long as she kept her hot little right hand off the stereo, off the phone and on the shift lever, nothing was going to catch her. Besides, she adored stress.

  We’d left the Basco Explorer behind. Boone started looking into the flames again. Amy was facing backwards and she let us know when the Whaler took off, headed for the shore. Spectacle Island was looking real big, the line of flames was breaking apart into individual bonfires, and the music was drowning out our motor.

  The final approach was not smooth. Pieces of debris kept fouling our propeller. Fortunately it was soft, whatever it was, so the prop just chopped it up, coughed and kept going. Boone was leaning over the back of the motor to check it out when he almost got thrown out of the Zode by a boat’s wake. Some jerk-offs had just shot by us in a small boat with a big motor, and now they were swinging around for another pass.

  “Hey,” Amy shouted, “alright, Chris!”

  “Chris is too young for you, and he’s actually a jerk,” Bart said. Two or three times a year, I got to hear one of Bart’s relationships fall apart.

  “Maybe you’re too old,” Amy suggested.

  I was watching that fast boat. For a second I was afraid it was Laughlin himself. But asshole père must have had other items on his dancecard this night; Laughlin’s awful son had tracked us down.

  He’d brought his pals, maybe the same ones we’d seen before. The roar of their motor didn’t drown out the sound of their laughter as they saw us wallow around in their wake. That was so much fun they came by for another pass, and another, and another. I could think of any number of ways to inflict injuries on them. For example, the Al Nipper approach: I took an empty Guinness bottle, of which we had several, wound up and drew a bead on Chris’s head. But Boone caught my arm as I was about to throw.

  “Why throw garbage at them,” he pointed out, “when we can steal their motor?”

  Within five minutes we were on the decomposing shore, doing exactly that. Laughlin had bought himself a real nice one, a Johnson fifty-horse, and also coughed up a couple of full gas tanks for us. With this rig we could really haul ass. We mounted it on the Zode and then we left our ten-horse sitting in the bottom of Laughlin’s boat. They’d neglected to bring their oars. I would have been happy to maroon Dad on this mound of trash, but the son deserved some sympathy.

  We did most of this without lights, not wanting to draw attention to ourselves. So when I was standing thigh-deep in the water, lifting our old ten-horse off the transom, I could tell that the bottom half of the motor was greasy and slippery, but I didn’t know why. When we dumped it into the bottom of the other boat, Boone checked it over with his flashlight and whistled.

  Our motor was splattered with a lot of gore that had been thrown up by the propeller. Wet, fishy-smelling gore. Chopped-up fish, as a matter of fact.

  Once we got it running, we took the Zode around to a deserted stretch of beach and left it there. No point in allowing these people a glimpse of a free, fast ride. We went slow, and aimed our lights into the water, which was full of dead fish.
/>   Harbor of Death. It made sense. The fish would get the PCB bug in their guts just like humans did, and they’d get sick and die in the same way.

  Boone and I hiked back across the island toward the northern shore, toward the party. Bart and Amy were already there. It would be impossible to find them again, but that was okay. Bart was a survivor. Finding a way back to Boston would be as easy for him as getting out of bed in the morning.

  We walked slow; on Spectacle Island you, never knew what was going to poke up through the sole of your shoe. Eventually, though, we crested a junk-heap ridge with a smokey, fiery halo and looked down on the festival.

  Three hundred people, give or take, twenty bonfires and a dozen kegs. There was also a garbage party—someone had brought a garbage can and people had dumped into it whatever alcoholic stuff they’d brought with them, creating a mystery punch. And a fire hazard.

  And I finally got to see the Satan worshippers. A dozen of them. Their black leather was somewhat more bizarre and expensive than that of the average fan. They were up on the hillside, standing in a circle, working their way through some kind of ritual that involved torches and large knives.

  The big knives weren’t too dangerous compared to the cheap revolvers that half of the guys on the beach were probably carrying, and a few spells and incantations didn’t worry me as much as the Basco Explorer. But we swung around them anyhow, since a few grams of PCP could make anyone feisty.

  Sometimes, they said, drugs led to possession. Then you had to get yourself an exorcist. The exorcist would come and call out the name of the evil spirit, and that would scare it away. This was all it took—no surgical operations, no chemicals, not even much of a ritual. I figured I was in a similar business. I stood in front of the TV cameras and called out the names of corporations. I lacked the power to do much more than that, but it seemed to be pretty effective.

  Dolmacher had called out Basco’s name earlier today. If I could find some kind of evidence under this barge, it would establish a link in my theoretical chain of events, and I, too, could call out their name. It wouldn’t bring down Basco, maybe, but it would probably ruin Alvin Pleshy. And Laughlin would really be pissed.