“Continue.”
“The ones buried under the north shore of the island. The ones that accidentally got ruptured by that old barge during Hurricane Alison, and spilled a whole lake of PCBs down into the Harbor. You were afraid I'd figured that all out. Which, actually, I hadn't. As you noticed, I can be pretty slow sometimes. But you tried to scare me off, to slow my investigation down, so that you could use the bug to wipe out the evidence before I went public.”
“And it worked.”
“It worked fine. The question is: did the bug really eat all those PCBs? What about deep underneath that old barge? Maybe there's an unruptured transformer down there. Or maybe there's a pocket of bugs down there, still working on some PCBs, bugs that I could sample and show before the public. You're still worried about that. You want me off your trail, you want me on your side.”
“Why shouldn't you be on our side? Dolmacher said. He really meant it. ”S.T., there are no covalent chlorine compounds left in Boston Harbor. Isn't that what you wanted?"
“Sangamon's Principle,” I said. “This plasmid, it's a huge molecule you're messing around with. You don't know what it's going to do. The answer is no.”
Laughlin didn't bother to show me out. Dolmacher followed me, going on about the Survival Game, until I body-checked him into a wall. He gave me a vacant yet somehow piercing look, and as I rode the elevator down, I got to thinking that Dolmacher was nothing but a big complicated molecule himself, and you never knew what he'd do either.
Zodiac
21
REBECCA CAME AROUND for our appointment about half an hour after I got back. I'd forgotten about it. Damn it, I was still just stewing in my emotions, trying to wash Laughlin's perfume off my hand. I hadn't had time to consider anything. I wanted to tell all, but first I had to come up with a plan. I shoved my clippings under some other crap when I heard her voice approaching; she walked in and said she had some interesting stuff for me.
She did, but nothing better than what I'd already seen. There was another copy of that same picture. The intern had also discovered a vague little article from the late Sixties saying that Basco had put some “junk machinery” on the floor of the Harbor, giving the usual feeble excuse.
“They claim that this junk was going to become a habitat for marine life. You don't buy that?”
Bless her, she did know how to blow my lid. “Rebecca, goddammit, since the beginning of time, every corporation that has ever thrown any of its shit into the ocean has claimed that it was going to become a habitat for marine life. It's the goddamn ocean, Rebecca. That's where all the marine life is. Of course it's going to become a habitat for marine life.”
“You think those things pose an environmental hazard today?”
“Nothing compared to those transformers. I've got Basco in my crosshairs, Rebecca.”
“I don't think I can print that in the paper, S.T.”
“I just don't have any ammunition in my magazine.”
“Look. Do you want to do the article? S.T. on Fleshy?”
“Can't, Not yet. Have to figure out what's going on.” I leaned forward and looked ponderous. “If I seem a little stressed out, well ... the FBI is after me.”
“You're kidding, S.T.!”
“Recess. I'll get back to you when Basco's in the grave.”
When I'd gotten back from that lovely chat with Laughlin and Dolmacher, there'd been a message waiting for me, a worried message from Gallagher's wife. It was still early enough in the day to catch him on his boat, and I needed an excuse to get out on the water. I persuaded Rebecca to drive me downtown, got on the Zodiac, and buzzed around to Gallagher's berth in Southie. He was still out on the water somewhere. So I persuaded one of the neighboring boats to hail him on the CB, and in about twenty minutes I was screaming flat-out across calm water to intercept the Scoundrel, which was just returning from the Bay.
They recognized me at a distance, since I'm the only one who travels in that way, and cut their engines so I could come up alongside.
“Jeez! You guys run into an oil slick?” I said when I got close enough to talk. Maybe it was the late-afternoon light, but they were all dark, greyish looking. They mumbled some kind of defiant, bullshit response. They sounded tired. I tossed one of them my bow line and then they helped me scramble on board.
They all stood around and stared at me, quieter than they'd ever been, sunk, depressed. The reason their skin was dark was that they were covered with chloracne.
“You guys have been into some bad chowder,” I said in a weak murmur, but Gallagher, skipper of the plague ship Scoundrel, held up his hands and cut me off.
“Listen. Listen, S.T, we stopped setting our traps there. I swear to God we haven't touched any of them oily lobsters.”
When was this damn thing going to start making any sense? Why did I feel like such an asshole? “You absolutely didn't eat any of those oily ones?”
“Only Billy. The guy you saw at Fenway.”
“How's he doing?”
“Fine. He felt real sick and took a couple days off, stopped eating lobster.”
Billy came up from below decks. He was pristine. A little residual scabbing from his old case of chloracne.
“But you guys have been eating lobster and you got sick.”
“Yeah. Real bad, just in the last couple of days. So we switched to Big Macs.”
“Good.”
“But it's getting worse anyway. When I left this morning, S.T, I was okay, I really was. But now I feel like shit.”
“The lobsters that you ate since the last time I talked to you-”
“Goddamn it, S.T, I'm telling you the God's truth. We looked at them all real careful and they didn't smell oily, they didn't taste oily.”
“Where'd you get 'em?”