"Shit. Four different kinds of cops, now five, all arresting different people. I need a scorecard."
"Could you prove in court that someone like that was violating the law?"
"I can run a chemical analysis that proves it. But any chemist can do that. You don't need me."
"Why are you laughing?"
"Because this is unbelievable. I just get sprung from jail and now...."
"You have a pretty low opinion of law enforcement in my state, don't you?"
A delicate question. "A lot of laws get broken there, let's put it that way." But that was a dodge. Of course I had a low opinion. I'd seen this before. GEE draws attention to a problem and suddenly the cops-particularly the category of cops who have to be reelected-are on the ball.
"It might interest you to know that our state is tired of being used as a chemical toilet so that people in Utah can have plastic lawn furniture."
"I can't believe an assistant attorney general came right out and said that."
"Well, I wouldn't say it in public. But we don't need this image problem."
"Sounds like strategy and tactics, man, like some important up-for-reelection type sat down with a chart, in the Statehouse maybe, and said: 'Item number two, this toilet-of-the-United-States business. Cohen, get out there and bust some corporate ass.'"
Cohen was nice enough to give me a bitchy little smile. "If that's how you want to view it, fine. But real life is more complicated."
I just sneered out the windshield. After I've gotten the date and done the work for them, ecocrats love to give me some pointers on real life. If it makes them feel better, I don't care.
"We want to prosecute these people," Cohen continued, "but getting evidence is hard."
"What's so hard about it?"
"Come on, Mr. Taylor, look at it from a cop's point of view. We aren't chemists. We don't know which chemicals to look for, we don't know where or how to look. Infiltration, sampling, analysis, all those activities require specialists-not state troopers. You're very scornful, Mr. Taylor, because for you-with your particular skills-for you all those things are easy. You can do them with your eyes closed." "Holy shit, is this going where I think it is?" It was. Cohen wanted me to break into a fucking chemical plant in the middle of the night, with cops! a warrant, in his home state, and get samples. Me, I was far too tired to hear this bizarre stuff. I desperately needed cold beer and loud rock and roll. So Cohen went on and on, about how I should think this over, and then I found myself sitting alone in the Omni, leaned back in the reclining seat with Debbie's Joan Jett tape blasting on the stereo-I'm in love with the modem world / I'm in touch, I'm a modem girl-drawing stares from the company suits, wondering if I'd just dreamed the whole thing.
12
BACK IN BOSTON , we worked out a settlement with Fotex. They had just lost their most vicious negotiator, my oldest and wiliest enemy in this business, who had toppled off a rusty catwalk into an intake pond, been sucked into a pig pipe, shredded into easily digestible bits by rotating knives and processed into toxic sludge. I guessed it was suicide. This Fotex deal was a big hassle since Wes, who runs the Boston office, was using the Omni for a business trip through northern New England. I had to ride my bike to and from their goddamn plant, way up north in the high-chemical-crime district and reachable only by riding on the shoulder of some major freeways. I could feel the years ticking off my life expectancy as the mile markers struggled by.
Someone had donated an old computer system, a five-terminal CP/M system about ten years old. Boston already had a Computer Museum, but we were neck-and-neck with them as a showcase of obsolete machinery. Old used computers are economically worthless and we pick them up for little or nothing. Usually they're good enough for what we want to do: telecommunications, printing up mailing lists, slowly crunching a few numbers.
Debbie and I took a vacation up to Quebec City and then over to Nova Scotia for a couple of days. I had a terrible time.
"If we get up now-" I said one night at about 3:00 A.M., looking at my digital nerd-watch.
"-and roll up the tent real fast," she continued, and by this time I was already embarrassed, but she kept going, "and jump into the car and drive all night, we could reach the ferry that runs down to the states, and be in Boston, wallow-ing in sludge, within twenty-four hours."
"Yeah."
"Instead of being out here on the beach, listening to the waves, relaxing and screwing," she continued.
"We aren't screwing," I pointed out, but suddenly we were. Debbie insisted on following the rhythm of the waves. Typical duck-squeezer sex: slow, frustrating, in tune with nature. Fortunately there was a trawler out there somewhere, maybe a mile out, and when its wake attacked the beach, the waves started piling in on top of each other, blending into one fast pounding whoosh-whoosh-whoosh. I burst the zipper out of my sleeping bag, Debbie kicked a pot of cold hot chocolate out into the sand, and for a while we just lay there, half tumbled out onto the beach, feeling the cold and the warmth on opposite sides, and I said to hell with the damn ferry. Every so often I got some hint that this woman really wanted me, and it was scary. When she wanted other things she was so crafty and effective.
Eventually we found our way back and then didn't see each other for a while. It was a nice summer and I spent more time at the beach, or playing ski-ball, than working. Bart had a friend in Tacoma who mailed us a shitload of powerful fireworks he'd bought on an Indian reservation. We got arrested shooting them off in a park and I had to sell off some shares of my old Mass Anal stock to pay the fine. The guy who arrested us was good-some kind of ex-military man. He waited until we lit off a whistle, so we couldn't hear his engine, then he closed on us at some huge speed, with his lights off, stopped right in front of us, pinning us against a retaining wall, and hit us with all of his cop lights at once.
Brilliant tactics. I congratulated him heartily; it was useful to remember that smart cops did exist.
The Blowfish showed up. It was about to turn the corner around Maine and head into the Buffalo area. But first we took a trip out to Spectacle Island, a couple of miles off of South Boston. It really ought to be called Gallagher Tow Island, because it was kind of a patrimony for that family. The guy who'd founded Gallagher Tow-I don't know his first name-had held down the city garbage-towing concession for fifty years. He'd clung to that concession like something out of an Alien movie; he couldn't be removed without killing the patient. He'd used everything-graft, blackmail, bullshit, violence, Irishness, defamation of character, arranged marriages, the Catholic church, and simple groveling. He'd hung on to that garbage contract, built up his fleet of tugs from one to fifteen, created an entire goddamn island out in the middle of the Harbor, and, like a true magnate, died of a massive stroke. Now his grandson, Joe, ran Gallagher Tow, and he'd moved on to other forms of envirocide. They had a brand new behemoth named Extra Stout, a 21,000-horse tugboat that could probably haul Beacon Hill out to sea if they could figure out where to attach the hawser. Instead they used it to haul oilrigs through twenty-foot swells in the North Atlantic.
So the Gallagher garbage-dumping days are over, but the evidence is still there. You can go walk around on it. Someday, I'm sure, a set of yuppie condos will spring up on Spectacle Island. The heating bills would be low, because all that trash is still decaying; if you stick a probe into its bowels in the middle of the winter, you will find that the entire island is blood-warm. It just sits there decomposing, throwing off heat and gases. As far as I'm concerned it kind of sums up Boston Harbor.