“I don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t know. They didn’t have wallets.”
He opened the metal box that held the first-aid kit. There was a tube of Germolene antiseptic, all sorts of bandages and gauze, tape, small scissors, eyewash, Bayer aspirin, and a bottle of pills from which most of the label was gone. But the little wording that remained led him to suspect it was a prescription antihistamine that was not part of the original kit.
“Give me your hand,” he said, and she obliged. He shook three aspirin into it and watched her swallow them without water. He handed her a canteen, but she shook her head.
“I’d rather save it. Just in case,” she murmured.
“Okay.” He squeezed some of the antiseptic onto his finger and ran it over the gash on her forehead. “Do you think you broke anything?”
“You’re going to set a bone for me out here?”
He held up the tape. “This—and the aspirin—is about as good as it’s going to get.”
“No. I suppose I have some bruises to look forward to. And my eye must be a mess.”
“Not that bad,” he lied.
“You were limping,” she observed.
“My left knee,” he admitted. “And maybe a hamstring.”
“Can you walk?”
“Absolutely,” he said. “But I will tape up my knee and my shin. It might help—and it couldn’t hurt.”
“Until, as they say, you rip off the bandage.”
He smiled at her small joke.
“You rolled up the windows?” she asked.
“Yes,” he lied again. “I did.” He was a deeply honest man, but he knew also that he was a very convincing liar.
She nodded.
And then, finally, they started away from the wreck and the bodies, walking west, the sun overhead. Paralleling them, perhaps two hundred yards away, were three hyenas. Limpers. They were off to the side of Carmen’s face where her eye was swollen shut, and so Reggie hoped that she wouldn’t （or couldn’t） see them.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Margie Stepanov
Margie Stepanov, seen here smiling beside actresses Katie Barstow and Carmen Tedesco, may be a housewife, but in this lavender bridesmaid’s dress at Barstow’s wedding, she looked every bit the movie star, too.
—The Hollywood Reporter, November 9, 1964
It was, she supposed, late afternoon, by the way the sun had moved west: there were no windows in this hut, but the cow dung and mud had started to separate along one wall, creating a sliver of light. About two hours ago, one of the men had untied her and allowed her to pee, and then given her water and some sort of gruel. She had heard enough through the walls that she knew each member of their group had been marched out, one by one, and walked behind some brush and allowed （like her） to relieve themselves at gunpoint. They’d been given their allotment of water and a little of that porridge. Then they were brought back into their huts.
The cut on her stomach was painful, and she wished she could examine it. She wished she could see it. She tried to convince herself it was nowhere near the kid. Too high on her abdomen. She told herself it would have no effect on her baby. But she failed. Already, she feared, the infection was growing worse.
She recalled when they had all heard the first shots that morning. No one had understood the magnitude of what was occurring. She knew the term Billy used for that sort of underreaction: normalcy bias. We suppose the world will continue to spin the way it always has. We tell ourselves that what we are seeing isn’t, in fact, the cataclysm that it is. She was the first to scream, and for a moment, even in her hysteria, clearly Billy had supposed that she was panicking about nothing.
If only she had been…
Now she noticed a flashlight beam and saw one of the captors returning. It was someone new, someone she had never seen before—neither the driver nor the guard from the Land Rover who had brought them here. He knelt before the sleeping pallet on which she was restrained and shined the flashlight up on his face so she could see him more clearly. He had moonstones for eyes and dirty blond hair. He was good-looking, but she would have thought he was drop-dead gorgeous if it didn’t appear as if his nose had been broken at some point and left twisted and bulbous. God, she thought, poor Billy’s nose might look like that someday.
“Good afternoon,” he said, his accent tinged with Russian. At one point, perhaps, an hour ago, she had heard men speaking outside the hut in Russian. He smiled at her. Then he put the handle of the flashlight in his mouth and shined it on her ankles as he unbound them from the post. He scooted forward and untied her hands the same way.