“Who was this?”
“I never heard a name. It’s possible she gave Corinne one, but I doubt it.”
Gunner fell silent, once more trying to absorb something his uncle was telling him. What he would have sworn he knew about Del and his family only three days ago was gradually taking the form of a laughable delusion.
“So Noelle told Corinne all this?”
“Yes.”
“What about Del?”
“He admitted it was more or less true, but insisted Noelle was exaggerating greatly. He had a tendency to side with his daughter where she and her mother were concerned, and I think he felt his wife was too protective of the child.”
“You call her a child, but Zina is what? Twenty-one, twenty-two? That’s a grown woman by almost anyone’s standards.”
“Agreed.”
“Have either you or Corinne told the police about this boyfriend who allegedly attacked Noelle physically?”
“Of course. We both did. But do you think they believed us? Or give a damn if they do? Hell, no!”
“Take it easy, Uncle. We don’t know what they believe yet.”
“I think their actions speak louder than words. You said so yourself, the only theory they’re pursuing is that Del did all the shooting in that house, and we both know that’s not possible.”
“I never said it wasn’t possible. All I said—”
“There was someone else in that house when my son was killed. And you’re going to find out who it was.”
“Uncle… ”
“I don’t want to hear any more of your excuses, Aaron.”
“For God’s sake! All we’ve established tonight is that one of Zina’s boyfriends may have had a motive to harm Noelle. Not Del and certainly not Zina. And there’s no evidence such a person was at the scene when all the shooting occurred.”
“He was there. He must have been.”
“Then why would he leave Del alive?”
“Del wasn’t alive! For the last time—”
“Think about what you’re getting ready to suggest: that this boyfriend shot Noelle and Zina outright and then what? Faked Del’s suicide? After Del called me to all but confess to shooting his wife and daughter himself? It doesn’t add up, Uncle. It’s ludicrous.”
“So you’re giving up, then. You’re quitting.”
“No! Goddammit, you’re not hearing what I’m saying!”
“All right, then. Try me again. What are you going to do, Aaron? Since what I’m suggesting is ‘ludicrous,’ what’s your plan?”
Gunner’s uncle took up his drink, drew a long sip from it, and then sat back, waiting.
11
ZINA HAD REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS OVERNIGHT. Gunner got the word from his uncle Wednesday morning. He warned Daniel Curry that the police would want to try talking to the girl as soon as possible, but between her doctors and both grandparents, he knew it would be hours before Jeff Luckman and his partner would be allowed access to her.
He could foresee how their first interview with Zina would go, in any case. They’d gently break the news to her about her parents, then give her a few moments to absorb the shock. After that, she’d shut down and say nothing, moving the worried hospital staff to order everyone from her room, lest she fall into a dangerous depression. Interview over.
Gunner decided he would go by the hospital in the afternoon, when his chances would be better of catching Del’s daughter alert and conversant, and keep to the two things he already had on his morning schedule. The second of these was a trip out to the Twin Towers jail to visit Harper Stowe with Kelly DeCharme; the first was a sit-down with his old friend Matthew Poole.
Poole was a recently retired LAPD detective Gunner had known for many years. As jowly and dawdling as an aged basset hound, Poole had always been an anomaly among his peers, an old-school white cop whose decades of service on the Los Angeles Police Department had failed to leave him with any noticeable disdain for the public he served, most especially Angelenos of color. Over his career he’d moved from one division to another, never straying too far from the inner city, and in the course of their strange relationship, he and Gunner had formed a bond built on respect, cynicism, and a dogged infatuation with the truth.
Officially, the department had no mandatory retirement age, but Poole, made to feel increasingly anachronistic by partners and superiors alike, turned in his badge three years ago, shortly after his fifty-sixth birthday. These days, he worked as a part-time consultant for various private security firms and played poker at the Lucky Lady Casino in Gardena. Luring him away from both occupations with the bait of a free breakfast platter at the diner of his choice had proven as difficult for Gunner as picking up the phone.
“Egg whites, no Tabasco. Really, Poole?” Gunner said, eyeing the ex-cop’s plate with open pity.
“You had any sense, you’d be doing likewise. Or don’t you want to live to be seventy-five?”
“Define ‘live.’”
They were sharing a table at an IHOP on Slauson and Western, in Chesterfield Square. Any other cop, ex- or otherwise, would have insisted this meeting take place at a beachfront restaurant with linen tablecloths and waiters in aprons, but not Poole. Poole was a common man in every way, including the fees he charged for favors.
“Living is living, Gunner. With hot sauce or without, it beats the alternative either way.”
“Maybe.”
Poole let a moment pass before going on, seeing Gunner’s mind had drifted off toward Del again. “Yeah, I know. Kind of hard to see what any of this shit means right now, huh?”
“He should’ve talked to me, Poole. Before he put that fucking gun in his mouth, he should’ve talked to me.”
“Sure he should have. The same way you would have talked to him, in his place.”
He waited for Gunner to explode, thinking he’d gone too far, but Gunner just ran a fork around in his food instead, conceding his friend’s point.
“We’re secretive creatures, we men. Anything worth feeling’s worth hiding. And no hole’s too deep that we don’t think we can climb out of it on our own power, without anybody’s help.”
“He didn’t shoot his wife and daughter, Poole. No way.”
“You want to believe that. And maybe it’s true. But maybe what’s true instead is that he was up against something so fucked up, it changed him, just for a minute. A good man gone bad. It happens, partner. About a thousand times a day.”
“No.” Gunner shook his head. “No.”
“Okay. So if you didn’t call this meeting to hear my opinion, why did you call it?” Poole shoved another forkful of egg white in his mouth.
“I need you to find something out for me.”
“Unlike a lot of words in the English language, Gunner, retired’s only got one meaning.”
“I’m not asking for any Black Ops action here. You could do this in your sleep.”
“The only thing I do in my sleep is sleep.”
“I just want to know that these guys on the case are playing it straight. Not mailing it in, not cutting any corners. Del deserved better than that.”
“I don’t know anybody at Southeast anymore.”
“Bullshit. You know somebody everywhere.”
It wasn’t true, but it was close enough to fact that Poole didn’t bother denying it.
“What are the names again?”
“Luckman, Jeff. He’s the lead. His partner’s name is Yee. Chris, I think.”
“I can check in. Get a feel for things. That’s all.”
“That’ll do.”
Gunner held his right fist out for Poole to bump.
“Jesus. Let me get my dashiki out of the car.”
The white man bumped Gunner’s fist with his own and went back to his free meal.
12
FIREBASE RIPCORD had been Hamburger Hill all over again, only in reverse.
They called Dong Ap Bia, aka Hill 937, Hamburger Hill because the battle that took place there in May
1969 had been nearly as bloody as it was pointless. It was a fight for control of a strategically innocuous position atop the A Shau Valley between the North Vietnamese Army, which held it, and US and South Vietnamese forces, who wanted it; and over the span of ten days a lethal combination of tactical blunders, bad weather, and military hubris cost seventy-two US soldiers their lives. Along with the 372 Americans wounded and all the time, manpower, and ordnance “victory” had required, the casualties were a high price to pay for a prize that ultimately held so little value, it was surrendered right back to the North Vietnamese within days of its capture.
A little over a year later, the battle for Firebase Ripcord was no such fiasco, but it was close. This time, it was the NVA fighting to take control of a hilltop position on the eastern edge of the very same A Shau Valley, with an outgunned and outnumbered US Army digging in its heels to defend it. Among the grunts in the latter contingent was SP4 Aaron Gunner, D/2-506th Infantry.
Ripcord was intended to provide artillery and navigational support for a planned offensive on Viet Cong supply installations on Co Pung Mountain, nine kilometers to the south. For the first two months of its existence, the enemy had shown the base little interest, but it was only playing possum. Under cover of the dense jungle that loomed over Ripcord on all sides, several NVA battalions were methodically working their way down the hills toward it, constructing a complex chain of tunnels, bunkers, and firing pits as they went.
On the morning of July 1, the now heavily entrenched NVA began an assault on the firebase designed to blow it off the face of the earth. Sixty millimeter and 82mm mortar shells rained down upon the Americans’ heads like the wrath of God. No amount of return fire or aerial support could make the barrage stop; the enemy was too well camouflaged, its defenses too impenetrable. Inevitably, the US forces were left with but a single choice: climb up into the hills to put the NVA guns to rest or perish beneath the onslaught.
It was a no-win proposition. Outnumbered almost ten to one, fighting uphill against an enemy lying in wait within heavily fortified bunkers barely visible to the naked eye, platoon after platoon of GIs marched up the sides of the A Shau into a hornet’s nest of machine gun and RPG fire. Trying to take the hills back knoll by knoll, ordered to either mark the NVA bunker positions for an aerial assault or destroy them outright on the ground, all the Americans could do in the end was keep coming, to no discernible effect.
On the seventh day of the battle, it was Gunner’s turn to go.
First Lieutenant Greg Brewer, the greenhorn shake-and-bake in charge of Gunner’s squad, tried to put PFC William “Jolly” Mokes at point, but Jolly told the white man to go to hell. Big, clumsy, and anything but jolly, Mokes had fallen in with a band of knuckleheaded Panther-wannabes back at Camp Evans and was now treating every order from a white CO like an affront to his manhood. Gunner understood the impulse—black GIs in ’Nam caught more hazard duty than mere coincidence alone could explain. But militant insubordination was all too easily written off as cowardice, and that was a badge of dishonor some liked to apply with a broad brush to every brother in uniform.
Still, Gunner was as loath to take point as Jolly was. He did it when ordered, but he never volunteered, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to volunteer now.
Left to assign the thankless duty to someone more amenable than Jolly, Brewer ultimately gave the job to PFC Andy “Duke” Wayne, and the kid ambled up to the front without complaint.
Duke was an eighteen-year-old white boy from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, splattered with red freckles and brimming with cornball, country humor; and he was the closest thing to a real friend Gunner had in the service. Gunner spent more time with Jolly because they’d known each other longer, since their days in boot camp back at Fort Benning, but the truth was, he and Duke had more in common. With Jolly, conversation always turned to women and booze or nothing at all; Duke, on the other hand, liked to jaw about everything from food to politics, movies, and music. Like Gunner, he was a huge fan of Arthur C. Clarke and Raymond Chandler.
It was their mutual love of fast cars, however, that formed the real bond between them. Duke was the son of a Ford dealer back home, and what he didn’t know about automobiles Gunner had no interest in learning. He could talk about one subject alone—the fire engine red 1965 Ford Shelby Cobra convertible his father had given him for his sixteenth birthday—for hours on end without losing a minute of Gunner’s attention.
When Duke was given point in Jolly’s place that day up on Hill 1000, Gunner almost raised an objection. But he didn’t feel like dying and Duke wouldn’t give a shit about his objections in any case, so he just kept his mouth shut and let the white boy lead the squad forward.
It was a decision he would second-guess for years to come.
Aerial prep had bombed the upper third of the hill into mulch, making the climb up the last two hundred meters a tedious, backbreaking slog. It was all the GIs could do to keep their balance as they pressed on, boots catching and sliding in the muck. Seventy meters from the knoll that was their objective, Duke’s left leg sank knee deep into the pulverized earth and he stumbled trying to pull it free. The mishap saved his life, at least momentarily, as an AK-47 round that would have surely taken his head off ripped through his left arm instead.
The grunts behind him scattered, diving for cover that wasn’t really there. Brewer led most of the platoon downward in retreat, taking heavy fire from the gunman above, as Gunner and Jolly scurried sideways across the face of the hill to a shallow depression barely big enough for one. From there, all they could see above them was Duke, well out of their reach, flat on his back behind a fragment of tree stump, screaming and cursing in pain. The gook with the rifle was beyond their range of view.
“We’ve gotta go up and get him,” Gunner said, referring to Duke, curled up in a ball so as to avoid the fusillade of bullets kicking up dirt all around them. Brewer and the others were answering the enemy fire as best they could, but they were shooting at a target they simply couldn’t see.
Jolly shook his head. “Man, fuck that.”
Gunner propped the nose of his M16 up under the big man’s double chin, and said, “You’re the reason the man’s up there, nigga. You’re either gonna help me get him down or die right here. See if I’m playin’.”
Gunner wasn’t and Jolly knew it. “Okay, G. Be cool, man.”
At Gunner’s signal, they chucked a pair of frag grenades overhead and used the cover of the explosions to scramble up the hill toward their fallen comrade. When they reached him, the seriousness of Duke’s injuries became immediately apparent to both: his left arm was tied to his shoulder by the merest of threads, the Viet Cong AK-47 round having sheared through his upper biceps to leave a single strand of muscle behind. He was still conscious, but not by much, mumbling nonsense through a thick fog of pain and delirium. Gunner knew he was as good as dead if they didn’t get him back to base, fast.
It wasn’t going to be easy. The respite from enemy fire the two grenades had afforded them was already over, the NVA rifleman above them once more ringing their position with a heavy spray of lead. In fact, it seemed obvious to Gunner that the Viet Cong soldier was no longer alone; there had to be three men firing upon the GIs now, at least. The mere act of applying a tourniquet to Duke’s arm involved a degree of risk tantamount to a death wish; all Gunner or Jolly had to do was raise his head an inch too high to give the enemy a target they couldn’t—and no doubt wouldn’t—miss.
Brewer shouted up the hill for status, he and the others in no position to be of much help. An uphill charge to the rescue would be suicide; they were too far down the slope, with nothing but open space between them and the three GIs above. Gunner barked an order for them to stay where they were and get ready to lay down a shitload of cover fire. He and Jolly were bringing Duke down.
“How the fuck we gonna do that, G?” Jolly wanted to know. It was clear even to him that it couldn’t be done.
And Gunner knew he was right
, if success was to be measured by the survival of all involved. There was no plan he could conjure that would allow for that. What he had in mind, in fact, was going to get either him or Jolly killed for sure. There was no other way. Somebody was going to have to play sacrificial lamb for the other two, and that somebody could only be Gunner. Duke was his friend, not Jolly’s, and guilt had surely pushed Jolly as close to death for the white boy’s sake as he was ever going to go.
“When I tell you, throw homeboy over your shoulder and haul ass down the hill,” Gunner said. “Don’t stop, don’t look back, just run. Understand?”
“Alone? What about you?”
“Don’t ask any questions, fool. Just shut up and do what I say. You ready?”
Jolly bit his lower lip, set himself to go, and nodded.
“Go!”
Gunner jumped to one side out of the foxhole, M16 blazing. He could just see Jolly throwing Duke across his back out of the corner of his right eye. For a second, all he could hear was gunfire: his own, the NVA’s, and that of the rest of the platoon behind him. Bullets whizzed all around, then something struck him up high in the chest and caromed off: a satchel charge, tossed down by one of the gooks at the top of the hill. The yellow, one-pound blocks of C4 the NVA favored didn’t always detonate, but this one did.
He only had time to turn his face away before the explosion blew him off his feet like a paper doll.
He awoke in a hospital bed back at Camp Evans thirty hours later. He’d had the kind of luck a grunt only saw once. Had the satchel charge gone off at his feet, rather than down into the foxhole after bouncing off his chest, he would have lost one leg at the very least. Instead, the blast had merely torn his right thigh open from knee to hip, a flap of flesh and muscle peeled up and back like the lid on a rations can. The army surgeons had simply sewn the flap back on and plucked a pound of shrapnel out of it and the rest of his lower extremities. The result was a lot of pain but no paralysis; when the time came, he’d walk out of the hospital tent on his own two feet, without the aid of crutches or, worse, a wheelchair.
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