"This thing hits you and ploosh! You're marked. See, totally nonviolent. It's a game of strategy. That's why Dolmacher's so good at it. He's a master strategist."
We told the guy that we'd get back to him. When we got back to the parking lot, Boone was standing in a semicircle of awed survivalists, explaining how to defeat a Doberman Pinscher in single combat without hurting it.
"Nice to see you're getting back to your old self," I told him, when we finally dragged him back into the truck.
"Those guys are troglodytes," he said. "Their solution to everything is a high-powered rifle."
"Maybe we should start an institute on nonviolent terrorism."
"Catchy. But if it's not violent, there's no terror involved."
"Boone, you sound like those guys. There's more to life than firepower. I think it's possible to create some terror just by confronting people with their own sins."
"What's your problem, you grow up Catholic or something? Nobody gives a shit about their sins anymore. You think those corporate execs worry about sin?"
"Well, they've poisoned people, they've broken the law, and when I show them up in the media, they get real bothered by it."
"That's just because it's bad for business. They don't really feel guilty."
By now Jim had us out on the highway. He pointed the silver Indian's face northwards and depressed the accelerator.
"How about Fleshy?" Boone said. "You think he feels guilty? You think he's scared? Shit no."
"They're still human beings, Boone. I'll bet he's scared shitless. He created a disaster."
"Yeah, he's showing all the symptoms of a man paralyzed with fear," Boone said, consulting one of his newspapers. "Let's see, ten o'clock, ax-throwing competition. Ten-thirty, grand marshal of log-rolling contest. He's running sacred all right."
"What do you expect him to do, run to Boston and hide? Look Boone, the guy is slick. He's got his gnomes working on the problem. Like Laughlin. Shit, I wonder what that bastard Laughlin's up to. Pleshy's job is to go around looking brave. But if someone confronted him, right in front of the TV cameras..."
Boone and I locked eyes for about a quarter of a mile, until Jim got nervous and started looking over at us. "You guys are nuts," he said, "you'll get popped. Or shot."
"But at the very least he'd break a sweat," I said.
"I'll buy that," Boone said.
"And we could publicize the whole thing." I was remembering my last action in New Hampshire-at the Seabrook nuclear site, years ago. We all got arrested, never made it onto the site. Some of us even got the crap beat out of us. But we got it on the news. And the reactor was still sitting there, uncompleted, a decade later.
"You'd have to get real close," Jim said. "Secret Service, you know."
"They'll be totally loose," Boone said. "What do they have to worry about? A dwarf like Fleshy-nobody even remembers the guy's name-early in the campaign, at an ax-throwing contest in New fuckin' Hampshire. Shit, if I was going to assassinate him, this is when I'd do it."
We found Dolmacher's car easily enough. The Lumbermen's Festival was staged in one of the many postage-stamp state parks scattered around New Hampshire, and there just weren't that many ways to get into it. We knew he wasn't go-
ing to park his car conspicuously, or illegally. He was going to park it like a proper Beantown leaf-peeper and then he was going to fade into the woods. And that was exactly what he'd done. We found it at a roadside camping/picnicking area, near the head of a nature-appreciation trail.
"Very clever," Jim said. "No one would expect him there."
I looked in the windows but didn't see much. One pharmaceuticals bottle, half-hidden under the seat. No ammo belts or open tubes of camouflage paint. Dolmacher was taking a remarkably buttoned-down approach to this totally insane mission.
Maybe the bugs could affect your brain. The media had been speculating all week that my contact with toxic wastes had fried my cerebral cortex, turned me into a drooling terrorist. I felt pretty calm, but Dolmacher had gotten a much worse dose, and was less stable to begin with. He hadn't turned into a raving maniac. He was acting more like the psychotics you read about in the newspapers: calm, methodical, invisible.
Jim was sitting in the truck, messing around with something, and Boone was watching intently. I went over, stood on the running board, and looked. Jim had pulled one of his homemade bows out from behind the seat.
"This is the Nez Perce model," he explained. "See, the limbs are strengthened with a membrane that comes from the inside of a ram's horn. They used bighorn sheep, but I get by using domesticateds."
"What the fuck are you going to do with that, Jim?"
"What the fuck are you going to do when you catch Dolmacher, S.T.? Remember? Your gun's on the bottom of that lake."
"Wasn't planning on shooting him anyway."
"You're a real prize, you know that? What do you think we're doing here? It's my understanding that we're going after a psycho with a gun."
"Only because we have to have his knowledge. We won't have that if we fill him full of arrows."
"You underestimate me, S.T" Jim pulled a bundle of arrows out from behind the seat. The shafts were straight and smooth, feathers at the back as usual, but without heads.
"Fishing arrows," Boone said.
Jim nodded and held one up for me. One short barb stuck backwards from the point, and a short perpendicular piece was lashed to the shaft about three inches behind that.
"This keeps it from going all the way through the fish, the barb keeps it from pulling out. Now, a game arrow, with the big head, that kills by severing a lot of blood vessels. The animal bleeds to death. But this will just stick into a big animal and annoy him."
I guess I still looked skeptical.
"Look, the guy said Dolmacher has a black belt in this game. If you think he's going to let us sneak up close enough to pluck the gun out of his hand, you're nuts."
"Okay. But if the Secret Service comes after us, you have to toss all that crap into the bushes."
"Obviously. Hell, this isn't for assassinations anyhow. It's the equivalent of a CO2 gun with paint pellets."
29
BOONE INSISTED that he was the one. "Hell, you just tried to blow the guy up a week ago," he kept pointing out. "Your face is a 3-D wanted poster. They'll pop you. But everyone's forgotten about me. Unless Pleshy's secretly in the whaling business."
I couldn't argue with any of that. We agreed that Jim and I were going to hike up the trail and Boone was going to take the truck. He would swing around to the site of the Lumbermen's Festival and scope out the place. There wasn't any point in planning this out, because it was all random. If Fleshy happened to walk past him, he'd take the opportunity to stand up and state his case, get some media glare on Pleshy's reaction. If it was impossible to get near Fleshy, he'd forget about that, head for the back of the crowd and look for a tall, pale, psychotic nerd with his hand in his coat.
"Maybe we should call the cops and tell them Dolmacher's out there," Jim said at the last minute.
This was not an idea that had occurred to me. Frankly, if Fleshy ate a few bullets it was okay with me. I was worried about Dolmacher-probably the only guy in the world who knew how to stop this impending global catastrophe. He could easily get shot in the bargain. Even if he didn't, they'd truck him off to the loony bin where he wouldn't be of any use.