We all owe a toxic debt to our bodies, and sooner or later it comes due. Cigarettes or a chemical-factory job boost that debt to the sky. And though Tanya had hardly any debt at all, when she figured out she was staring at PCBs, smearing them on her skin, breathing them into her lungs, she probably felt like all her carefulness had been erased. All that tofu was for nought. Suddenly she was up there with the I.V.-drug abusers.
I have no illusions about my own purity. I avoid the really bad stuff, I use common sense. I refuse to work with the nastier solvents and I don't inhale my cigars. But I could look at those PCBs and say, okay, I'm poisoned, maybe if I give up cigars and ride my bike a little more I can pay off this debt.
You don't get PCB poisoning from the air anyway. You get it by eating the stuff.
When I thought of that, I thought of Gallagher and his crew. Those bastards lived on lobsters. I had to get in touch with them right away. Easy enough.
The tough part was this. Where were the PCBs coming from? I was used to finding trace amounts just about everywhere. Basco had put lots of them into the Harbor. But I'd never actually seen the stuff before; just detected it with exquisitely sensitive instruments. To actually stand there and watch it running through a lobster's viscera like melted butter-that was a fucking nightmare. Unheard of. Somebody had to be dumping it into the Harbor by the barrel load.
First things first, so I got myself decently protected and wrapped the lobsters up in many layers of PCB-proof plastic, marked it as hazardous waste, and left it there for the time being. I wasn't normally in the business of disposing of hazardous waste and wasn't sure how to begin. Scrubbed the counter down and locked the place up, then went to a different lab and hosed myself off. Finally got Tanya on the phone; she was jittery as hell, but laughing a little now. I tried to tell her she was okay as long as she hadn't been licking her fingers, but with her background she knew more about it than I did. I asked her to put Debbie on.
"Yeah?"
"We have a big thing coming up. A huge thing. Would you like to work on it?"
"Sure."
"And sometime, if I can find some time, I would like very much, more than I can really say here at this pay phone, to, like, take you to dinner or something of that nature."
"Well, you have my number," she said.
And you've got mine, I refrained from saying. And then what? How could I explain the Poyzen Boyzen thing?
"Gotten any weird messages on your phone lately?"
"Have you been doing that?"
"What?"
"Putting that awful music on our phone machine?"
"No. That's being done by some-some assholes. Heavy-metal fans."
"What do they want?"
Actually, that was a damn good question. What did these guys want? If they wanted to scare me, it was working. But what did they want to scare me into? Thugs can be so nonspecific.
"They're pissed about something. Something to do with Spectacle Island. And the lab."
"Drugs?"
"There you go." Spectacle Island-specifically, that old barge-would be a great place to process drugs. A nice, abandoned, lawless zone, only minutes from downtown.
Bart had said that PCP was very hip among the Poyzen Boyzen drones. PCP was easy to make-even a metalhead could manufacture it by the fifty-five-gallon drum. And I could detect it, by the wastes and smell it generated. No wonder they didn't want me taking samples out there.
"You want to know exactly what happened?" I said. "Those poor idiots overheard me saying I was hunting for PCBs, and they thought I said PCP!"
"Great. So you've got a band of dustheads after you?"
"No. We have a band dustheads after us."
"That's great. I'll never take another shower."
I refrained from offering showering privileges at my place. Without being her official boyfriend, there wasn't much I could do.
Reassuring was my best bet, but I wasn't. I wanted Debbie and Tanya as scared as I was, because that way they'd be careful. "Watch your ass. I have stuff to do."
"Going to call the cops?" she asked.
"About what-the PCBs?"
"No, the PCP."
"Uh, no. Look, the angel dust is weird and exciting; the PCBs are ten times as important. So right now I'm thinking about the PCBs. Sorry."
Went to a bank machine and took out a hundred dollars.
I'm not sure why. Called Bartholomew and told him where I was going, just in case. And had an idea.
"How'd you like to become a Poyzen Boyzen fan?'
"I have to anyway. Amy is."
"Oh. Is that your woman?" Amy was his new girlfriend. Hadn't met her face-to-face, but I'd heard her in the next room, late at night; the second loudest copulater I'd ever heard.
"Yeah. Have you guys met?"
"Indirectly. Well, go hang out with the hard core if you can, okay? The young ones-teenagers. Shit, I'll even subsidize it."
"But teen Boyzen heads are like two-legged cockroaches or something."
"So bring some Raid. Come on, you're the social critic, right? This is it, man."
"We'll see."
Then I headed for Fenway Park, only a few blocks away. Everything in Boston's only a few blocks away. It was approaching dusk and the wind was coming up, with something cold and wet behind it. The baseball game probably wouldn't make it to the seventh inning. Tonight it was going to rain like hell-the first Nor'easter of the fall.
When I was almost there, I walked by another phone booth, saw its white pages fluttering in the wind and remembered Dolmacher. Formerly of Basco and presently of Biotronics, a subsidiary of Basco, he was now my prime suspect. "I'm in the book-look me up," he'd said. So I did. I knew for damn sure he wasn't about to tell me anything, but if I hit him with a frontal assault, and he was his emotionally retarded self, I'd know he was totally ignorant. If he went into adrenaline overdrive and called me a terrorist, I'd know Basco was involved. So I dropped a dime on Dolmacher and let the phone ring twelve times.
"Hello?"
"Dolmacher, this is ST."
"Hi!" He sounded terribly cheerful, and a cheerful Dolmacher was almost unbearable. It meant that his work was going wonderfully. "I just got in the door from work, S.T."
"Dolmacher, just tell me one thing. Why is the floor of the Harbor, right off Castle Island Park, a lake of solid PCBs this evening?"
He laughed. "You're taking too many of those hallucinogenic alkaloids, Sangamon. Better get a real job."
I hung up-he didn't know shit-then I bought a bleacher ticket and ran around to the dark side of Fenway Park.
A toxic crime had been committed. I had witnesses and an address. The witnesses were bleacher creatures, and the address was underwater. First I had to see those witnesses, and it was easy to track them down. Like dolphins, Townies communicate with high-pitched sonar; "Heyyy, Maaahk! I'll meet ya at the Aaahk afta da geem!"
"Mr. Gallagher," I said.
"Heyyy, S.T.! Heyyy, guys, look who's here! It's the invironmintle!"
"Heyyy, S.T, how ya doin?"
"Barrett grounded out, Horn flew out, now it's 0 and 2 on Dewey. He's swinging for the bleachers, that stupid bastard."
"Look. Those oily-smelling lobsters. You haven't been eating any, have you?"
"Shit no. Tried it once but they taste awful. When you gonna do something about that, S.T? That whole area there, it's for shit now."
S.T., when are you going to stop pollution? "Which area?"
Gallagher looked around at his buddies and they all threw out rough descriptions: "Right out there, you know." "South of the airport." "North of Spectacle Island." "Right off Southie."
"Since when?"
"Month or two."
"Look, Rory. I gotta tell you something. I know sometimes you guys give me shit, you think I'm kind of flaky, but I'm telling you that shit is dangerous. I'm not talking about maybe getting cancer in twenty years, I'm talking about croaking next week. Don't eat those lobsters. I want you to go find all the other lobstermen and tell them not to use that area."