He began to descend again, then slipped and fell on his rump, still clutching the baby to his chest. There was a sharp flare of pain in his right ankle, as if someone had struck sparks inside his flesh. And he found himself staring at a triangular patch of shadow between two rounded rocks that bulged toward each other like breasts. He crawled toward it, still holding Joe against him. Yes, that was it. Yes and yes and yes. He ducked his head and crawled inside.
The cave was dark and moist and surprisingly warm. The floor was covered with soft, ancient pine-boughs. Blaze was swept with
Blaze set the baby down on a bed of boughs, fumbled in his jacket pocket for the kitchen matches he always kept in there, and lit one. By its wavering light he could see Johnny’s neatly made printing on the wall.
It was written in candlesmoke.
Blaze shivered — not from the cold, not in here — and shook out the match.
Joe was staring up at him in the gloom. He was gasping. His eyes were full of dismay. Then he stopped gasping.
“Christ, what’s wrong with you?” Blaze cried. The rock walls knocked his voice back into his own ears. “What’s wrong? What’s —”
Then he knew. The blankets were too tight. He had pulled them around Joe when he put him down, and he’d pulled too hard. Kid couldn’t breathe. He loosened them with trembling fingers. Joe whooped in a huge lungful of damp cave air and began to cry. It was a weak, trembling sound.
Blaze shook the Pampers out of his shirt, then got one of the bottles. He tried to give Joe the nipple, but Joe turned his head away.
“Wait then,” Blaze said. “Just wait.”
He took his cap, put it on, gave it a tug to the left, and went out.
He got some good deadwood from a tangle at the end of the gulch, and several handfuls of duff from beneath it. These he stuffed in his pockets. When he got back to the cave, he made a little fire and lit it. There was a small fissure like a cleft palate above the main opening, enough to create a draft and pull most of the smoke outside. He didn’t have to worry about anyone seeing this little bit of smoke, at least not until the wind died and the snow stopped.
He fed the fire stick by stick, until it was crackling briskly. Then he put Joe on his lap before it and warmed him. The little guy was breathing more naturally now, but that bronchial rattle was still there.
“Gonna take you to a doctor,” Blaze told him. “Soon as we get outta this. He’ll fix you up. You’ll be as cool as a fool.”
Joe grinned at him abruptly, showing off his new tooth. Blaze grinned back, relieved. The kid couldn’t be too bad off if he was still grinning, right? He offered Joe a finger. Joe wrapped his hand around it.
“Shake, pard,” Blaze said, and laughed. Then he took the cold bottle out of his jacket pocket, brushed off the clinging bits of duff, and set it next to the fire to get warm. Outside, the wind howled and shrieked, but in here it was warming up nicely. He wished he had remembered the cave first. It would have been better than HH. It had been wrong to bring Joe to an orphanage. It was what George would have called bad mojo.
“Well,” Blaze said, “you won’t remember. Willya?”
When the bottle felt warm to the touch, he gave it to Joe. This time the baby latched on eagerly, and took the whole thing. While putting away the last two ounces, his eyes took on the glassy, faraway look Blaze had come to know well. He put Joe on his shoulder and rocked him back and forth. The baby burped twice and talked his little nonsense words for maybe five minutes. Then he ceased. His eyes were closed again. Blaze was getting used to his schedule. Joe would sleep now for forty-five minutes — maybe an hour — and then want to be active the rest of the morning.
Blaze dreaded leaving him, especially after the accident of the night before, but it was vital. His instincts told him so. He laid Joe down on one of the blankets, put the other over him, and anchored the top blanket with big rocks. He thought — hoped — that if Joe awoke while he was gone, he could turn over but not crawl out. It would have to be good enough.
Blaze backed out of the cave, then started back the way he’d come, following his tracks. They were already starting to drift in. He hurried, and when the ground opened out, he began to run. It was quarter past seven in the morning.
While Blaze prepared to feed the baby, Sterling was in the arrest-and-recovery operation’s command vehicle, a 4X4. He sat in the shotgun seat. A State Trooper was driving. With his big flat hat off, the Statie looked like a Marine recruit after his first haircut. To Sterling, most Staties looked like Marine recruits. And most FBI agents looked like lawyers or accountants, which was perfectly fitting, since —
He caught his flying thoughts and pulled them back down to ground level. “Can’t you push this thing a little faster?”
“Sure,” the Statie said. “Then we can spend the rest of the morning picking our teeth out of a snowbank.”
“There’s no need to take that tone, is there?”
“This weather makes me nervous,” the Statie said. “This is a shitstorm. Slippery as hell underneath.”
“All right.” Sterling looked at his watch. “How far to Cumberland?”
“Fifteen miles.”
“How long?”
The Trooper shrugged. “Twenty-five minutes?”
Sterling grunted. This was a “cooperative venture” between the Bureau and the Maine State Police, and the only thing he hated more than “cooperative ventures” were root canals. The possibility of clusterfucks grew when
