“When should I do it, George? When?”
“When you wake up. When you wake up. Wake up.
Blaze woke up. He was in the chair. All the comic-books were on the floor and his shoes were on.
He got up and looked at the cheap clock on top of the refrigerator. It was quarter past one. There was a soap- spotted mirror on one wall and he bent down so he could see himself. His face looked haunted.
He put on his coat and hat and a pair of mittens and went out to the shed. The ladder was still in the car but the car hadn’t been running for three days and it cranked a long time before it started.
He got in behind the wheel. “Here I go, George. I’m gonna roll.”
There was no answer. Blaze twisted his cap to the good-luck side and backed out of the shed. He made a three-point turn and then drove down to the road. He was on his way.
Chapter 11
THERE 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
“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.
