Zodiac (3 page)

My only worry was that maybe this editor was so fucking old and decrepit that he was already dead, or even retired. On the other hand, it seemed he was a dyed-in-the-wool “sportsman,” a type traditionally long-lived, unless he'd spent too much time sloshing around in a particular toxic swamp. Esmerelda, accustomed to my ways, had sent a xerox of the most recent masthead, which didn't show any changes. The senior sports editor was Everett “Red” Grooten and the sports-page editor was Alvin Goldberg.

Raucous laughter probably sounded from my office. Tricia hung up on Fotex's PR director and shouted “S.T., what are you doing in there?” Called the florist and had them send the usual to Esmerelda. Cranked up my old PCB-spitter and searched my files. “Fish, marine, sport, Mid-Atlantic, effects of organic solvents on.” “Estuaries, waterfowl populations of, effects of organic solvents on.” These were old boilerplate paragraphs I'd written long ago. Mostly they referred to EPA studies or recent research. Every so often they quoted a “source” at GEE International, the well-known environmental group, usually me. I directed the word processor to do a search-and-replace to change “source” to “authority.”

Then I pulled up my press release about what the Swiss Bastards were pumping into the waters off Blue Kills, which my gas chromatograph and I had discovered during my last trip down there. Threw it into the center of the piece and then composed a hard-hitting topic sentence in basic Dick-and-Jane dialect, no compound sentences, announcing that Bluker sportsmen might be the first ones to feel the effects of the “growing toxic waste problems” centered on the Swiss Bastards' illegal dumping. Hacked it all into an inverted-pyramid shape, and ended up with 2350 words. Put on a final paragraph, the lowly capstone of the pyramid, mentioning that some people from GEE International, the well-known environmental group, might be dropping by Blue Kills any day now.

Opened up my printer and put in a daisy wheel that produced a typeface that went out of style in the Thirties. Printed the article up on some unpretentious paper, stuck it in an envelope along with some standard GEE photos of dead flounder and two-headed ducks, suitable for the
Lighthouse-Republican's
column width. Federal Expressed it to one Red Grooten at his home address, because I had this idea that maybe he didn't stop by the office all that often.

Wyman called. Wyman, the Scourge of Cars. He wanted the keys to the Omni so that he could drive to Erie, Pennsylvania to see his girlfriend, who was about to leave for Nicaragua. For God's sake, she could be bayoneted by contras and he'd never see her again.

“Where's the van, Wyman?”

“I'm not telling you until I get the keys to the Omni.”

So I hung up and called the Metro Police, who told me: on the shoulder, westbound lanes, Revere Beach Parkway, near the bridge over the Everett River. Due to be towed at any moment. I hung up when they asked for my name, grabbed my toolbox and headed out.

Gomez heard the wrenches crashing against the insides of the toolbox, fired the last half of his whole-wheat croissant into the “noncompostable nonrecyclables” wastebasket, where it belonged, and intercepted me at the top of the stairs. “Got a job?”

“Sure. What the fuck, come on.”

A lot of people out there simply adore GEE. One of them had donated this car to us—in fact, she'd done better. In Massachusetts, the insurance can run way over a thousand bucks a year, so this fine lady was lending us the Omni, no strings attached, and paying the insurance as well. We didn't even know who she was.

Normally an Omni is a piece of shit, an econobox with a 1.6-liter engine. But for a higher sticker price you can get an Omni GLH, which has aerodynamic trim and 2.2 liters and, for a few hundred more, an Omni GLH Turbo, which has all of that plus a turbocharger. GLH, by the way, stands for Goes Like Hell. Honest. When the blower is singing, the engine puts out as much power as a small V8. Add big fat racing tires and alloy wheels and you have yourself a poor man's Porsche, the most lethal weapon ever developed for the Boston traffic wars. Sure, spend three times as much and you could get a car that goes a little faster, but who is seriously going to thrash a vehicle that costs that much? Who'll risk denting it? But if it's an Omni, who cares?

I popped in the coil wire, a detail that Gomez richly appreciated—he made sure I knew it too—and we blew out of there. First we had to unload a lot of junk from out of the back to make room for what we were going to strip off the van: the two containers of hydraulic cement had to go. If I felt the urge to plug a pipe between here and Everett, I'd have to fulfill it later. The big, long roll of nylon banner material, the rappelling harness and climbing ropes, an extra outboard-motor gas tank, a Zodiac inflation pump, and the traveling chemistry lab we jettisoned. The laptop computer for tapping into the GEE International databases. The $5000 gas chromatograph. My big magnets. The Darth Vader Suit. We packed it all into the trunk of Gomez's Impala so we wouldn't have to haul it up to the fourth floor.

We'd hired Gomez after I'd inadvertently gotten him canned from his previous job as a minimum-wage rent-a-cop at one of the state office buildings. Unfortunately for his breed, I make my living by making people like him look like jerks. For weeks we'd been trying to make an appointment with a honcho in the state environmental agency, and he wouldn't even answer our letters.

Shortly before Christmas, I dressed up in a Santa Claus outfit and had Tricia and Debbie (one of our interns) dress up as elves. I forged an ID card, complete with a mug shot of Saint Nick and an
address at the North Pole, stuffed my Santa sack full of GEE leaflets, and we blew right past Gomez; he was really in the Christmas spirit. We hit on an
Untergruppen-secretary
who passed us on up to an
Übergruppen-secretary
, then three floors up to a
Sturm band-secretary
, then ten more floors on up to Thelma, the
Übersturmgruppenführer
secretary, and that poor lady didn't even blink. She led us right into Corrigan's office, the place we'd been trying to penetrate for three months, without even the courtesy of a nasty letter.

“Ho ho ho,” I said, and I was sincere.

“Well, Santy Claus!” said Corrigan, that poor jackass. “What you got there?”

“I've got a surprise for you, you naughty boy! Ho ho ho!” In the corner of my eye I could see beams of high-energy light sweeping down the hall as the Channel 5 minicam crew stormed past Thelma's vacant desk.

“What kind of surprise,” he said. I upended my pillowcase and treated him to a propaganda blizzard just as the cameraman centered his crosshairs on Corrigan's forehead. We not only got him to agree to a meeting, but also got the agreement broadcast throughout the Commonwealth—just about the only way to make an environmental appointee keep his word. Corrigan hasn't been very nice to me since then, but I did make Thelma's Christmas card list.

Anyway, Gomez got fired for accepting my fake ID. We ended up hiring him to do jobs here and there around the office. Nothing illegal. When it came to finding things that needed fixing or painting he was an enterprising guy. To watch him find loose stair treads and peeling paint was to see free enterprise in action. Not unlike my own job.

The van was right where Wyman had left it, in the dirtiest, the most dangerous, the most crime-ridden neighborhood in Boston. I'm not talking about crack dealers, tenements, or minority groups here. The neighborhood isn't Roxbury. It's the zone around the Mystic River where most of New England's heavy industry is located. It's split fifty-fifty between Everett and Charlestown. I spend a lot of my time up
here. Most of the “rivers” feeding into the Mystic are drainage ditches, no more than a couple of miles long. The nation's poisoners congregate along these rivers and piss into them. In my Zodiac I have visited them personally, smelled their yellow, brown, white, and red waters, and figured out what they're made of.

We could see Wyman's footprints wandering out across the mud flats next to the Everett River, heading for a side street that might lead him to a telephone. I already knew the name of the street: Alkali Lane. We could see the place where he got a whiff of something, maybe, or got close enough to read the name of the street, then spun around the loped back to the nontoxic shoulder, obsessively wiping his Reeboks on the dead ragweed. From there, he'd hitchhiked.

Gomez stripped the van in much the same way that a Sioux would dismantle a buffalo. I just concentrated on getting the wheels off, with their brand-new, six-hundred-dollar set of radiais that Wyman was going to abandon—a free gift from GEE to a randomly chosen junkyard. I also made sure we got our manhole-lifting tool, which is to me what a keychain is to a janitor. Gomez got the battery, electronic ignition box, cassette player, sheepskin, jack, lug wrenches, tire chains, half case of Ray-Lube, spare fan belt, alternator, and three gallons of gasoline. He was going after the starter when I officially pronounced the van dead.

We took the license plates so we could prove to the insurance company that we weren't driving it anymore, and then I removed the Thermite from the glove compartment. It's wise to keep some handy in case you need to weld some railroad rails together. The van's serial number was stamped on its parts and body in three places, all of which I'd noted down, so I put Thermite on each and ignited them with my cigar. Instant slag. Like a Mafia hitter chopping the fingertips off a corpse.

The identification numbers were still smoking as we climbed back into the Omni. But immediately a vehicle pulled up behind us, a Bronco II with too many antennas and a flashing light on the roof.

“Fucking rent-a-cop,” Gomez said. From being one himself, he'd become sensitized to the whole absurd concept.

I walked back so I could read the sign on the Bronco's door: BASCO SECURITY. I knew them well. They owned every thing on Alkali Lane and most of the Everett River. In fact, if you stepped off the shoulder of the parkway, you were on their property. Then your shoes would dissolve.

“Morning,” said the rent-a-cop, who, like Gomez, was young and skinny. They never had the authority belly of a true Boston cop.

“Morning,” I said, sounding like a man in a hurry, “Can I help you?”

He was looking at a picture of me from what looked startlingly like a dossier. Also included were photographic representations of my boss, and of a jerk named Dan Smirnoff, and one I hadn't seen in a while, a fugitive named Boone.

“Sangamon Taylor?”

“You got a warrant somewhere? Hey! You aren't a real cop at all, are you?”

“We got some witnesses. A bunch of us security guards been over there on the main building, watching you here. Now, we know this van.

“I know, we're old pals.”

“Right. So we recognized it when it stopped here last night. And we watched you stripping it. And maybe fucking with the VIN?”

“Look. If you want to hassle me, just go to your boss and say, ‘pH?'. Just tell him that.”

“P-H? Isn't that something they put in shampoo?”

“Close enough. Tell him ‘pH thirteen'. And for your sake, get a different job. Don't go out there, into those flats, patrolling around. You understand? It's dangerous.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, highly amused. “Big criminal element down there.”

“Exactly. The board of directors of Basco. The Pleshy family. Don't let them kill again.”

Back at the Omni, Gomez said, “What'd you tell him?”

“pH. Went here last week and tested their pH and it was thirteen.”

“So?”

“So they're licensed for eight. That means they're putting shit into the river that's more than two times the legal limit.”

“Shit, man,” Gomez said, scandalized. That was another good thing about Gomez. He never got jaded.

And I hadn't even told him the truth. Actually, the shit coming out of Basco's pipe was a
hundred thousand times
more concentrated than was legally allowed. The difference between pH 13 and pH 8 was five, which meant that pH 13 was ten to the fifth power—a hundred thousand times—more alkaline than pH 8. That kind of thing goes on all the time. But no matter how many diplomas are tacked to your wall, give people a figure like that and they'll pass you off as a flake. You can't get most people to believe how wildly the eco-laws get broken. But if I say “More than twice the legal limit,” they get comfortably outraged.

I had Gomez drop me off in Harvard Square so I could eat birdseed and tofu with a reporter from
The Weekly
. Ditched my cigar. Then I went in to this blond-wood extravaganza, just off the square, allowed the manager to show me her nostrils, and finally picked out Rebecca sitting back in the corner.

“How's the Granola James Bond?”

I nearly unleashed my Toxic Spiderman rap but then remembered that some people actually admired me, Rebecca among them, and it was through admiration and James Bond legends that we got things like free cars and anonymous toxic tips. So I let it drop. Rebecca had picked the sunniest corner of the room and the light was making her green eyes glow like traffic lights and her perfume volatilize off the skin. She and I had been in the sack a few times. The fact that we weren't going to be there in the near future made her a hundred thousand time—oops—more than twice as beautiful. To distract myself, I growled something about beer to a waiter and sat down.

“We have—” the waiter said, and drew a tremendously deep breath.

“Genesee Cream Ale.”

“Don't have that, sir.”

“Beck's.” Because I figured Rebecca was paying.

“The specialty is sparkling water with a twist,” Rebecca said.

“I need something to wash the Everett out of my mouth.”

“Been out on your Zode?”