Dr. Petrie opened his car door and got out. The heat was oily and fierce. Shielding his eyes, he went as close to the wrecks as he could, and to his horror, he saw a woman still sitting in the Cadillac – her face was roasted raw, but she was lifting her smoking arm up and down, trying to call out. A lurch of nausea made his empty stomach turn over, and he had to look away.
Adelaide called out, ‘What is it? Can we get past?’
Dr. Petrie shouted back, ‘Stay there! Just stay there!’
He took the security guard’s revolver out of his pocket, held it tight in both hands, and hoped to God that he wouldn’t miss. He inched as close to the blazing car as he could, and then fired. The woman jerked sharply back into her ruined seat as if he had kicked her. She disappeared in a torrent of rubbery smoke.
Dr. Petrie climbed back into the Gran Torino.
‘Was there someone in there?’ Adelaide asked quietly.
He nodded, and laid the gun on the parcel shelf. For some reason, the killing seemed to have purged something within him; to have quelled his broken nerves. Maybe it was because, for the first time since Mr. Kelly had woken him up on Monday morning, he had been able to act, to do something positive.
‘Honey – I’m going to have to ram my way through there,’ he said. He twisted around in his seat, and backed the car up thirty or forty yards. He stopped. ‘All you have to do is hold tight.’
He licked his lips. Then he shifted the car into 2, and stamped on the gas. The back tires screeched and slithered as they fought for traction on the concrete, and then the Torino bellowed forward – straight towards the two smoking wrecks.
There was a heavy smash, and for a moment Petrie thought the car was going to roll over. But he forced his foot harder on the gas, and their car gradually shoved the black carcass of the Riviera, its buckled hubs scraping and shuddering on the road, right to the edge of the expressway. Then Dr. Petrie backed up a foot or two, turned the wheel, and drove the Gran Torino over broken glass and oil and litter until they were clear. The car gave one last snaking skid, and they were driving north again.
‘Are you all right?’ asked Dr. Petrie.
Adelaide brushed back her hair. ‘I bruised my knee when we collided, but that’s all. I’m okay.’
Dr. Petrie checked his watch. ‘Another two or three minutes, and we’ll be there. Then we can try and get out of this godforsaken place.’
They drove without talking for a moment or two, and then Adelaide said, ‘Was it a man or a woman?’
Dr. Petrie frowned. ‘Was what a man or a woman?’
‘In that burning car. I just wondered.’
He rubbed at his left eye. The road was dark and confusing, and he had to swerve to avoid an abandoned police car.
‘It was a woman,’ he said baldly. ‘Does it make any difference?’
‘I don’t know. I got the feeling you needed to kill someone.’
He glanced across at her. ‘What made you think that?’
‘It was the way you fired at that security man. He wasn’t doing anything. He was just doing his job. Somehow, you looked as though you really needed to kill him.’
She was right, but Dr. Petrie could no more analyze his reactions than she could. It was connected with his present sense of helplessness as a doctor, with the need to protest, however ridiculously, against the outrage that was sweeping through his city. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I guess I’m just tired and frustrated.’
They didn’t say anything more until they had driven through the dark suburbs of North Miami Beach up to Dr. Petrie’s former house. He pulled the Gran Torino up to the kerbside, and climbed out. With Adelaide he walked across the grass to the house next door. It was a pink Spanish-style ranchette, called El Hensch, and owned by the Henschels. There was a bright gas-light burning in the living-room, so Dr. Petrie assumed his erstwhile neighbors were at home. He rang the doorbell, and it played The Yellow Rose of Texas.
The frosted-glass door opened half-an-inch. Dr. Petrie saw one bespectacled eye and the muzzle of a .38 revolver.
‘Who’s that?’ said David Henschel. ‘You get along out of here before I put a hole through ya.’
‘Mr. Henschel,’ said Dr. Petrie. ‘It’s me. Leonard Petrie. Used to live next door – remember? I’ve come for Prickles.’
There was a pause, then Dr. Petrie heard Gloria Henschel saying, ‘David – open the goddamned door, will ya? It’s Dr. Petrie. I seen him through the upstairs window.’
After a lot of rattling of chains and locks, the door was opened. Dr. Petrie took Adelaide by the arm and stepped inside. Mr. Henschel, a fat, fiftyish man with a check shirt and a pot belly, opened the living-room door for them.
On the living-room table was a butane camping lamp. It made the room seem like a dazzling religious grotto. Pickles was lying on the red velvet-style settee, with her thumb in her mouth, and her long honey-colored hair tied back with a pink ribbon. She was holding a worn-out teddy bear with a peculiarly maniac smile on its face, and she was wearing a red dressing gown and one red slipper.
Dr. Petrie knelt down on the floor beside her, very quietly, and watched her sleeping. Her cheeks were flushed, but she didn’t look as if she had contracted plague. He ran the tip of his finger down the middle of her forehead, and down the small curve of her nose. Adelaide came up behind him, and put her arm around him.
He looked up. ‘She’s beautiful, isn’t she?’ he said, shaking his head – a proud father who couldn’t believe that his luck was real.
Mrs. Henschel came into the room
