Blaze

“Forget and rob that same store every third or fourth week till they stake the place out and catch your ass? Sit here lookin at that numbfuck crib and sweetmother cradle in the sweet fuckin meanwhile?”

“I’m gonna chop the cradle up for kinnelin.”

“Look at you,” George said, and what was in his voice sounded beyond sadness. It sounded like grief. “Same pants on every day for two weeks? Piss-stains in your underwear? You need a shave and you need a fuckin haircut in the worst way…sittin here in this shack in the middle of the mumble-fuck woods. This ain’t the way we roll. Don’t you see that?”

“You went away,” Blaze said.

“Because you were actin stupid. But this is stupider. You have to take your chance or you’re gonna fall. You’ll do five years here, six there, then they’ll get you on three-strikes and you’ll sit in The Shank for the rest of your life. Just a two-bit dummy who didn’t know enough to brush his teeth or change his own socks. Just another crumb on the floor.”

“Then tell me what to do, George.”

“Go ahead with the plot, that’s what you do.”

“But if I get caught, it’s the long bomb. Life.” It had been preying on his mind more than he wanted to admit.

“That’s gonna happen to you anyway, the way you’re goin — ain’t you been listenin to me? And hey! You’ll be doin him a favor. Even if he don’t remember it — which he won’t — he’ll have something he can blow off his bazoo about to his country club friends for the rest of his life. And the people you’ll be rippin off, they stole the money themselves, only like Woody Guthrie says, with a fountain pen instead of a gun.”

“What if I get caught?”

“You won’t. If you run into trouble with the money — if it’s marked — you go on down to Boston and find Billy O’Shea. But the main thing is you just got to wake up.”

“When should I do it, George? When?”

“When you wake up. When you wake up. 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. Oh George.

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 very well-to-do — whose business interests lay in Portland, Portsmouth, and Boston. There was a gated visitors’ parking lot on one side. When Blaze pulled up to the gate, a man stepped out of the little booth, zipping up a parka.

“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.