CHAPTER THIRTY
Billy Stepanov
The majority of physicians and nurses in the study said they felt anxiety （64.2%）， stress （72.5%）， and depression （51.3%）。 William Stepanov, a West Hollywood–based psychologist who has doctors among his clients, said, “They all had parents who lived through the flu pandemic of 1918–1919 or were children themselves at the time. And so while 1957 might not have been as dire as its predecessor after the First World War, they knew this flu was killing tens of thousands of people in America. Some just wanted to curl up in bed or hide in a closet.”
—The American Journal of Psychiatry, April 1962
Cooper, the Russian, wasn’t going to die. At least not right away. Maybe he would if they were out here for days—an infection, Billy supposed—but Katie had now finished wrapping his hand in all the gauze they had found in the Land Rover’s medical kit, and the bleeding had stopped. But, hell, all three of them would die if they were out here a few days.
It was the damnedest thing, and Billy was trying hard to decide what he was feeling as he leaned against the grille of the Land Rover: part of him just wanted to shoot the bastard and be done with it. Throw the body beside his two dead comrades, which already were covered with insects, and let the animals here rip the flesh from the bones. But another part of him wanted Cooper alive because he just couldn’t bear to see another corpse or, arguably, to shoulder another corpse on his conscience. He thought of the doctors and nurses who were part of his practice and had been on the front lines of the flu pandemic of 1957. He’d been interviewed by a young UCLA grad student who was among a group studying depression in ER doctors and nurses, because Billy had opened his practice that very year and was quoted in a Los Angeles Times article as saying that he was surprised by the disproportionately large number of doctors and nurses he had among his patients, and suggested the pandemic was among the reasons why. A third of his practice was made up of people who worked in the movies, but at least another third were people who worked in health care. The flu was not a pretty way to die. But then, there really weren’t pretty ways to die, unless you were granted that rarest of miracles and died in your sleep. Usually, all you could hope for was fast. Fast and unexpected.
His father in that cab. His grandfathers’ heart attacks: they’d both gone the same way.
David Hill. Terrance Dutton.
When Katie had stopped weeping over Terrance’s body, he had dragged the dead actor into the vehicle and sat him upright in the second row, which at the moment was in the shade. It wouldn’t be soon.
God, had he ever been around so much death? He thought of Reggie Stout. Now there was a guy who’d seen carnage. He thought of some of his clients, especially three who worked in hospitals and emergency rooms.
It had all happened so fast today. He and Terrance had rushed at Glenn, and the Russian had gotten off the single burst that had, essentially, unzipped the actor from the base of his neck to his navel. But he had only just barely had time to fire. Billy had reached him, and the attack had caught him so spectacularly unprepared that Billy had managed to get his hands on the assault rifle. He hadn’t been able to wrest it from his captor’s grasp, but at some point in the scuffle the barrel had wound up facing the sky and when it had gone off—when, Billy believed, he himself had squeezed the trigger—the sight had been just under the son of a bitch’s chin. He honestly had no idea how many bullets had entered and exited the man’s skull, but he had found bone fragments in even his front shirt pocket. They had rained on his face like hail. The firing was brief but booming, so loud that for a second or two he had thought he himself had been wounded. Afterward, he had wiped most of the dead man’s blood and brains from his cheek and his chin with his shirttails, but pulpy remnants of the Russian still coated parts of his hair as if squeezed from a tube.
He hadn’t told his sister yet that her husband was dead. That it might have been the very Russian whose hand she had bandaged and bound who had shot David. He hadn’t told her that he’d concluded his own wife had likely perished too. If he could get a moment alone with the guy （no, he would get a moment alone with him）， he would make it clear that he’d shoot him without hesitation if he ever offered Katie even the slightest hint that he’d murdered David. Billy feared, based on the way that Katie had collapsed upon the body of her friend, that the news her husband was gone as well might be too much for her. Yes, she had rallied: she seemed better now. Stunned, but not incapacitated. Mostly exhausted. But the fact they’d killed David just might put her over the edge.