Blaze

Maybe it was the walking. Maybe it was the sound of Blaze’s voice. In any case, Joe’s screams shortened, then stopped. A few more turns around the shack’s kitchen and the baby’s head fell against the side of Blaze’s neck. His breathing lengthened into the long slow strokes of sleep.

Blaze put him carefully down in the cradle and began to rock it. Joe stirred but did not wake. One small hand found its way into his mouth, and he began to chew furiously. Blaze started feeling better. Maybe there was nothing wrong, after all. The book said they chewed their hands that way when they were teething or hungry, and he was pretty sure Joe wasn’t hungry.

He looked down at the baby and thought, more consciously this time, that Joe was sort of nice. Cute, too. Anybody could see that. It would be interesting to see him grow through all the stages the doctor talked about in Child and Baby Care. Joe was about ready to start crawling right now. Several times since Blaze had brought him to the shack, the little fucker had been right up on his hands and knees. Then he’d walk…and words would start coming out of all that babble…and then…then…

Then he’d have somebody.

The thought was unsettling. Blaze couldn’t sleep anymore. He got up and turned on the radio, keeping the volume low. He searched through the before-sunrise chatter of a thousand competing stations until he found the strong signal of WLOB.

The four AM news had nothing fresh about the kidnapping. That seemed all right; the Gerards wouldn’t be getting his letter until later today. Maybe not even until tomorrow, depending on when the mail got picked up from the mall. Besides, he couldn’t see why they should have any leads. He’d been careful, and except for that guy at Oakwood (Blaze had already forgotten his name), he thought this was what George would have called “a real clean gag.”

Sometimes, after they pulled a good con, he and George would buy a bottle of Four Roses. Then they would go to a movie and chase the Roses with Coke they bought from the theater’s refreshment stand. If the movie was a long one, George would sometimes be almost too drunk to walk by the time the final credits rolled. He was smaller, and the booze got to him quicker. They had been good times. They made Blaze think about the times when him and old Johnny Cheltzman had palled around, snickering at those old movies the Nordica showed.

Music came back on the radio. Joe was sleeping easily. Blaze thought he should go back to bed himself. There was a lot to do tomorrow. Or maybe even today. He wanted to send the Gerards another ransom note. He’d had a good idea for collecting the swag. It had come to him in a dream — a crazy one — he’d had the night before. He hadn’t been able to make head or tail of it then, but the sweet, heavy, dreamless sleep from which the baby’s crying had just roused him seemed to have clarified it. He’d tell them to drop the ransom from a plane. A small one that didn’t fly very high. In the letter he would say that the plane should fly south along Route 1 from Portland to the Massachusetts border, looking for a red signal light.

Blaze knew just how to do it: road-flares. He would buy half a dozen from the hardware store in town, and set them out in a little bunch at the place he picked. They would make a good hard light. He knew just the place, too: a logging road south of Ogunquit. There was a clearing on that road where the truckers sometimes pulled over to eat their lunches or catch a snooze in the sleepers they had behind their cabs. The clearing was close to Route 1, and a pilot flying down the highway couldn’t miss road-flares there, bunched close and shooting up like a big red flashlight. Blaze knew he still wouldn’t have much time, but he thought he’d have enough. That first logging road led to a network of unmarked rambles with names like Boggy Stream Road and Bumpnose Road. Blaze knew them all. One of them led to Route 41 and from there he could turn back north. Find a place to hide out until the heat cooled down. He had even considered Hetton House. It was empty and boarded up now, with a FOR SALE sign in front of it. Blaze had been by there several times in the last few years, drawn back like a little kid who’s had a scare in the neighborhood’s supposedly haunted house.

Only for him, HH really was haunted. He should know; he was one of the ghosts.

Anyway, it was going to be all right, that was the main thing. It had been scary for awhile, and he was sorry about the old lady (whose first name he had also forgotten), but now it was turned into a real clean g —

“Blaze.”