Blaze

Chapter 22

BLAZE WAS SITTING at the counter in Moochie’s, eating a doughnut and reading a Spider-Man funnybook, when George walked into his life. It was September. Blaze hadn’t worked for two months, and money was tight. Several of the candy-store wiseguys had been pinched. Blaze himself had been taken in for questioning about a loan-office holdup in Saugus, but he hadn’t been in on that job and had come across so honestly bewildered that the cops let him go. Blaze was thinking about trying to get back his old job at the hospital laundry.

“That’s him,” someone said. “That’s The Boogeyman.”

Blaze turned and saw Hankie Melcher. Standing with him was a little guy in a sharp suit. The little guy had sallow skin and eyes that seemed to burn like coals.

“Hi, Hank,” Blaze said. “Ain’t seenya.”

“Ah, little state vacation,” Hank said. “They let me out cause they can’t count right up there. Ain’t that so, George?”

The little guy said nothing, only smiled thinly and went on looking at Blaze. Those hot eyes made Blaze uncomfortable.

Moochie walked down, wiping his hands on his apron. “Yo, Hankie.”

“Chocolate egg cream for me,” Hank said. “Want one, George?”

“Just coffee. Black.”

Moochie went away. Hank said, “Blaze, like you to meet my brother-in-law. George Rackley, Clay Blaisdell.”

“Hi,” Blaze said. This smelled like work.

“Yo.” George shook his head. “You’re one big mother, know it?”

Blaze laughed as if no one had ever observed he was one big mother before.

“George is a card,” Hank said, grinning. “He’s a regular Bill Crosby. Only white.”

“Sure,” Blaze said, still smiling.

Moochie came back with Hankie’s egg cream and George’s coffee. George took a sip, grimaced. He looked at Moochie. “Do you always shit in your coffee cups, or do you sometimes use the pot, Sunshine?”

Hank said to Moochie: “George don’t mean nothin by it.”

George was nodding. “That’s right. I’m just a card, that’s all. Get lost a little while, Hankie. Go in the back and play pinball.”

Hankie was still grinning. “Yeah, okay. Rightie-O.”

When he was gone and Moochie was back down at the far end of the counter, George turned to Blaze again. “That retard says you might be lookin for work.”

“That’s about right,” Blaze said.

Hankie dropped coins into the pinball machine, then raised his hands and began to vocalize what might have been the theme from Rocky.

George jerked his head at him. “Now that he’s out again, Hankie’s got big plans. A gas station in Malden.”

“That so?” Blaze asked.

“Yeah. Crime of the fuckin century. You want to make a hundred bucks this afternoon?”

“Sure.” Blaze answered without hesitation.

“Will you do exactly what I tell you?”

“Sure. What’s the gag, Mr. Rackley?”

“George. Call me George.”

“What’s the gag, George?” Then he reconsidered the hot, urgent eyes and said, “I don’t hurt nobody.”

“Me either. Bang-bang’s for mokes. Now listen.”

That afternoon George and Blaze walked into Hardy’s, a thriving department store in Lynn. All the clerks in Hardy’s wore pink shirts with white arms. They also wore badges that said HI! I’M DAVE! Or JOHN! Or whoever. George was wearing one of those shirts under his outside shirt. His badge said HI! I’M FRANK! When Blaze saw that, he nodded and said, “That’s like an alias, right?”

George smiled — not the one he’d used around Hankie Melcher — and said: “Yes, Blaze. Like an alias.”

Something in that smile made Blaze relax. There was no hurt or mean in it. And since it was just the two of them on this gag, there was no one to nudge George in the ribs when Blaze said something dumb, and make him the outsider. Blaze wasn’t sure George would’ve grinned even if there had been someone else. He might have said something like Keep your fuckin elbows to yourself, shitmonkey. Blaze found himself liking someone for the first time since John Cheltzman died.

George had hoed his own tough row through life. He had been born in the charity ward of a Providence Catholic hospital called St. Joseph’s: mother unwed, father unknown. She resisted the nuns’ suggestions that she give the boy up for adoption and used him as a club to beat her family with instead. George grew up on the patched-pants side of town and pulled his first con at the age of four. His mother was about to give him a whacking for spilling a bowl of Maypo. George told her a man had brought her a letter and left it in the hall. While she was looking for it, he locked her out of the apartment and booked it down the fire escape. His whacking later was double, but he never forgot the exhilaration of knowing he had won, at least for a little while; he would chase that I gotcha feeling the rest of his life. It was ephemeral but always sweet.

He was a bright and bitter boy. Experience taught him things that losers like Hankie Melcher would never learn. George and three older acquaintances (he did not have pals) stole a car when George was eleven, took a joyride from Providence to Central Falls, got pinched. The fifteen-year-old who had been behind the wheel went to the reformatory. George and the other boys got probation. George also got a monster whacking from the gray-faced pimp his mother was by then living with. This was Aidan O’Kellaher, who had notoriously bad kidneys — hence his street-name, Pisser Kelly. Pisser beat on him until George’s half-sister screamed for him to stop.

“You want some?” Pisser asked, and when Tansy shook her head he said, “Then shut your fucking airscoop.”

George never stole another car without a reason. Once was enough to teach him there was no percentage in joyriding. It was a joyless world.

At thirteen, he and a friend got caught boosting in Wool-worth’s. Probation again. And another whacking. George didn’t stop boosting, but improved his technique, and wasn’t caught again.

When George was seventeen, Pisser got him a job running numbers. At this time, Providence was enjoying the sort of half-assed revival that passed for prosperity in the economically exhausted New England states. Numbers were going good. So was George. He bought nice clothes. He also began to jiggle his book. Pisser thought George a fine, enterprising boy; he was bringing in six hundred and fifty dollars every Wednesday. Unknown to his stepfather, George was socking away another two hundred.

Then the Mob came north from Atlantic City. They took over the numbers. Some of the mid-level locals got pink-slipped. Pisser Kelly was pink-slipped to an automobile graveyard, where he was discovered with his throat cut and his balls in the glove compartment of a Chevrolet Biscayne.

With his living taken away, George set off for Boston. He took his twelve-year-old sister with him. Tansy’s father was also unknown, but George had his suspicions; Pisser had had the same weak chin.

During the next seven years, George refined any number of short cons. He also invented a few. His mother listlessly signed a paper making him Tansy Rackley’s legal guardian, and George kept the little whore in school. Came a day when he discovered she was skin-popping heroin. She was also, happy days, knocked up. Hankie Melcher was eager to marry her. George was surprised at first, then wasn’t. The world was full of fools falling all over themselves to show you how smart they were.

George took to Blaze because Blaze was a fool with no pretensions. He wasn’t a sharpie, a dude, or a backroom Clyde. He didn’t shoot pool, let alone H. Blaze was a rube. He was a tool, and in their years together, George used him that way. But never badly. Like a good carpenter, George loved good tools — ones that worked like they were supposed to every time. He could turn his back on Blaze. He could go to sleep in a room where Blaze was awake, and know that when he woke up himself, the swag would still be under the bed.

Blaze also calmed George’s starved and angry insides. That was no small thing. There came a day when George understood that if he said, “Blazer, you have to step off the top of this building, because it’s how we roll,”…well, Blaze would do it. In a way, Blaze was the Cadillac George would never have — he had big springs when the road was rough.

When they entered Hardy’s, Blaze went directly to menswear, as instructed. He wasn’t carrying his own wallet; he was carrying a cheap plastic job which contained fifteen dollars cash and ID tabbing him as David Billings, of Reading.

As he entered the department, he stuck his hand in his back pocket — as if to check his wallet was still there — and pulled it three-quarters of the way out. When he bent over to check out some shirts on a low shelf, the wallet fell on the floor.

This was the most delicate part of the operation. Blaze half-turned, keeping an eye on the wallet without seeming to keep an eye on it. To the casual observer, he would have seemed entirely engrossed in his inspection of the Van Heusen short-sleeves. George had laid it out for him carefully. If an honest man noticed the wallet, then all bets were off and they would move on to Kmart. Sometimes it took as many as half a dozen stops before the gag paid off.

“Gee,” Blaze said. “I didn’t know so many people were honest.”

“They’re not,” George said with a wintry smile. “But plenty are scared. And keep your eye on that fuckin wallet. If someone dips it on you, you’re out fifteen bucks and I’m out ID worth a lot more.”

That day in Hardy’s they had beginner’s luck. A man wearing a shirt with an alligator on the tit strolled up the aisle, spied the wallet, then looked both ways down the aisle to see if anyone was coming. No one was. Blaze exchanged one shirt for another and then held it up in front of him in the mirror. His heart was pumping like a sweetmother.

Wait until he pockets it, George said. Then raise holy hell.

The man in the alligator shirt hooked the wallet against the rack of sweaters he was looking at. Then he reached into his pocket, took out his car-keys, and dropped them on the floor. Oops. He bent down to get them and gleeped the wallet at the same time. He shoved them both into his front pants pocket, then started to stroll off.

Blaze let out a bull bellow. “Thief! Thief! Yeah, YOU!”

Shoppers turned and craned their necks. Clerks looked around. The floorwalker spotted the source of the trouble and began to hurry toward them, pausing at a cash register location to push a button labeled Special.

The man with the alligator on his tit went pale — looked around — bolted. He got four steps before Blaze collared him.

Rough him up but don’t hurt him, George had said. Keep hollering. And whatever you do, don’t let him ditch that wallet. If he looks like he’s tryin to get rid of it, knee him in the jukebox.

Blaze grabbed the man by the shoulders and began shaking him up and down like a man with a bottle of medicine. The man in the alligator shirt, maybe a Walt Whitman fan, voiced his barbaric yawp. Change flew from his pockets. He stuck a hand in the pocket with the wallet in it, just as George had said he might, and Blaze popped him one in the nuts — not too hard. The man in the alligator shirt screamed.

“I’ll teachya to steal my wallet!” Blaze screamed at the guy’s face. He was getting into it now. “I’ll killya!”

“Somebody get him off me!” the guy screamed. “Get him off!”

One of the menswear clerks poked his nose in. “Hey, that’s enough!”

George, who had been examining casual wear, unbuttoned his outer shirt, took it off with absolutely no effort at concealment, and stashed it under a stack of Beefy Tees. No one was looking at him, anyway. They were looking at Blaze, who gave a mighty tug and tore the shirt with the alligator on the tit right down the middle.

“Break it up!” the clerk was shouting. “Cool it!”

“Sonofabitch has got my wallet!” Blaze cried.

A large crowd of rubberneckers began to gather. They wanted to see if Blaze would kill the guy he had hold of before the floorwalker or store detective or some other person in authority arrived.

George punched NO SALE on one of the two Menswear Department cash registers and began scooping out the currency. His pants were too large, and a pouch — sort of like a hidden fanny-pack — was sewn in the front. He stuffed the bills in there, taking his time. Tens and twenties first — there were even some fifties, beginner’s luck indeed — then fives and ones.

“Break it up!” the floorwalker was yelling as he cut through the crowd. Hardy’s did have a store detective, and he followed on the floorwalker’s heels. “That’s enough! Hold it!”

The store detective shoved himself between Blaze and the man in the torn alligator shirt.

Stop fighting when the store dick comes, George had said, but keep making like you want to kill the guy.

“Check his pocket!” Blaze yelled. “Sonofabitch dipped me!”

“I picked a wallet up off the floor,” the alligator-man admitted, “and was just glancing around for the possible owner when this — this thug—”

Blaze lunged at him. The alligator-man cringed away. The store dick pushed Blaze back. Blaze didn’t mind. He was having fun.

“Easy, big fella. Down, boy.”

The floorwalker, meanwhile, asked the alligator-man for his name.

“Peter Hogan.”

“Dump out your pockets, Mr. Hogan.”

“I certainly will not!”

The store dick said, “Dump em out or I’ll call the cops.”

George strolled toward the escalator, looking as alert and lively as the best Hardy’s employee who ever punched a time-clock.

Peter Hogan considered whether or not to stand on his rights, then dumped out his pockets. When the crowd saw the cheap brown wallet, it went ahhhh.

“That’s it,” Blaze said. “That’s mine. He must’ve took it out of my back pocket while I was lookin at shirts.”

“ID in it?” the store dick asked, flipping open the wallet.

For a horrible moment Blaze went blank. Then it seemed like George was standing right there beside him. David Billings, Blaze.

“Sure, Dave Billings,” Blaze said. “Me.”

“How much cash in it?”

“Not much. Fifteen bucks or so.”

The store dick looked at the floorwalker and nodded. The crowd ahhh-ed again. The store dick handed the wallet to Blaze, who pocketed it.

“You come with me,” the store dick said. He grabbed Hogan’s arm.

The floorwalker said, “Break it up, folks, this is all over. Hardy’s is full of bargains this week, and I urge you to shop them.” Blaze thought he sounded as good as a radio announcer; it was no wonder he had such a responsible job.

To Blaze, the floorwalker said: “Will you come with me, sir?”

“Yeah.” Blaze glared at Hogan. “Just let me get the shirt I wanted.”

“I think you’ll find that your shirt is a gift from Hardy’s today. But we would like to see you briefly on the third floor, ask for Mr. Flaherty. Room 7.”

Blaze nodded and turned to the shirts again. The floorwalker left. Not far away, one of the clerks was getting ready to punch NO SALE on the register George had robbed.

“Hey, you!” Blaze said to him, then beckoned.

The clerk came over — but not too close. “May I help you, sir?”

“This joint got a lunch counter?”

The clerk looked relieved. “First floor.”

“You the man,” Blaze said. He made a gun of his right thumb and forefinger, tipped the clerk a wink, and strolled off toward the escalator. The clerk watched him go. By the time he got back to his register, where all the bill compartments in the tray were now empty, Blaze was out on the street. George was waiting in a rusty old Ford. And off they drove.

They scored three hundred and forty dollars. George split it right down the middle. Blaze was ecstatic. It was the easiest job he had ever done. George was a mastermind. They would pull the gag all over town.

George took all this with the modesty of a third-rate magician who has just run the jacks at a children’s birthday party. He didn’t tell Blaze the gimmick went back to his grammar school days, when two buckies would start a fight by the meat-counter and a third would scoop the till while the owner was breaking it up. Nor did he tell Blaze they would be collared the third time they tried it, if not the second. He simply nodded and shrugged and enjoyed the big guy’s amazement. Amazement? Blaze was fucking awestruck.

They drove into Boston, stopped at a liquor store, and picked up two fifths of Old Granddad. Then they went to a double feature at the Constitution on Washington Street and watched car-chases and men with automatic weapons. When they left at ten o’clock that evening, they were both blotto. All four hubcaps had been stolen off the Ford. George was mad, even though the hubcaps had been as shitty as the rest of the car. Then he saw someone had also keyed off his VOTE DEMOCRAT bumper-sticker and started to laugh. He sat down on the curb, laughing until tears rolled down his sallow cheeks.

“Taken off by a Reagan-lover,” he said. “My fuckin word.”

“Maybe the guy who spoiled your fumper-licker wasn’t the same guy was took your wheelcaps,” Blaze said, sitting down beside George. His head was whirling, but it was a good whirl. A nice whirl.

“Fumper-licker!” George cried. He bent over as if he had a stomach cramp, but he was screaming with laughter. He tromped his feet up and down. “I always knew there was a word for Barry Goldwater! Fuckin fumper-licker!” Then he stopped laughing. He looked at Blaze with swimming, solemn eyes and said, “Blazer, I just pissed myself.”

Blaze began to laugh. He laughed until he fell back on the sidewalk. He had never laughed so hard, not even with John Cheltzman.

Two years later, George was busted for passing bad checks. Blaze’s luck was in again. He was getting over the flu, and George was alone when the cops grabbed him outside of a Danvers bar. He got three years — a stiff sentence for first-time forgery — but George was a known bunco and the judge was a known hardass. Perhaps even a fumper-licker. It was twenty months, with time served and time off for good behavior.

Before the sentencing, George took Blaze aside. “I’m going to Walpole, big boy. A year at least. Probably longer.”

“But your lawyer—”

“The fuckhead couldn’t defend the Pope on a rape charge. Listen: you stay away from Moochie’s.”

“But Hank said if I came around, he could—”

“And stay away from Hankie, too. Get a straight job until I come out, that’s how you roll. Don’t go trying to pull any cons on your own. You’re too goddam dumb. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Blaze said, and grinned. But he felt like crying.

George saw it and punched Blaze on the arm. “You’ll be fine,” he said.

Then, as Blaze left, George called to him. Blaze turned. George made an impatient gesture at his forehead. Blaze nodded and swerved the bill of his cap around to the good-luck side. He grinned. But inside he still felt like crying.

He tried his old job, but it was too square after life with George. He quit and looked for something better. For awhile he was a bouncer at a place in the Combat Zone, but he was no good at it. His heart was too soft.

He went back to Maine, got a job cutting pulp, and waited for George to get out. He liked pulping, and he liked driving Christmas trees south. He liked the fresh air and horizons that were unbroken by tall buildings. The city was okay sometimes, but the woods were quiet. There were birds, and sometimes you saw deer wading in ponds and your heart went out to them. He sure didn’t miss the subways, or the pushing crowds. But when George dropped him a short note — Getting out on Friday, hope to see you — Blaze put in his time and went south to Boston again.

George had picked up an assortment of new cons in Walpole. They tried them out like old ladies test-driving new cars. The most successful was the queer-con. That bastard ran like a railroad for three years, until Blaze was busted on what George called “the Jesus-gag.”

George picked something else up in prison: the idea of one big score and out. Because, he told Blaze, he couldn’t see spending the best years of his life hustling homos in bars where everybody was dressed up like The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Or peddling fake encyclopedias. Or running a Murphy. No, one big score and out. It became his mantra.

A high school teacher named John Burgess, in for manslaughter, had suggested kidnapping.

“You’re trippin!” George said, horrified. They were in the yard on ten o’clock exercise, eating bananas and watching some mokes with big muscles throw a football around.

“It’s got a bad name because it’s the crime of choice for idiots,” Burgess said. He was a slight balding man. “Kidnap a baby, that’s the ticket.”

“Yeah, like Hauptmann,” George said, and jittered back and forth like he was getting electrocuted.

“Hauptmann was an idiot. Hell, Rasp, a well-handled baby snatch could hardly miss. What’s the kid going to say when they ask him who did it? Goo-goo ga-ga?” He laughed.

“Yeah, but the heat,” George said.

“Sure, sure, the heat.” Burgess smiled and tugged his ear. He was a great old ear-tugger. “There would be heat. Baby snatches and cop-killings, always a lot of heat. You know what Harry Truman said about that?”

“No.”

“He said if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”

“You can’t collect the ransom,” George said. “Even if you did, the money would be marked. Goes without saying.”

Burgess raised one finger like a professor. Then he did that dopey ear-tugging thing, which kind of spoiled it. “You’re assuming the cops would be called in. If you scared the family bad enough, they’d deal privately.” He paused. “And even if the money was hot — you saying you don’t know some guys?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“There are guys who buy hot money. It’s just another investment to them, like gold or government bonds.”

“But collecting the swag — what about that?”

Burgess shrugged. He pulled on his ear. “Easy. Have the marks drop it from a plane.” Then he got up and walked away.

Blaze was sentenced to four years on the Jesus-gag. George told him it would be a tit if he kept his nose clean. Two at most, he said, and two was what it turned out to be. Those years inside weren’t much different than the jail-time he’d put in after beating up The Law; only the inmates had grown older. He didn’t spend any time in solitary. When he got the heebie-jeebies on long evenings, or during one interminable lockdown when there were no exercise privileges, he wrote George. His spelling was awful, the letters long. George didn’t answer very often, but in time the very act of composition, laborious as it was, became soothing. He imagined that when he wrote, George was standing behind him, reading over his shoulder.

“Prisin laundre,” George would say. “My fuckin word.”

“That wrong, George?”

“P-r-i-s-o-n, prison. L-a-u-n-d-r-y, laundry. Prison laundry.”

“Oh yeah. Right.”

His spelling and even his punctuation improved, even though he never used a dictionary. Another time:

“Blaze, you’re not using your cigarette ration.” This was during the golden time when some of the tobacco companies gave out little trial packs.

“I don’t hardly smoke, George. You know that. They’d just pile up.”

“Listen to me, Blazer. You pick em up on Friday, then sell em the next Thursday, when everybody’s hurtin for a smoke. That’s how you roll.”

Blaze began to do this. He was surprised how much people would pay for smoke that didn’t even get you stoned.

Another time:

“You don’t sound good, George,” Blaze said.

“Course not. I just had four fuckin teeth out. Hurts like hell.”

Blaze called him the next time he had phone privileges, not reversing the charges but feeding the phone with dough he’d made selling ciggies on the black market. He asked George how his teeth were.

“What teeth?” George said grumpily. “Fuckin dentist is probably wearin em around his neck like a Ubangi.” He paused. “How’d you know I had em out? Someone tell you?”

Blaze suddenly felt he was on the verge of being caught in something shameful, like beating off in chapel. “Yeah,” he said. “Someone told me.”

They drifted south to New York City when Blaze got out, but neither of them liked it. George had his pocket picked, which he took as a personal affront. They took a trip to Florida and spent a miserable month in Tampa, broke and unable to score. They went north again, not to Boston but to Portland. George said he wanted to summer in Maine and pretend he was a rich Republican fuckstick.

Not long after they arrived, George read a newspaper story about the Gerards: how rich they were, how the youngest Gerard had just gotten married to some good-looking spic chick. Burgess’s kidnap idea resurfaced in his mind — that one big score. But there was no baby, not then, so they went back to Boston.

The Boston-in-the-winter, Portland-in-the-summer thing became a routine over the next two years. They’d roll north in some old beater in early June, with whatever remained of the winter’s proceeds stashed in the spare tire: seven hundred one year, two thousand the next. In Portland, they pulled a gag if a gag presented itself. Otherwise, Blaze fished and sometimes laid a trap or two in the woods. They were happy summers for him. George lay out in the sun and tried to get a tan (hopeless; he only burned), read the papers, swatted blackflies, and rooted for Ronald Reagan (who he called Old White Elvis Daddy) to drop dead.

Then, on July 4th of their second summer in Maine, he noticed that Joe Gerard III and his Narmenian wife had become parents.

Blaze was playing solitaire on the porch of the shack and listening to the radio. George turned it off. “Listen, Blazer,” he said, “I got an idea.”

He was dead three months later.

They had been attending the crap-game regularly, and there had never been any trouble. It was a straight game. Blaze didn’t play, but he often faded George. George was very lucky.

On this night in October, George made six straight passes. The man kneeling across from him on the other side of the blanket bet against him every time. He had lost forty dollars. The game was in a warehouse near the docks, and it was full of smells: old fish, fermented grain, salt, gasoline. When the place was quiet, you could hear the tack-tack-tack of seagulls walking around on the roof. The man who had lost forty dollars was named Ryder. He claimed to be half Penobscot Indian, and he looked it.

When George picked up the dice a seventh time instead of passing them, Ryder threw twenty dollars down on the crapout line.

“Come, dice,” George said — crooned. His thin face was bright. His cap was yanked around to the left. “Come big dice, come come come now!” The dice exploded across the blanket and came up eleven.

“Seven in a row!” George crowed. “Pick up that swag, Blazerino, daddy’s goin for number eight. Big eighter from Decatur!”

“You cheated,” Ryder said. His voice was mild, observational.

George froze in the act of picking up the dice. “Say what?”

“You switched them dice.”

“Come on, Ride,” someone said. “He didn’t—”

“I’ll have my money back,” Ryder said. He stretched his hand out across the blanket.

“You’ll have a broken arm if you don’t cut the shit,” George said. “That’s what you’ll have, Sunshine.”

“I’ll have my money back,” Ryder said. His hand still out.

It was one of those quiet times now, and Blaze could hear the gulls on the roof: tack-tack-tack.

“Go fuck yourself,” George said, and spat on the outstretched hand.

So then it happened quickly, as those things do. The quickness is what makes the mind reel and refuse. Ryder reached his spit-shiny hand into the pocket of his jeans, and when it came out, it was holding a spring-knife. Ryder thumbed the chrome button in the imitation ivory handle, and the men around the blanket scattered back.

George shouted: “Blaze!”

Blaze lunged across the blanket at Ryder, who rocked forward on his knees and put the blade in George’s stomach. George screamed. Blaze grabbed Ryder and slammed his head against the floor. It made a cracking sound like a breaking branch.

George stood up. He looked at the knife-handle sticking out of his shirt. He grabbed it, started to pull, then grimaced. “Fuck,” he said. “Oh fuck.” He sat down hard.

Blaze heard a door slam. He heard running feet on hollow boards.

“Get me outta here,” George said. His yellow shirt was turning red around the knife-handle. “Get the swag, too — oh Jesus this hurts!”

Blaze gathered up the scattered bills. He stuffed them into his pockets with fingers that had no feeling in them. George was panting. He sounded like a dog on a hot day.

“George, let me pull it out—”

“No, you crazy? It’s holding my guts in. Carry me, Blaze. Oh my fuckin Jesus!”

Blaze picked George up in his arms and George screamed again. Blood dripped onto the blanket and onto Ryder’s shiny black hair. Under the shirt, George’s belly felt as hard as a board. Blaze carried him across the warehouse and then outside.

“No,” George said. “You forgot the bread. You never got any goddam bread.” Blaze thought maybe George was talking about the swag and he started to say he had it, when George said: “And the salami.” He was beginning to breathe very rapidly. “I got that book, you know.”

“George!”

“That book with the picture of—” But then George began to choke on his own blood. Blaze turned him over and whammed him on the back. It was all he could think of to do. But when he turned George over again, George was dead.

Blaze laid him on the boards outside the warehouse. He backed away. Then he crept forward again and closed George’s eyes. He backed away a second time, then crept forward again and knelt. “George?”

No answer.

“You dead, George?”

No answer.

Blaze ran all the way to the car and got in and threw himself behind the wheel. He screamed away, peeling rubber for twenty feet.

“Slow down,” George said from the back seat.

“George?”

“Slow down, goddammit!”

Blaze slowed down. “George! Come on up front! Climb over! Wait, I’ll pull over.”

“No,” George said. “I like it back here.”

“George?”

“What?”

“What are we going to do now?”

“Snatch the kid,” George said. “Just like we planned.”