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  For Tommy Dobson, an admirable man

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It’s a strange thing, the genesis of a novel. Some ideas stick. Others don’t. Years ago, I read the story of Hugh Thompson, Jr., a helicopter pilot serving in Vietnam who, along with his Hiller OH-23 Raven Crew, was instrumental in stopping what’s come to be known as the My Lai massacre. If you’re unfamiliar with his story, you might want to check it out—an act of exceptional heroism backlit by what most consider the worst atrocity of the entire conflict. Having been too young to serve in Vietnam, I would never presume to write a story of that actual war, but the idea of this man’s unflinching courage—both physical and moral—has been with me for a very long time. My first acknowledgment, then, is to Hugh Thompson, Jr., and those who flew with him, Glenn Andreotta and Lawrence Colburn, heroes in the best sense of the word and the inspiration for one of the finest characters I may have ever written.

  That being said, this is not a novel about the Vietnam War, but of an American city in 1972, of young men who served and died, and of the boys who grew to manhood in fear of the draft. It’s also a story of courage and sacrifice, of families and girlfriends and the sad, hard truth that acts of horrible violence are not relegated to war alone. Writing such a novel takes a lot of support, and I’d like to thank my family for all they do to help, not just my wife, Katie, and my daughters, Saylor and Sophie, but all of my family, fine people who keep me sane and make life a joy.

  After seven books my editor, Pete Wolverton, remains a rock of encouragement and sound advice. Hannah O’Grady works at his side and has also been a blessing. I do love a beautiful book, so thanks, as well, to the production team of Vincent Stanley and Ken Silver, to Omar Chapa, who designed the book, and to Mike Storrings and Young Lim, who designed a lovely jacket. Only a writer knows how easy it is to embarrass oneself in print, so thanks to Sara Ensey, my copy editor, and to Ryan Jenkins, who proofed the manuscript—your work allows me to hold my head up in public. And because I write for a living it matters that the reading public knows about the book, so a huge shout-out to all the pros at St. Martin’s who work hard to spread the word. I’m looking at you, Jeff Dodes, Paul Hochman, and Joe Brosnan, marketing gurus that you are; and at my wonderful publicists, Tracey Guest, Sarah Bonamino, and Rebecca Lang. I wouldn’t be where I am without your efforts and expertise. That sentiment applies, as well, to the Macmillan sales force. Thank you all for what you do.

  I have also been blessed with the kind of top-down support about which every author dreams, not just for one book or two, but for my career to date. This is book seven with the same publishing house, and it’s hard to walk such a long road without the intangibles that matter, things like vision, patience, and faith. For that I thank the shot callers at Macmillan: John Sargent, Don Weisberg, Sally Richardson, Jennifer Enderlin, Andy Martin, and Lisa Senz. You’ve made a lot of calls that went my way, and for that I am grateful. Thanks, also, to my agency, ICM, and to Esther Newberg, my agent, who does what she does, and does it well.

  I do owe a brief word to the City of Charlotte and those who call it home. For the story to work I needed to make the city a bit larger than it was in 1972, also a bit dirtier and more violent. Apologies for that, but hey, it’s fiction. I must also thank Laura and Maurice Hull, fine friends who did a kind thing. I mean, seriously—what other novelists get their books plastered on a race car? Finally, I’d like to thank all the people here and abroad who’ve read my books and spread the word. I wouldn’t be here without you.

  We the unwilling, led by the unqualified to kill the unfortunate, die for the ungrateful.

  —Unknown Soldier

  1

  Daniel Reed knew many things about ex-cops, and one of those things was that not all the cop died when a man quit or took early medical or got fired for smoking weed. Four years of pushing a bus station mop, and he still felt that burn beneath his collar, the prickle of skin that drew his eyes up from the slop bucket and busted tile.

  He considered the young people first. They sprawled on a bench, drunk and loud, but that wasn’t the problem. The families and the hippies came next, then the old men and the pregnant woman and the soldiers in uniform. Beyond the glass, the two fifteen from Raleigh idled in the bay as a dozen people waited for suitcases, old Mac sweating in the heat as he hauled them out and lined them up. Daniel had known a thousand days like it, small-city South in a country tired of war. Inevitably, his eyes found the pretty girl in the yellow dress. She was eighteen, maybe, with a shabby suitcase and leather shoes starting to split. He’d watched her, on and off, for an hour: the small walks from one wall to the next, little turns, the tilted head. At the moment, she stood unmoving, lips slightly parted.

  Following her gaze, Daniel spotted the young man in a dim recess leading to the bay. Angular and lean, he stopped five feet from the double doors and stood long enough to study the people in the room. Daniel’s first thought was, Vietnam, and not long from the war. Something about the way he stood, the awareness. When he stepped into the light, Daniel got a better look at the Zeppelin T-shirt, the cheekbones, the belt made of black leather, turquoise, and tarnished silver. Faded jeans brushed the tops of old boots; and when he walked past, he smelled like diesel and whiskey and tobacco. “Detective,” he said; but Daniel looked away, ashamed that he was old and stoned and not a cop anymore. He waited until a swinging door flashed sunlight into the room, then asked the ticketing agent if he could please use the phone. She handed it over, and he dialed the station from long memory, requesting a detective by name.

  “Just a moment, please.”

  Silence rolled onto the line, and Daniel watched the young man cross against traffic, breaking into a jog as he hit the final lane and a truck blew past. In the bright sunlight, he was a blade of a man: the waist, the shoulders, the angle of his jaw. He looked back once and slipped dark glasses across his eyes.

  Shit, the old cop thought.

  Just … shit.

  * * *

  Detective French took the call at a phone on his partner’s desk. “French,” he said, and listened. “That seems unlikely.” He listened some more, then thanked the caller and hung up.

  “Everything okay?”

  French glanced at the familiar lines of his partner’s face. He and Ken Burklow went back twenty years, and had few secrets between them. One was about to come out. “Jason’s back in town. That was Reed, at the bus station.”

  “Reed’s a burnout.”

  “Not so burned out he wouldn’t know my oldest son.”

  Burklow leaned back in his chair, hard-faced and unhappy. “I thought Jason was still in prison.”

  “Halfway house in Raleigh. Seven weeks now.”

  “And you didn’t think to tell me he was out?”

  “I need to call my wife.” French dialed the phone and watched emotions play across his partner’s face. Sadness. Worry. Anger. “She’s not answering.”

  “
Would he go to the house?”

  “Not after the way things ended.”

  “You can’t be sure of that.”

  “He wouldn’t do that to his mother. Not after the last time.”

  “You say that, but come on. Vietnam. Prison. Who knows what he’ll do. You’ve heard the stories.”

  French scrubbed a palm across his face, and sighed unhappily.

  Twenty-nine confirmed kills …

  That was the story: twenty-nine in his first year.

  Dialing a few more numbers, he asked his questions and hung up. “She’s not at the neighbor’s house or with either of her best friends.”

  “What about Gibby, then? If Jason’s not going home…”

  The sentence trailed off, and French thought of Gibson, his youngest son. “Gibby’s in school. He should be fine.”

  “Uh-uh. Senior Skip.”

  French did the math, and realized that his partner was right. Senior Skip Day had been tradition since the first year of the draft. Last three Fridays before final exams, the seniors cut school and went to the quarry south of town. Teachers looked away and so did the cops. Gibby would be there, and he should be, they all should. That was the thing about childhood and endings and war in some foreign fucking jungle.

  “I’ll check the quarry.” Burklow stood. “That way you can look for your wife, and let her know Jason’s in town. Give her time, you know. Get her ready.”

  “I should handle this myself.”

  “Don’t be stupid.” Burklow shrugged into a coat, and checked his weapon. “Not even Superman can be in two places at once.”

  * * *

  William French was no genius, and was smart enough to know as much. He was steady and solid, a determined man who’d become a better cop than he had a right to be. It was the same with his marriage. Gabrielle was out of his league on the day they’d met, and still there on the day they’d married. He’d asked her once how someone who’d studied literature at Vanderbilt and lit up every room she entered could possibly settle for a college dropout three years into a job that might get him killed. She’d kissed his cheek, put a hand on his heart, and said, “Don’t ever ask me that again.” Three sons and thirty years later, she was still a gift—his whole life—but she’d lost one son already.

  Now this …

  He parked in front of their house, and thought, as he often did, how empty it felt. That, too, was about the war. They’d buried their oldest son, then watched his twin brother return from the same conflict only to spiral into violence, drugs, and prison. In that regard, Vietnam had killed two of their three boys, Robert with a bullet to the heart, and his brother more insidiously. Jason never talked about the things he’d done in the service of his country, but Burklow had a friend at the Department of Defense. He refused to provide details, but said once that there was war and there was WAR, and that Jason had fought the latter kind.

  “Gabrielle?”

  The silence inside was familiar from all the years of mourning, a large house with parts of its soul carved away. Nearing the bedroom, French heard running water, and stopped where the bathroom door hung open an inch.

  “Sweetheart?”

  She was in the tub and in the dark, but he could see her silhouette against the tile.

  “Don’t turn on the light.”

  He took his hand from the switch, wondering if she’d known or merely guessed. As his eyes adjusted, he saw more of her shape. Water rose to the curve of her breasts, and her arms were wrapped across her shins.

  Without turning, she said, “Is he the reason you’re here?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Her head tilted, then, and a glint showed in one of her eyes. “You haven’t come home midafternoon since we were newlyweds. I’m asking if Jason is the reason you’re here.”

  French sighed unhappily. “Who told you he’s back?”

  “Marion called. She saw him at the square. His hair was longer, but she knew him. She said he was pale, that prison cost him twenty pounds.”

  “I’m going to handle this, Gabrielle. I promise.”

  “Gibby will want to see him, to spend time—”

  “I won’t allow that.”

  “How will you stop it?”

  “Gabrielle—”

  “He’s dangerous, Bill. He’s a danger to our son. Don’t you see that? Can’t you feel it?”

  French sighed again, and knelt by the tub. Gabrielle had tried to make room in her heart for the man Jason had become, but Jason had not made it easy for her. Heroin. Prison. The effect he had on Gibby. Before Jason’s conviction, all Gibby had wanted was to trail in his brother’s shadow, to know about the Marine Corps and war, and whether he, too, should go to Vietnam. “Listen,” he said. “I just wanted to tell you in person that Jason was back, to promise you that I’ll keep Gibson safe.”

  “You think I’m silly, don’t you? A silly, overprotective woman.”

  “I promise you I don’t.”

  “If you were a mother, you’d understand.”

  “Jason would never hurt his brother.”

  “Not intentionally. Not with malice.”

  She left the rest unspoken, but he understood the deeper fears, her worries about corruption, deception, dangerous ideas.

  “Gibby’s not in school,” she said. “Did you know that?”

  “It’s a skip day. He’ll be at the quarry with his friends. Ken is already looking for him.”

  “What if Jason finds him first?”

  French looked away from the fear in his wife’s eyes. Gibby was her world, and Jason was a destroyer of worlds. “I’ll go, too,” he said. “I’ll find him.”

  “You do that. You bring him home.”

  French stood, but didn’t leave. He pushed his hands into his pockets, and looked down on the crown of her head and the curve of a dim, damp shoulder, bits of his wife on an apron of dark water. “Sooner or later Gibson will want to see his brother.”

  “Just make sure it’s later.”

  “Jason was inside for two years and change. He did his time.”

  “Only Gibby matters. I’m sorry, Bill, but that’s the truth.”

  “Won’t you at least talk to him?”

  “To Jason?”

  “Yes.”

  “About what?” she asked. “Heroin?”

  2

  The quarry means different things to different people. For me, it’s about the drop. They say it’s a hundred and thirty feet from the top of the cliff to the top of the water, and from the water that feels about right: the granite rising, the gray sky above that. All that sameness makes the cliff seem small, and I know what people think, floating on their backs or looking out from the narrow shore across the quarry.

  I could do that.

  The more they drink, the more certain they become. It’s only water, they say, just a dive. How hard can it be?

  But then they make the climb.

  The first good ledge is sixty feet up, and people do jump from it. A few might make it to the next good ledge. Call it eighty feet. Somehow that looks twice as high as the one right below it. Those who make it all the way up tend to lean out from the waist and look downward as if somehow the laws of physics might have changed on the way up.

  Seventy miles an hour when you hit the water.

  Four full seconds to get there.

  From thirteen stories up, the water looks like plate steel, and people remember the stories they’ve heard: the kid who died back in ’57, the ballplayer who hit wrong and drove a knee through his jaw, breaking it in four places and shattering every tooth on the right side. I’ve seen it a hundred times. The boys go pale, and their girlfriends say, I take it back, don’t do it. I’m not the only who’s jumped—a few others have, too—but only one person had the balls to dive, and that was my brother.

  The dead one.

  “Come on, man. If you’re going to do it, do it already.” The voice was behind me, my oldest friend. “You know Becky’s watching.”
>
  I looked into the quarry and saw Becky Collins on an inner tube a hundred feet out from the cliff. She was as small as the rest, but no one else wore a white bikini. Her head rocked back, and I thought she might be laughing. The girl beside her might be laughing, too. Around them, a collection of rafts and tubes held half the senior class. The rest were on the far side of the quarry or in the woods or passed out in any of the cars that glinted in the distance like bits of colored glass.

  “Are you making this dive or not?”

  I looked away long enough to catch the gleam in Chance’s eyes. He was a small kid, but would fight anybody; try for any girl. “Maybe she’s looking at you,” I said.

  “I’m not dumb enough to jump off this rock.”

  I wondered what that said about me. I’d jumped seven times, but never made the dive, and everyone down there knew it. I’d sworn to do it before graduation, but that was two years ago, and I’d been angry when I’d said it. “Do you think I’m stupid?” I asked.

  “I think you’re a rock star.”

  “McCartney or Jagger?”

  Chance offered up a devil’s grin. “That depends on if you jump or dive.”

  I looked away from my friend, and thought about hitting wrong at seventy miles an hour. Beneath me, people began to chant.

  “Dive, dive, dive…”

  When my brother did it, it was a swan dive drawn against a high, pale sky, and I see it still in my dreams: the way he rose and hung, and then the long fall—no breath in my lungs—and how his hands came together an instant before he struck. Only three of us were there to see it, but word of it spread.

  Robert French made the dive off Devil’s Ledge …

  Did you hear?

  Can you believe it?

  At the time, the world record cliff dive was only fifteen feet higher, some guy in Argentina. But this was Charlotte, North Carolina, a little place in 1967. That was five years ago, but on that day in this little city, my oldest brother became a god. People asked him why he did it and how and a thousand other questions, but only four of us knew the truth that mattered, and I dream of that part, too: the way light hit his face when it broke from the water, the eyes that looked brighter and more alive. Let the Vietcong touch that, he’d said; and that was the thing only a few of us knew.