Bart's old space had been taken so we just cruised around and made a nuisance of ourselves until he showed up.

"Hey, ST., thanks for pistol-whipping me."

"I'm sorry about that, Bart, but-"

"You met my girlfriend, Amy?"

"Yeah, we've met."

"Hi, S.T.," Amy said, popping her gum explosively. Heavy metal, drugs and sexual passion had dissolved her brain to a certain point where she no longer distinguished between dead and living persons.

"Hop in," I said.

Boone introduced himself. They didn't take much notice of him. Amy wanted to know where we were all going.

"We're going to Spectacle Island," I said. By "we" I meant me and Boone and just possibly Bart, but Bart and Amy took it the other way.

"Alright!" he said. "That is going to be brutal tonight."

"That's what I was afraid of," I said. "A lot of Poyzen Boyzen fans out there?"

"Tonight they are, man. It's going to be an all night party. I know someone who's got a boat." "Christopher Laughlin?" "Yeah, how'd you know?" "It's okay. We have our own boat."

"ALRIGHT, MAN . A motley crew," Bart observed as we made our way across the piers to the GEE slip.

He had a point. There weren't deck shoes or yachting cap among us. We had walkie-talkies and Liquid Skin instead of Brie and baguettes. If there were any loose cops in the Boston area we'd be arrested on the spot. Fortunately they were all out in the streets training fire hoses on Poyzen Boyzen fans.

Amy found the trip down the ladder to the Zode extremely exciting. Bart had to help her down, using some holds he'd picked up as a high school wrestler in Oklahoma. Meanwhile, Boone and I were down there operating on the ten-horse. Wes had taken out the plugs. We didn't know what kind of plugs it took so we'd bought about twelve boxes of different types. Also we didn't know how to gap them. New plugs have to be gapped.

"It doesn't matter anyway because we don't have a gauge," Boone pointed out. But I was already one-upping him by whipping a set of leaf gauges out of my wallet.

"No wonder your fucking wallet's an inch thick," Boone said. We guessed thirty-five thousandths on the plug gap and bent the electrodes accordingly.

The net result is that the motor started on the first pull. By this time Amy had mounted the prow like a sadomasochistic figurehead and Bart was thudding up and down the ladder loading the Zode with our war supplies. This included a nice stack of Big Macs and pseudo-shakes we'd picked up at the McDonald's. No telling how long we were going to be out. I shifted into forward and Boone cracked open a Guinness. Bart leaned back between Amy's thighs and trailed one of his hands in the black brine. For some reason I felt formidable.

With this worthless motor, the trip from downtown to Spectacle Island took almost an hour. I was expecting Amy to get bored and petulant, or at least seasick, but I underestimated her. She actually kind of liked it out here. She'd never seen Boston from the water, few people have, so we basically spent half the time telling her where shit was. The 747s were coming down fast and thick at Logan and that was a sight. Bart had a Walkman with stereo minispeakers that you could plug into it, so we listened to an old Led Zep tape and later to a Sox game, in California, on the radio. Boone told some kind of interminable story about hand-to-hand combat with a Canadian helicopter in Labrador. I kept an eye on Castle Island Park, hoping Debbie would show up and give me a sign, but she didn't.

Spectacle Island was easy to find in the dark, because half of it appeared to be on fire. If I shut off the motor, we could hear the stereos from a distance of three miles. We had the slowest boat in the harbor and everyone else had gotten there first. Small boats occasionally crossed our line of sight and made silhouettes against the light.

Somehow I doubted they had all brought firewood along. They were probably burning whatever was at hand. There must be some great toxins in the air tonight. Before long we smelled them, a profoundly nasty and foul odor drifting toward us on a southeasterly wind.

"I guess we picked the wrong night," I said.

Amy didn't understand. She thought that I wasn't sufficiently impressed by this party. Bart finally had to break the news to her: "They're not coming to party. They're coming to-" his silhouette turned to look at me "-just why the fuck are you coming?"

"Chris Laughlin ever tell you about his dad?"

"Yeah, he told me all about that fucking bastard."

"Remember my enemy at Fotex? Who fell into the pond?"

"Oh, yeah, the rotating knives?"

"Yeah. That's roughly what we're going to do to Chris Laughlin's dad."

"And what will that involve?"

"Beats me. Boone and I will just have to scope it out."

"Looks like you'll have plenty of light."

Amy was temporarily depressed that we were actually coming out to test a scientific theory, but she got over it. Meanwhile I was noticing something interesting, namely a big shadow that was blocking off about half of our view of Spectacle. We were getting to the point where we could make out some running lights, and eventually, Boone and I started aiming our humongous flashlights into that shadow, checking it out with binoculars. I already had an intuition about it. So did he, I guess, because we aimed our beams at the same place: high on the bow, where the name of the ship is written. It stood out nicely in rust-stained white: Bosco Explorer.

"It's not going anywhere," he said. And when we got a little closer we could definitely see its anchor chains, coming out the hawsepipes up on the prow, descending straight into the water. The Basco Explorer, the toxic Death Star, was anchored about half a mile off Spectacle Island.

"Poyzen fans," Bart said.

But Boone and I were just looking. He reached over and shut off the radio, and I dropped the motor to an idle.

"Spray paint," I said.

Boone rummaged through one of our bags and came up with a can of black Rustoleum we'd picked up with the spark plugs. Bart shook it up and blacked out the GEE lettering on the sides of the Zode.

Most of those boat silhouettes were heading to or from Spectacle Island. But when we noticed one that was going sideways, headed for the Basco Explorer, I cranked up the motor so that we didn't look suspiciously slow. We buzzed across the ship's bow, giving it a hundred yards of clearance, and checked out the other side, which was glowing an almost imperceptible red from the fires on the island. We had to look straight at it for a minute or two before our eyes adjusted. We asked Bart and Amy to look the other way, because anyone might feel nervous if four people on a Zodiac were staring them down.

A small boat, a Boston Whaler, was bobbing alongside. One of the fyasco Explorer's davits was active, lowering a drum of some godawful cargo toward the boat.

"Deja vu," Boone said. "Just like the old days. Except the little boat's on their side."

That any of those Poyzen Boyzen fans could tolerate Spectacle Island was amazing. The stench nauseated. Maybe the smoke was rising off the island so they didn't notice it, drifting downwind, hitting an inversion layer, and spreading out close to the water.

Bart was tugging on my sleeve, pointing in the opposite direction, toward the mainland. A small strobe light was flashing away on Castle Island Park.

I turned my back to the Basco Explorer and hunched over our walkie-talkie. This was just a guess, because I hadn't asked Debbie to bring a walkie-talkie along. But I thought she might. I switched to the channel we'd used in Blue Kills and punched the mike button.