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.
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
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.
“
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.
Chapter 24
Q: How’s Joe, Mr. Gerard?
