There was a CSO near Castle Island Park. It explains why I'd found a condom out in the middle of the Harbor. There was probably a CSO in the Hudson River, in New York, upstream of my uncle's old condom-diving beds. Of course, he didn't have scuba gear. He just swam through the raw sewage
with his eyes open. He must have had the immune system of a junkyard dog.
I cut slowly through the rain back toward the yacht club, chopping through big rollers the whole way.
The visibility was next to nothing. So I was rather surprised when I came face to face with something big, shiny and blue, floating about a hundred yards from where I'd been diving. It was a boat, a good-sized powerboat, sitting there dark and quiet. And about the time I saw it, it saw me, and suddenly there was a tremendous whhooos echoed by a second one as its engines were started; the storm was drowned out by the sound of about a thousand horsepower digging a hole in the water. Its nose angled up like the prow of a star-ship, and it vanished into the night. No running lights. The only evidence it had ever been there was a clashing, foaming wake that knocked me around for a few seconds, and a high roar that dwindled to nothing in a hurry.
I realized kind of slowly, on my way back, that it was a thirty-one foot Cigarette. The same one I'd seen before, up in that channel, sitting idle on the water. And the son of a bitch was watching me. As the man says: just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean everyone isn't really out to get me.
For a second, I wanted to chase it down, try to see some identifying marks. Then I figured out why they were going to the trouble to use a hot-rod speedboat, a Miami penis-mobile, up here in this land of bankers' sloops and wallowing trawlers. Why they'd put nine hundred horses on its back, when it was only rated for six. They were using a Cigarette because it was the only boat in the harbor that my Zodiac couldn't catch.
Or to look at it another way, the only boat I couldn't get away from. That one didn't occur to me until a few hours later, when I was trying to sleep.
I took a long shower in the yacht club and then sat out under an awning, waiting for Bart to pick me up, watching yuppies destroy their umbrellas in the wind. I was wasted. But I was alert. If some Satan-worshipping heavy-metal dustheads decided to hurt you, or kill you, how would they go about it? The old multiple shotgun blasts probably wouldn't suffice. They'd want to cart me off somewhere,
make a ritual of it. For the nth time in my career I considered owning a gun. But guns were tricky and hard to aim. I should think in terms of chemical warfare-something really obnoxious I could use to slow down whoever came after me.
I had an idea already: 1,4-diamino butane; a.k.a., putrescine-the distinctive chemical scent given off by decaying corpses. I could whip up a batch and carry some on me. That would give anyone second thoughts.
When Bart pulled in, he cranked up a Poyzen Boyzen tape and I half-breathed all the way home-half a breath of air, half a breath of nitrous. Phoned Debbie and Tanya to make sure they were all right. Tanya's boyfriend was holed up there, answering the phone, and armed. He was into some kind of martial art that involved samurai swords, so I felt better. I took another shower and then started drinking. Bart and I sat in the living room watching the Stooges on Deep Cable until about two in the morning, and I think Amy came over, though I never heard a single moan, shriek or wail. Roscommon drove through sometime during the night and sideswiped Bart's van, streaking it with white paint.
I took the T into the university, ran into the lab, locked the door behind me, and ran a test on my sample. It was full of PCBs. The concentration was roughly a hundred times higher than the worst ever recorded in Boston Harbor. The lobsters and Gallagher and Tanya and I had discovered a toxic catastrophe.
16
I THOUGHT, SHIT . The Mafia. I'm fucking around with the Mafia. It would be just like them to take this blatant approach, just haul a few barrels of PCBs out into the Harbor and throw them overboard.
For two reasons I didn't want to fuck with the Mafia. The first reason is obvious. The second reason is that I can't do anything about them. I pressure large corporations by hurting their image. By making them look like criminals. There wasn't much point in trying that approach on the Mafia. Besides, we already have cops to fight them. Not just ERA officials. Cops with guns. Recently they'd been doing a pretty good job of it and they didn't need my help.
If it was the Mafia, they were being awfully subtle. The goons in the Cigarette first had hidden from me, then had run away. I should have found a horse's head in my bed by now, at the very least. Why so coy?
You had to figure they'd warn me off before killing me. That's what I'd have to bet on. As soon as I got a warning, I'd forget about it. Maybe issue some dire warnings about lobsters from the Harbor, but not cause any real trouble.
If I didn't hear from them, this was going to get interesting fast.
In the early days, GEE didn't play anything close to the vest, they took what they had and ran with it. But I've got this chemistry background and it's given me some habits I can't break. I won't go to the media until I've got lots and lots of information. One shit-filled Jiffy jar didn't qualify.
What I needed was a lot more samples and a rough plot of the spill's distribution on the Harbor floor. Then a lot of poisoned lobsters to freeze for later display. In the meantime I could make a few discreet media contacts. When the story broke, there was going to be a lot of background to explain, so I contacted Rebecca at The Weekly, the Globe's environmental reporter and a local freelancer who had been eating macaroni and cheese for three weeks.
"I'm kind of busy with your friend, Fleshy," Rebecca told me.
"The big one? Alvin?" I never could keep them straight. For Brahmins they multiplied quickly.
"Alvin. You know, he's kicking off his campaign...."
"Don't tell me. Faneuil Hall. Shit! I wish I knew about it-"
"Forget it. Look, ST., to you he's just a local hack, but he's important nationally. He's got Secret Service three deep. You don't want to get near him."
"Oh, I don't know. Maybe we could borrow a rocket launcher from Boone-oh, I almost forgot. This line's tapped."
When they first started bugging my phone, I went out of my way not to use keywords like "ammo" and "detonator." But after a couple of years I figured, fuck it. The poor bastard who sat there listening to me talking to Esmerelda about her grandchildren, talking to my roommates about which movie we should go see, explaining to reporters the difference between dioxin and dioxane-he must have been bored out of his mind. So from time to time I'd toss in a reference to an RPG-7 or a shipment of Soviet plastique, just to spice things up a little.
They say that the people who listen to bugs for a living are all thirty-five-year-old men who still live with their
mothers. That was the image I kept in my own mind. Some kind of balding, spare-tired paleface in wirerims, sitting at a desk, monitoring my life and worrying about the carburetor on his Chevette. I didn't care what he heard, because if he didn't know by now that I wasn't a terrorist, he'd never figure it out.
"Anyway, ST., I have a proposal," Rebecca said. "He's supposed to be the Democrats' Great White Hope, right? But you seem to think his environmental record is less than clean."