fresh paintjob, no fresh plates, no nothing. Where you going?”
Blaze didn’t say anything.
“You ain’t going to Ocoma, are you?”
Blaze didn’t say anything.
“Oh, fuck, you are,” George said. “Fuck
Blaze didn’t say anything. He was dummied up.
“Listen to me, Blaze. Turn around. You get picked up, it’s out the window. Everything. The whole deal.”
Blaze knew that was right, but wouldn’t turn back. Why should George always get to order him around? Even dead, he wouldn’t stop giving orders. Sure, it was George’s plan, that one big score every small-timer dreams of. “Only we could really make it happen,” he’d say, but usually when he was drunk or high and never like he really believed it.
They had spent most of their time running two-man short cons, and mostly George seemed satisfied with that no matter what he said when he was drunk or getting his smoke on. Maybe the Ocoma Heights score was just a game for George, or what he sometimes called mental masturbation when he saw guys in suits talking about politics on TV. Blaze knew George was smart. It was his guts he had never been sure of.
But now that he was dead, what choice? Blaze was no good by himself. The one time he’d tried running the menswear con after George’s death, he’d had to book like a bastard to keep from being picked up. He got the lady’s name out of the obituary column just the way George did, had started in on George’s spiel, had shown the credit slips (there was a whole bag of them at the shack, and from the best stores). He told her about how sad he was to have to come by at such a sad time, but business was business and he was sure she would understand that. She said she did. She invited him to stand in the foyer while she got her pockabook. He never suspected that she had called the police. If she hadn’t come back and pointed a gun at him, he probably would have still been standing there waiting when the police ho’d up. His time sense had never been good.
But she came back with a gun and pointed it at him. It was a silver lady’s gun with little swoops on the sides and pearl handles. “The police are on their way,” she said, “but before they get here, I want you to explain yourself. I want you to tell me what kind of a lowlife preys on a woman whose husband isn’t even cold in his grave yet.”
Blaze didn’t care what she wanted him to tell her. He turned and ran out the door and across the porch and down the steps to the walk. He could run pretty good once he got going, but he was slow getting going, and panic made him slower that day. If she had pulled the trigger, she might have put a bullet in the back of his big head or shot off an ear or missed him entirely. With a little short-barrel shooter like that, you couldn’t tell. But she never fired.
When he got back to the shack, he was half-moaning with fear and his stomach was tied in knots. He wasn’t afraid of jail or the penitentiary, not even of the police — although he knew they would confuse him with their questions, they always did — but he was afraid of how easy she saw through him. Like it wasn’t nothing to her. They had hardly ever seen through George, and when they did, he always knew it was happening and got them out.
And now this. He wasn’t going to get away with it, knew it, kept on anyway. Maybe he wanted to go back inside. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad, now that George was wasted. Let someone else do the thinking and provide the meals.
Maybe he was trying to get caught right now, driving this hot car through the middle of Ocoma Heights. Right past the Gerard house.
In the icebox of New England winter, it looked like a frozen palace. Ocoma Heights was old money (that’s what George said), and the houses were really estates. They were surrounded by big lawns in the summertime, but now the lawns were glazed snowfields. It had been a hard winter.
The Gerard house was the best one of all. George called it Early American Hot Shit, but Blaze thought it was beautiful. George said the Gerards had made their money in shipping, that World War I made them rich and World War II made them holy. Snow and sun struck cold fire from the many windows. George said there were over thirty rooms. He had done the preliminary work as a meter-reader from Central Valley Power. That had been in September. Blaze had driven the truck, which was borrowed rather than stolen, although he supposed the police would have called it stolen if they’d been caught. People were playing croquet on the side lawn. Some were girls, high school girls or maybe college girls, good-looking. Blaze watched them and started feeling horny. When George got back in and told him to wheel it, Blaze told him about the good-looking girls, who had gone around to the back by then.
“I saw em,” George said. “Think they’re better than anybody. Think their shit don’t stink.”
“Pretty, though.”
“Who gives a rat’s ass?” George asked moodily, and crossed his arms over his chest.
“Don’t you ever get horny, George?”
“Over babies like that? You jest. Now shut up and drive.”
Now, remembering that, Blaze smiled. George was like the fox who couldn’t reach the grapes and told everyone they were sour. Miss Jolison read them that story in the second grade.
It was a big family. There was the old Mr. and Mrs. Gerard — he was eighty and still able to put away a pint of Jack a day, that’s what George said. There was the middle Mr. and Mrs. Gerard. And then there was the young Mr. and Mrs. Gerard. The young Mr. Gerard was Joseph Gerard III, and he really was young, just twenty-five. His wife was a Narmenian. George said that made her a spic. Blaze had thought only Italians could be spics.
He turned around up the street and cruised past the house once more, wondering what it felt like to be married at twenty-two. He kept on going, heading home. Enough was enough.
The middle Gerards had other kids besides Joseph Gerard III, but they didn’t matter. What mattered was the baby. Joseph Gerard IV. Big name for such a little baby. He was only two months old when Blaze and George did their meter-reading bit in September. That made him — um, there were one-two-three-four months between September and January — six months old. He was the original Joe’s only great-grandson.
“If you’re gonna pull a snatch, you got to snatch a baby,” George said. “A baby can’t ID you, so you can return it alive. It can’t fuck you up by trying to escape or sending out notes or some shit. All a baby can do is lie there. It don’t even know it’s been snatched.”
They had been in the shack, sitting in front of the TV and drinking beer.
“How much do you think they’d be good for?” Blaze asked.
“Enough so you’d never have to spend another winter day freezing your ass off selling fake magazine subscriptions or collecting for the Red Cross,” George said. “How’s that sound?”
“But how much would you ask?”
“Two million,” George said. “One for you and one for me. Why be greedy?”
“Greedies get caught,” Blaze said.
“Greedies get caught,” George agreed. “That’s what I taught you. But what’s the workman worthy of, Blaze- a-rino? What’d I teach you about that?”
“His hire,” Blaze said.
“That’s right,” George said, and hit his beer. “The workman’s worthy of his fucking hire.”
So here he was, driving back to the miserable shack where he and George had been living since drifting north from Boston, actually planning to go through with it. He thought he would be caught, but — two million dollars! You could go someplace and never be cold again. And if they caught you? The worst they could do would be put you in jail for life.
And if that happened, you’d still never be cold again.
When the stolen Ford was back in the shed, he remembered to brush the tracks away. That would make George happy.
He made himself a couple of hamburgers for his lunch.
“You really going through with it?” George asked from the other room.
“You lyin down, George?”
“No, standin on my head and jerkin off. I asked you a question.”
“I’m gonna try. Will you help me?”
George sighed. “I guess I’ll have to. I’m stuck with you now. But Blaze?”
