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, he 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.
Today, retired Specialist Harper Stowe III, Tenth Mountain Division’s Second Battalion, 87th Infantry, bore no obvious resemblance to the man he had once been. He had come back home eleven months ago, after thirty-eight months in southern Afghanistan, damaged goods. He was broken in all the ways war can break a man, short of tearing his limbs from his body or rendering him blind. His injuries were the kind you don’t see at first glance, the kind that live down deep beneath the surface of the skin. He had a bad back that pained him constantly and a left hand he could barely use, both reminders of a brush he’d had with a stray RPG in Kandahar, but his mind was where his real disabilities began.
Like so many other young men who’d fought