Without bothering to put the mask back on, Pete bolted out of the house and jumped into the car.
“You’re at Prince Field now?” he said, fumbling the key into the ignition.
“I… yeah. I tried to get Sharon back to… to…”
“To what, Mark? Stay with me, buddy.” He set the phone down on the passenger seat, shifted into reverse, and flattened the gas pedal to the floor. “You tried to get Sharon back to what?”
The sizzle of the rain filled the headset again, with no piggish grunts this time.
“Mark? Mark!” Pete knew he sounded desperate and didn’t care a whit.
No response.
“Maaaaaaaaark!” He was practically howling now.
There were two beeps — the Verizon warning for a lost signal — followed by dead air.
“Oh, shit, oh, shit…” Pete’s voice climbed to a mouselike pitch. “Shit shit shit.”
Bouncing out of the driveway and back to the road without so much as a glance for oncoming traffic, he made a sharp right and scooped up the phone again.
“Come on, pal, hang with me here.” He hit redial with his thumb. The phone rang six times before going to voice mail.
Then the message—“Hey, it’s Mark. If you’ve got something interesting to say, say it after the beep. Otherwise, don’t waste my time.”
Pete didn’t know whether to laugh or scream his lungs out. Vintage Mark, that message. All attitude, but all bluster. I know it, his friends know it. Everyone does. But damned if he isn’t hilarious sometimes.
Rolling through the toxic puddles that swelled out of the overwhelmed gutters, he tried redialing one more time. When it went to voice mail again, he ended the call and tried Kate instead.
She picked up immediately. “What’s happening?”
“He’s somewhere in Prince Park.”
“Prince Park?! What’s he—”
“He said Sharon wanted to go for a walk in the rain. Jesus, Kate, they’ve been out there for hours.” He broke into sobs, grief and misery coming out in a cresting tide. “He was throwing up blood, and he… he was confused.”
“No,” she said softly. “God, no…”
“I’m going to get him now. I’m gonna get him and bring him straight to County General. Him and Sharon both.”
“Do you know exactly where he is?”
“No, but I’m going to find him. Nothing’s gonna stop me.”
Taking the turn off Benton Boulevard too fast onto Juniper, which dipped sharply, the car began to hydroplane. Pete gunned the engine in a fury and spun the wheel until he was straight again. The little Prius fishtailed several times before steadying.
Sorry, Fate, not today, you heartless S.O.B.
In the next instant he slammed on the brakes. Juniper was the fastest route to Orchid Place and the park — and it was submerged in a long pool of irradiated rainfall.
“Oh, boy,” he said dully.
“What’s wrong?”
“The road’s flooded.”
“How bad?”
Bad enough, he wanted to say; transparent code for Too deep to drive through. The water would be up to the windows, he guessed. At least.
Fate.
Fate laughing.
Doing its best to see that I fail… and that my boy dies.
No.
Not today, pal. Not today…
“If I go slow… come on, I know the rule.”
“What are you talking about?” Kate asked.
Pete was already rolling the car forward, tapping the brakes as he eased into the toxic solution.
“If you drive slowly and steadily without coming to a complete stop, a car can make it through a flooded area. If you stop, some kind of vacuum is created where water gets sucked back into the tailpipe and makes the engine stall. Something like that.”
His heart was pounding like a lunatic trying to get out of his padded cell. Please let me be right about this. Oh, please… He’d had a friend back in college who knew all about cars — Freddie Carter, an Alabama redneck who had an eidetic memory and a gift for figures. Most of Pete’s other Columbia school chums resented the hell out of him because their parents’ money couldn’t get them what Freddie had been born with. But Pete liked the kid and his peculiar yet charming combination of natural genius and easy, down-home simplicity. He told me something like, “If you just keep moving, you won’t stall out.” Pete prayed his memory wasn’t faulty.
“Pete… you need to be careful,” Kate said.
“I’m being careful, I promise. Super careful.”
He tried to guess how deep the water would be at the lowest part of the road. It was already at the bottom of the doors — he could hear it sloshing against the panels. Trying to get in, he thought. Wanting to. Like a thousand hands, reaching for me. He knew the car was sealed underneath; or, at least, he was pretty sure. If I feel so much as a drop, I’m gunning the engine. I don’t care what Freddie said.
The water reached a point about halfway up the door, and between that and the unremitting rainfall, it felt like driving through a giant, half-filled bathtub with the shower running.
A burbling noise came from under the hood. Pete didn’t need Freddie Carter sitting in the passenger seat to get a general idea of what was happening. Water’s in there now. Engines aren’t supposed to be immersed this long. An odor rose, sharp, steely, bitter. It reminded him of something in his home office. The toner on the laser printer. Oh, no…
“Pete?” his wife called out in his ear.
“What?” he replied, trying to sound calm.
“How are you doing?”
He forced himself to look, glancing from the very corner of his periphery, and had to summon all remaining strength to suppress a scream when he saw the water rippling just inches from the base of the windows. Jesus, I’m right in the middle of it. It’s all around me.
“I’m, uh…” His throat had gone as dry as an old chimney liner. “I’m getting there. Just a little more. A little more and I’ll—”
The motor puttered out.
The car stopped dead.
“Oh, no. No-no-no.”
“What’s wrong?” Kate asked. Her panic had been under the surface before; evident but still a shadow, like the shape of a fish swimming under the frozen surface of a lake. Now it burst forth. “Tell me!”
“The damned car died!”
“Pete!”
He let out a fiery string of profanities that would’ve melted a stone effigy and hammered the gas pedal repeatedly while twisting the key back and forth.
“Start, you pile of shit! Start!”
At first, the engine sounded like it wanted to turn over but couldn’t. Then it gave up and issued nothing but muted, achromatic clicks in response to each turn of the key.
Pete was about to curse Freddie Carter to hell when he remembered reading something in the owner’s manual, something about hybrid or wholly electric vehicles being less tolerant of flood conditions than cars with standard engines.
Fate… Fate laughing.
“Pete, what’s happening?!”
The sound of trickling water drew his attention to the driver’s side door; he looked and saw the first pernicious streams worm their way through the window seal and race down the glass. For a moment his mind was paralyzed by the unreality of his circumstances. He seemed to be floating around his body rather than settled squarely within it, as if the spiritual had become unmoored from the physical but had not drifted too far off. In spite of the sizzling rain spatter and the lapping of the tiny waves against the metal shell around him, he felt a distinct sense of quiet that was almost peaceful.