Dr. Petrie shrugged. 'I can't be sure until the experts are sure. But I wasn't close to that boy for very long, and the chances are that I probably haven't caught it.'
Adelaide sat down. She watched Prickles playing for a while, and then said, 'I just find it so hard to believe. I thought plague was one of those things they had in Europe, in the Middle Ages. It just seems so weird.'
Dr. Petrie sat on the arm of the settee opposite. Unconsciously, he felt he ought to keep his distance. There was something about the word Plague that made him think of infection and putrescence and teeming bacteria, and until he knew for certain he was clean and clear, he didn't feel like breathing too closely in Adelaide's direction.
He sipped his drink. 'I was reading about it the other day, in a medical journal. We've had plague in America since the turn of the century. We've still got it — particularly in the west. They had to lift the ban on DDT not long ago, so that they could disinfect rats' nests and ground squirrels' burrows. Don't look so worried. It's just one of these things that sounds more frightening than it really is.'
Adelaide looked up, and gave him a twitchy smile. 'Plague. The Black Death. Who's frightened?' she said softly.
Prickles was shaking her doll. 'Dolly,' she said crossly, 'are you feeling giddy again?'
Dr. Petrie smiled. 'Is dolly feeling sick, too?' he asked. 'Maybe she needs a good night's sleep, like you.'
Prickles shook her head seriously. 'Oh, no. Dolly's not tired. Dolly doesn't feel like going to bed yet. Dolly's just feeling giddy.'
Dr. Petrie looked at his little daughter closely! Her hair was drawn back in a pony-tail, and her profile was just like his. When she grew up, and lost some of that six-year-old chubbiness, she would probably be pretty. Margaret, when he had first married her, had been one of the prettiest girls on the north beach.
'Well,' he said, 'if dolly's feeling giddy, perhaps dolly would like some nice streptomycin.'
Prickles frowned. 'No, dolly doesn't want any of that. Dolly doesn't like it. She's just feeling giddy, like Mommy.'
Dr. Petrie stared at Prickles intently. 'What did you say?' he asked her. He said it so sharply that she looked up at him with her mouth open, as if she'd done something wrong.
He knelt on the floor beside her. 'I'm not angry, darling,' he said. 'But did you say that Mommy was giddy?'
Prickles nodded. 'Mommy went swimming, and when she came back she said she felt sick, and the next day she was giddy.'
Dr. Petrie leaned back against the settee. The creeping sensation of anxiety was spreading all over him.
Adelaide, her face pale, said, 'Leonard… you don't think that Margaret…?'
Dr. Petrie stood up. 'I don't know,' he said hoarsely. 'What worries me is how many other people have caught it. I think I'd better get down to the hospital and find out what's going on.'
'Is Mommy all right?' said Prickles, frowning. Dr. Petrie forced a smile, and laid a gentle hand on his daughter's pony-tail.
'Yes, honey. Mommy's all right. Now — don't you think it's time that dolly went to bed?'
Prickles sighed. 'I suppose so. She has been very giddy today. Do all dollies get giddy? All the dollies in Miami?'
Dr. Petrie picked Prickles up in his arms, and held her close against him. The doll was made of lurid pink plastic, with a shock of brassy blonde nylon hair. He examined it closely, and then pronounced his diagnosis.
'I think that dolly's going to get better. And I don't think that all the dollies in Miami will get giddy. At least — '
He couldn't help noticing Adelaide's anxious, attractive face.
'At least I hope not,' he finished quietly, and laid his daughter down.
It was nearly midnight when the black and white police patrol car turned the corner from Washington Avenue into Dade Boulevard, cruising up the warm, deserted streets at a watchful speed. At the wheel, in his neat-pressed shirtsleeves, sat 24-year-old Officer Herb Stone — a thin-faced cop with a dark six o'clock shadow and a pointed nose. Beside him, eating a hot dog out of a pressed cardboard tray, sat his buddy, 26-year-old Officer Francis Poletto, a chunky, tough-looking young police athlete with a face like a pug.
'I almost broke my ass laughing,' Poletto was saying, with his mouth full. 'The guy gets on the water-skis, the boat starts up, and the next thing I know, they're pulling him right across the bay underwater. He climbs out, coughing and spluttering, and he says, 'Well, that's great for a start — now teach me how to do it on the surface!' Laugh? I broke my ass.'
Herb Stone grinned politely, and left it at that. He liked Poletto, and there were a couple of times when he'd been glad of Poletto's rough-house style arrest. But Stone was quiet and academic, and hoped to make it through to detective school, and promotion.
Poletto, on the other hand, liked to keep in touch with the streets, and the tough cookies who hung around the beaches. He was hard and dedicated and had once shot a hippie in the left arm.
They stopped at a red light, and waited at the empty junction. Crickets chirruped in the grass, and palms rustled drily in the soft night air. Herb Stone whistled tunelessly under his breath. Poletto munched. The radio said something indistinct about a traffic violation on Tamiami Trail.
Just as they were about to move off, a second-hand silver Pontiac came swerving across the junction in front of them, bouncing unsteadily on its springs, and roared off down Alton Road. Stone looked at Poletto and Poletto looked at Stone.
'Let's go,' said Poletto, screwing up his cardboard hot-dog tray. 'This might be the only action we get all night.' Herb Stone switched on the siren, and the police car squealed and skittered around the corner and bellowed off after the speeding Pontiac. They saw its crimson tail-lights vanishing down Alton Road in the direction of MacArthur Causeway, swaying erratically from one side of the road to the other.
'Drunk,' snarled Poletto. 'Drunk as a fucking skunk.'
Herb Stone, tense and sweating, closed the gap between the speeding Pontiac and the warbling, flashing police car. In a few seconds, they were close enough to see the dark shape of the driver, hunched over his wheel. Herb tried to nudge the police car up alongside the Pontiac and force him over, but the Pontiac slewed from kerb to kerb, tires squealing and suspension banging at every turn.
Suddenly, the Pontiac driver slammed on his brakes. Herb, dazzled by the red glare of the fugitive's tail- lights, went for his brake-pedal and missed it. The black and white police car smashed noisily into the back of the silver Pontiac, knocking it sideways into the kerb. Herb stamped on the brakes and stopped savagely.
'You're, supposed to chase him,' said Poletto bluntly. 'Not smash the ass off him.'
The two officers climbed out of their car and walked across to the Pontiac. Poletto unbuttoned his top pocket and took out his notebook.
'Okay, Charlie,' he snapped. 'What's all this, Death Races?' The driver didn't answer. He was middle-aged, with rimless glasses, and he was sitting upright in his seat like a wax dummy. His face was a ghastly and noticeable white.
Herb stepped up closer and saw that his eyes were closed. He had gray, close-cropped hair and a check working man's shirt. He looked respectable, even staid. He was shivering.
'Do you think he's okay?' asked Herb uncertainly. 'He doesn't look too well to me.'
Poletto shrugged. 'Herb — if you'd drunk as much as this guy, you wouldn't look too well, neither. Okay, Charlie, out of the car.'
The man didn't open his eyes, or stir, or say anything.
He just sat there shaking, pale and beaded with perspiration.
'Come on, wise guy,' ordered Poletto, and wrenched open the dented car door. He was about to reach in, but he stopped himself. He pulled a contorted face and said, 'Jesus H. Christ.'
'What's wrong?' said Herb. Then, before Poletto could answer, he smelled it for himself. It was so rank that he almost felt sick.
'I think he's ill, Frank,' said Herb. 'Get an ambulance, will you, and the wreck squad, and I'll pull him out of there.'
Poletto screwed up his nose. 'Rather you than me, buddy boy. That guy smells like a goddamned drain.'
