By the time he reached the intersection with the Vine Street Expressway, Braydon Harris was convinced that God had it in for him.
An electric storm like Judgment Day was flashing and thundering over the center of Philadelphia, and rain was hammering down so hard that it was almost impossible for him to see the highway ahead of him through the spray.
On the back seat of his seven-year-old Dodge Caliber, Sukie was lying fast asleep, snuggled up under a red plaid blanket, clutching that moon-faced doll of hers. Sukie had been overjoyed that Braydon had kidnapped her from Melinda’s parents, but this evening it seemed as if the Lord was on the side of Melinda and the Maryland Family Courts, and that He wasn’t going to allow Braydon to make an easy getaway.
As he drove north on the Schuylkill Expressway, past the Philadelphia Zoo, there was a bellow of thunder directly overhead, so loud that Braydon was almost deafened. Sukie woke up and screamed in fright, dropping her doll on the floor.
‘Daddy! I’m scared! What is it? I dropped Binkie! I dropped Binkie!’
‘It’s OK, sweetheart! Everything’s OK! It’s only thunder! It can’t hurt you!’
‘I’m scared, Daddy! I dropped Binkie! I can’t find her!’
There was another devastating cannonade of thunder, and this time Sukie let out a high-pitched shriek, the kind of shriek that only terrified little girls can produce, almost beyond the range of human hearing. The rain began to drum down even harder on the Caliber’s roof, as if God were doing His level best to flatten it.
‘I can’t find Binkie! I’ve lost her! I can’t find Binkie!’
‘Don’t worry, sweetheart, it’s a rainstorm, that’s all! There’s nothing to be scared of!’
‘But Binkie’s scared!’
Braydon twisted himself around in the driver’s seat and reached behind him with his right hand, trying to locate Sukie’s doll on the floor. At first he couldn’t feel it at all, but then he arched his back and lifted himself up in his seat a little more, and his fingertips touched the doll’s frizzy nylon hair.
‘It’s OK,’ he told Sukie. ‘I got her!’
He managed to pinch Binkie’s hair between his index finger and his middle finger, and he was just about to pick her up when his windshield was flooded with blinding white light. Through his furiously-flapping windshield wipers he saw a huge truck sliding sideways across the expressway in front of him, and the single word DIAMOND.
Even with both hands on the wheel, he probably couldn’t have steered the Caliber out of the path of the jackknifing semi. As it was, his right arm was pinioned between the two front seats, and he had to spin the wheel with his left hand only.
He heard nothing. He didn’t even hear Sukie shrieking. The Caliber skidded through one hundred eighty degrees and slid backward underneath the semi’s trailer, so that its rear end was instantly crushed to half its height. Braydon was slammed face first into his inflated air-bag, smashing his nose. The side of the trailer hit the back of his seat, forcing him forward and pinning him against the steering wheel.
He sat stunned for almost half a minute, with a beard of blood. Gradually, his hearing returned, and he heard rain pattering against the windshield and people shouting. He tried to turn around to see if Sukie was all right, but his right arm was jammed tight between his seat and the center console.
‘Sukie?’ he coughed. ‘Sukie, are you OK, sweetheart? Please tell Daddy you’re OK.’
There was no reply. Only the sound of rain and rumbling thunder and people shouting, and the scribble-scribble-scribble of a distant siren.
‘Sukie! Can you hear me? Please tell Daddy you haven’t been hurt!’
Through his rain-ribbed windshield he saw flashlights coming toward him, and dark silhouettes. Somebody was tugging at his door handle, and then knocking at his window.
‘Are you OK in there, buddy? Hold on – we’re going to get you out of there ASAP!’
‘My daughter,’ he said.
‘Hold on, buddy! We’re going to try to force the door open!’
‘My daughter!’ he repeated, although his ribs were pressed hard against the center of the steering wheel, and he couldn’t force enough air out of his lungs to manage anything louder than a croak. ‘My daughter’s in the back seat! She’s not answering me! I think she might be hurt!’
More flashlights criss-crossed in front of his windshield, and then he heard a bang and a creak as somebody forced a tire iron into the side of his door.
‘Sukie?’ he called her. ‘Sukie, please answer me, sweetheart!’
There was another creak, and he felt the Caliber rock from side to side as his rescuers tried to jimmy his door open. He twisted his head around as far as he could, but the vehicle had been crushed so low beneath the trailer that all he could see was the vinyl roof-lining. He prayed that Sukie had still been lying flat on her seat at the moment of impact.
‘Dear God I’m so sorry I took her,’ Braydon gabbled to himself. ‘They told me I wasn’t fit to be her father, and look at me, I’m not. Dear God please tell me that I haven’t killed her.’
He heard more sirens, wailing and screaming. He inhaled deeply so that he could shout to his would-be rescuers to hurry it up, but when he did so he breathed in the eye-watering pungency of gasoline fumes. The Caliber’s fuel tank must have been split open by the collision, and it had been almost full.
‘Hurry!’ he wheezed. ‘Hurry! The gas tank’s leaking!’
‘Don’t panic, buddy!’ called back one of his rescuers. ‘We almost got the door open.’
Almost as soon as he had spoken, however, Braydon heard a soft explosive whumph, and then another, followed by a crackling sound.
‘Hurry!’ he shouted. ‘We’re on fire in here! For Christ’s sake, hurry! We’re on fire!’
Hot air began to swarm through the gap between the front seats, and Braydon smelled shriveling vinyl and scorching wool. A spattering of molten plastic burned the back of his hand, and he tried even more desperately to wrench his arm free, but the force of the collision had trapped it too tightly. He could feel a thick crunching sensation inside his wrist, and for the first time since the crash, his arm began to throb with unbearable pain.
‘We’re burning up! Get us out of here! We’re burning up!’
The interior of the Caliber was rapidly filling up with choking fumes. Braydon coughed and coughed, and then he burst into tears. He didn’t want to die like this. He didn’t want Sukie to die like this. She was five years old. She had all of her life ahead of her, but he had killed her.
‘God almighty we’re burning up in here!’