"Where's Amy," I asked him.

"Back there. We broke up."

He didn't seem too wrecked. "Sorry. We didn't mean to screw up a good thing."

"She's pissed off because I left her with this guy Quincy when I went and shot those dudes. But the reason I left her with Quincy was because I wanted to make sure she was protected."

"Who's Quincy?"

"The guy I stole this revolver from."

"So where's Amy now?"

"With Quincy."

Boone didn't say anything, just handed him a Guinness. Black beer for black thoughts.

We shoved off, taking it slow because we didn't know what we were doing. I tried the walkie-talkie again and suddenly Debbie's voice came through. Sometimes the radio works, sometimes it doesn't.

"Modern Girl here. I think we can pop the Big Suit for public urination."

The Big Suit had to be Laughlin. She'd never been introduced to him. But on my answering machine, right before the house blew up, she'd described the man as he was ripping off the car.

"He's doing it by the Amazing," she continued, "westbound."

Public urination had to mean that Laughlin was dumping something into the gutters. Just like we thought: the Harbor was dead, now he was killing the sewers too. The Amazing had to be the Amazing Chinese Restaurant out in west Brighton. He was heading down Route 9, heading for Lake Cochituate, for Tech-Dale. Everything between Natick and the Harbor was going to be antiseptic tonight.

"Can you prove it, Modem Girl?"

"Yup. Losing you, Tainted Meat." And then our transmission got overwhelmed by a trucker, headed up the Fitzgerald Expressway, cruising the airwaves for a blowjob.

Boone wrapped up a walkie-talkie in a Hefty bag along with a couple of Big Macs and a flotation cushion. The two magnets he slung from a belt around his waist. The cushion balanced out the weight of the magnets so that he could stay afloat and concentrate on swimming.

With three people and lots of gear, the Zode was near its weight limit, but fifty horses balanced that nicely. Traveling through the dark in an open vehicle made me think of biking through Brighton, so I clicked into my full paranoid mode. Instead of taking a direct route toward the Basco Explorer, I took us all the way around the south end of the island, swung a good mile or so out to the east, about halfway to the big lighthouse at the Harbor's entrance, and approached the ship from astern.

Boone said something that I couldn't hear fell out of the Zode and vanished. The boat sped up by a few knots and we just kept going straight. By now we had nothing to hide, so we just swung right along the side of the Basco Explorer, checked it out like a couple of Poyzen fans from Chicopee who'd never seen a freighter before.

It was pretty quiet. Blue light was flickering out of the windows on the bridge; someone was watching TV, probably the slow-motion replays of their boss getting chopped in the trachea by Boone. And they probably didn't realize that the same guy was crawling right up their asshole at this very moment. We could hear a couple of men talking above us, standing along the rail.

"Hey! Ahoooy, dude!" Bart shouted, "What's happening?"

I couldn't believe it. "Jesus, Bart! We don't want to talk to these pricks."

"Boone said we were supposed to create a diversion, didn't you hear him?" Bart cupped his hands and hollered, "Hey! Anybody up there?" I slapped my hands over my face and commenced deep breathing. I might get noticed, but my description didn't match the old S.T. anymore. No beard, different hair.

The deckhands murmured on for a few seconds, finishing their chat, and then one leaned over to check us out: a young guy, neither corporate exec nor ship's officer, just your basic merchant marine, standing on the rail having a smoke. With the cargo this ship carried, they probably weren't allowed to smoke below decks.

"Hey! How fast can this thing go?" Bart shouted.

"Ehh, twenty knots on a good day," the sailor said. Classic Jersey accent.

"What's a knot?"

"It's about a mile."

"So it can go, like, twenty miles in a day? Not very far, man."

My roommate had left me in his dust. I just leaned back and spectated. Technically he wasn't my roommate anymore, our home had been exploded by its owner. I guess that meant we were now friends; kind of terrifying.

"No, no, twenty miles an hour," the sailor explained. "A little more, actually. Hey. You dudes party in'?"

Bart was getting ready to say, "Sure!," always his answer to that question. Then I imagined this sailor asking to go along, and me spending a couple of hours waiting for them to work their way to the bottom of that garbage can. So I said, "Naah, the cops came and started to bust it up, you know."

"Bummer. Hey, you guys know any good bars in this town?"

"Sure," Bart said.

"Are you Irish?" I asked.

"Bohunk," he said.

"No," I said.

"Hey, we got some Guinness down here. Can we come up there and check out your boat?"

"Ship," the sailor blurted reflexively. Then a diligent pause. "I don't think Skipper'd mind," he concluded. "We're under real tight security when we get into port. 'Cause of terrorists. But this ain't in port."

If Bart had proposed, back on Spectacle Island, that we board in this fashion, I'd have laughed in his face. But that

was Bart's magic. The sailor unrolled a rope ladder down the side of the ship and we climbed up over the gunwhales.

"You know, in your own utterly twisted way, you've got more balls than I do," I said to Bart as we were climbing up. He just shrugged and looked mildly bewildered.

The sailor's name was Tom. We handed him a Guinness and did a quick orbit of the deck, checking out such wonders as the anchor chains and the lifeboats and the bit hatches that led down into the toxic hplds. The whole ship stank of organic solvents.

"Fuckin" water sure stinks tonight," Bart observed. I kicked him in the left gastrocnemius.

"Yeah, don't ask me about that," Tom said with a kind of shit-eating chuckle.

After we'd checked out the butt end of the ship, examined the controls of the big crane, they headed up toward the bow and I couldn't resist leaning out over the aft rail and trying to nail Boone with a loogie. He was there, all right, though I wouldn't have seen him if I hadn't been looking. He was totally black, there weren't any lights back here, and when he saw someone above him he collapsed against the hull and froze. I missed by a yard.

I took out a flashlight and shone it over my face for a second. Then I shone it down on his face. I'd never seen utter, jaw-dropping amazement on Boone's face before and it was kind of fulfilling. Then I just turned around and left. He was doing pretty well; he was over halfway up.

Tom showed us the bridge and the lounge where the rest of the crew was sitting around watching "Wheel of Fortune" and drinking Rolling Rock. They all said quick hellos and then went back to watching the tube. We were in your basic cramped but comfy nautical cabin, with fake-wood paneling glued up over the steel bulkheads, a semi-installed car stereo strung out across the shelves, pictures of babes with big tits on the walls. Up in one comer, a CB radio was roaring and babbling away for background noise.

We watched the show a little, worked on our beers, exchanged routine male-bonding dialog about the wild scene on Spectacle Island and the fact that women were present, some good looking. I let Bart handle most of that; a cutaway blueprint of the Basco Explorer was tacked up on the wall and I was trying to memorize its every detail.

The world's strange. You plan something like sneaking onto a ship and then you get completely paranoid about the chances of being noticed; you figure watchmen are spaced every twenty feet along the rail. But hanging out in that cabin, drinking bad beer and watching TV, surrounded by total darkness outside, I knew these guys never had a chance of noticing Boone. We might as well have dropped him on the deck with a helicopter. I just hoped he'd find a nontoxic hideaway.