Blaze

by Richard Bachman

  Joe began to cry, and Blaze heated a bottle. The baby pushed it away, so Blaze dandled him absently on his lap. Joe quieted at once and began to stare around at things from his new elevation: the three pin-ups on the far side of the room, the greasy asbestos shield screwed into the wall behind the stove, the windows, dirty on the inside and frosty on the outside.

  “Not much like where you came from, huh?” Blaze asked.

  Joe smiled, then tried his strange, unpracticed laugh that made Blaze grin. The little guy had two teeth, their tops just peeking through the gums. Blaze wondered if some of the others struggling to come through were giving him trouble; Joe chewed his hands a lot, and sometimes whined in his sleep. Now he began to drool, and Blaze wiped his mouth with an old Kleenex that was wadded up in his pocket.

  He couldn’t leave the baby with George again. It was like George was jealous, or something. Almost like George wanted to—

  He might have stiffened, because Joe looked around at him with a funny questioning expression, like What’s up with you, buddy? Blaze hardly noticed. Because the thing was — now he was George. And that meant that part of him wanted to—

  Again he shied away from it, and when he did, his troubled mind found something else to seize on.

  If he went somewhere, George went somewhere, too. If he was George now, that only made sense. A leads to B, simple as can be, Johnny Cheltzman would have said.

  If he went, George went.

  Which meant that George was powerless to hurt Joe no matter how much he might want to.

  Something inside him loosened. He still didn’t like the idea of leaving the baby, but better to leave him alone than with somebody who might hurt him — and besides, he had to do it. There was no one else.

  But he could sure use a disguise, with them having that drawing of him and all. Something like a nylon stocking, only natural. What?

  An idea came to him. It didn’t come in a flash, but slowly. It rose in his mind like a bubble rising to the surface of water so thick it’s nearly mud.

  He put Joe back on the floor, then went into the bathroom. He laid out scissors and a towel. Then he got George’s Norelco shaver out of the medicine cabinet, where it had been sleeping all these months with the cord wrapped around it.

  He cut his hair in big unlovely bunches, cut until what was left stuck up in bristly patches. Then he plugged in the Norelco and shaved those off, too. He went back and forth until the electric razor was hot in his hand and his newly nude scalp was pink with irritation.

  He regarded his image in the mirror curiously. The dent in his brow showed more clearly than ever, all of it uncovered for the first time in years, and it was sort of horrible to look at — it looked almost deep enough to hold a cup of coffee, if he was lying on his back — but otherwise Blaze didn’t think he looked much like the crazed babynapper in the police sketch. He looked like some foreign guy from Germany or Berlin or someplace. But his eyes, they were still the same. What if his eyes gave him away?

  “George has shades,” he said. “That’s the ticket — isn’t it?”

  He vaguely realized he was actually making himself more conspicuous rather than less, but maybe that was all right. What else could he do, anyway? He couldn’t help being six-foot-whatever. All he could do was try and make his looks work for him rather than against him.

  He certainly didn’t realize that he had done a better job of disguise than George ever could have, no more than he realized that George was now the creation of a mind working at a feverish, half-crazed pitch below the burnt-out surface of stupidity. For years he had identified himself as a dummy, coming to accept it as just one more part of his life, like the dent in his forehead. Yet something continued to work away beneath the burnt-out surface. It worked with the deadly instinct of living things — moles, worms, microbes — beneath the surface of a burnt-over meadow. This was the part that remembered everything. Every hurt, every cruelty, every bad turn the world had done him.

  He was hiking at a good pace along an Apex back road when an old pulp truck with an oversized load wheezed up beside him. The man inside was grizzled and wearing a thermal undershirt under a checkered wool coat.

  “Climb up!” he bawled.

  Blaze swung onto the running board and then climbed into the cab. Said thank you. The driver nodded and said, “Goin to Westbrook.” Blaze nodded back and gave the guy a thumbs-up. The driver clashed the gears and the truck began to roll again. Not as if it particularly wanted to.

  “Seen you before, ain’t I?” the trucker shouted over the flailing motor. His window was broken and blasts of cold January air whirled in, fighting with the baking air from the heater. “Live on Palmer Road?”

  “Yeah!” Blaze shouted back.

  “Jimmy Cullum used to live out there,” the trucker said, and offered Blaze an incredibly battered package of Luckies. Blaze took one.

  “Some guy,” Blaze said. His newly bald head did not show; he was wearing a red knitted cap.

  “Went down south, Jimmy did. Say, your buddy still around?”

  Blaze realized he must mean George. “Naw,” he said. “He found work in New Hampshire.”

  “Yeah?” the trucker said. “Wish he’d find me some.”

  They had reached the top of the hill and now the truck began down the other side, picking up speed along the rutted washboard, banging and clobbering. Blaze could almost feel the illegal load pushing them. He had driven overweight pulp trucks himself; had once taken a load of Christmas trees to Massachusetts that had to’ve been half a ton over the limit. It had never worried him before, but it did now. It dawned on him that only he stood between Joe and death.

  After they’d gotten on the main road, the driver mentioned the kidnapping. Blaze tensed a little, but he wasn’t particularly surprised.

  “They find the guy grabbed that kid, they ought to string him up by his balls,” the pulper offered. He shifted up to third with a hellish grinding of gears.

  “I guess so,” Blaze said.

  “It’s gettin as bad as those plane hijacks. Remember those?”

  “Yep.” He didn’t.

  The driver tossed the stub of his cigarette out the window and immediately lit another one. “It’s got to stop. They ought to have mandatory death penalties for guys like that. A firing squad, maybe.”

  “You think they’ll get the guy?” Blaze asked. He was starting to feel like a spy in a movie.

  “Does the Pope wear a tall hat?” the driver asked, turning onto Route 1.

  “I guess so.”

  “What I mean is, it goes without saying. Of course they’ll get ’im. They always do. But the kid’ll be dead, and you can quote me on that.”

  “Oh, I dunno,” Blaze said.

  “Yeah? Well, I know. Whole idea is crazy. Kidnappin in this day and age? The FBI’ll mark the bills or copy the serial numbers or put invisible marks on em, the kind you can only see with an ultraviolet light.”

  “I guess so,” Blaze said, feeling troubled. He hadn’t thought about those sorts of things. Still, if he was going to sell the money in Boston, to that guy George knew, what did it matter? He started to feel better again. “You think those Gerards will really fork over a million bucks?”

  The driver whistled. “Is that how much they’re askin?”

  Blaze felt in that moment as if he could gladly have bitten off his own tongue and swallowed it. “Yeah,” he said. And thought Oh, George.

  “That’s somethin new,” the driver said. “Wasn’t in the morning paper. Did you hear about it on the radio?”

  George said, quite clearly: “Kill him, Blaze.”

  The driver cupped his hand to his ear. “What? Didn’t quite get that.”

  “I said yeah, on the radio.” He looked down at his hands, folded in his lap. They were big hands, powerful. One of them had broken a Collie’s neck with a single blow, and back then he hadn’t even had his growth.

  “They might get that ransom,” the driver said, flipping out
his second cigarette butt and lighting a third, “but they’ll never get to spend it. Nossir. Not never.”

  They were headed up Route 1 now, past frozen marshes and clam-shacks shuttered for the winter. The trucker was avoiding the turnpike and the weighing stations there. Blaze didn’t blame him.

  If I hit ’im right in the throat, where his adam’s apple is, he’d wake up in heaven before he even knew he was dead, Blaze thought. Then I could grab the wheel and pull ’im over. Prop ’im up on the passenger side. Anyone who sees him’ll think he’s just catching him a little catnap. Poor fella, they’ll think, he was probably drivin all n –

  “ goin?”

  “Huh?” Blaze asked.

  “I said, where you goin? I forgot.”

  “Oh. Westbrook.”

  “Well, I gotta swing off on Marah Road a mile up. Meetin a buddy, you know.”

  “Oh,” Blaze said. “Yeah.”

  And George said: “You got to do it now, Blazer. Right time, right place. It’s how we roll.”

  So Blaze turned toward the driver.

  “How about another cigarette?” the driver asked. “You in’trested?” He cocked his head a little as he spoke. Offering a perfect target.

  Blaze stiffened a little. His hands twitched in his lap. Then he said, “No. Tryin to quit.”

  “Yeah? Good for you. Cold as a witch’s tit in here, ain’t it?” The driver downshifted in anticipation of his turn, and from below them came a series of barking explosions as the engine backfired down its rotting tailpipe. “Heater’s broke. Radio, too.”

  “Too bad,” Blaze said. His throat felt as if as if someone had just fed him a spoonful of dust.

  “Yeah, yeah, life sucks and then y’die.” He applied the brakes. They screamed like souls in pain. “You have to hit the ground runnin; sorry, but she stalls out in first.”

  “Sure,” Blaze said. Now that the moment had come and gone, he felt sick to his stomach. And afraid. He wished he had never seen the driver.

  “Say hi to your buddy when you see ’im,” the driver said, and downshifted another gear as the overloaded truck swerved onto what Blaze assumed was Marah Road.

  Blaze opened the door and jumped out onto the frozen shoulder, slamming the door behind him. The driver honked his horn once, and then the truck roared over the hill in a cloud of stinking exhaust. Soon it was just a sound, dwindling away.

  Blaze started up Route 1 with his hands jammed in his pockets. He was in the exurban sprawl south of Portland, and in a mile or two he came to a big shopping center with stores and a cinema complex. There was a laundrymat there called The Giant Kleen Kloze U-Wash-It. There was a mailbox in front of the laundrymat, and there he mailed his ransom note.

  There was a newspaper dispenser inside. He went in to get one.

  “Look, Ma,” a little kid said to his mother, who was unloading kleen kloze from a coin-op dryer. “That guy’s got a hole in his head.”

  “Hush,” the kid’s mother said.

  Blaze smiled at the boy, who immediately hid behind his mother’s leg. From this place of safety he peered out and up.

  Blaze got his paper and went out with it. A hotel fire had pushed the kidnap story to the bottom of page one, but the sketch of him was still there. SEARCH FOR KIDNAPPERS GOES ON, the headline said. He stuffed the newspaper in his back pocket. It was a bummer. While cutting across the parking lot to the road, he spotted an old Mustang with the keys in it. Without giving it much thought, Blaze got in and drove it away.

  Chapter 16

  CLAYTON BLAISDELL, JR., became the prime suspect in the kidnapping at 4:30 PM on that same gray January afternoon, about an hour and a half after he dropped his letter into the mailbox in front of the Giant Kleen Kloze U-Wash-It. There was “a break in the case,” as law enforcement officials like to say. But even before the phone call that came to the FBI number listed in that day’s story about the snatch, ID had become only a matter of time.

  The police had a wealth of information. There was the description given by Morton Walsh (whose ass would be canned by his Boston employers as soon as the furor died down). There were a number of blue threads plucked from the top of the chainlink fence surrounding the Oakwood visitors’ parking lot, identified as being from D-Boy jeans, a discount brand. There were photos and casts of boot-treads with distinctive wear-patterns. There was a blood sample, type AB, Rh-negative. There were photos and casts of the feet of an extendable ladder, now identified as a Craftwork Lightweight Supreme. There were photographs of boot-prints inside the house, featuring those same distinctive wear-patterns. And there was a dying declaration by Norma Gerard, identifying the police artist’s sketch as a reasonable likeness of the man who had assaulted her.

  Before lapsing into a coma, she had added one detail that Walsh had left out: the man had a massive dent in his forehead, as if he had once been hit there with a brick or a length of pipe.

  Very little of this information had been given to the press.

  Other than the dent in the forehead, investigators were particularly interested in two facts. First, D-Boy jeans were sold at only a few dozen outlets in northern New England. Second, and even better, Craftwork Ladders was a small Vermont company that wholesaled only to independent hardware stores. No Ames, no Mammoth Mart, no Kmart. A small army of officers began visiting these independent dealers. They had not reached Apex Hardware (“The Helpful Place!”) on the day Blaze mailed his letter, but it was now only a matter of hours before they did.

  At the Gerard home, traceback equipment had been installed. Joseph Gerard IV’s father had been carefully coached on how to handle the inevitable call when it came. Joe’s mother was upstairs, stuffed with tranks.

  None of the law enforcement officials were under any orders to take the kidnapper or kidnappers alive. Forensic experts estimated that one of the men they were after (maybe the only man) stood at least six feet, four inches tall and weighed in the two-fifty range. The fractured skull of Norma Gerard offered testimony, if any were needed, of his strength and brutality.

  Then, at 4:30 PM on that gray day, SAC Albert Sterling got a call from Nancy Moldow.

  As soon as Sterling and his partner, Bruce Granger, stepped into the Baby Shoppe, Nancy Moldow said: “There’s something wrong with your picture. The man you want has a big hole in the middle of his forehead.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Sterling said. “We’re holding that back.”

  Her eyes got round. “So he won’t know that you know.”

  “That’s correct.”

  She gestured to the young fellow standing next to her. He was wearing a blue nylon duster, a red bowtie, and a thrilled look. “This is Brant. He helped that — that — him out with the things he bought.”

  “Full name?” Agent Granger asked the kid in the blue duster. He opened his notebook.

  The stockboy’s adam’s apple went up and down like a monkey on a stick. “Brant Romano. Sir. That guy was driving a Ford.” He named the year with what Sterling deemed to be a high degree of confidence. “Only it wasn’t blue, like it says in the paper. It was green.”

  Sterling turned to Moldow. “What did this man buy, ma’am?”

  She actually laughed a little. “My laws, what didn’t he. All baby things, of course, that’s what we sell here. A crib, a cradle, a changing table, clothes — the works. He even bought a single place serving.”

  “Do you have a complete list?” Granger asked.

  “Of course. I never suspected he was up to something awful. He actually seemed like a nice enough man, although that dented place in his forehead — that hole—”

  Granger nodded sympathetically.

  “And he didn’t seem terribly bright. But bright enough to fool me, I guess. He said he was buying things for a little nephew, and silly Nan believed him.”

  “And he was big.”

  “My laws, a giant! It was like being with a — a—” She trilled nervous laughter. “A bull in a baby shop!”

  “How big?” />
  She shrugged. “I’m five-feet-four, and I only came up to his ribs . That would make him—”

  “You probably won’t believe this,” said Brant the stockboy, “but I thought he had to be, like, six-seven. Maybe even six-eight.”

  Sterling prepared to ask a final question. He had saved it for last because he was almost sure it would lead to a dead end.

  “Mrs. Moldow, how did this man pay for his purchases?”

  “Cash,” she said promptly.

  “I see.” He looked at Granger. It was the answer they had expected.

  “You should have seen all the cash he had in his wallet!”

  “Spent most of it,” Brant said. “He tipped me five, but by then the cupboard was mostly, like, bare.”

  Sterling ignored this. “And since it was a cash purchase, you don’t have any record of the man’s name.”

  “No. No record. Hager’s will get around to putting in security cameras in a few years, I suppose—”

  “Centuries,” said Brant. “This place is, like, cheap to the max.”

  “Well, then,” Sterling said, flipping his notebook closed, “we’ll be going. But I want to give you my card in case you think of anyth—”

  “I do happen to know his name,” Nancy Moldow said.

  They both turned back to her.

  “When he opened his wallet to take out that big stack of money, I saw his driver’s license. I remember the name partly because that kind of sale is a once-in-a-lifetime thing, but mostly because it was such a… a stately name. It didn’t seem to fit him. I remember thinking that a man like him should be named Barney or Fred. You know, like on The Flintstones.”

  “What was the name?” Sterling asked.

  “Clayton Blaisdell. In fact, I think it was Clayton Blaisdell, Jr.”

  By five-thirty that evening, they had their man tabbed. Clayton Blaisdell, Jr., aka Blaze, had been popped twice, once for assault and battery against the headmaster of the state home where the kid was living — a place called Hetton House — and once more, years later, for bunco and fraud. A suspected accomplice, George Thomas Rackley, aka Rasp, had gotten off because Blaze wouldn’t testify against him.