Blaze (10 page)

The third room was occupied by another sleeping man and woman. She was moaning in her sleep, and Blaze closed that door quickly.

He went around the corner. What if he had to go upstairs, to the third floor? The idea filled him with the kind of terror he felt in his infrequent nightmares (these were usually of Hetton House, or the Bowies). What would he say if the lights went on right now and he was caught? What could he say? That he came in to steal the silverware? There was no silverware on the second floor, even a dummy knew that.

There was one door on the short side of the hallway. He opened it and looked into the baby's room.

He stared for a long moment, hardly believing he had gotten so far. It wasn't a pipe dream. He could do it. The thought made him want to run.

The crib was almost exactly like the one he had bought himself. There were Walt Disney characters on the walls. There was a changing table, a rack crowded with creams and ointments, and a little baby dresser painted some bright color. Maybe red, maybe blue. Blaze couldn't tell in the dark. There was a baby in the crib.

It was his last chance to run and he knew it. As of now, he might still be able to melt away as unknown as he had come. They would never guess what had almost happened. But he would know. Perhaps he would go in and lay one of his big hands on the baby's small forehead, then leave. He had a sudden picture of himself twenty years from now, seeing Joseph Gerard IV's name on the society page of the paper, what George called news of rich bitches and whinnying horses. There would be a picture of a young man in a dinner jacket standing next to a young girl in a white dress. The young girl would be holding a bouquet of flowers. The story would tell where they had been married and where they were going on their honeymoon. He would look at that picture and he would think:
Oh buddy. Oh buddy, you never had no idea.

But when he went in, he knew it was for keeps.

This is how we roll, George, he thought.

The baby was sleeping on his stomach, head turned to the side. One small hand was tucked under his cheek. His breathing moved the blankets over him up and down in small cycles. His skull was covered with a fuzz of hair, no more than that. A red teething ring lay beside him on the pillow.

Blaze reached for him, then pulled back.

What if he cried?

At the same instant he spotted something that brought his heart into his mouth. It was a small intercom set. The other end would be in the mother's room, or the babysitter's room. If the baby cried—

Gently, gently, Blaze reached out and pushed the power button. The red light over it died out. As it did, he wondered if there was a buzzer or something that went off when the power went off. As a warning.

Attention, mother. Attention, babysitter. The intercom is
on the blink because a big stupid kidnapper just turned it off. There is a stupid kidnapper in the house. Come and see. Bring a gun.

Go on, Blaze. Take your best shot.

Blaze took a deep breath and let it out. Then he untucked the blankets and scooped them around the baby as he picked him up. He cradled him gently in his arms. The baby whined and stretched. His eyes flickered. He made a kitteny
neeyup
sound. Then his eyes closed again and his body relaxed.

Blaze exhaled.

He turned, went back to the door, and went back into the hall, realizing he was doing more than just leaving the kid's room, the nursery. He was crossing a line. He could no longer claim to be a simple burglar. His crime was in his arms.

Going down the ladder with a sleeping infant was impossible, and Blaze did not even consider it. He went to the stairs. The hallway was carpeted, but the stairs weren't. His first footfall on the first polished wood riser was loud, obvious, and unmuffled. He paused, listening, drawn straight to attention in his anxiety, but the house slept on.

Now, though, his nerves began to unravel. The baby seemed to gain weight in his arms. Panic nibbled at his will. He could almost glimpse movement in the corners of his eyes—first one side, then the other. At each step he expected the baby to stir and cry. And once it started, its wails would wake the house.

“George—” he muttered.

“Walk,” George said from below him. “Just like in the old joke. Walk, don't run. Toward the sound of my voice, Blazer.”

Blaze began to walk down the stairs. It was impossible to be soundless, but at least none of his steps was as loud as that horrible first one. The baby joggled. He couldn't hold him perfectly still, no matter how he tried. So far the kid was still sleeping, but any minute, any
second
—

He counted. Five steps. Six. Seven. Eighter from Decatur. It was a very long staircase. Made, he supposed, for colorful cunts to sweep up and down at big dances like in
Gone with the Wind
. Seventeen. Eighteen. Nine—

It was the last step and his unprepared foot came down hard again:
Clack!
The baby's head jerked. It gave a single cry. The sound was very loud in the stillness.

A light went on upstairs.

Blaze's eyes widened. Adrenaline shot into his chest and belly, making him stiffen and squeeze the baby to him. He made himself loosen up—a little—and stepped into the shadow of the staircase. There he stood still, his face twisted in fear and horror.

“Mike?” a sleepy voice called.

Slippers shuffled to the railing just overhead.

“Mikey-Mike, is that you? Is it you, you bad thing?” The voice was directly overhead, speaking in a stage-whispery, others-are-sleeping tone. It was an old voice, querulous. “Go in the kitchen and see the nice saucer of milk Mama left out.” A pause. “If you knock over a vase, Mama will spank.”

If the kid cried now—

The voice over Blaze's head muttered something too full of phlegm for him to make out, and then the slippers shuffled away. There was a pause—it felt like a hundred years long—and then a door clicked softly shut, closing away the light.

Blaze stood still, trying to control his need to tremble. Trembling might wake the kid. Probably
would
wake the kid. Which way was the kitchen? How was he going to take the ladder and the kid both? What about the electric wire?
What
—
how
—
where
—

He moved in order to stifle the questions, creeping up the hall, bent over the wrapped child like a hag with a bindle. He saw double glass doors standing ajar. Waxed tiles glimmered beyond. Blaze pushed through and was in a dining room.

It was a rich room, the mahogany table meant to hold twenty-pound turkeys at Thanksgiving and steaming roasts on Sunday afternoons. China glowed behind the glass doors of a tall, fancy dresser. Blaze passed on like a wraith, not pausing, but even so, the sight of the great table and the chairs with their soldierly high backs awoke a smoldering resentment in his breast. Once he had scrubbed kitchen floors on his knees, and George said there were lots more just like him. Not just in Africa, either. George said people like the Gerards pretended people like him weren't there. Well let them put a doll in that crib upstairs and pretend it was a real baby. Let them pretend that, if they were so good at pretending.

There was a swing door at the far end of the dining room. He went through it. Then he was in the kitchen. Looking out the frost-jeweled window next to the stove, he could see the legs of his ladder.

He looked around for a place to lay the baby while he opened the window. The counters were wide, but maybe not wide enough. And he didn't like the idea of putting a kid on the stove even if the stove was turned off.

His eye lit on an old-fashioned market basket hanging from a hook on the pantry door. It looked roomy enough, and it had a handle. It had high sides, too. He took it down and put it on a small wheeled serving cart standing against one wall. He tucked the baby into it. The baby stirred only slightly.

Now the window. Blaze lifted it, and was confronted with a storm window beyond that. There had been no storm windows upstairs, but this one was screwed right into the frame.

He began opening cupboards. In the one below the sink, he found a neat pile of dishwipers. He took one out. It had an American eagle on it. Blaze wrapped his mittened hand in it and punched out the storm window's lower pane. It shattered with relative quiet, leaving a large, jagged hole. Blaze began to poke out the pieces that pointed in toward the center like big glass arrows.

“Mike?” That same voice. Calling softly. Blaze stiffened.

That wasn't coming from upstairs. That was—

“Mikey, what did you-ums knock over?”

—from down the hall and coming closer—

“You'll wake the whole house, you bad boy.”

—and closer—

“I'm going to put you down cellar before you spoil it for yourself.”

The door swung open, and a silhouette woman entered behind a battery-powered nightlight in the shape of a candle. Blaze got a blurred impression of an elderly woman, walking slowly, trying to preserve the silence like juggled eggs. She was in rollers; her head, in silhouette, looked like something out of a science fiction movie. Then she saw him.

“Who—” That one word. Then the part of her brain that dealt with emergencies, old but not dead, decided talking wasn't the right thing in this situation. She drew in breath to scream.

Blaze hit her. He hit her as hard as he had hit Randy, as hard as he had hit Glen Hardy. He didn't think about it; he was startled into it. The old lady folded to the floor with her nightlight beneath her. There was a muffled tinkle as the bulb shattered. Her body lay twisted half-in and half-out of the swing door.

There was a low and plaintive
miaow
. Blaze grunted and looked up. Green eyes peered down at him from the top of the refrigerator.

Blaze turned back to the window and batted out the rest of the glass shards. When they were gone, he stepped out through the hole he'd made in the lower half of the storm window and listened.

Nothing.

Yet.

Shattered glass glittered on the snow like a felon's dream.

Blaze pulled the ladder away from the building, freed the latches, lowered it. It gave out a terrifying ratcheting sound that made him feel like screaming. Once the latches were hooked again, he picked the ladder up and began to run. He came out of the house's shadow and was halfway across the lawn when he realized he had forgotten the baby. It was still on the serving cart. All sensation left the arm holding the ladder and it plopped into the snow. He turned and looked back.

There was a light on upstairs.

For a moment Blaze was two people. One of them was just sprinting for the road—
balls to the wall,
George would have said—and the other was going back to the house. For a moment he couldn't make up his mind. Then he went back, moving fast, his boots kicking up little puffs of snow.

He slit his mitten and cut the flesh of his palm on a shard of glass that was still sticking out of the window-frame. He barely felt it. Then he was inside again, grabbing the basket, swinging it dangerously, almost spilling the baby out.

Upstairs, a toilet flushed like thunder.

He lowered the basket to the snow and went after it without a backward glance at the inert form on the floor behind him. He picked the basket up and just
booked.

He stopped long enough to get the ladder under one arm. Then he ran to the hedge. There he stopped to look at the baby. The baby was still sleeping peacefully. Joe IV was unaware he had been uprooted. Blaze looked back at the house. The upstairs light had gone out again.

He sat the basket down on the snow and tossed the ladder over the hedge. A moment later, lights bloomed on the highway.

What if it was a cop? Jesus, what if?

He lay down in the shadow of the hedge, very aware of how clearly his footprints back and forth across the lawn must show. They were the only ones there.

The headlights swelled, held bright for a moment, then faded without slowing down.

Blaze got up, picked up his basket—it was his basket now—and walked to the hedge. By parting the top with his arm he was able to lift the basket over and put it down on the far side. He just couldn't lower it all the way. He had to drop it the last couple of feet. It thudded softly into the snow. The baby found his thumb and began to suck it. Blaze could see his mouth pursing and relaxing in the glow of the nearest streetlight. Pursing and relaxing. Almost like a fish-mouth. The night's deep cold had not touched it yet. Nothing peeked out of its blankets but its head and that one tiny hand.

Blaze jumped the hedge, got his ladder, and picked up the basket again. He crossed the road in a hurried crouch. Then he moved across the field on his earlier diagonal path. At the Cyclone fence surrounding the Oakwood parking lot, he put the ladder up again (it wasn't necessary to extend it this time), and carried his basket to the top.