Blaze (9 page)

T
HERE WAS NO PROBLEM
parking in Ocoma Heights, even though it was well patrolled by the fuzz. George had worked out this part of the plan months before he died. This part had been the seed.

There was a big condo tower opposite the Gerard estate and about a quarter of a mile up the road. Oakwood was nine stories high, its apartments inhabited by the working well-to-do—the
very
well-to-do—whose business interests lay in Portland, Portsmouth, and Boston. There was a gated visitors' parking lot on one side. When Blaze pulled up to the gate, a man stepped out of the little booth, zipping up a parka.

“Who are you calling on, sir?”

“Mr. Joseph Carlton,” Blaze said.

“Yes, sir,” the attendant said. He seemed unruffled by the fact that it was now nearly two in the morning. “Will you need a buzz-up?”

Blaze shook his head and showed the parking attendant a red plastic card. It had been George's. If the attendant said he would have to call upstairs—if he even looked suspicious—Blaze would know the card was no longer any good, that they had changed colors or something, and he would haul ass out of there.

The attendant, however, only nodded and went back into his booth. A moment later, the gate-arm swung up and Blaze drove into the lot.

There was no Joseph Carlton, at least Blaze didn't think there was. George said the apartment on the eighth floor was a playpen leased by some guys from Boston, guys he called Irish Smarties. Sometimes the Irish Smarties had meetings there. Sometimes they met girls who “did variations,” according to George. Mostly they played cutthroat poker. George had been to half a dozen of those games. He got in because he had grown up with one of the Smarties, a prematurely gray mobster named Billy O'Shea with frog eyes and bluish lips. Billy O'Shea called George Raspy, because of his voice, or sometimes just Rasp. Sometimes George and Billy O'Shea talked about the nuns and the fadders.

Blaze had been to two of these high-stakes games with George, and could barely believe the amount of money on the table. At one, George had won five thousand dollars. At another he had lost two. It was Oakwood being near to the Gerard estate that had gotten George thinking seriously about the Gerard money and the small Gerard heir.

The visitors' parking lot was black and deserted. Plowed snow glittered under the single arc sodium light. The snow was heaped high against the Cyclone fence that divided the parking lot from the four acres of deserted parkland on the other side.

Blaze got out of the Ford, went around to the back door, and pulled out his ladder. He was in action, and that was better. When he was moving, his doubts were forgotten.

He threw the ladder over the Cyclone fence. It landed silently, in a snowy dreampuff. He scrambled after, caught his pants on a jutting wire strand, and went tumbling headfirst into snow that was three feet deep. It was stunning, exhilarating. He thrashed for a moment, and made an inadvertent snow-angel getting up.

He hooked an arm into his ladder and began to trudge toward the main road. He wanted to come out opposite the Gerard place, and he was concentrating on that. He wasn't thinking about the tracks he was leaving—the distinctive waffle tread of his Army boots. George might have thought of it, but George wasn't there.

He paused at the road and looked both ways. Nothing was coming. On the other side, a snow-hooded hedge stood between him and the darkened house.

He ran across the road, hunched over as if that would hide him, and heaved the ladder over the hedge. He was about to wade through himself, just bulling a path, when some light—the nearest streetlamp or perhaps only starglow—traced a silvery gleam running through the denuded branches. He peered closer and felt his heart bump.

It was a wire strung on slim metal stakes. Three-
quarters of the way up each stake, the wire ran through a porcelain conductor. An electrified wire, then, just like in the Bowies' cow pasture. It would probably buzz anyone who came in contact with it hard enough to make them pee in their pants and set off an alarm at the same time. The chauffeur or the butler or whoever would call the cops, and that would be that. Over-done-with-gone.

“George?” he whispered.

Somewhere—up the road?—a voice whispered: “Jump the fucker.”

He backed off—still nothing coming on the road in either direction—and ran at the hedge. A second before he got there his legs bunched and thrust him upward in an awkward, rolling broad-jump. He scraped through the top of the hedge and landed sprawling in the snow beside his ladder. His leg, lightly scratched coming over the Oakwood Cyclone fence, left droplets of type AB-negative blood on both the snow and several branches of the hedge.

Blaze picked himself up and took stock. The house was a hundred yards away. Behind it was a smaller building. Maybe a garage or a guest house. Maybe even servants' quarters. In between was a wide snowfield. He would be easily observed there, if anyone was awake. Blaze shrugged. If they were, they were. There was nothing he could do about it.

He grabbed the ladder and trotted toward the protecting shadows of the house. When he got there he crouched down, getting his breath back and looking for any signs of alarm. He saw none. The house slumbered.

There were dozens of windows upstairs. Which one? If he and George had figured this out—if he had known—he had forgotten. Blaze laid his hand against the brick as if expecting it to breathe. He peered into the nearest window and saw a large, gleaming kitchen. It looked like the control room of the Starship
Enterprise
. A nightlight over the stove cast a soft glow across Formica and tile. Blaze wiped his palm across his mouth. Indecision was trying to crowd in, and he went back to get the ladder to forestall it. Any action, even the most trivial. He was trembling.

This is life!
a voice inside him screamed.
For this they give you the long bomb! There's still time, you can still
—

“Blaze.”

He almost cried out.

“Any window. If you don't remember, you'll have to creep the joint.”

“I can't, George. I'll knock something over…they'll hear and come and shoot me…or…”

“Blaze, you got to. It's the only thing.”

“I'm scared, George. I want to go home.”

No answer. But in a way, that
was
the answer.

Breathing in harsh, muffled grunts that sent out clouds of vapor, he unhooked the latches that held the ladder's extension and pulled it to its greatest length. His fingers, clumsy in the mittens, had to fumble twice to secure the latches again. He had threshed about a great deal in the snow now, and he was white from head to toe—a snowman, a Yeti. There was even a little snowdrift on the bill of his cap, still twisted to the good-luck side. Yet except for the
click-clunk
of the latches and the soft plosives of his breathing, it was quiet. The snow muffled everything.

The ladder was aluminum, and light. He raised it easily. The top rung reached to just below the window over the kitchen. He would be able to reach the catch on that window from two or three rungs farther down.

He began to climb, shaking off snow as he went. The ladder settled once, making him freeze and hold his breath, but then it was solid. He started up again. He watched the bricks go down in front of him, then the windowsill. Then he was looking in a bedroom window.

There was a double bed. Two people slept in it. Their faces were nothing but white circles. Just blurs, really.

Blaze stared in at them, amazed. His fear was forgotten. For no reason he could understand—he wasn't feeling sexy, or at least he didn't think he was—he started getting a hardon. He had no doubt that he was looking at Joseph Gerard III and his wife. He was staring at them but they didn't know it. He was looking right into their world. He could see their bureaus, their nightstands, their big double bed. He could see a big full-length mirror with himself in it, looking in from out here where it was cold. He was looking in at them and they didn't know it. His body shook with excitement.

He tore his eyes away and looked at the window's inside catch. It was a simple little slip-lock, easy enough to open with the right tool, what George would have called a gimme. Of course Blaze didn't have the right tool, but he wouldn't need one. The lock wasn't engaged.

They're fat, Blaze thought. They're fat, stupid Republicans. I may be dumb, but they're stupid.

Blaze placed his feet as far apart on the ladder as they would go, to increase his leverage, then began to apply pressure to the window, increasing it gradually. The man in the bed shifted from one side to the other in his sleep and Blaze paused until Gerard had settled back into the rut of his dreams. Then he put the pressure back on.

He was beginning to think that maybe the window had been sealed shut somehow—that that was why the lock wasn't engaged—when it came open the tiniest crack. The wood groaned softly. Blaze let up immediately.

He considered.

It would have to be fast: open the window, climb through, close the window again. Otherwise the inrush of cold January air would wake them for sure. But if the sliding window really squalled against the frame, that would wake them up, too.

“Go on,” George said from the base of the ladder. “Take your best shot.”

Blaze wriggled his fingers into the crack between the bottom of the window and the jamb, then lifted. The window rose without a sound. He swung a leg inside, followed it with his body, turned, and closed the window. It
did
groan coming back down, and
thumped
into place. He froze in a crouch, afraid to turn and look at the bed, ears attuned to catch the slightest sound.

Nothing.

But oh yes there was. Yes, there were plenty. Breathing, for instance. Two people breathing nearly together, as if they were riding a bicycle built for two. Tiny mattress creaks. The tick of a clock. The low whoosh of air—that would be the furnace. And the house itself, exhaling. Running down as it had been for fifty or seventy-five years. Hell, maybe a hundred. Settling on its bones of brick and wood.

Blaze turned around and looked at them. The woman was uncovered to the waist. The top of her nightgown had pulled to the side and one breast was exposed. Blaze looked at it, fascinated by the rise and fall, by the way the nipple had peaked in the brief draft—

“Move, Blaze! Christ!”

He high-stepped across the room like a caricature lover who has hidden under the bed, his breath held and his chest puffed out like a cartoon colonel's.

Gold gleamed.

There was a small triptych on one of the bureaus, three photos bound in gold and shaped like a pyramid. On the bottom were Joe Gerard III and his olive-skinned Narmenian wife. Above them was IV, a hairless infant with a baby blanket pulled to his chin. His dark eyes were popped open to look at the world he had so lately entered.

Blaze reached the door, turned the knob, and paused to look back. She had flung one arm across her bared breast, hiding it. Her husband was sleeping on his back with his mouth open, and for a moment, before he snorted thickly and wrinkled his nose, he looked dead. This made Blaze think of Randy, and how Randy had lain on the frozen ground with the fleas and ticks leaving his body.

Beyond the bed, there was a splotched sugaring of snow on the inside window ledge and on the floor. Both were already melting.

Blaze eased the door open, ready to halt at the first hint of a squeak, but there was no squeak. He slipped through to the other side as soon as the gap was wide enough. Outside was a kind of combination hallway and gallery. There was a thick, lovely carpet under his feet. He closed the bedroom door behind him, approached the darker darkness of the railing that went around the gallery, and looked down.

He saw a staircase that rose in two graceful twists from a wide entrance hall that went out of sight. The polished floor threw up scant, glimmering light. Across the way was a statue of a young woman. Facing her, on this side of the balcony, was a statue of a young man.

“Never mind the statues, Blaze, find the kid. That ladder's standin right out there—”

One of the two staircases went down to the first floor on his right, so Blaze turned left and padded up the hall. Out here there was no sound but the faint whisper of his feet on the rug. He couldn't even hear the furnace. It was eerie.

He eased the next door open and looked into a room with a desk in the middle and books on the walls—shelves and shelves of books. There was a typewriter on the desk and a pile of papers held down by a chunk of black glassy-looking rock. There was a portrait on the wall. Blaze could make out a man with white hair and a frowning face that seemed to be saying
You thief
. He closed the door and went on.

The next door opened on an empty bedroom with a canopy bed. Its coverlet looked tight enough to bounce nickels on.

He moved up the line, feeling trickles of sweat start on his body. He was hardly ever conscious of time passing, but now he was. How long had he been in this rich and sleeping house? Fifteen minutes? Twenty?