I'd made it to the piers of South Boston, goddamn it, and it was low tide. The low tide was going to save my life. The piers stood up on piles and I could squeeze between them.
Time for some serious Zodiac abuse. I was hanging onto the Zode in about six different ways because the piles kept trying to punch it out from under me. I was flying every which way, like riding a bronco, so the barnacles on those piles left a nice series of parallel gashes in my hands and arms. Long years of video-game experience were coming into play. I just kept worrying about the next set of piles, cutting and jiving through the gaps, ducking under the occasional strut. Cigarettes aren't made for that particular kind of abuse, so all they could do was parallel me and then try to cut me off when the piers came to an end and I had to emerge into the Harbor again.
But that was like a defensive lineman trying to stand in the way of a running back. A fake here, a fake there, and there's just no way to do it. I screamed past with them no more than ten feet away, because it's harder to draw a bead on something that's going by close and fast - ask any Indian circling a wagon train - and then I swung around, heading inland again. I was all done with Southie; downtown was a hundred yards away.
Paranoia is my way of life, and for a couple of weeks, some creeps had been shadowing me in a big powerful speedboat. I'd lost sleep, irritated Debbie and wasted a lot of gasoline because of these creeps. Instead of sleeping I had sprawled on my bed trying to think of what I would do if they ever came after me. In other words, I wasn't unprepared for this. I'd given it some thought.
So I knew exactly how to send these bastards to their graves: lead them into the Fort Point Channel at high velocity.
Boston used to be just a round island at the end of a sandbar. The airport, Back Bay, and much of Southie's waterfront are all artificial land. The bay between Southie and downtown Boston had been narrowed until it was just a slit - a canal, really - called Fort Point Channel. It was only a couple hundred yards wide, and it was no place to race speedboats. It was spanned with several bridges and completely fouled with old, half-rotten pilings. In its one-mile length it had more snags and shallows and lurking dangers than any hundred miles of the Mississippi. Like a riverboat pilot, I knew where all that shit was. I could navigate this channel at full speed with my eyes closed. Or so I'd bragged. This was my chance to find out.
First I got them excited, acted like I wanted to head home toward the yacht club, made a desperate break for the airport, got cut off both ways. Got them going very fast in the wrong direction, then broke the opposite way and just headed for the Channel at a flat sprint. Finally broke the motor in - hit full throttle - never thought I'd be that scared of anything. So I had a quarter of a mile lead before they even got turned around. I knew that Deadeye was looking right through the fog with his infrared specs, zeroing in on the heat signature of my motor, which must be blazing like a nova. He found me, probably fading fast, and his partner did exactly the right thing: leaned on the throttle, asked for all thousand horsepower, and got it. They hauled ass into the Channel, passed under the Northern Avenue Bridge, and I led them right through the safe part so they wouldn't even know they were in mortal danger. They were driving right up my ass when I led them toward a picket fence of foot-thick pilings next to the Boston Tea Party ship. I pulled into a violent turn and the Zode went between them, on its side. Then I got out of the way.
They plowed into the pilings doing upwards of sixty miles an hour. Their sexy fiberglass hull shattered like a potato chip in a meat grinder. Those big oversize motors took a lot of gasoline and all of it exploded at once. I remember one of the big outboards tumbling through space like a comet, trailing pale blue flames, its screw cutting on air. The Cigarette was a big boat going fast, and it took a long time for all that crap to stop moving.
Myself, I crossed the Channel and got onto dry land at the Summer Street Bridge. I squatted on the shore for a while, watching the flames coming up off the water. Then I wandered up into civilization, stood in the road and flagged down a BMW. It overshot me a little bit so I got to see the SAVE THE WHALES sticker on the rear bumper. A young guy in a suit climbed out. “What's burning?” he said. “Are you okay?”
“I am. You got a tire patch kit in that thing?”
“You bet.” The guy even knew my full name. We carried his kit down to the water and fixed the Tazer holes in my Zodiac. Then he got back in his BMW and drove away. I told him he didn't even have to think about donating more money to GEE this year.
Zodiac
22
EVEN THESE PUSSWADS couldn't afford to own more than one Cigarette, so I figured I was okay as long as I stayed on the water. The yacht club was definitely not an option, but I could come ashore just about anywhere else.
So I took the Zode up and out of Fort Point Channel and up to the Aquarium docks, where I found a pay phone.
“What's up?” Bartholomew asked.
Where to begin? “Well, I just killed some guys.”
For once he didn't say anything, just sat there uncomfortably silent, and I realized that this was a stupid way to commence a conversation. “Look, how many people are at the house this evening?”
“Just me. Roscommon's banging on something downstairs. Shut off our water.”
“Could you track the others down?”
“I think maybe. Why?”
“Because everyone should stay away from the house for a while. Somebody's trying to kill me.”
“Again?”
“Yeah. But for real this time.”
“You call the cops?”