“I actually had a couple of pet turtles on Okinawa. We did. Four of us. They were the soft shells,” Reggie said. “Most of the time, we were trying not to get killed. But a friend of mine found these two in some muck in a bomb crater, and one was missing a leg and the other had big cuts on his face. He was missing an eye. And suddenly, we had built them a turtle tank out of an oil drum and were foraging bugs and worms for them. They became like mascots for us. Some fellows were superstitious and told themselves that so long as the turtles stayed alive—we named them Mike and Ike, after the candy—they’d stay alive.”
“I have a feeling that didn’t end well,” Felix said.
Reggie shrugged. “No. The turtle tank was blown up by a mortar shell. And the next day, two of the GIs who helped build the turtle tank were killed, too. Anyway, we were all shaken up by Mike and Ike’s deaths in ways we hadn’t expected. Let’s face it: they were turtles.”
“They died quickly. That’s the best thing that can happen to an animal,” Charlie said.
“We’re animals, too. But I think the timing matters,” Felix said. “You’re talking about old lions and old elephants and wounded turtles that may also have been pretty old.”
“And?” asked Charlie.
Felix almost didn’t answer. Opening his mouth a moment ago had been a reflex; for a change, he wasn’t thinking about what he should be saying. “And,” he said finally, “quick is relative. My kid sister died quickly, but whether she had thirty seconds or three minutes before her heart stopped or her brain stopped or whatever stopped, she must have been so scared. So horribly, unbelievably scared.”
Carmen smiled at him gently and Reggie was nodding.
“How did she die?” Charlie asked.
“Car accident. Another car slammed into her.”
“Well, when human animals”—and he emphasized the word animals in a way that sounded affectionate to Felix—“die out here, it’s not because of automobiles.”
“No,” said Reggie, and he chuckled. “It’s because, I suppose, we get eaten.”
* * *
.?.?.
It happened fast: the deaths. Not as quickly as a bullet taking down an old lion or a mortar obliterating a pair of wounded turtles, but it unfolded with a speed that astonished Felix. And, either because he hadn’t had the time to think or because he was simply fed up with being a child, he jumped into the fray.
Carmen lunged forward and wrapped her scarf around the driver’s neck, pulling it tight at the same moment that Reggie plunged that little jackknife into the neck of the guy behind them. And so Felix dove across the seat and grabbed the man’s rifle barrel, and while he wasn’t strong enough to wrest it from the guard’s hands, he could keep it aimed up toward the roof, while over his shoulder Reggie kept stabbing the fellow and the blood splattered him like marble-sized drops of rain. The Land Rover careened off the track and into the grass as the driver lost control, and then he jammed his foot hard on the brake and everyone in the vehicle was thrust forward, especially Carmen, who fell between the front bucket seats and into the dashboard. But she held on to the scarf and broke the guy’s neck. Felix saw it and he knew, even as he and Reggie and the guard were falling against the seats ahead of them, that his wife had snapped the driver’s neck. His head whipped forward and then backward, and then his hands and his body went limp—which meant that his foot slipped off the brake and the Rover sped forward and smashed into a copse of acacia and rolled onto its side.
Which was when the rifle went off.
At first, Felix thought that he had had the wind knocked out of him. He knew the feeling because it had happened before, playing pickup football as a boy. One minute he was running and then he was being tackled and then he couldn’t breathe. They were all on their sides in the Land Rover, and both of their captors were dead. But then he saw Carmen’s face—the horror and the fear, so much worse than it had been at any point this awful morning, when she had been so very, very brave—and he saw that she was staring at his chest. Reggie was, too, and he seemed just as alarmed as Carmen. And so Felix tried to gaze down, but his neck wasn’t quite right, and the combination of the fact that he couldn’t breathe and the looks on his wife and her publicist’s faces had him scared. Reggie pressed on his chest, and Felix wanted to say, No, please, no, don’t do that; that will only make it hurt more and make it harder to breathe, but when he tried to speak there was so much fluid in his throat and his mouth that it was impossible. It was running down his cheek and his chin.