The driver’s door burst open and was wrenched right back against its hinges. A big shaven-headed man reached inside with tattooed forearms and released Braydon’s seat belt. He grabbed hold of him and tried to drag him out but Braydon’s arm was still trapped.
‘My little girl – she’s in the back seat!’ Braydon told him. ‘Please get her out of there! Please!’
‘OK, buddy, just hold on! Somebody pass me that tire iron! Quick! Somebody pass me that goddamned tire iron!’
‘I called out to her—’ Braydon coughed. ‘I called out to her – but she didn’t answer! Maybe she’s unconscious. She’s only – she’s only five years old. Please, you have to get her out of there!’
The big shaven-headed man forced the tire iron into the space between the driver’s seat and the center console. ‘When I say yank your arm out, you yank your arm out, OK?’
Braydon nodded. The big shaven-headed man grunted, and leaned against the tire iron as hard as he could. There was a loud crack of breaking plastic, and then the man said, ‘Yank your arm out! Yank it out now!’
Braydon twisted his arm forward, even though the pain from his shattered wrist almost made him pass out. As soon as he was free, the man heaved him bodily out of the driver’s seat as if he were a child and lifted him clear. Two other men took hold of his legs, and between them they hurried him over to the opposite side of the highway and laid him down on somebody’s raincoat. An ambulance had just arrived, its lights flashing red in the rain, and paramedics were opening up its rear doors.
There was another ear-splitting rumble of thunder. Braydon felt rain splattering against his face and he could smell gasoline smoke on the wind.
‘My daughter!’ he said, hoarsely, trying to sit up. ‘My daughter’s still in there! I have to get her out of there!’
A fire truck arrived with its klaxons blaring, followed almost nose-to-tail by a heavy rescue vehicle, and then a fire marshal’s van. Orange flames were crawling like the tentacles of a fiery octopus from underneath the trailer and people were shouting to each other to stay well back.
‘You have to let me go!’ Braydon demanded. But two paramedics helped Braydon’s rescuers to haul him up on to his feet, and between them they practically frogmarched him up to the back of the ambulance and hoisted him up the steps. They tried to make him lie flat on the gurney but he insisted on sitting up so that he could see what was happening.
‘Sir – please try to stay calm,’ said a black woman paramedic. ‘The firefighters are going to do everything they can to get your daughter out of there.’
Braydon was coughing so hard that he couldn’t answer her. He tried to swing his legs off the gurney but the paramedic pushed him back. She was chunkily built, and unexpectedly strong.
‘Please, sir. Please stay here. There’s nothing you can do.’
‘My daughter’s dying in there!’ Braydon told her. ‘My daughter could be dead already!’
‘I know that, sir. But all we can do right now is pray for her.’
The firefighters were spraying the wreck with compressed-air foam, and clouds of it were dancing across the highway and flying up into the air. The orange flames reluctantly retreated and shrank back under the trailer, and then they died out altogether. Six or seven firefighters approached the burned-out shell of Braydon’s Caliber and Braydon could hear them shouting out for hydraulic lifting equipment and cutters.
‘You have to let me out of here!’ said Braydon. ‘That’s my Sukie in there! That’s my little girl!’
‘Sir – please,’ said the paramedic. And at that moment, two officers from the Philadelphia Highway Patrol appeared at the back of the ambulance, in their distinctive crushed caps and black leather coats and riding boots. One of them was tall and thin and sandy-haired, and the other was stocky, with a walrus moustache.
‘Sir, you really need to stay here. There’s absolutely nothing you can do.’
‘Oh God,’ Braydon wept. He pressed his left hand over his mouth. ‘Oh God, it was all my fault.’
‘I don’t think you should blame yourself, sir,’ said the sandy-haired patrolman. ‘That semi had a multiple blow-out and skidded clear across to the northbound side of the highway and there wasn’t nothing you could have humanly done to avoid it. Wasn’t nothing that nobody could have done.’
‘Here,’ said the paramedic. She pulled up his sleeve and gave him a shot of oxycodone for the pain. Then she strapped an FLA splint to his fractured wrist, while the patrolmen asked him his name, and his address, and Sukie’s name.
‘Susan Amelia Harris,’ said Braydon. ‘Born April seventeenth, two thousand seven.’ He didn’t tell them that he had long ago lost custody of her, and that he had been kidnapping her, and taking her back to his home in Connecticut. What would have been the point of it? He felt guilty enough already.
When the patrolmen had finished questioning him, he sat in the ambulance watching the firefighters at work with their cutters and their spreaders. Now that the oxycodone was beginning to take effect, he was beginning to feel strangely detached, as if that burned-out wreck on the other side of the highway wasn’t really his car at all. The paramedic gently lifted his elbow into a sling, and all the time she kept on asking him ‘Is that OK, sir? Is that comfortable? Does that hurt?’ but he didn’t answer her, or even glance at her. If he had answered her, that would have confirmed that he was really here, and that his daughter Sukie was really trapped inside his car, and that she had probably been killed.
‘How are you feeling, sir?’ the paramedic asked him. ‘You’re not feeling faint at all, are you?’ But he still refused to respond. I’m not feeling anything. This is not me.
It seemed to take hours for the firefighters to attach a steel hawser to the front of a fire truck and drag the Caliber out from underneath the trailer, so that they could begin to open up its crushed rear section. With a last few spiteful flickers and a last few sulky rumbles, the thunder and lightning were gradually moving off toward the north-east, but the rain continued steadily to dredge across the surface of the highway.
Braydon saw showers of sparks as the vehicle’s roof pillars were cut apart, and then four firefighters lifted the roof clear off and laid it down on the road.
Three paramedics reached inside the rear seat. Braydon began to shiver uncontrollably. Oh God almighty she’s dead and I’ve killed her. Oh God have mercy on me. Oh God, my poor little Sukie.
The woman paramedic unhooked an oxygen mask and pressed it over his face. ‘Just breathe normally, sir. We don’t want you going into shock.’
Braydon rolled his eyes and stared up at her. He took four deep breaths and then he lifted the mask away. ‘She was so darn unhappy. That was the trouble. She kept on begging me to take her away with me. But now look what I’ve done.’
‘Sir, this was an accident. You heard what the officers told you. This was not your fault. But now I think we need to take you to the ER. There’s nothing more that you can do here.’
‘Please – I have to see her. I have to know for sure.’
Just then, another ambulance backed up to the wreck of Braydon’s Caliber, and its rear doors opened. Less than a minute later, it sped away, with its siren screaming.
‘What was that? Was that Sukie? Where are they taking her?’
A gray-haired paramedic walked across to the back of the ambulance and climbed up the steps. For some odd reason, he reminded Braydon of the actor Lloyd Bridges. ‘We got your daughter out, sir. She’s alive.’
Braydon coughed, and coughed again. He could hardly breathe. ‘How badly is she hurt?’
The paramedic looked serious. ‘I can’t yet tell you the full extent of her injuries, sir, not until the doctors have examined her. But I have to warn you that she’s suffered some very serious burns.’
‘Oh, God. Oh, God, no.’
‘We’ve sent her directly to the burns center at Temple University Hospital. It’s the finest burns unit in the country, bar none, and it’s only a few minutes from here. We’ll take you there right now, so that you can be with her.’
He climbed down and closed the ambulance doors behind him. The woman paramedic said, ‘Why don’t you lie down, sir, so’s I can strap you in? You’ll be safer.’
Braydon shook his head. ‘Who cares if I’m safe? What difference does it make?’
‘It makes all the difference, sir. From now on, your Sukie’s going to need you more than ever.’
Braydon lay back on the gurney and the woman paramedic buckled him in. He closed his eyes as the ambulance swerved and bumped its way to North Broad Street. He didn’t pray any more. All he wanted to do was to fall asleep. If he could fall asleep, maybe he could wake up and find that it was still seven a.m. this morning, and that he hadn’t yet set out for Baltimore to kidnap Sukie from Melinda’s parents.
He would rather that he had never seen Sukie again than have her burned alive.
He would rather that she had never been born at all.