Zodiac Read Free

about?”
    â€œThe guy wants to know if they should shut their plant down today.”
    The day before, talking to some geek at Fotex, I’d mumbled something about closing them down. But in fact I was going to New Jersey tomorrow to close someone else down, so Fotex could keep dumping phenols, acetone, phthalates, various solvents, copper, silver, lead, mercury, and zinc into Boston Harbor to their heart’s content, at least until I got back.
    â€œTell them I’m in Jersey.” That would keep them guessing; Fotex had some plants down there also.
    I went back to my office, cutting across a barnlike room where most of the other GEE people sat among half-completed banners and broken Zodiac parts, drinking herbal teas and talking into phones:
    â€œ500 ppm sounds good to me.”
    â€œDon’t put us on the back page of the Food section.”
    â€œDo those breed in estuaries?”
    I wasn’t one of those GEE veterans who got his start spraying orange dye on baby seals in Newfie, or getting beat senseless by Frog commandos in the South Pacific. I slipped into it, moonlighting for them while I held down my job at Mass Anal. Partly by luck, I broke a big case for GEE, right before my boss figured out what an enormous pain in the ass I could be. Mass Anal fired, GEE hired. My salary was cut in half and my ulcer vanished: I could eat onion rings at IHOP again, but I couldn’t afford to.
    My function at Mass Anal had been to handle whatever walked in the door. Sometimes it was genuine industrial espionage—peeling apart a running shoe to see what kinds of adhesives it used—but usually it amounted to analyzing tap water for the anxious yuppies moving into the center of Boston, closet environmentalists who didn’t want to pour aromatic hydrocarbons into their babies any more than they’d burn 7-Eleven gasoline in their Saabs. But once upon a time, this guy in a running suit walked in and got routed to me; anyone who wasn’t in pinstripes got routed to me. He was brandishing an empty Doritosbag and for a minute I was afraid he wanted me to check it for dioxins or some other granola nightmare. But he read my expression. I probably looked skeptical and irritated. I probably looked like an asshole.
    â€œSorry about the bag. It was the only container I could find on the trail.”
    â€œWhat’s in it?”
    â€œI’m not sure.”
    Predictable answer. “
Approximately
what’s in it?”
    â€œDirt. But really strange dirt.”
    I took the Doritos bag and emptied it out all over the comics page of the
Globe
. I love the comics, laughing out loud when I read them, and everyone thinks I’m a simpleton. The runner let out kind of a little snort, like he couldn’t believe this was how I did chemistry. It looks impressive to pour the sample into a fresh Pyrex beaker, but it’s faster to spread it out over Spiderman and Bloom County. I pulled the toothpick out of my mouth and began to pop the little clods apart.
    But that was just for the hell of it, because I already knew what was wrong with this dirt. It was green—and purple and red and blue. The runner knew that, he just didn’t know why. But I had a pretty good idea: heavy-metal contamination, the kind of really nasty stuff that goes into pigments.
    â€œYou jogging in hazardous waste dumps, or what?” I asked.
    â€œYou’re saying this stuff’s hazardous?”
    â€œFuck, yes. Heavy metals. See this yellow clump here? Gotta be cadmium. Now, cadmium they tested once as a poison gas, in World War I. It vaporizes at a real low temperature, six or seven hundred degrees. They had some people breathe that vapor.”
    â€œWhat does it do?”
    â€œGangrene of the testicles.”
    The jogger inhaled and shifted his pair away from my desk. One of the problems, hanging out with me, is that I can turn any topic into a toxic horror story. I’ve lost two girlfriends and