Flash and Filigree Read Online Free PDF

from the pivotal truck to the burning sedan, traced straight through the outstretched man, cutting dead from the center of the cross-road—yet at an angle, as the isolate instance, the stunned pendulum swing, never caught at keel but on the rise or fall—for the black burning wreck had torn half its own length up the pole, and the front wheels jutted starkly from either side the vertically split chassis: so thus the wreck itself cast against the sun a smoky crucifixion.
    Dr. Eichner tried to turn the car around but could get no more than quarter-wheel steering. He began to back up toward the intersection. Behind him then the cab doors of the truck sprang open and a man and woman were down, running toward the body in the highway. They lifted him, as Dr. Eichner sounded his horn. “STOP!” he shouted. And while the two carried the loose figure toward the truck, the Doctor tried to increase his speed in reverse but the wheels so rasped against the bent fenders that the car could not be steered. Stopping the car, he jumped out and began to run. Yet, even before he was abreast the burning wreck, a crackling inferno of upholstery and Bakelite, impossible to approach, even then the truck beyond was pulling away.
    The Doctor stood at the pivotal point and looked up and down the glaring roads, glaring without the green glass visor, and desolate.
    He reached into his pocket and drew out a small leather memo-book. Moistening the detached pencil, he noted:
    Truck: 10 wheel, gray, van type with high short cab. No rear license or markings otherwise.
    He touched the pencil to his nose, staring in the direction of the departed truck, then he added:
    CM.? Mack?
    and continuing:
    Man: stocky build; florid; sandy hair. Brown leather jacket over dark, heavy (possibly corduroy) trousers. Woman: medium dark, straight short hair . . . nondescript dress.
    Dr. Eichner looked at his wrist watch and, at the top of the page, he wrote:
    Drexel and Lord’s Canyon Drive. 11:20—11:25.
    Then he turned, quickly putting away his book, toward the sedan, that blazing wreck, fiery-moated now, where for several feet on either side, the earth itself leapt alight with gas and oil. There was a certain defiance in the way this car burned, and a threat. It was an amalgam of separate parts, no longer distinct, impaled, a fusion. An inviolate pyre.
    The sides of the highway were shouldered with fine, loose gravel, and from a distance behind, Dr. Eichner scooped handfuls at the flames. After a futile moment of this he took off his coat and stepped down the rocky culvert aside the road, and up again over a barbed wire fence into the adjacent field. Here, under his knees he spread the coat, forcing it flat against all stick-shoots of weed and nettle, kneeling, as with his hands he began to dig into the dry clay ground, piling what he could onto the coat.
    In this attitude, the Doctor started up at the sound of a plane passing far overhead. And caught like this, having only begun to dig, his head cocked to a new, breaking sound, the high distant shrill of an approaching police car: and without standing, as if at last really somehow caught between the siren and the plane, the Doctor knelt, and kneeling, cocked his head from side to side to determine the direction of the sound, the siren.
    Then it appeared, the dark patrol car, frozen for an instant at the far top of the hill where last the truck was seen, and it dropped toward the Doctor, the siren suddenly a wailing shriek. Dr. Eichner picked up the coat, waved it, running toward the fence and the wreck, as the patrol car hit the intersection in a screaming two-wheel turn and plunged sideways to a sliding stop a few yards behind the burning sedan. Before the dust had cleared, one of the men was out of the car plying the spray of a hand-extinguisher over the wreck. As he stooped through the fence. Dr. Eichner shouted to make himself heard above the unchecked siren.
    “Did you pass a gray truck?” he cried.
    He bounded