Maria Hudgins - Lacy Glass 01 - Scorpion House Read Online Free PDF Page A

curly-haired man in a gallabeyah, the long, loose garb worn by most Egyptian men. He shifted his weight from one sandaled foot to the other.
    “This is Selim. He’s very kindly come to pick us up.”
    Lacy extended her hand to the new man, hoping it wasn’t a breach of middle-eastern etiquette. Her guidebook warned against men sitting with legs crossed or showing the soles of the feet, but wasn’t clear on whether those taboos applied to women. She didn’t recall any mention of hand-shaking. “Lacy Glass,” she said.
    “Selim Hamdy,” the man answered, smiling and bowing without taking her proffered hand.
    Outside, Susan exploded when she saw the topless Jeep Selim proposed to take them all away in. “The Jeep! You brought the Jeep? Look, Selim! How many people do you see? I see five plus you, that’s six! Do you see our luggage?” She swept her arm toward their massive assortment of bags. “Do you notice that the total volume of us plus our luggage is greater than the volume of this Jeep by a factor of about
ten
?”
    “This is all we have, Dr. Donohue. This Jeep.”
    “You could have borrowed something larger! Or rented something.” She twirled around and let out a scream that turned heads all across the parking lot.
    Joel Friedman took her by the arm. “Calm down, Susan. I think I see a rental place just over there.” He pointed to a sign written in both Arabic and English.
    Selim interrupted them, saying that he had a friend with a truck who could help them. He pulled a cell phone out of his gallabeyah and punched numbers with his thumb. Within a half-hour they had their baggage loaded onto a rusted-out flatbed truck and themselves into the Jeep. Joel got to ride shotgun and the other four shoe-horned themselves into the back, each with his or her precious laptop behind their legs or between their knees.
    They bumped and careened southward down several miles of road, a little toy Pepsi bottle on Selim’s key chain swinging in circles around the ignition hole, clacking against the gearshift knob. The road took them to a bridge that spanned the Nile. The land changed abruptly from tan to green as they approached the river, then back to tan in the hills beyond the strip of green after they’d crossed over and onto the West Bank. Selim and Susan provided a continuous travelogue while they bounced past temple ruins and villages. Lacy couldn’t make much sense of either, with Selim tossing heavily accented words over his shoulder and Susan vying to out-shout him over the wind and the roar of the Jeep’s engine.
    They headed north along a road that divided the green on their right from the beige sand and rock on their left. Lacy did a double-take and punched Shelley when they bumped past the Colossi of Memnon. A sight she never expected to see in real life. For some reason, it transported her back to a high school English class.
    Selim stopped at an intersection bounded by alabaster shops and waited for a chance to turn left. He pointed to a cluster of boxy shanties clinging to the hills beneath a row of holes dug straight into the slope. “My house.”
    “You live up there?” Lacy wondered that people actually lived in what looked, to her, like a ghost town.
    “Yes.”
    “Are you married?”
    “Yes. Wife. Two children.” Selim smiled and held up two fingers. “Very good for me. Short walk to expedition house.” He made his turn, following close behind a minibus belching black fumes that enveloped their Jeep and forced all but Selim to clamp their hands over their noses. Selim appeared unfazed. “But not for long,” he said.
    “What do you mean?”
    “The government is tearing our houses down. They already tear down some. See?” He pointed to a couple of backhoes and graders parked near a pile of rubble, then turned and pointed southward. “They move us to new village they build … down there.”
    “Is that okay with you? Do you want to move?” Friedman asked.
    “No! New place is too