Gunner drove out to Harbor UCLA hospital on automatic pilot, no more aware of what he was doing than a rock was of rolling downhill. A host of news reporters had tried to get a statement out of him at the station while he was sleepwalking to his car, but they would have had better luck drawing a quote from one of the wax figures at Madame Tussauds. He vacillated over which inalienable fact was more difficult to believe: that Del was dead, or that he’d killed himself after turning a gun on both his wife and daughter.
Either way, Gunner knew his world had just narrowed dramatically. Del hadn’t been his only family, but he had been Gunner’s closest. Gunner had lost contact with his younger brother, John, almost a year ago now—the last he’d heard, the retired Navy man had been living somewhere just outside of Portsmouth, Virginia—and his baby sister, Jo, was up in Seattle. He had a nephew here in Los Angeles—his late sister Ruth’s son Alred—“Ready,” as he was known on the street, was a bona fide gangster Gunner treated like a rabid dog on too short a chain. Del, by contrast, was someone he saw or spoke to over the phone at least two or three times a week. The only child of his mother Juliette’s brother Daniel, Del was the nearest thing Gunner had to a confidant.
And yet, as Gunner thought about it now, he realized that their frequency of contact had dropped off precipitously over the last two months or so. He’d last seen his cousin only three days earlier, at the Acey Deuce bar where they often hooked up, but prior to that, the two men hadn’t spoken in almost two weeks. As it was, that last night at the Deuce, they’d had almost nothing to say to each other; even the banter Gunner and Del liked to exchange with the bar’s loud-mouthed owner Lilly Tennell had been decidedly muted and uninspired. Looking back, Gunner could see that a space had opened up between them, a wedge of silence and secrecy that had crept up on them like a ghost, and it shamed him that it had taken him this long to become aware of it.
He’d been too caught up in his own troubles to care if Del had developed any of his own. Maybe if he’d tried to talk to Del about the things that had been weighing on his own mind lately, his cousin would have felt obliged to reciprocate, giving Gunner a chance to defuse whatever it was that had driven him to murder-suicide. But men didn’t open themselves up to each other that way, especially when times were hard and complaining just made you feel like an old woman. Pride shut you down instead and made you pretend all was well, feeding the false hope that, no matter the odds against it, you could fix whatever was broken all by yourself.
Still operating under a cocktail fog of guilt and reflection, Gunner parked the Cobra in the hospital lot and made his way up to the ICU where Zina Curry—assuming the girl was still alive—waited. He knew it would be some time before she’d be able to answer the questions he and the police had for her, if she ever recovered from her injuries enough to do so at all, but the girl was unmarried and childless and, as far as he knew, Gunner was her last living relative in Los Angeles. Somebody had to be there when she either opened her eyes again or passed on. It didn’t matter that he and Zina were, for all practical purposes, strangers—he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen her, and what little Del used to say about her hadn’t left him with anything more than a vague idea of what kind of foolishness she liked to watch on television or how much weight she’d lost or gained; she was family, and a man didn’t let family go unrepresented in hospital waiting rooms. Ever.
When he found the nurses’ desk on the third floor, they told him Zina had just come out of surgery and was still on her way to the ICU recovery room. They couldn’t comment on her condition. He asked to speak with the doctor who’d performed her surgery and then followed the nurses’ directions to the waiting room, which was every bit as claustrophobic and depressing as he’d feared it would be. The walls were bare, the magazines were all unreadable, and the muted television was tuned to a cooking show he would have traded for a cartoon had he access to the remote. The room’s only other occupant, a fat white woman in a yellow blouse and gray sweatpants, sat in one corner crying the blues into a cell phone, making a mockery of a sign mounted directly over her head forbidding the use of such devices.
Gunner figured he could live with her ignorance for a good five minutes; after that, the lady was going to need a new cell phone.
He had calls of his own to make. Del’s parents, Daniel and Corinne, had to be informed of his death and Noelle’s, and the condition of their granddaughter. He would wait until he spoke to Zina’s surgeon before contacting them in Atlanta. With any luck, they would absolve him of any further responsibility and volunteer to pass the word on to anyone else in the family who needed to be notified. It was a selfish wish, but that was what he wanted.
The big woman in the gray sweatpants and knockoff running shoes closed up her phone and waddled out of the room, leaving Gunner free to replumb the depths of his grief and confusion in relative peace. He tried the thought on for size one more time: Del was dead, and he’d murdered Noelle and tried to kill Zina.
It still made no sense.
It made no sense at all.
2
THE BACK DOOR OFF THE ALLEY at Mickey Moore’s Trueblood Barbershop led directly into Gunner’s office, but Gunner almost never used it as an entrance. Mickey was his unofficial secretary, and coming in through the front door enabled him to check for messages on his way to his desk. Today, however, whatever messages might be waiting for him could wait until hell froze over.
Today, the amusement he usually derived from walking the gauntlet of Mickey and whatever cast of fools, liars, and/or comedians was in the shop at the moment did not interest him in the least. He knew that word of Del’s death—and the crimes he was suspected of committing—would have reached this place by now, hotbed of community gossip that it was, and he was in no mood to deflect all the questions those in attendance would no doubt rain upon him. He had no way to answer those questions, and his ignorance was becoming a greater annoyance to him by the minute.
Still, he had no illusions that sneaking into his office through the back door was going to save him from Mickey himself. His landlord had a sixth sense where the shop was concerned and could detect the slightest disturbance within it, whether the shop was filled to capacity or as empty as a tomb. Mickey didn’t disappoint him. Gunner hadn’t completely closed the back door behind him before the barber split the beaded curtain that divided the two halves of the shop and started toward him, moving like a white-smocked spirit in the dark.
“Not now, Mickey,” Gunner said.
“I’m just checkin’ to see if you’re okay.”
“I’m okay.” Gunner fell into the chair behind his desk. “I just need a little time alone.”
“They say—” Gunner’s glare struck him silent. Mickey stood there for a moment, trying to decide how close to the edge of Gunner’s patience he should let his curiosity take him. Finally, he said, “Just so you know, reporters been calling askin’ for you all mornin’, and a couple have actually come in here lookin’ for you. I think one of ’em’s still parked out front.”
Gunner nodded. “Thanks.”
Mickey went to the doorway, turned before passing through the curtain to return to the head of hair he was supposed to be cutting. “He was a good man. No matter what might’a happened today, he was a good man.”
He walked out. Gunner watched the strands of walnut beads sway back and forth in his wake, and heard a host of anxious voices on the other side of the barrier welcome the barber’s return. Gunner counted three voices in all, including those of Joe Worthy and Chester Hayes, two of Mickey’s most regular customers—but it might have been four. He couldn’t trust his instincts enough to be sure of anything today.
He sat alone in the dark and closed his eyes, summoning the strength to do what he had to do next. He had put it off long enough. He picked up the phone on his desk, only to put it right back down again, having forgotten the instrument was nothing but a useless prop now. As he had his cable TV service, he’d canceled the phone’s lan
dline a week ago, seeking one less bill to pay, and had been reduced ever since to being one of those people who lived and breathed at the mercy of a viable cell phone signal. It was a heartfelt loss. Maintaining a landline might have been ridiculously old school, even for him, but the comfort he found these days in things that were more reliable than fashionable could not be overstated.
Using his cell phone now, he called Del’s parents in Atlanta to give them the terrible news.
Daniel Curry answered the phone on the fourth ring, just as Gunner was about to lose his nerve and hang up. He hadn’t spoken to his uncle in over two years, and it made him sick to think that this was how he was going to break that silence, by dropping a bomb on the old man he couldn’t possibly see coming. Making every effort to be kind, he identified himself and got right to the point, not wanting small talk to give Daniel Curry any false hope that what he was about to hear was going to be anything less than devastating.
When Gunner was done and it was his uncle’s turn to speak, Del’s father reacted exactly the way Gunner thought he would. After letting the space of a few seconds go by, he said, “I don’t understand.”
And of course, Gunner couldn’t make him understand, as unable to understand it as he was himself. All Gunner could do was redeliver the bad news, over and over again, and promise to do whatever he could to help Daniel and Corinne Curry survive the dark days to come. Naturally, his uncle expected much more of him—he was the one out in Los Angeles, seeing Del on a regular basis—how could he not know more about what had happened than he was professing to know? How could Gunner not have more answers to Daniel Curry’s questions than he was offering? Wasn’t he some kind of policeman by trade? How could a policeman be as ignorant of his own cousin’s business as Gunner was making himself out to be?
And, most incredible of all, how could Gunner so willingly accept the authorities’ explanation for what had happened to Del and his family as fact when such a thing was so obviously impossible?
Gunner didn’t know what to say to any of this, especially the last, so he said very little. Apologies and condolences were his only recourse, and he offered up both until his voice was gone and his throat was dry. He let the call peter out with an exchange of sad goodbyes and hung up the phone, certain he had done all the damage his uncle and aunt—both well into their seventies—could endure.
They were going to fly out from Atlanta as soon as they could make arrangements, firmly convinced they were in a race against death to reach their only grandchild. Gunner had told his uncle what Zina’s doctor had told him: though the surgery to remove a bullet from the parietal lobe of the girl’s brain had been successful, and it appeared her injuries would not prove fatal, it would be hours yet before they could say what her long-term prognosis might be. She could suffer extensive memory loss, partial paralysis—or, God willing, she could recover completely. They were going to have to wait until the swelling in her brain receded and she regained consciousness to know.
As reasons to hope went, it wasn’t much, but for Gunner at least, it was better than nothing.
Somewhere in Los Angeles, Noelle had a younger brother, and a father in a convalescent hospital. Gunner had never met either man, but he’d heard enough from Del over the years that he knew the brother spent his time in and out of drug rehab, and the father suffered from dementia. Assuming they were still alive, they needed to be notified of Noelle’s death, as well, and Gunner would have felt obligated to make the calls now had he any idea where the two men could be reached. But he didn’t. He was thankful for small favors.
Sitting motionless behind his desk, listening to the chatter of Mickey and his customers out front, he considered his next move. He had paid work to do and that needed to come first. It was bad form to put off a client in hand just to hustle for your next one or two, regardless of how dire your future prospects appeared to be. He was weeks into a legal defense case for Kelly DeCharme, an attorney who occasionally retained him, and he had both personal and professional reasons for wanting to keep Kelly a satisfied customer.
On the professional side, he needed the work she gave him to keep coming; on the flip side, over the last fifteen days, he and Kelly had taken the first tentative steps into the muddy waters of a romantic relationship.
It was a romance long in the making, a surprising development neither had suspected was even possible this far down the road of their acquaintance. Physical attraction had always been part of the mix between them, ever since their first meeting over twenty years ago when the attorney, then on staff at the Public Defender’s office, had hired Gunner to assist her with a case she didn’t trust the city’s own detectives to reliably handle. She was a striking, dark-eyed brunette, and he was an older, bronze-skinned giant with a shaved head and a wry smile. But he was also a black pretend-cop working from the back of a Watts barbershop, while she was a white defense attorney with Century City aspirations, and the discordance of that combination was clear enough to them both that they’d never let their lightweight flirting take any kind of serious turn.
Until two weeks ago.
They’d met for dinner to talk about a case and allowed the personal to creep into the conversation near the end. She told him that her marriage of four years to a Woodland Hills dentist had ended in divorce six months earlier, and he countered by describing how his last attempt at a long-term relationship had taken its final breath almost a year before that. Neither could explain why afterward, but something in this exchange gave them the idea that the next logical step for them both was to sleep in the same bed, and that’s where they ended up that night.
Now they were gingerly going wherever that fateful evening seemed to be taking them. They’d had no regrets the morning after and were still waiting to see if any would ever develop. But they were taking it slow. Painfully slow. No multiple-night sleepovers, no talk about the future. She’d made no promises to him and he’d made none to her. If it all unraveled tomorrow, it wasn’t going to be because they’d pushed too hard.
Their business relationship, meanwhile, continued unabated. Gunner was being paid by DeCharme—now working for a private law firm in North Hollywood—to do legwork on a complicated murder case, and he was obligated to make this his first priority. But it wasn’t going to be his only priority. Finding out what had happened to Del, and why, was going to be a primary occupation for him, as well. Maybe it had been unfair of Daniel Curry to think his nephew should have seen this thing coming, and to have expected him to have all the answers to the questions Del had left his survivors to ask. But Gunner’s uncle would be well within his rights to hold him accountable if he didn’t seek those answers out now. He owed Del and his parents that much, at least.
Whatever the truth was, it wouldn’t bring anyone back from the dead. And knowing it could prove to be more terrible than not.
But that was a risk Gunner knew he was just going to have to take.
3
IT WAS THE SPRING OF 1969. The war in Southeast Asia that America despised with all its heart was continuing to churn. Newly elected President Richard M. Nixon was giving lip service to peace but had yet to strike a deal with the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong that the nation’s collective pride could accept. The draft was still sending eighteen-year-old kids into the heart of the conflict by the tens of thousands, and far too many were coming back in body bags.
Aaron Douglass Gunner was seventeen.
He could have waited to go until they came to get him. He could have run away to Canada or gone into hiding at college. He was in no hurry to make an enemy of the Viet Cong, nor to meet an untimely death in a foreign land he could barely find on a map. But college wasn’t in his plans, and the role of a draft dodger was too laden with cowardice to suit him. More to the point, he’d seen friends go off to Vietnam who were better men than he, some with wives and kids and careers on the rise, and he couldn’t see how their obligation to serve God and country had been any greater than his own. So one rainy day in March, h
e walked into an Army recruiter’s office on Florence Avenue and signed his life away, pride all puffed up with the sense he had done something brave and noble, denied the Man the satisfaction of putting him back in chains by reentering into bondage of his own free will. It took him hours to win her over, but eventually his sister Ruth, who’d become his legal guardian after their father’s passing just one year earlier, made the deal binding by putting her own name on the recruiting papers.
What neither Ruth nor Gunner could know was how idiotic his volunteer enlistment would appear in less than a year’s time.
He had thrown himself headlong into Vietnam thinking there would be no avoiding it, that despite all the demonstrations and sit-ins and speeches made against it, this was a war destined to have no end. But America’s patience for the conflict was in fact about to finally run out, pushed to the limit by the My Lai massacre and the senseless bloodbath of Hamburger Hill. Shamed into retreat by the fallout from his secret bombing of Cambodia, Nixon began pulling troops out of Vietnam as early as July, only four months after Gunner’s enlistment, and by year’s end the draft Gunner had been so certain would drag him overseas on its own terms was turned into a lottery, a game of chance he might have easily won.
It all made for a bitter pill to swallow, especially from the vantage point of a shallow foxhole on Hill 1000, Fire-base Ripcord in the A Shau Valley, in July 1970.
Unlike Gunner, Kelly DeCharme’s client had never been to Vietnam, but hell by any other name was still hell. Before his enlistment in the US Army, twenty-six-year-old Afghanistan War vet Harper Stowe III had been a sociology major at Cal State Dominguez Hills holding down two part-time jobs while earning a 3.5 grade point average. He had friends and family, the latter in the form of the father who’d raised him and one older brother. People who knew him described him as quiet but polite. He had a girlfriend with whom he occasionally discussed marriage and children.
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