Zodiac Read online

  Boone said something that I couldn’t hear, fell out of the Zode and vanished. The boat sped up by a few knots and we just kept going straight. By now we had nothing to hide, so we just swung right along the side of the Basco Explorer, checked it out like a couple of Pöyzen fans from Chicopee who’d never seen a freighter before.

  It was pretty quiet. Blue light was flickering out of the windows on the bridge; someone was watching TV, probably the slow-motion replays of their boss getting chopped in the trachea by Boone. And they probably didn’t realize that the same guy was crawling right up their asshole at this very moment. We could hear a couple of men talking above us, standing along the rail.

  “Hey! Ahoooy, dude!” Bart shouted, “What’s happening?”

  I couldn’t believe it. “Jesus, Bart! We don’t want to talk to these pricks.”

  “Boone said we were supposed to create a diversion, didn’t you hear him?” Bart cupped his hands and hollered, “Hey! Anybody up there?” I slapped my hands over my face and commenced deep breathing. I might get noticed, but my description didn’t match the old S.T. anymore. No beard, different hair.

  The deckhands murmured on for a few seconds, finishing their chat, and then one leaned over to check us out: a young guy, neither corporate exec nor ship’s officer, just your basic merchant marine, standing on the rail having a smoke. With the cargo this ship carried, they probably weren’t allowed to smoke belowdecks.

  “Hey! How fast can this thing go?” Bart shouted.

  “Ehh, twenty knots on a good day,” the sailor said. Classic Jersey accent.

  “What’s a knot?”

  “It’s about a mile.”

  “So it can go, like, twenty miles in a day? Not very far, man.”

  My roommate had left me in his dust. I just leaned back and spectated. Technically he wasn’t my roommate anymore, our home had been exploded by its owner. I guess that meant we were now friends; kind of terrifying.

  “No, no, twenty miles an hour,” the sailor explained. “A little more, actually. Hey. You dudes partyin’?”

  Bart was getting ready to say, “Sure!” always his answer to that question. Then I imagined this sailor asking to go along, and me spending a couple of hours waiting for them to work their way to the bottom of that garbage can. So I said, “Naah, the cops came and started to bust it up, you know.”

  “Bummer. Hey, you guys know any good bars in this town?”

  “Sure,” Bart said.

  “Are you Irish?” I asked.

  “Bohunk,” he said.

  “No,” I said.

  “Hey, we got some Guinness down here. Can we come up there and check out your boat?”

  “Ship,” the sailor blurted reflexively. Then a diligent pause. “I don’t think Skipper’d mind,” he concluded. “We’re under real tight security when we get into port. ’Cause of terrorists. But this ain’t in port.”

  If Bart had proposed, back on Spectacle Island, that we board in this fashion, I’d have laughed in his face. But that was Bart’s magic. The sailor unrolled a rope ladder down the side of the ship and we climbed up over the gunwhales.

  “You know, in your own utterly twisted way, you’ve got more balls than I do,” I said to Bart as we were climbing up. He just shrugged and looked mildly bewildered.

  The sailor’s name was Tom. We handed him a Guinness and did a quick orbit of the deck, checking out such wonders as the anchor chains and the lifeboats and the bit hatches that led down into the toxic holds. The whole ship stank of organic solvents.

  “Fuckin’ water sure stinks tonight,” Bart observed. I kicked him in the left gastrocnemius.

  “Yeah, don’t ask me about that,” Tom said with a kind of shit-eating chuckle.

  After we’d checked out the butt end of the ship, examined the controls of the big crane, they headed up toward the bow and I couldn’t resist leaning out over the aft rail and trying to nail Boone with a loogie. He was there, all right, though I wouldn’t have seen him if I hadn’t been looking. He was totally black, there weren’t any lights back here, and when he saw someone above him he collapsed against the hull and froze. I missed by a yard.

  I took out a flashlight and shone it over my face for a second. Then I shone it down on his face. I’d never seen utter, jaw-dropping amazement on Boone’s face before and it was kind of fulfilling. Then I just turned around and left. He was doing pretty well; he was over halfway up.

  Tom showed us the bridge and the lounge where the rest of the crew was sitting around watching “Wheel of Fortune” and drinking Rolling Rock. They all said quick helios and then went back to watching the tube. We were in your basic cramped but comfy nautical cabin, with fake-wood paneling glued up over the steel bulkheads, a semi-installed car stereo strung out across the shelves, pictures of babes with big tits on the walls. Up in one corner, a CB radio was roaring and babbling away for background noise.

  We watched the show a little, worked on our beers, exchanged routine male-bonding dialogue about the wild scene on Spectacle Island and the fact that women were present, some good looking. I let Bart handle most of that; a cutaway blueprint of the Basco Explorer was tacked up on the wall and I was trying to memorize its every detail.

  The world’s strange. You plan something like sneaking onto a ship and then you get completely paranoid about the chances of being noticed; you figure watchmen are spaced every twenty feet along the rail. But hanging out in that cabin, drinking bad beer and watching TV, surrounded by total darkness outside, I knew these guys never had a chance of noticing Boone. We might as well have dropped him on the deck with a helicopter. I just hoped he’d find a nontoxic hideaway.

  They say that parents can pick out their baby’s cries in the midst of total pandemonium. Maybe it’s true. In Guadalajara, I’ve seen evidence to support the notion. Anyway, it seems some of those parental circuits were wired into my brain, since I caught Debbie’s voice right in that cabin.

  My heart was beating so hard it threw me off balance and I had to grab a bulkhead. I thought she was somewhere on board. I thought they’d taken her prisoner, then I traced the sound to the CB in the corner.

  A powerful transmission was breaking through the clutter. I heard the sound of an outboard motor, the chuff of waves against a fiberglass hull and a man’s voice, high-pitched and strained: “Explorer… Explorer… come in.” Debbie’s voice was in the background, on the same transmission. I couldn’t make it all out, but she was issuing some kind of death threat, and she was scared.

  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.

  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 Smirnoff 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 Pöyzen Böyzen 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 Pöyzen Böyzen 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 Pöyzen Böyzen 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. J. 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, SLUDding 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.