This room was so loud that we fled into the hallway. “I hate these dusters,” Dr. J. said.
A nurse was bearing down on me with a clipboard. I got to thinking about the bureaucratic problems that might arise. Which form do you fill out when a dead terrorist brings a handcuffed, SLUDing organophosphate victim in off the street? How many hours were we going to spend plowing through this question if I stuck around? So I didn't stick around. I told them Debbie had a Blue Cross card in her wallet, and then I split. Once we were a safe distance away, I called Tanya and told her to spread the word: Debbie was in the hospital and she could probably use some visitors. And some bodyguards.
Then I hung up. Bart and I were standing in the parking lot of the Charles River Shopping Center at three in the morning, in the Hub of the Universe, surrounded on all sides by toxic water. Boone was on a ship that was probably headed for Everett right now. When it got there, my favorite environmentalist, Smirnoff, was going to blow it up. Laughlin and the other bad guys would die. That was good. Our sailor friend, the skipper and Boone would probably die too, though. And the evidence we wanted so badly, the tank full of concentrated organophosphates down in the belly of the ship, would become shrapnel. The PCB bugs would be gone from the Harbor, with no way to trace them back to Basco. Pleshy would become president of the United States and eight-year-old schoolchildren would write him letters. My aunt would tell me what a great man he was and military bands would precede him everywhere. And, what really hurt: Hoa would say, well, maybe Canada needs some Vietnamese restaurants.
At least that's the way it seemed right then. I might have stretched a few things, but one thing was for damn sure: we had to stop Smimoff.
“Is this what they call being a workaholic?” I muttered as we jogged through the North End, heading for Bart's van, chewing on some benzedrine capsules. “I mean, any decent human should be sitting by Debbie's bed, holding her hand when she wakes up.”
“Hum,” Bart said.
“I would give anything to kiss her right now. Instead, she's going to wake up and say, 'Where is that fucker who claims he loves me?' I'm out working, that's where I am. I've been working for, what, ninety-six hours straight?”
“Forty-eight, maybe.”
“And can I take time out to hold the hand of a sick woman? No. This is workaholism.”
“Pretty soon the speed'll kick in,” Bart explained, “and you'll feel better.”
We found the van where he'd left it, but someone had broken in and ripped off the stereo and the battery. He'd parked on a flat space by the waterfront so I got to push-start it. That was fun. The speed helped there. “I wish we had the stereo,” he said.
We headed south along Commercial street, running along all the piers, and when we looked to the east we could see the Basco Explorer churning its way northward, blending the poison into the Harbor with its screws. A major crime was taking place right out there, in full view of every downtown building, and there wasn't a single witness. Toxic criminals have it easy.
Eventually we got ourselves to Rory Gallagher's house in Southie. He was back from the hospital now, healthy enough to threaten us with physical harm for coming around at this time of night. We got him calmed down and asked him how we could get in touch with the other Gallaghers, the Charlestown branch of the family.
Here's the part where I could cast racial aspersions on the Irish and say that they have a natural fondness for acts of terrorism. I won't go that far. It's fairer to say that a lot of people have fucked them over and they don't take it kindly. Gallagher, he loved Kennedy and he loved Tip, but he'd always suspected Pleshy, who was a Brahmin, who pissed on his leg whenever he spoke about the fishing industry. When I told Rory how Basco and Pleshy - to him they were a single unit - had poisoned his body and many others, he turned completely red and responded just the right way. He responded as though he'd been raped.
“But we've pushed them,” I explained, “pushed and pushed them and made them desperate, forced them into bigger crimes to cover up the old ones. That's why we need your brother.”
So we got Joe on the phone. I let Rory argue with him for a while, so he'd be fully awake when I started my pitch. Then I just confiscated the telephone. “Joseph.”
“Mr. Taylor.”
“Remember all that garbage your grandpa dumped into the Harbor?”
“I don't want to hear any shit about that at this time of the morning....”
“Wake up, Joe. It's Yom Kippur, dude. The Day of Atonement is here.”
I knew Rory's phone wasn't bugged, so we made all kinds of calls. We called an Aquarium person I knew and gave her the toxic Paul Revere. Called all the media people whose numbers I could remember, yanked them right out of bed. Called Dr. J. for an update on Debbie; she was doing okay. The Gallaghers made a couple of calls and inadvertently mobilized about half of the self-righteous anger in all of Southie and half of Charlestown. When we walked out Gallagher's front door to get back in Bart's van, we found, waiting in the front yard, a priest with chloracne, a fire engine, a minicam crew and five adolescents with baseball bats.
We borrowed a car battery from one of the adolescents and drove crosstown toward Cambridge, taking the two largest adolescents with us. Along the way, I gave Bart a brief lesson in how to run a Zodiac - one of the Townies kept saying “I know, I know” - and then dropped them all off on the Esplanade near Mass General.
Then I took the van to GEE headquarters. Gomez's Impala was there, and I met him in the stairway. “Thanks for the warning,” I said. I'd had plenty of time to think about that voice on my answering machine - “your house has a huge fucking bomb in the basement. Get out, now.”
“I'm sorry,” he said.