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"Wyman? What did that silly fuck want?"
"He was tipping us off. He says Smimoff is going to do something tonight."
"Oh, shit."
"Going to blow up a big ship in Everett. He's got some plastic explosive."
"A Basco ship?"
"Yeah."
Water was streaming down her face, though by now she should have been wind-dried. She was sweating and shivering at the same time. In the dim, grey light coming off the city, I could see a trail of saliva roll out the corner of her mouth and down toward her ear.
"He's got a navy demolition man," she chattered.
"Debbie," I said, "did you swallow any of that water?"
She didn't answer.
"I love you, Debbie," I said, because it might be the last thing she'd ever hear.
We weren't going especially fast. I cranked the throttle back up and asked Bart to put some fingers down her throat. It wasn't necessary, though, because she was vomiting on her own. By the time we were in the Charles River Locks, north of downtown, the odor of shit and urine had mixed with the vomit and the bile, and her wrists were bleeding because she was convulsing in her handcuffs.
The Zode got us to within a couple hundred feet of the best hospital in the world, and then I put her over my shoulders in a fireman's carry and ran with her. Bart ran out onto Storrow Drive and stopped traffic for me. The Emergency Room doors were approaching, a rectangle of cool bluish light, and finally they sensed my presence and slid open.
The waiting room was full. All the benches and most of the floor were infested with dustheads, half handcuffed, half in convulsions. Someone had been handing out bad chowder at the Poyzen Boyzen concert.
This was no good. Debbie's nervous system was completely shorted out; she was thrashing so hard, like a woman possessed by Ashtoreth, that together Bart and I could hardly hold her.
"Organophosphate poisoning," I shouted. "Cholinesterase inhibitor."
"Drug related," said the nickel-plated nurse receptionist. "You'll have to wait your turn," she continued, as we blew past her and into the corridor.
We hauled Debbie from room to room, chased by a cortege of nurses and security guards, until I found the right one and kicked the door open.
Dr. J. turned around and was amazed. "Alright, S.T.! You have a new look! Thanks for coming around, man! I'm kind of busy now but ..."
"Jerry! Atropine! Now!" I screamed. And being Dr. J., he
had a syringe of atropine going into her arm within, maybe, fifteen seconds. And Debbie just deflated. We laid her out on the linoleum because a two-hundred-fifty pound Poyzen Boyzen fan was strapped to the table. Dr. J. began to check her signs. A lynch mob of ER nurses had gathered in the hallway.
"SLUD," Dr. J. said.
"What?"
"SLUD. Salivation, Lachrymation, Urination, and Defecation. The symptoms of a cholinesterase inhibitor. What, S.T., are you handling nerve gas now? Working for, like, the Iraqis or something?"
"These guys make the Iraqis look like fucking John Denver," I said.
"Well, that's a real drag. But your friend is going to be physically okay."
"Physically?"
"We have to check her brain functions," he said. "So I'm going to get a consult on this."
Pretty soon they brought a gurney and hauled her away to someplace I couldn't go. "We'll get word on this pretty soon," Dr. J. said, "so just chill out for a little."
He turned back to the Poyzen Boyzen on the table. Despite his size and PCP overdose, he'd been pretty quiet. Mostly because he was strapped down with six-point leather restraints. Not that he didn't want to kill us.
"Hey, check it out!" Dr. J. was pulling some slips of paper out of the guy's studded vest. "Tickets to a private party, man! Or ticket stubs, I should say. Up in Saugus. There's three of them. Hey, I'm off in fifteen minutes, let's check it out."
The patient protested the only way he could, by arching his back and slamming his ass into the table over and over again.
"I'll bet his old lady's still up there. Hey, I'll bet she's cute!"
The guy figured out how to use his vocal cords at some preverbal level and Dr. J. had to shout to be heard.
"Jeez, can you believe I already gave this guy twenty-five mils of Haldol? PCP is amazing stuff, man!"
"Dr. J.!" a nurse was screaming. "We have other patients!"
"His keychain's right there, man," Dr. ]. said, nodding to a big wad of chain hanging out of the guy's pocket. "Grab it and we can fuck around with his Harley."
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, SLUDding 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, ru
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.