Blaze

“George? I’m going now.”

“Okay,” George said from the bedroom.

“You better come out here and watch him. In case he wakes up.”

“I will, don’t worry.”

“Yeah,” Blaze said, without conviction. George was dead. He was talking to a dead man. He was asking a dead man to babysit. “Hey, George. Maybe I oughta—”

“Oughtta-shmotta, coulda-woulda. Go on, get out of here.”

“George—”

“Go on, I said! Roll!”

Blaze went.

The day was bright and sparkling and a little warmer. After a week of single-number temperatures, twenty degrees felt like a heatwave. But there was no pleasure in the sunshine, no pleasure to be had in driving the back roads to Portland. He didn’t trust George with the baby. He didn’t know why, but he sure didn’t. Because, see, now George was a part of himself, and he most likely took all the parts with him when he went somewhere, even the George part. Didn’t that make sense?

Blaze thought it did.

And then he started wondering about the woodstove. What if the house burned down?

This morbid picture entered his head and wouldn’t leave. A chimney fire from the stove he’d stoked special so Joe wouldn’t be cold if he kicked off his blanket. Sparks sputtering from the chimney onto the roof. Most dying, but one spark finding a dry shingle and catching hot, reaching out to the explosively dry clapboards beneath. The flames then racing across the beams. The baby beginning to cry as the first tendrils of smoke grew thicker and thicker

He suddenly realized he had pushed the stolen Ford up to seventy. He eased off the accelerator. That was worse and more of it.

He parked in the Casco Street lot, gave the attendant a couple of bucks, and went around to Walgreens. He picked up an Evening Express, then went to the rack of paperbacks by the soda fountain. A lot of Westerns. Gothics. Mysteries. Science fiction. And then, on the bottom shelf, a thick book with a smiling, hairless baby on the cover. He worked out the title quickly; there were no hard words in it. Child and Baby Care. There was a picture of an old dude surrounded by kids on the back cover. Probably the guy who wrote it.

He paid for his stuff and shook open the newspaper going out the door. He stopped suddenly on the sidewalk, mouth open.

There was a picture of him on the front page.

Not a photo, he saw with relief, but a police drawing, one of those they made with Identi-Kits. It wasn’t even that good. They didn’t have the bashed-in place in his forehead. His eyes were the wrong shape. His lips were nowhere near that thick. But somehow it was still recognizably him.

The old lady must have woken up, then. Only the subheading did away with that idea, and in a hurry.

FBI ENTERS SEARCH FOR BABYNAPPERS Norma Gerard Succumbs to Head Injury Special to the Evening Express By James T. Mears THE MAN WHO DROVE the getaway car in the Gerard baby kidnapping — and possibly the only kidnapper — is pictured on this page, in an Evening Express exclusive. The drawing was made by Portland P.D. sketch artist John Black from a description given by Morton Walsh, a night attendant at Oakwood, a new high-rise condominium tower a quarter of a mile from the Gerard family compound. Walsh told Portland police and Castle County Sheriff’s deputies earlier today that the suspect said he was visiting Joseph Carlton, a name that is apparently fictitious. The suspected babynapper was driving a blue Ford sedan, and Walsh said there was a ladder in the back. Walsh is being held as a material witness, and there is speculation about his failure to question the driver more closely on his intentions, given the lateness of the hour (approximately 2 AM). A source close to the investigation has suggested that the Joseph Carlton “mystery apartment” may have ties to organized crime, raising the possibility that the infant kidnapping could have been a well-organized criminal “caper.” Neither FBI agents (now on scene) nor local police would comment on this possibility. There are other leads at the present time, although no ransom letter or call has been announced. One of the kidnappers may have left blood at the crime scene, possibly from a cut received in his scramble over the Oakwood parking lot fence, which is of the chain-link type. Sheriff John D. Kellahar called it “one more strand in the rope that will eventually hang this man or gang of men.” In other developments, Norma Gerard, the kidnapped boy’s great-great-aunt, succumbed during an operation at Maine Medical Center to relieve pressure on her (go to Page 2, Col 5)

Blaze turned to page two, but there wasn’t much there. If the cops had other stuff, they were holding it back. There was a picture of “The Kidnap House,” and another of “Where the Babynappers Entered.” There was a small box that said Appeal to Kidnappers from Father, Page 6. Blaze didn’t turn to page 6. The time always got away from him when he was reading, and he couldn’t afford that now. He’d been away too long already, it would take him at least another forty-five minutes to get home, and also –

Also, the car was hot.

Walsh, that miserable bastard. Blaze almost hoped the organization whacked the miserable bastard for blowing their apartment. Meantime, though—

Meantime, he would just have to take his chances. Maybe he could get back okay. Things would be a lot worse if he just left the car. It had his fingerprints all over it — what George called “dabs.” Maybe they had the license plate number, though; maybe Walsh had written it down. He turned this over slowly and carefully and decided Walsh wouldn’t have written it down. Probably. Still, they knew it was a Ford, and blue — but of course it had been green originally. Before he painted it. Maybe that would make a difference. Maybe it would still be okay. Maybe not. It was hard to know.

He approached the parking lot carefully, lurking his way up to it, but he saw no cops and the attendant was reading a magazine. That was good. Blaze got in, started the Ford up, and waited for cops to descend from a hundred hiding places. None did. When he drove out, the attendant took the yellow ticket from under his windshield wiper with hardly a glance.

Getting clear of Portland, and then Westbrook, seemed to take forever. It was a little bit like driving with an open jug of wine between your legs, only worse. He was sure that every car that pulled up close behind him was an unmarked police car. He actually saw only one copmobile on his trip out of the city, crossing the intersection of Routes 1 and 25, breaking trail for an ambulance with its siren howling and its lights flashing. Seeing that actually comforted him. A police car like that, you knew what it was.

After Westbrook dropped behind, he swung off onto a secondary road, then onto two-lane blacktop that turned to frozen dirt and wound cross-country through the woods to Apex. He did not feel entirely safe even there, and when he turned into the long driveway leading to the shack, he felt as if great weights were dropping off his body.

He drove the Ford into the shed and told himself it could stay there until hell was a skating rink. He had known that kidnapping was big, and that things would be hot, but this was scorching. The picture, the blood he’d left behind, the quick and painless way that glorified doorman had given up the organization’s private playpen

But all those thoughts faded as soon as he got out of the car. Joe was screaming. Blaze could hear him even outside. He ran across the dooryard and burst into the house. George had done something, George had –

But George hadn’t done anything. George wasn’t anywhere around. George was dead and he, Blaze, had left the baby all alone.

The cradle was rocking with the force of the baby’s anger, and when Blaze got to Joe, he saw why. The kid had thrown up most of his ten o’clock bottle, and rancid, reeking milk, half-dry, was lathered on his face and soaking into his pajama top. His face was an awful plum color. Sweat stood out on it in beads.

In a kind of shutter-frame, Blaze saw his own father, a hulking giant with red eyes and big hurting hands. The picture left him agonized with guilt and horror; he had not thought of his father in years.

He snatched the baby out of the cradle with such suddenness that Joe’s head rolled on his neck. He stopped crying out of surprise as much as anything.

“There,” Blaze crooned, beginning to walk around the room with the baby on his shoulder. “There, there. I’m back. Yes I am. There, there. Don’t cry no more. I’m right here. Right here.”

The baby fell asleep before Blaze had made three full turns around the room. Blaze changed him, doing the