Zodiac Page 28

  33

  Boone and I wandered straight through the party and over to the barge. Down by the shoreline, Boone kicked a couple of dead fish out of the way to establish his footing. Then I climbed up on his shoulders and got a handhold on the top of the barge. That got me over the top and then I helped him in.

  There wasn’t much here. The barge was made to carry some kind of dry, bulk cargo—coal or corn. It was divided up into garage-sized compartments that were open on top, and you could get around between them on catwalks that ran on top of the partitions. The Satanists had been here with their goddamn spray cans and labeled the whole thing with various kinds of nonsense; there was a HEAVEN sign with an arrow pointing toward the bow, and a HELL sign pointing to the stern. Right now we were in the middle, and it was labeled EARTH. Different compartments had been labeled with the names of different demons, or something, and little shrines had been put together in some of them, using household junk gathered from the island.

  EARTH or HELL was the place to look. I didn’t expect the transformers to be located in heaven. When Basco had dumped them back in ’56, they wouldn’t have had any reason to drag them way up the slopes of the island. They’d have dropped them at the waterline, or below it, and covered them up. The impact of the barge might have dragged a few of them uphill, but not far.

  We gave it a once-over to begin with, walked down all of those catwalks and aimed our flashlights into the compartments. If we were lucky we’d find something obvious. The Pöyzen Böyzen cult had made a mess of things, covered up a lot of shit, but this was a big barge and a small cult and they couldn’t screw up the whole thing.

  A whiff of cool wind came in from the north, bearing that nauseating smell. I hadn’t smelled it since we’d landed. Apparently it wasn’t coming from the island at all. Maybe it was coming from the reactions going on in the Harbor: rotting fish added to its usual delicacies. There was a strong overtone of putrescine, which I hadn’t noticed before; maybe someone had found my cache of the stuff and poured it into the sea.

  Actually, it came from the compartment below my feet, where three mutilated corpses were sprawled on the floor.

  They’d been there for a few days. The blood was brownish-black, and they looked a mite puffy, about to burst the seams of their black leather pants.

  “Boone!” I said. He was with me in a few seconds. We squatted, like archaeologists looking into a burial pit, and observed in totally rude fascination. But after a couple of seconds, he began shining his flashlight on the walls of the compartment.

  “Fragged,” he concluded. “Check out the walls.”

  A lot of shrapnel had gone into those walls. The impact points twinkled on the rust like stars in a shit-brown sky. “Fragmentation grenades,” Boone continued, “or maybe Claymores.”

  We started beaming our lights at the trash strewn around on the floor. This wasn’t random garbage; it was bright, colorful and interesting. The remains of a shrine. And a big, rust-free, stainless steel pipe, maybe six feet long, was toppled across one of the bodies.

  “That pipe’s weird,” I said.

  “There’s all kinds of shit on this island,” Boone said. “Check that out.”

  He was shining his light near the feet of a corpse. A wire was glinting in the light and at one end was a metal ring.

  “Grenade.”

  After that he led the way. Boone knew more about booby traps than anyone. He searched the barge, one row of compartments at a time, and I tagged along behind to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. When he said, “Shit!,” I hit the catwalk. When he laughed, I got up.

  We were a few yards past the shoreline, out in HELL. The compartment below had been dedicated to some demonic force named Ashtoreth. I’d already checked it out. There was a shrine here, basically a pile of junk—the obligatory toilet, some dolls’ heads, wind chimes manufactured from old brake drums, rotating candelabras built on bicycle wheels. Boone had noticed something I’d missed. The shrine was built around an axis, a vertical pipe that rose from the floor of the compartment. The pipe was brand shiny new, not rusty, and it had a valve on the top. A padlocked valve.

  “Laughlin’s been prospecting,” I said. “Digging down into the PCB deposits. The Pöyzen Böyzen devotees build shrines around the pipes. Or maybe he built them himself, as camouflage. And then he came around and booby trapped them.”

  “Because he was afraid of you.”

  “Maybe he knows I’m not dead?”

  “No,” Boone said, “you died a week ago. Those corpses were at least that old.”

  “I’ll take your word for it. But I know why he was worried. This is great evidence, man.”

  “Yeah. Evidence that fights back.”

  Once we made damn sure there were no tripwires, we lowered ourselves down there. Then we squatted and investigated the heap of junk from a distance, saw the grenades, clustered around the pipe like coconuts on a tree, saw the wires.

  Someone landed on my back. I turned my head a little so that when my face smashed into the floor, I was leading with my cheek and not my teeth. Whoever had jumped me was drunk and we ended up lying there, nestled like spoons for an instant, and then I just rolled over on top because it felt like he or she wasn’t as heavy as I was.

  I was right. But the second person, standing above me, astride my body, holding the ceremonial knife in his hands—he was heavy. He was obese, in fact. His floor-length leather cape spread way out, like Batman’s.

  There wasn’t much I could do because I still didn’t have my breath back. I gasped and moaned, getting my lungs push-started, but this didn’t do anything about the guy with the knife.

  Boone, over in the opposite corner, was giving a better account of himself. Someone had started by breaking a bottle over his head. She’d seen a lot of TV shows and thought that this would knock him out. Instead, Boone got pissed off and punched out her front teeth. Now she was shrieking like a bad set of air brakes, spinning and bouncing around the compartment like a top. A guy had gotten Boone in a bearhug from behind and lifted his feet off the floor, allowing him to kick with both feet—which isn’t normally possible—and so he inflicted a bit of internal bleeding on a third attacker. I heard the ribs snap. But he didn’t even notice. The person who was holding him off the ground spun him around and methodically rammed his face against a rusty wall about half a dozen times. The guy with the broken ribs was jumping up and down, shouting without using any words, stabbing at the air with his knife.

  I happened to be looking at that person when he got about half his brains blown against the compartment wall. The obese guy standing above me stood up straight and I kicked him in the nads. Then I got showered with blood as he took a bullet in the middle of his back.

  He staggered sideways into the shrine, rammed it like a tractor hitting a Christmas tree, and in the aftermath I heard a little tink-tink-tink that was probably the sound of a grenade pin bouncing around on the floor.

  When I went over the top of the wall, I ran into Bart and took him with me; we landed hard on the floor of the next compartment. I was just starting to think about pain when the blast of the grenade came through like one beat of a heavy-metal tom-tom. The shrapnel hit the wall with an overwhelming pulse of static and then I could hardly hear anything.

  Boone was above us, wiping blood out of his face and trying to get ungrogged. His head had already taken a lot of abuse. Bart was waving his revolver dangerously. “You better take this gun,” he suggested. “I’m incredibly drunk.”

  “Lucky it wasn’t a Claymore,” Boone said, “or we wouldn’t have had the time delay.”

  “That one seemed like about thirty seconds,” I said.

  “More like five.”

  The fragged compartment looked about the way I expected it to. The silver pipe had been severed halfway up. A golden fluid was welling calmly out the top, running down to the floor of the compartment. It wasn’t necessary to run an analysis.

  We weren’t clear about what to do
with the dead guys. If it came down to it, we could certainly defend ourselves in court. But you’re supposed to bury corpses, or put sheets over them or something, not leave them sitting in a barge compartment that’s slowly filling up with toxic waste.

  “On the other hand, why not?” Bart said. “For them, this is like dying in church.”

  “That’s good enough for me,” Boone said, and jogged away down the catwalk. After about a nanosecond of careful thought, I followed him.

  We came down on the opposite side of the barge, in case the Satanists had decided to bring in reinforcements. Once we hit the ground, I waded out into the water a little ways, sweeping my flashlight back and forth across my path. Just before Boone had discovered the shrine, I’d been starting to put a suspicion together in my mind.

  The odor we’d noticed on our way over wasn’t coming from Spectacle Island. It was coming from the water. But we hadn’t noticed it in other parts of the Harbor. Only the part right north of Spectacle Island—where the Basco Explorer was anchored.

  I scooped half a dozen dead fish out of the surf and tossed them up onto the land. We squatted around them and checked them over.

  If the odor came from the dying of Boston Harbor—if these fish had died from infection with the PCB bug—they would have died at different times. Some would be decomposed, some would be fresh. But if I may be excused another disgusting thought, these fish all looked good enough to eat. They had died within the last couple of hours.

  “There’s something new in the Harbor,” I said. “Something that stinks real bad, and is incredibly toxic. And it stinks worst around the Basco Explorer.”

  “They must do something,” Boone said.

  “We didn’t see any dumping.”

  “Sure. Years ago, when we started taking movies of them dropping barrels into the water, they got really shy and came up with a new system. They’ve got tanks in there that can be filled from the top and then drained out the bottom of the hull while the ship is in motion.”

  “What did Pleshy say to you this morning?”

  “Make my day!” Bart said. “It was in the Herald.”

  “That’s what he said,” Boone said. “Go ahead. Test the Harbor for PCB-eating bugs. Test the sewers. Make my day. You won’t find anything.”

  “Say they filled those hidden tanks with some kind of massively toxic, concentrated stuff, probably an organophosphate, and dumped it into the Harbor tonight. They’d want to anchor near Spectacle Island—the center of the infection. They’d dump it into the water. Everything in the water would die. No one would find it remarkable that fish were dying—remember, the Herald called it the Harbor of Death. But at the microscopic level, all those PCB bugs are dying too.

  “Just like Kelvin said,” Boone said. “If it gets real bad, we might have to nuke the Harbor.”

  “Jesus,” Bart said, “Isn’t that a little overkillish?”

  “Not at all. Look. Twenty-four hours ago, these guys were dead. They had illegally put a genetically engineered bug into the environment and it was creating a toxic catastrophe. They’d rigged up a scapegoat—Dolmacher—but he’d gotten wise. A loose waste barrel on the deck.

  “Now that’s all different. Basco’s dropping the bomb. Murdering the Harbor. Shit, the sewers too. The drums they were offloading into the Boston Whaler? Probably full of the same stuff. They’re probably dumping it into the gutters right now. Exterminating the bug, covering up their traces.”

  “Kind of blatant,” Bart said.

  “Not at all,” said Boone. “Shit, Basco’s back on its home territory here. They’re old hands at poisoning the water and getting away with it.”

  “It can’t be traced to the ship, and it can’t be traced through the gutters,” I said.

  “The bastards are getting off scot free,” Boone said. He was just breathing the words, he was almost inaudible.

  “Kind of looks that way,” Bart said.

  “We have to get onto that ship.” Boone was in outer space now, in a kind of trance, staring at the incantations on the barge. “Before they get rid of the evidence. We have to board the ship and find the tanks they used.”

  “What would you do then,” Bart asked. “Just getting on board wouldn’t prove anything.”

  “We’d have to get the media on board,” Boone said.

  “No way to do that until they tie up somewhere,” I said. “The ship is going to be moored on Basco property, and you can bet they’ll have intense security. We can’t even get within striking distance without trespassing on their property and getting popped.”

  “Maybe there’s something real mediagenic we could do on board the ship, something the crews could film from a great distance.”

  “The toxin tanks are way down in the bowels of the thing. There’s no way to make them visible from a distance without blowing the ship in two.”

  “We’ve handled this kind of thing before—remember the Soviet invasion? We could bring in our own cameras, do our own filming and distribute the tapes.”

  “That’s one option,” I said.

  “One option. You have another?” Boone said.

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s that? Blow it up?”

  “Shit no. This is a nonviolent action, I think.”

  “And what might it be?”

  “Steal it. Steal the ship.”

  “Whoa!” Bart said.

  Boone’s blue eyes were giving off kind of a Tazer discharge and I felt the need to scoot away from him. We had found a plan.

  “Steal the whole fucking ship?” he said. But he knew exactly what I meant.

  “Steal the whole fucking ship, before they’ve had a chance to destroy the evidence—that means tonight—take it out into the Harbor, where the media will be waiting for us. Better yet, take it to Spectacle Island. Have the media in place out here. We can turn it into an all-night minicam slumber party.”

  “That is just fucking great, man,” Boone said, levitating to his feet. “Let’s do it, man. It’s time to rock and roll.”

  34

  Bart went around to the party side of the barge to find Amy, and Boone and I cut straight across the island to the Zodiac. We were trying to figure out a way to steal the Basco Explorer, but we were clueless. Our only real chance to get on board was right now, when it was on the open water. Once it was tied up at a pier, they’d have guards posted on it, toting machine guns and with every excuse to use them. But we didn’t have a plan, so the only thing we could think of was to have Boone board it now and leave me on the outside to come up with the plan later. Boone was enthusiastic; he knew I’d think of something. Easy for him to say. We’d leave him a walkie-talkie and have maybe a fifty-fifty chance of being able to communicate with him.

  We sat out on the Zodiac and got out two of my big old magnets. I used duct tape to coat them pretty thickly, so they wouldn’t clang, and so they’d have good friction against the side of the ship. Then I rigged up little rope stirrups. Boone put on the Liquid Skin, put on a lot of it, then wrestled into a drysuit. It was black, the proper color for domestic terrorism during the evening hours, and would protect everything but his face.

  I picked up the walkie-talkie once or twice and asked if Modern Girl was out there, but got no real answer. A walkie-talkie isn’t like a telephone; you don’t have a private line, just a thick chowder of noise that you try to pick something out of. I tried hard and only got a hint of Debbie’s voice, like a whiff of perfume in a hurricane.

  Bart came wandering along after about twenty minutes, alone. We went in and picked him up.

  “Where’s Amy,” I asked him.

  “Back there. We broke up.”

  He didn’t seem too wrecked. “Sorry. We didn’t mean to screw up a good thing.”

  “She’s pissed off because I left her with this guy Quincy when I went and shot those dudes. But the reason I left her with Quincy was because I wanted to make sure she was protected.”

  “Who’s Quincy?”

&
nbsp; “The guy I stole this revolver from.”

  “So where’s Amy now?”

  “With Quincy.”

  Boone didn’t say anything, just handed him a Guinness. Black beer for black thoughts.

  We shoved off, taking it slow because we didn’t know what we were doing. I tried the walkie-talkie again and suddenly Debbie’s voice came through. Sometimes the radio works, sometimes it doesn’t.

  “Modern Girl here. I think we can pop the Big Suit for public urination.”

  The Big Suit had to be Laughlin. She’d never been introduced to him. But on my answering machine, right before the house blew up, she’d described the man as he was ripping off the car.

  “He’s doing it by the Amazing,” she continued, “westbound.”

  Public urination had to mean that Laughlin was dumping something into the gutters. Just like we thought: the Harbor was dead, now he was killing the sewers too. The Amazing had to be the Amazing Chinese Restaurant out in west Brighton. He was heading down Route 9, heading for Lake Cochituate, for Tech-Dale. Everything between Natick and the Harbor was going to be antiseptic tonight.

  “Can you prove it, Modern Girl?”

  “Yup. Losing you, Tainted Meat.” And then our transmission got overwhelmed by a trucker, headed up the Fitzgerald Expressway, cruising the airwaves for a blow job.

  Boone wrapped up a walkie-talkie in a Hefty bag along with a couple of Big Macs and a flotation cushion. The two magnets he slung from a belt around his waist. The cushion balanced out the weight of the magnets so that he could stay afloat and concentrate on swimming.

  With three people and lots of gear, the Zode was near its weight limit, but fifty horses balanced that nicely. Traveling through the dark in an open vehicle made me think of biking through Brighton, so I clicked into my full paranoid mode. Instead of taking a direct route toward the Basco Explorer, I took us all the way around the south end of the island, swung a good mile or so out to the east, about halfway to the big lighthouse at the Harbor’s entrance, and approached the ship from astern.