The blacks stopped talking again and watched him.
He waited for a while, and then shouted, 'Guard! Guard! Let me out of here!'
A few more minutes passed, and then a young policeman with rimless spectacles came down the corridor jangling a bunch of keys.
'You Dr. Petrie?' he asked.
'That's right. I want to see my lawyer.'
'You don't have to. You're free to leave.'
The guard unlocked the cell, and Dr. Petrie stepped out. One of the blacks said, 'So long, honky, have a nice day,' and the other laughed.
Dr. Petrie was ushered back to the police station desk, where the two arresting officers had brought him that morning. Adelaide was there, with dark rings under her eyes. She was still wearing the buttermilk-colored dress in which he had picked her up last night.
'Leonard — are you all right? Oh God, I was so worried.'
She came up and held him close, and he was so relieved to feel her and see her that he felt tears prickling in his eyes.
The desk sergeant said, 'When you've quite finished the love tableau, would you mind signing for these personal possessions?'
Dr. Petrie signed. 'Listen,' he told Adelaide, as he tied his necktie, 'I have to get back to the hospital. I promised Dr. Selmer.'
'It was Dr. Selmer who told me you were missing,' Adelaide said. He called at the house to see if you were there. When I said you weren't, he called the police, and they found out that you were here. I came straight over.'
'Have they closed the beaches yet?' he asked her, as they walked out of the tinted glass doors of the police station into the brilliant mid-morning sunlight.
'Not yet. The news says that it's serious, this plague, but that people mustn't get too worried. But it doesn't make sense. What the newspapers are saying, and the TV, it doesn't seem to tie up at all. I've seen people sick in the streets, and yet they keep saying there's nothing wrong.'
Dr. Petrie looked around. The sky was its usual imperturbable blue, flecked with shadowy White clouds. But the city was quiet. There were only a few cars, and they seemed to be rolling around the city streets in a strange dream. Some of them were piled high with possessions — chairs, tables and mattresses — and it was obvious that the few people who had realized what was going on were getting out as quick as they could.
The sidewalks — usually crowded with shoppers and tourists — were almost empty. People who needed to go for food or drink were, hurrying back to their cars and avoiding strangers like — Like the plague, thought Dr. Petrie bitterly.
'Have you seen any bodies?' he asked Adelaide.
She shook her head. 'I've heard though,' she said quietly. 'I caught a taxi, and the taxi-driver said he'd seen people lying on the ground, dead.'
'I saw a whole family last night,' Dr. Petrie said. 'It was awful. They were just lying on the sidewalk. I can't understand how Donald Firenza has kept this under wraps for so long.'
'Are you going back to the hospital?' Adelaide asked.
'I have to.'
'Do you want me to come with you?'
He shook his head. 'It's too risky. The hospital is full of infection. I don't know why on earth I haven't caught the plague yet but Dr. Selmer reckons that a few people could be immune. Maybe I'm one of them.'
Adelaide held his arm. 'Maybe? Leonard — what if you go to the hospital and — well, what if I never see you again?' She looked away.
'Adelaide, I'm a doctor. This city is dying around us. Look at it. Have you ever seen downtown Miami as quiet as this on a Tuesday lunchtime? I have to find out what's going on, and I have to help.'
'Leonard, I'm not leaving you. Not again. I've just spent the most frightening night of my life, waiting for you to come back, and I'm not going to let it happen again.'
A cab was parked at the corner. The driver, a squat middle-aged man in a straw hat, was calmly smoking a cigar and sunning himself as he leaned against the trunk.
Dr. Petrie walked over, holding Adelaide's hand, and said, 'Will you take me to the hospital?'
The taxi driver looked him up and down. 'You sick?' he asked.
'No, I'm a doctor.'
The man reached behind him and opened the door. 'That'll be forty bucks,' he said, without taking the cigar out of his mouth.
'Forty bucks? What are you talking about? That's a two-dollar ride at the most.'
The taxi driver slammed the door shut again. 'That's the price. Forty bucks or no trip.'
Dr. Petrie said firmly, 'Come on, Adelaide. We'll find ourselves a cab driver with some goddamned morality.'
The taxi driver was unfazed. 'Mister,' he said, 'you can search all day. All the moral cab drivers have taken their taxis and headed north. So has anyone else who's realized what the hell's going on in this town.'
Dr. Petrie reached for his wallet and peeled off three ten-dollar bills. 'Here's thirty. Take me down to the hospital, and you'll get the other ten. But don't think for one moment that I enjoy paying money to a flake like you.'
The taxi driver tucked the cash in his shirt pocket, and opened the car door. They climbed in, and the driver performed a wide U-turn, and drove them downtown to the hospital.
'I've seen fifty, sixty people dead in the streets,' said the driver conversationally, puffing on his cigar. 'I came out for my roster this morning, and I couldn't believe it. You know what they said on the radio? It's a kind of an influenza, and that it's all going to be over by the end of the week. Nothing to get excited about. You think fifty or sixty stiffs is nothing to get excited about?'
'I'm surprised you didn't leave town along with the rest of your buddies,' said Adelaide tartly.
'Why should I?' said the cab driver, turning the car towards the hospital. 'I can make a few bucks here in the city. I've lived here all my life. Look — there's another stiff on the sidewalk — right there.'
They looked, and saw the body of a woman in a blue-and-green dress lying on the concrete sidewalk outside a delicatessen. Her basket of groceries had spilled all over the pavement, and her arms were drawn up underneath her like a sick child.
The delicatessen proprietor was standing in his doorway staring at her, but what struck Dr. Petrie more than, anything else was the attitude of the few passers-by. They stepped over the sprawling woman as if she and her shopping were quite invisible.
Dr. Petrie said, 'Don't slow down. I have to get to the hospital as soon as I can.'
Adelaide was pale. 'Leonard,' she said. 'That woman.'
Dr. Petrie looked away. 'There's nothing we can do. She's probably dead already.'
The taxi driver puffed his cigar. 'You bet she's dead. I hear tell they got so many stiffs in the streets, they're going to start collecting them with garbage trucks.'
Adelaide looked shocked. 'Yes,' Dr. Petrie said, 'I heard that too.'
Dr. Selmer was waiting for him in his private office. The corridors outside were jammed with medical trolleys, and the weeping and wailing relatives of the dead were adding to the confusion of amateur ambulance drivers and local doctors who had been brought in to console the sick. All that was left to give was consolation. In spite of every kind of antibiotic treatment, people who caught the plague were dying with the inevitability of mayflies. 'Firenza was on the phone about an hour ago,' said Anton Selmer, leaning back wearily in his large leather chair, and resting his feet on his cluttered desk. 'He's agreed to close the beaches.'
'What's the death toll?' asked Dr. Petrie, taking off his jacket and rolling up his sleeves.
'About a hundred and twenty so far. That's with this hospital and all the others. Add to that another thirty who may be lying dead in their apartments or in the streets, and you've probably got yourself a reasonably accurate figure.'
'The city's real quiet. I thought it would have been more.'
Dr. Selmer shook his sandy head. 'Don't worry, Leonard. It will be more before the day's over. Every one of
