AFTER half a morning’s fruitless search for Biff, Ray claimed his mail at the Suffolk County Courthouse. He opened an impressive-looking envelope and spread across his desk the Bank of Boston’s response to his subpoena of Lemuel Childs’s checking account.
Ray went over the records with care. This account had a pulse, a nice working hum. Childs took in $406 biweekly, his City & County paycheck, and irregular deposits in cash, five hundred here, a thousand there, which Ray read as Mears giving Childs the money to buy fentanyl or LSD, or both. Childs wrote checks for rent, utilities, and the usual miscellany, and a few things not so usual. Childs wrote checks to four different pharmaceutical houses, probably for fentanyl, and made healthy withdrawals to cash, which landed LSD in the underground network, or so Ray guessed. Ray nearly choked on the last transactions: a ten-thousand-dollar deposit in mid-March, followed by a ten-thousand-dollar withdrawal to cash, three days ago.
Ray remembered Caesar Raines: Mears was into something big, and cleaned Caesar out in early March, just before Childs made this big deposit. Mears gave the money to Childs, who sat on it awhile before withdrawing it last week. Ten thousand in cash, for what?
Ray remembered the kid chemist: everyone on the East Coast was scrambling to get a stockpile together before acid went criminal and Sandoz stopped shipping. And, Ray thought, before the price went through the roof. Childs was about to purchase one last big package for Mears, something like a pound of pure crystal LSD. Ray did the math on the top of the bank records: ten thousand bucks buys five hundred grams times a million divided by seventy-five micrograms a hit. Ray put his pen down, awestruck. After this drug deal, Joe Mears would control something like six million doses of LSD. Jesus.
Ray knew that Childs would have to meet Joe Mears to give Mears the package. Childs might have the package already, or he might be waiting on it. They would not know for sure that the LSD was with Childs until Childs met Mears. If they let the package pass from Childs to Mears, Mears would control enough LSD to—to do what? Manny, watching Childs, was probably the single most important man in Massachusetts at that moment.
MANNY pulled into a side street near the guardhouse at the foot of the causeway leading out to City & County and watched the back of Childs’s car disappear onto the island. Manny had tailed Childs here three days straight, routine. To do a deal, Childs would have to leave through this gate, or Mears would have to arrive the same way. Manny bet himself five bucks that Childs would go to Mears, not the other way around. Childs would drive to his stash, probably his apartment, get the package, and rendezvous with Mears at some third location. They might meet at Childs’s place, and do the handoff inside, but Manny doubted this. Too much risk for Childs. He was afraid of Mears. He’d want to see Mears in a parking lot or park, out in the open, someplace near a highway so he could get in and out fast, someplace Childs and Mears both knew so directions wouldn’t be a problem.
Manny read the paper, smoked half a pack of Larks, and checked his watch: 4:12 P.M. In eight hours, the doc’s package went criminal. Childs would need an hour to pick up his stash, then make the meeting. He’d leave himself a few hours leeway.
Childs had patient consultations scheduled until eight-fifteen, Manny learned by calling Childs’s secretary posing as a tearful wacko who needed to see Childs that night. Childs would keep these appointments, wanting to appear absolutely normal. After eight-fifteen, Childs was unavailable, the secretary said. Manny bet himself another five-spot that Childs would leave the island between eight-thirty and eight forty-five. Settling in with a new cigarette, he immediately lost his wager when the doctor’s gray Studebaker was waved through the guard gate and tore past Manny for the Quincy Shore Drive.
Four hours too early, Manny thought. Something’s haywire.
Manny let the Stude pass, counted to five, and pulled into traffic, beginning the biggest tail of his life.
AS MANNY left the jail island in his rearview mirror, two orderlies were walking Biff through the hospital complex. They yanked him around a sharp corner. Goon One was waiting. “Hey, Sugar Ray,” he grinned, producing a needle, which he stabbed at the inside of Biff’s elbow. In it went.
Biff came to in a small room, strapped to a hard wooden table. The only other thing in the room was a control panel that looked like a motorboat dashboard. Had he been here before? He thought he had. Do I know you? he asked the dashboard. Yes: pain. This is a pain place.
He twisted in the straps. Somebody was putting what felt like mayonnaise on his temples. Light blinded him as he struggled to see the face that did this, and then he felt mini-telephones on his skull to talk through the bone right into the brain. He was squirming to see the face of whoever was in the room with him. He heard a man’s voice: “Clear.”
Biff’s head went white with pain.
The second shock:
Pain was everything. The voice was at the motorboat controls. Straps bit Biff’s chest, neck, cheek.
The third shock:
His knees convulsed up, down, up. His spine jerked. Then again, from his balls to his skull like a rope pulled taut, jerk. His jaw was open, shut, slammed. His teeth sought to shear his tongue. Spine: jerk.
The fourth shock:
Next he would be blind, so he corkscrewed himself in a last effort, and saw the face at the motorboat controls. Red. Red waved, Hi.
The fifth shock:
Biff went blind.
The sixth shock:
Mears had promised the doc that he wouldn’t kill the cop with a heart attack. Mears had told him to get off the island if he didn’t have the stomach. Mears jammed the volt button again.
The seventh shock:
Mears watched the cop flop like a rag doll, watched the volts romp. Here comes the grand mal seizure. Now the eerie stillness in the brain stem, a moment suspended. Then the tonic and clonic convulsions arrive, like your skull trying to ejaculate your brain. Want some more?
The eighth shock:
“Don’t worry about me,” Mears had told Childs. “Just get me my drugs—and watch for a tail, like I told you.”
The ninth shock:
Pity Mears had had no time to rig the cop to an electroencephalogram, since the tonics and clonics, which now racked the cop, always produced the prettiest spike waves: first the six sharp dagger-stabs up and down, EEG pen scratching across the unrolling paper, great tonic storms settling into waves, then ripples of clonic voltage, asynchronous with the jerks and spasms that still twisted the cop, who now screamed and gulped his tongue. Mears loved to watch the EEG ride the crags and valleys of the brain blasted with three hundred volts. More?
The tenth shock:
Lungs and glottis spasm. Breathing stops. Blood floods the cerebellum. The heart stops cold, then stagger-pumps, all off-beat.
The eleventh shock:
Mears watched the cop feel his heart ejaculate his blood, his skull ejaculate brain, his lungs unstartable.
The twelfth shock:
Mears knew exactly what the cop was feeling. Your mouth’s filling with saliva and snot, cop, and you’re sucking fluids into frozen lungs. You could drown in snot. Work your mouth to spit out snot and your clamping teeth could bite off your tongue.
Mears called the orderlies in to stash the cop for an hour until the next session. The orderlies unstrapped Biff and began to free his head. Biff went for Mears behind the dashboard, electrodes still on his temples. Biff was a step away from Mears’s hated face. Mears mashed down on the button and blew current through Biff’s head. Goon One was on Biff, and Mears pounded his controls, volts and volts and volts from ear to ear. Biff was seeing white again, but felt the mini-telephones slip off his temples and into Goon One’s grappling hands, and now Mears pushed a button and Goon One shrieked. Biff grabbed Mears’s neck across the dashboard, but Mears was quick and powerful, and he had Biff’s face in his hands. He meant to break Biff’s neck, but Mears’s left hand was stitched up the palm. Biff bit the stitches and Mears let go. Mears snatched the cord to the electrodes from the floor and looped it once, quickly, around Biff’s throat, then yanked it strangle-tight. Biff fought to loosen the cord, finding the electrode ends, jamming them into Mears’s mouth, and reached back for the controls, finding any button, pushing hard.
Mears screamed, eyes bugged, inadvertently swallowing. He rolled off Biff. Biff was pushing the button. Mears was screaming, and convulsing, trying to spit out the electrodes. Mears squirmed across the floor, jumping with each new shock, and pulled the electrodes out of his mouth.
Biff fell on him, but Mears again got his throat. Biff’s neck would snap in a moment. Orderlies were rushing in the doorway with saps.
Biff grabbed Mears’s neck as hard as he could and threw himself into the glass and out the window, falling unknown stories, pulling Mears behind him by the throat.