Blaze (25 page)

He picked up the cradle and began to move on. It was quarter to eight when he got back to the cave. Joe was still sleeping, and that made Blaze cry again, this time from relief. But the cave was cold. Snow had blown in and put the little fire out.

Blaze began to build it up again.

Special Agent Bruce Granger watched Blaze come down the ravine and crawl into the slit mouth of the cave. Granger had been lying there stolidly, waiting for the hunt to end one way or another so someone could carry him out. His leg hurt like hell and he'd felt like a fool.

Now he felt like someone who'd won the lottery. He reached for the walkie Corliss had left him and picked it up. “Granger to Sterling,” he said quietly. “Come back.”

Static. Peculiar blank static.

“Albert, this is Bruce, and it's urgent. Come on back?”

Nothing.

Granger closed his eyes for a moment. “Son of a bitch,” he said. Then he opened his eyes and began to crawl.

8:10.

Albert Sterling and two State Troopers stood in Martin Coslaw's old office with their guns drawn. There was a blanket squashed up in one corner. Sterling saw two empty plastic nursing bottles, and three empty cans of Carnation Evaporated Milk that looked like they had been opened with a jackknife blade. And two empty boxes of Pampers.

“Shit,” he said. “Shit, shit,
shit
.”

“He can't be far,” Franklin said. “He's on foot. With the kid.”

“It's ten degrees out there,” someone in the hall remarked.

Sterling thought: One of you guys tell me something I don't fucking know.

Franklin was looking around. “Where's Corliss? Brad, did you see Corliss?”

“I think he might still be downstairs,” Bradley said.

“We're going back into the woods,” Sterling said. “The moke's got to be in the woods.”

There was a gunshot. It was faint, muffled by the snow, but unmistakable.

They looked at each other. There were five seconds of perfect, shocked silence. Maybe seven. Then they broke for the door.

Joe was still asleep when the bullet came into the cave. It ricocheted twice, sounding like an angry bee, chipping away splinters of granite and sending them flying. Blaze had been laying out diapers; he wanted to give Joe a change, make sure he was dry before they set out.

Now Joe started awake and began to cry. His small hands were waving in the air. One of the granite chips had cut his face.

Blaze didn't think. He saw the blood and thought ceased. What replaced it was black and murderous. He burst from the cave and charged toward the sound of the shot, screaming.

B
LAZE WAS SITTING
at the counter in Moochie's, eating a doughnut and reading a Spider-Man funnybook, when George walked into his life. It was September. Blaze hadn't worked for two months, and money was tight. Several of the candy-store wiseguys had been pinched. Blaze himself had been taken in for questioning about a loan-office holdup in Saugus, but he hadn't been in on that job and had come across so honestly bewildered that the cops let him go. Blaze was thinking about trying to get back his old job at the hospital laundry.

“That's him,” someone said. “That's The Boogeyman.”

Blaze turned and saw Hankie Melcher. Standing with him was a little guy in a sharp suit. The little guy had sallow skin and eyes that seemed to burn like coals.

“Hi, Hank,” Blaze said. “Ain't seenya.”

“Ah, little state vacation,” Hank said. “They let me out cause they can't count right up there. Ain't that so, George?”

The little guy said nothing, only smiled thinly and went on looking at Blaze. Those hot eyes made Blaze uncomfortable.

Moochie walked down, wiping his hands on his apron. “Yo, Hankie.”

“Chocolate egg cream for me,” Hank said. “Want one, George?”

“Just coffee. Black.”

Moochie went away. Hank said, “Blaze, like you to meet my brother-in-law. George Rackley, Clay Blaisdell.”

“Hi,” Blaze said. This smelled like work.

“Yo.” George shook his head. “You're one big mother, know it?”

Blaze laughed as if no one had ever observed he was one big mother before.

“George is a card,” Hank said, grinning. “He's a regular Bill Crosby. Only white.”

“Sure,” Blaze said, still smiling.

Moochie came back with Hankie's egg cream and George's coffee. George took a sip, grimaced. He looked at Moochie. “Do you always shit in your coffee cups, or do you sometimes use the pot, Sunshine?”

Hank said to Moochie: “George don't mean nothin by it.”

George was nodding. “That's right. I'm just a card, that's all. Get lost a little while, Hankie. Go in the back and play pinball.”

Hankie was still grinning. “Yeah, okay. Rightie-O.”

When he was gone and Moochie was back down at the far end of the counter, George turned to Blaze again. “That retard says you might be lookin for work.”

“That's about right,” Blaze said.

Hankie dropped coins into the pinball machine, then raised his hands and began to vocalize what might have been the theme from
Rocky
.

George jerked his head at him. “Now that he's out again, Hankie's got big plans. A gas station in Malden.”

“That so?” Blaze asked.

“Yeah. Crime of the fuckin century. You want to make a hundred bucks this afternoon?”

“Sure.” Blaze answered without hesitation.

“Will you do exactly what I tell you?”

“Sure. What's the gag, Mr. Rackley?”

“George. Call me George.”

“What's the gag, George?” Then he reconsidered the hot, urgent eyes and said, “I don't hurt nobody.”

“Me either. Bang-bang's for mokes. Now listen.”

That afternoon George and Blaze walked into Hardy's, a thriving department store in Lynn. All the clerks in Hardy's wore pink shirts with white arms. They also wore badges that said HI! I'M DAVE! Or JOHN! Or whoever. George was wearing one of those shirts under his outside shirt. His badge said HI! I'M FRANK! When Blaze saw that, he nodded and said, “That's like an alias, right?”

George smiled—not the one he'd used around Hankie Melcher—and said: “Yes, Blaze. Like an alias.”

Something in that smile made Blaze relax. There was no hurt or mean in it. And since it was just the two of them on this gag, there was no one to nudge George in the ribs when Blaze said something dumb, and make him the outsider. Blaze wasn't sure George would've grinned even if there
had
been someone else. He might have said something like
Keep your fuckin elbows to yourself, shitmonkey.
Blaze found himself liking someone for the first time since John Cheltzman died.

George had hoed his own tough row through life. He had been born in the charity ward of a Providence Catholic hospital called St. Joseph's: mother unwed, father unknown. She resisted the nuns' suggestions that she give the boy up for adoption and used him as a club to beat her family with instead. George grew up on the patched-pants side of town and pulled his first con at the age of four. His mother was about to give him a whacking for spilling a bowl of Maypo. George told her a man had brought her a letter and left it in the hall. While she was looking for it, he locked her out of the apartment and booked it down the fire escape. His whacking later was double, but he never forgot the exhilaration of knowing he had won, at least for a little while; he would chase that
I gotcha
feeling the rest of his life. It was ephemeral but always sweet.

He was a bright and bitter boy. Experience taught him things that losers like Hankie Melcher would never learn. George and three older acquaintances (he did not have pals) stole a car when George was eleven, took a joyride from Providence to Central Falls, got pinched. The fifteen-year-old who had been behind the wheel went to the reformatory. George and the other boys got probation. George also got a monster whacking from the gray-faced pimp his mother was by then living with. This was Aidan O'Kellaher, who had notoriously bad kidneys—hence his street-name, Pisser Kelly. Pisser beat on him until George's half-sister screamed for him to stop.

“You want some?” Pisser asked, and when Tansy shook her head he said, “Then shut your fucking airscoop.”

George never stole another car without a reason. Once was enough to teach him there was no percentage in joyriding. It was a joyless world.

At thirteen, he and a friend got caught boosting in Wool-worth's. Probation again. And another whacking. George didn't stop boosting, but improved his technique, and wasn't caught again.

When George was seventeen, Pisser got him a job running numbers. At this time, Providence was enjoying the sort of half-assed revival that passed for prosperity in the economically exhausted New England states. Numbers were going good. So was George. He bought nice clothes. He also began to jiggle his book. Pisser thought George a fine, enterprising boy; he was bringing in six hundred and fifty dollars every Wednesday. Unknown to his stepfather, George was socking away another two hundred.

Then the Mob came north from Atlantic City. They took over the numbers. Some of the mid-level locals got pink-slipped. Pisser Kelly was pink-slipped to an automobile graveyard, where he was discovered with his throat cut and his balls in the glove compartment of a Chevrolet Biscayne.

With his living taken away, George set off for Boston. He took his twelve-year-old sister with him. Tansy's father was also unknown, but George had his suspicions; Pisser had had the same weak chin.

During the next seven years, George refined any number of short cons. He also invented a few. His mother listlessly signed a paper making him Tansy Rackley's legal guardian, and George kept the little whore in school. Came a day when he discovered she was skin-popping heroin. She was also, happy days, knocked up. Hankie Melcher was eager to marry her. George was surprised at first, then wasn't. The world was full of fools falling all over themselves to show you how smart they were.

George took to Blaze because Blaze was a fool with no pretensions. He wasn't a sharpie, a dude, or a backroom Clyde. He didn't shoot pool, let alone H. Blaze was a rube. He was a tool, and in their years together, George used him that way. But never badly. Like a good carpenter, George loved good tools—ones that worked like they were supposed to every time. He could turn his back on Blaze. He could go to sleep in a room where Blaze was awake, and know that when he woke up himself, the swag would still be under the bed.

Blaze also calmed George's starved and angry insides. That was no small thing. There came a day when George understood that if he said, “Blazer, you have to step off the top of this building, because it's how we roll,”…well, Blaze would do it. In a way, Blaze was the Cadillac George would never have—he had big springs when the road was rough.

When they entered Hardy's, Blaze went directly to menswear, as instructed. He wasn't carrying his own wallet; he was carrying a cheap plastic job which contained fifteen dollars cash and ID tabbing him as David Billings, of Reading.

As he entered the department, he stuck his hand in his back pocket—as if to check his wallet was still there—and pulled it three-quarters of the way out. When he bent over to check out some shirts on a low shelf, the wallet fell on the floor.

This was the most delicate part of the operation. Blaze half-turned, keeping an eye on the wallet without seeming to keep an eye on it. To the casual observer, he would have seemed entirely engrossed in his inspection of the Van Heusen short-sleeves. George had laid it out for him carefully. If an honest man noticed the wallet, then all bets were off and they would move on to Kmart. Sometimes it took as many as half a dozen stops before the gag paid off.

“Gee,” Blaze said. “I didn't know so many people were honest.”

“They're not,” George said with a wintry smile. “But plenty are scared. And keep your eye on that fuckin wallet. If someone dips it on you, you're out fifteen bucks and I'm out ID worth a lot more.”

That day in Hardy's they had beginner's luck. A man wearing a shirt with an alligator on the tit strolled up the aisle, spied the wallet, then looked both ways down the aisle to see if anyone was coming. No one was. Blaze exchanged one shirt for another and then held it up in front of him in the mirror. His heart was pumping like a sweetmother.

Wait until he pockets it,
George said.
Then raise holy hell.

The man in the alligator shirt hooked the wallet against the rack of sweaters he was looking at. Then he reached into his pocket, took out his car-keys, and dropped them on the floor. Oops. He bent down to get them and gleeped the wallet at the same time. He shoved them both into his front pants pocket, then started to stroll off.

Blaze let out a bull bellow. “Thief!
Thief! Yeah, YOU!
”

Shoppers turned and craned their necks. Clerks looked around. The floorwalker spotted the source of the trouble and began to hurry toward them, pausing at a cash register location to push a button labeled
Special
.

The man with the alligator on his tit went pale…looked around…bolted. He got four steps before Blaze collared him.

Rough him up but don't hurt him,
George had said.
Keep hollering. And whatever you do, don't let him ditch that wallet. If he looks like he's tryin to get rid of it, knee him in the jukebox.

Blaze grabbed the man by the shoulders and began shaking him up and down like a man with a bottle of medicine. The man in the alligator shirt, maybe a Walt Whitman fan, voiced his barbaric yawp. Change flew from his pockets. He stuck a hand in the pocket with the wallet in it, just as George had said he might, and Blaze popped him one in the nuts—not too hard. The man in the alligator shirt screamed.

“I'll teachya to steal my wallet!” Blaze screamed at the guy's face. He was getting into it now. “I'll
killya
!”

“Somebody get him off me!” the guy screamed. “Get him
off
!”

One of the menswear clerks poked his nose in. “Hey, that's enough!”

George, who had been examining casual wear, unbuttoned his outer shirt, took it off with absolutely no effort at concealment, and stashed it under a stack of Beefy Tees. No one was looking at him, anyway. They were looking at Blaze, who gave a mighty tug and tore the shirt with the alligator on the tit right down the middle.

“Break it up!” the clerk was shouting. “Cool it!”

“Sonofabitch has got my wallet!” Blaze cried.

A large crowd of rubberneckers began to gather. They wanted to see if Blaze would kill the guy he had hold of before the floorwalker or store detective or some other person in authority arrived.

George punched NO SALE on one of the two Menswear Department cash registers and began scooping out the currency. His pants were too large, and a pouch—sort of like a hidden fanny-pack—was sewn in the front. He stuffed the bills in there, taking his time. Tens and twenties first—there were even some fifties, beginner's luck indeed—then fives and ones.

“Break it up!” the floorwalker was yelling as he cut through the crowd. Hardy's did have a store detective, and he followed on the floorwalker's heels. “That's enough! Hold it!”

The store detective shoved himself between Blaze and the man in the torn alligator shirt.

Stop fighting when the store dick comes,
George had said,
but keep making like you want to kill the guy.