Blaze (27 page)

Not long after they arrived, George read a newspaper story about the Gerards: how rich they were, how the youngest Gerard had just gotten married to some good-looking spic chick. Burgess's kidnap idea resurfaced in his mind—that one big score. But there was no baby, not then, so they went back to Boston.

The Boston-in-the-winter, Portland-in-the-
summer thing became a routine over the next two years. They'd roll north in some old beater in early June, with whatever remained of the winter's proceeds stashed in the spare tire: seven hundred one year, two thousand the next. In Portland, they pulled a gag if a gag presented itself. Otherwise, Blaze fished and sometimes laid a trap or two in the woods. They were happy summers for him. George lay out in the sun and tried to get a tan (hopeless; he only burned), read the papers, swatted blackflies, and rooted for Ronald Reagan (who he called Old White Elvis Daddy) to drop dead.

Then, on July 4th of their second summer in Maine, he noticed that Joe Gerard III and his Narmenian wife had become parents.

Blaze was playing solitaire on the porch of the shack and listening to the radio. George turned it off. “Listen, Blazer,” he said, “I got an idea.”

He was dead three months later.

They had been attending the crap-game regularly, and there had never been any trouble. It was a straight game. Blaze didn't play, but he often faded George. George was very lucky.

On this night in October, George made six straight passes. The man kneeling across from him on the other side of the blanket bet against him every time. He had lost forty dollars. The game was in a warehouse near the docks, and it was full of smells: old fish, fermented grain, salt, gasoline. When the place was quiet, you could hear the
tack-tack-tack
of seagulls walking around on the roof. The man who had lost forty dollars was named Ryder. He claimed to be half Penobscot Indian, and he looked it.

When George picked up the dice a seventh time instead of passing them, Ryder threw twenty dollars down on the crapout line.

“Come, dice,” George said—crooned. His thin face was bright. His cap was yanked around to the left. “Come big dice, come come come
now
!” The dice exploded across the blanket and came up eleven.

“Seven in a row!” George crowed. “Pick up that swag, Blazerino, daddy's goin for number eight. Big eighter from Decatur!”

“You cheated,” Ryder said. His voice was mild, observational.

George froze in the act of picking up the dice. “Say what?”

“You switched them dice.”

“Come on, Ride,” someone said. “He didn't—”

“I'll have my money back,” Ryder said. He stretched his hand out across the blanket.

“You'll have a broken arm if you don't cut the shit,” George said. “That's what you'll have, Sunshine.”

“I'll have my money back,” Ryder said. His hand still out.

It was one of those quiet times now, and Blaze could hear the gulls on the roof:
tack-tack-tack
.

“Go fuck yourself,” George said, and spat on the outstretched hand.

So then it happened quickly, as those things do. The quickness is what makes the mind reel and refuse. Ryder reached his spit-shiny hand into the pocket of his jeans, and when it came out, it was holding a spring-knife. Ryder thumbed the chrome button in the imitation ivory handle, and the men around the blanket scattered back.

George shouted: “
Blaze!
”

Blaze lunged across the blanket at Ryder, who rocked forward on his knees and put the blade in George's stomach. George screamed. Blaze grabbed Ryder and slammed his head against the floor. It made a cracking sound like a breaking branch.

George stood up. He looked at the knife-handle sticking out of his shirt. He grabbed it, started to pull, then grimaced. “Fuck,” he said. “Oh fuck.” He sat down hard.

Blaze heard a door slam. He heard running feet on hollow boards.

“Get me outta here,” George said. His yellow shirt was turning red around the knife-handle. “Get the swag, too—
oh Jesus this hurts!
”

Blaze gathered up the scattered bills. He stuffed them into his pockets with fingers that had no feeling in them. George was panting. He sounded like a dog on a hot day.

“George, let me pull it out—”

“No, you crazy? It's holding my guts in. Carry me, Blaze.
Oh my fuckin Jesus!
”

Blaze picked George up in his arms and George screamed again. Blood dripped onto the blanket and onto Ryder's shiny black hair. Under the shirt, George's belly felt as hard as a board. Blaze carried him across the warehouse and then outside.

“No,” George said. “You forgot the bread. You never got any goddam bread.” Blaze thought maybe George was talking about the swag and he started to say he had it, when George said: “And the salami.” He was beginning to breathe very rapidly. “I got that book, you know.”

“George!”

“That book with the picture of—” But then George began to choke on his own blood. Blaze turned him over and whammed him on the back. It was all he could think of to do. But when he turned George over again, George was dead.

Blaze laid him on the boards outside the warehouse. He backed away. Then he crept forward again and closed George's eyes. He backed away a second time, then crept forward again and knelt. “George?”

No answer.

“You dead, George?”

No answer.

Blaze ran all the way to the car and got in and threw himself behind the wheel. He screamed away, peeling rubber for twenty feet.

“Slow down,” George said from the back seat.

“George?”

“Slow
down,
goddammit!”

Blaze slowed down. “George! Come on up front! Climb over! Wait, I'll pull over.”

“No,” George said. “I like it back here.”

“George?”

“What?”

“What are we going to do now?”

“Snatch the kid,” George said. “Just like we planned.”

W
HEN
B
LAZE BLUNDERED
out of the little cave and got his feet under him, he had no idea how many men were out there. Dozens, he supposed. It didn't matter. George's pistol fell out of the waistband of his pants and that didn't matter, either. He trod it deep into the snow as he charged the first guy he saw. The guy was lying in the snow a little distance away, resting on his elbows and holding a gun in both hands.

“Hands up, Blaisdell! Stay still!” Granger shouted.

Blaze leaped at him.

Granger had time to fire twice. The first shot creased Blaze's forearm. The second plugged nothing but snowstorm. Then Blaze crashed all two hundred and seventy pounds into the guy who had hurt Joe, and Granger's weapon went flying. Granger screamed as the bones of his broken leg grated together.

“You hit the kid!” Blaze yelled into Granger's terrified face. His fingers found Granger's throat. “You hit the kid, you stupid sonofabitch, you hit the kid, you hit the kid, you hit the kid!”

Granger's head was flopping and nodding now, as if to say he understood, he was getting the message. His face had gone purple. His eyes bulged from their sockets.

They're coming.

Blaze stopped choking the guy and looked around. No one in sight. The woods were silent except for the wind and the faint hissing noise the snow made as it fell.

No, there
was
another sound. There was Joe.

Blaze ran back up the embankment to the cave. Joe was rolling around, wailing and clutching at the air. The flying chip of rock had done more damage than the fall from the cradle; his cheek was covered in blood.

“God
damn
it!” Blaze cried.

He picked Joe up, wiped his cheek, slipped him into the envelope of blankets again, and stuck his cap back over the baby's head. Joe whooped and screamed.

“We gotta run now, George,” Blaze said. “Full-out run. Right?”

No answer.

Blaze backed out of the cave holding the baby to his chest, turned into the wind, and fled toward the logging road.

“Where did Corliss leave him?” Sterling panted at Franklin. The men had paused at the edge of the woods, breathing hard.

Franklin pointed. “Down there. I can find it.”

Sterling turned to Bradley. “Call your people. And the Cumberland County Sheriff. I wanted that logging road plugged at both ends. What's past it if he slips through?”

Bradley barked a laugh. “Nothing but the Royal River. Like to see him ford that.”

“Is it iced over?”

“Sure, but not enough to walk on.”

“All right. Let us press on. Franklin, take point.
Short
point. This guy is very dangerous.”

They moved down the first slope. Fifty yards into the woods, Sterling made out a blue-gray figure slumped against a tree.

Franklin got there first. “Corliss,” he said.

“Dead?” Sterling asked, joining him.

“Oh yeah.” Franklin pointed to tracks that were now little more than vague dips.

“Let's go,” Sterling said. This time he took point.

They found Granger five minutes later. The marks on his throat were at least an inch deep.

“Guy must be a brute,” someone said.

Sterling pointed into the snow. “That's a cave up there. I'm almost positive. Maybe he left the kid.”

Two State Troopers scrambled up toward the triangular patch of shadow. One of them paused, bent, picked something out of the snow. He held it up. “A gun!” he yelled.

As if the rest of us are blind, Sterling thought. “Never mind the frigging
gun,
see about the kid! And be careful!”

One of them knelt, used his flashlight, then crawled after the beam. The other bent forward, hands on knees, listened, then turned back to Sterling and Franklin. “Not here!”

They spotted tracks leading from the cave toward the logging road even before the Trooper who had gone into the cave was out again. They were little more than vague humps in the fast-falling snow.

“He can't have more than ten minutes on us,” Sterling said to Franklin. Then he raised his voice. “Spread out! We're going to sweep him out onto that road!”

They headed out fast, Sterling tromping in Blaze's tracks.

Blaze ran.

He went in stumbling leaps, crashing straight through tangles of brush rather than trying to find a way around, bending over Joe to try and shield him from stabbing branches. Breath tore in and out of his lungs. He heard faint yelling behind him. The sound of those voices filled Blaze with panic.

Joe was whooping and struggling and coughing, but Blaze held him fast. Just a little more, a little farther, and they would come out on the road. There would be cars there. Police cars, but he didn't care about that. As long as there were keys left in them. He would drive as far and fast as he could, then dump the police cruiser and switch to something else. A truck would be good. These thoughts came and went in his head like big colored cartoons.

He blundered through a marshy place where the thin ice surrounding the snow-covered hummocks gave way and plunged him into frigid water up to his ankles. He kept going and came to a head-high wall of brambles. He went straight through, only turned around backwards to protect Joe. One of them got under the cap Joe was wearing, though, and slingshotted it back toward the marsh. No time to get it.

Joe stared around, his eyes wide with terror. Without the enveloping hat to warm the air in front of his face, he began to gasp harder. Now his cries sounded thin. Behind them, the faint blue voice of the law was yelling something else. It didn't matter. Nothing did except getting to the road.

The land began to slope upward. The going became a little easier. Blaze lengthened his stride, running for his life. And Joe's.

Sterling was also going full out, and he had drawn thirty yards ahead of the others. He was gaining. Why not? The big bastard was breaking trail for him. The walkie on his belt crackled. Sterling pulled it but didn't waste his breath, only double-keyed it.

“This is Bradley, come back?”

“Yeah.” That was all. Sterling needed the rest of his breath to run with. The most coherent thought in his mind, overlaying the others like a bright red film, was the knowledge that the homicidal fuck had killed Granger. Had killed an Agent.

“County Sheriff has placed units on that logging road, boss. State Police will reinforce ASAP. Over?”

“Good. Over and out.”

He ran on. Five minutes later he came upon a red cap lying in the snow. Sterling stuck it in his coat pocket and kept running.

Blaze struggled the last fifty uphill yards to the logging road, almost winded. Joe wasn't crying anymore; he no longer had breath to waste on crying. Snow had clotted on his eyelids and in his lashes, weighting them down.

Blaze went to his knees twice, each time holding his arms against his sides to cushion the baby. At last he reached the top. And bingo. There were at least five empty State Police cruisers parked up and down the road.

Below him, Albert Sterling broke from the woods and looked up the incline Blaze had already climbed. And damn, there he was. There the big bastard finally was.

“Stop, Blaisdell, FBI! Stop and put your hands up!”

Blaze looked over his shoulder. The cop looked tiny from up here. Blaze turned back and ran out into the road. He stopped at the first cruiser and looked in. Once again, bingo. Keys dangling from the ignition. He was about to put Joe on the seat beside the officer's citation book when he heard an engine revving. He turned and saw a white cruiser slewing up the road toward him. He turned the other way and saw another one.

“George!” he screamed. “Oh, George!”

He clutched Joe against him. The baby's respiration was very fast and shallow now, the way George's had been after Ryder stabbed him. Blaze slammed the State Police car's door and ran around the hood.

A Cumberland County Sheriff's deputy leaned from the car that was coming from the north. He had a battery-powered bullhorn in one gloved hand.
“Stop, Blaisdell! It's over! Stay where you are!”

Blaze ran across the road and someone fired at him. Snow puffed up on his left. Joe began to let out a series of gasping whimpers.

Blaze plunged down the other side of the road, taking gigantic leaps. Another bullet droned past his head, snapping splinters and bark from the side of a birch tree. At the bottom he stumbled over a log hidden beneath the fresh snow. He went down into a drift, the baby beneath him. He struggled to his feet and brushed Joe's face off. It was powdered with snow. “Joe! You all right?”

Joe was breathing in hoarse, convulsive gasps. Each one seemed to come an age apart.

Blaze ran.

Sterling got to the road and ran across it. One of the County Sheriff's cars had come to a skidding, veering stop on the far side. The deputies were out and standing there, looking down, guns pointing.

Sterling's cheeks were stretched and his gums were cold, so he supposed he was grinning. “We
got
the bastard.”

They ran down the embankment.

Blaze dodged through a skeletal stand of poplar and ash. On the other side, everything opened up. The trees and underbrush were gone. There was a flat white stillness in front of him, and that was the river. On the far side, gray-green masses of spruce and pine marched toward a snow-choked horizon.

Blaze began to walk out onto the ice. He got nine steps before the ice broke, plunging him in frigid water up to his thighs. Struggling for breath, he lurched back to the bank and climbed it.

Sterling and the two deputies burst through the last clump of trees. “FBI,” Sterling said. “Lay the baby down on the snow and step back.”

Blaze turned to the right and began to run. His breath was hot and hard going down his throat now. He looked for a bird, any bird over the river, and saw none. What he saw was George. George was standing eighty yards or so ahead. He was mostly obscured by blowing snow, but Blaze could see his cap, slewed around to the left—the good-luck side.

“Come on, Blaze! Come on, you fucking slowpoke! Show em your heels! Show em how we roll, goddammit!”

Blaze ran faster. The first bullet took him in the right calf. They were firing low to protect the baby. It didn't slow him down; he didn't even feel it. The second hit the back of his knee and blew his kneecap out in a spray of blood and bone fragments. Blaze didn't feel it. He kept running. Sterling would say later he never would have thought it possible, but the bastard just kept running. Like a gutshot moose.

“
Help me, George! I'm in trouble!
”

George was gone, but Blaze could hear his hoarse, raspy voice—it came to him on the wind. “Yeah, but you're almost out of it. Shag, baby.”

Blaze let out the last notch. He was gaining on them. He was getting his second wind. He and Joe were going to get away after all. It had been a close shave, but it was all going to turn out okay. He looked at the river, straining his eyes, trying to see George. Or a bird. Just one bird.

The third bullet struck him in the right buttock, angled up, shattered his hip. The slug also shattered. The largest piece hung a left and tore open his large intestine. Blaze staggered, almost fell, then took off running again.

Sterling was down on one knee with his gun in both hands. He sighted quickly, almost off-handedly. The trick was not to let yourself think too much. You had to trust your hand-eye coordination and let it do its work. “Jesus, work Your will,” he said.

The fourth bullet—Sterling's first—struck Blaze in the lower back, severing his spinal cord. It felt like being punched by a big hand in a boxing glove, just above the kidneys. He went down, and Joe flew from his arms.

“Joe!” he cried, and began to haul himself forward on his elbows. Joe's eyes were open; he was looking at him.

“He's going for the kid!” one of the deputies yelled.

Blaze reached for Joe with one large hand. Joe's own hand, searching for anything, met it. The tiny fingers wrapped around Blaze's thumb.

Sterling stood behind Blaze, panting. He spoke low, so the deputies couldn't hear him. “This is for Bruce, sweetheart.”

“George?” Blaze said, and then Sterling pulled the trigger.