The Unwilling

by John Hart

  Why did X want him dead?

  Because he’d taken the girl after X gave specific orders not to do it.

  Why did X care if Reece took the girl?

  Because if Sara died, reasonable minds might doubt that Jason French had killed Tyra Norris. Cops might look elsewhere.

  But why did that matter?

  Because X wanted Jason at Lanesworth.

  Why?

  Unknown. Unknowable.

  What made Jason so important to a man like X?

  Good question.

  Just how important was he?

  That was the rubber on the road.

  An hour later, Reece was behind the wheel of a jet-black BMW, peering through darkened grounds at the house where Gibson French lived with his parents. The structure was set back from the road, but undoubtedly had a high-end security system. Plus, the father was a cop, and Reece hated cops.

  Ticktock, motherfucker …

  Reece was hard on himself, but things were moving fast, and he had to move faster.

  How long until X learned that Reece was still breathing?

  Not long.

  For a moment more, Reece stared up at the big house, then U-turned across the road, heading for the poor side of things. That’s where Gibson’s friend lived.

  He was the weak spot.

  That’s how it would happen.

  * * *

  Chance spent the night alone and wide awake, most of it cross-legged on an old blanket, huddled where the bedside lamp spilled yellow light in a broken circle. Magazines littered the blanket around him—more war porn—but Chance couldn’t look past the photograph cupped in the palms of his hands.

  “Fuck you, Martinez.”

  He blinked away a tear, but the photograph remained: Tyra Norris, or what was left of her. He could only see her in parts. The ruin of her body was so … immediate. It hadn’t happened on a battlefield far away or in some distant, other city. Whoever did this to Tyra was in the here and now.

  “Goddamn it.”

  Chance sniffed loudly, and scrubbed his face with a sleeve. Martinez had come to the house twice, and the first time, Chance had claimed to be a minor whose mother should be there for him to answer questions. The second time was different. Late at night, a shit-slick grin on his face.

  You’re eighteen, kid. I checked.

  Then he’d started with the questions about Gibby, easy ones at first, things like places and timing, and when did Chance last see his best friend. Eventually, he’d asked about Gibby’s brother, killed in the war.

  Did Gibby view the body? How did that make him feel?

  Does he blame the government?

  Society?

  Tell me about the funeral …

  He had a real hard-on for Jason, though, and got there pretty quick.

  Does he talk about him?

  Admire him?

  Does Gibby want to go to war like Jason?

  How often do they speak? See each other?

  I know he’s been to Lanesworth …

  Questions like that came hard and fast. Ten minutes’ worth, at least. Then the questions got dark.

  Does your friend like dirty movies?

  Those flat, cop eyes.

  Magazines, I bet. The really nasty ones.

  Are girls afraid of him?

  What about animals? Does he like to kill things?

  Martinez went down so many twisty dark holes Chance decided he must be screwed in the head to think of those questions.

  Is your friend into ropes and knots?

  What about chains?

  How about in the locker room? Does he pay a little too much attention in the shower?

  Does he do drugs?

  What about booze?

  Let’s go back to the pornography question …

  Turned out they were still on the easy part. When Martinez finally lost his cool, he’d pulled out a picture of Tyra’s murdered corpse, and made Chance look at it. Closer, he’d ordered, his hand on the back of Chance’s neck. Get up in there, good and close. You see that? You freaking taste that?

  It took the partner to pull him off.

  When dawn came at last, it gathered like a fist, and Chance pulled himself into the shower, water beating down as he imagined mountain roads and a girl on the back of a brand-new motorcycle, maybe someone as pretty as Becky.

  Why couldn’t it happen like that?

  He wasn’t ugly.

  He wasn’t stupid.

  Out of the shower, Chance twisted a towel around his waist, thinking he would never have that new motorcycle. His mother was pulling two-and-a-half shifts, all night and most of the day. She needed a new car. They were two months down on the rent, but she wouldn’t let him work until the schooling was done …

  Chance pulled on jeans, and got a comb through his hair before he heard music, a hint of it from down the hallway. He wasn’t imagining it. His mother had come home early, he thought. A forgotten something. An unexpected shift change. Either way, it was all for the good. He’d make her breakfast, and put her to bed.

  But that’s not how it went down.

  The man in the living room chair looked like Jason said he would: narrow and seamed, with eyes too old for such a bland face. That was the first thing Chance saw. Second was the gun.

  “This will be easier,” the man said, “if you do not scream.”

  Chance closed his mouth; couldn’t feel his fingers.

  “Good boy. Sit down.” He gestured with the gun, and Chance sank into a chair. “Tell me your name,” he said.

  Chance told him his name.

  “There is no car in the driveway. Is there anyone else in the house? Mother? Father?”

  “Mother. At work.”

  “Does she come home during the day?”

  Chance couldn’t answer. His mind had stopped working.

  “Yes or no,” the man said. “It’s a simple question.”

  “One o’clock. She comes home at one.”

  “What about housekeepers? Friends?”

  “Just me.”

  Grunting once, the man produced a pair of handcuffs, and held them out. “If you would, please. Behind your back.”

  Chance didn’t move. His fingers were numb; he couldn’t feel his arms or legs, either.

  “Here, I’ll help you.”

  The man stood, his eyes damp, flat and gray. He pressed the gun to Chance’s neck, and manipulated the cuffs one-handed. One wrist. The second. He sat again, and the room tilted.

  This can’t be real …

  But the man was right there, dry-skinned and pale, with those street-puddle eyes. “I need a favor,” he said. “A phone call. You have a friend, Gibson French.” Chance nodded; felt drool at the corner of his mouth. “Is it Gibby or Gibson?”

  Chance blinked slowly. “Gibby.”

  “I’d like to meet him. Now. This morning. I’d like him to come here, and I want you to make that happen.”

  * * *

  I heard my father’s footsteps long before he knocked on the door. I’d not really slept. That kind of night.

  “Gibson?”

  Another knock would come—no stopping it. I could all but predict the timing.

  Five, four, three …

  “Come on in, Dad.”

  He looked as sleep-deprived as I felt. Same clothes as last night. Same red eyes and stubble. “Good morning. Did you sleep?”

  “Like a baby,” I said.

  “Yeah, me, too.”

  That’s how the day started, with a pair of matching lies. He sat on the bed, and had trouble with my eyes. His big hands looked useless, too. I didn’t know what he wanted, but words gathered in my mouth, as if they had plans of their own. “I know why the Marine Corps kicked Jason out.”

  It’s not what he’d expected to hear. His eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Have you been in my office?”

  “I have not.”

  “Where did you get that information?”

  “Does it really matter?” H
e said nothing, and the silence told me everything I needed to know. “You know the reasons, too, don’t you? Why they sent him home with a dishonorable discharge?” He did; I could tell that, too. “Do you know about the medals?”

  My father moved toward the window, looking as if he’d kicked over a box marked VENOMOUS REPTILES, and was in fear of whatever creature might crawl out first. “I do,” he said.

  “And the massacre?”

  “Jesus Christ, son.” He palmed his eyes, paler than usual. “That’s classified information.”

  “They say that without Jason, it might have been another My Lai.”

  “You did break into my desk. You read the damn file, the DOD file on your brother.”

  “I wouldn’t do that.” But I had considered it. “I’m right, though. Aren’t I?”

  “It’s not a fair comparison. American soldiers slaughtered five hundred villagers at My Lai, civilians, every one of them, women and children, even infants. This wasn’t like that.”

  “It could have been, though. They say Jason saved an entire village.”

  “Few things in war are so black and white.”

  “This was. His actions were.”

  I saw in my father’s eyes a deep and abiding pain, and understood why he might feel that way. In the church of Don’t Be Like Your Brother, he was a high priest. But what I’d learned from Darzell changed everything I’d once believed about Jason. Three years after the massacre at My Lai, a platoon of U.S. Marines went as war-mad as Charlie Company had at that small village in the Sơn Tinh District of South Vietnam. The village was smaller than My Lai, little more than a clutch of huts gathered along a tributary of the Bến Hải River.

  Darzell didn’t know what triggered the slaughter, but Jason and his crew were five miles out of the DMZ when the first body appeared, faceup in the river: a young girl, according to Darzell, a tiny thing, shot four times through the chest. By the time Jason’s gunboat arrived at the village, that platoon of marines had already spread thirty-three bodies along the muddy banks, or left them bobbing like corks in the reeds along the river’s edge. The ARVN troops used the gunboat to carry off what survivors they could find, but for Jason and the master chief, that wasn’t enough. Guns were still firing, people screaming; so they went in alone to stand down an entire platoon of red-eyed, raging marines. Jason took three bullets before the madness broke, and even then beat the commanding lieutenant within an inch of his life.

  “We never listened to him,” I said.

  “What are you talking about, son?”

  “He saved three hundred people that day…”

  “A remarkable thing, I know.”

  “You didn’t let me finish. He did that remarkable thing, and when he came home hurting, we never listened.”

  “Jason didn’t want to talk about the war, not any of it.”

  “We didn’t make it easy, though, did we? Mom, like an eggshell ready to break, and you so certain of right and wrong.”

  “We did some things wrong, yes. But your brother’s no saint. You can trust me on that.”

  “You mean the drugs.” I laughed harshly. “Of course you mean the drugs.”

  “Heroin is tearing the city apart. I see it every day. Whatever your brother did in Vietnam, he ended up a user, maybe even a dealer. I can’t condone that. And I can’t have you near it.”

  “Whatever your brother did in Vietnam.” I threw the words back. “You talk about a DOD file. Did it include the terms of Jason’s discharge?”

  “Yes, son. It did. Right or wrong, your brother almost killed a superior officer. The military gave him the choice of ten years in Leavenworth, or a dishonorable discharge in conjunction with a signed nondisclosure agreement. It’s a cover-up. I understand that. I don’t approve of it, but after the My Lai fallout, I recognize the necessity. Support for the war is already weak. Another massacre. Another black eye for the country…”

  “It’s not about support for the war.”

  “It says so in the file.”

  “Does the file say who was in command of that platoon?”

  “The name was redacted…”

  “It’s Laughtner, Lieutenant John G.”

  “Laughtner?” My father’s mouth opened and closed twice before he could continue. “Isn’t there a General Laughtner on Westmoreland’s staff?”

  “Second in command of ground operations.”

  “Related?”

  “Father and son. And it gets worse.” My father closed his eyes, but I didn’t relent. “They needed time,” I said. “How to spin the killings. What to do with Jason. They held him off books for seven weeks. Drugged. Morphine. If it weren’t for the master chief, they’d have probably just killed him. But the master chief had friends in high places.” I met my father’s eyes, and dared him to blink. “They turned him into a junkie instead. They strung him out and sent him home.”

  “Who else knows about this?”

  “About the drugs? I have no idea. The rest of it seems to be an open secret in the Marine Corps.”

  He showed me his back, and I wondered at his thoughts. Did he feel guilt or shame? Because I did. What about regret? None of us had been there for Jason. He’d come home from war strung out, quiet, and bitter. But did my father ever ask why? Wasn’t that his job? Wasn’t it my mother’s? Or mine?

  “Will you give me a few minutes?” he asked.

  I said I would, and left him there.

  Halfway to the kitchen, I heard the phone ring.

  35

  Warden Wilson rose early, showered, shaved, and dressed. It was a big day, with a bigger one coming.

  “Twenty-four hours. Maybe a little more.”

  He spoke to the mirror as his fingers worked a dark tie into a Windsor knot. The suit was brown. So were the shoes. For color, he put a fresh rose in his lapel, cut in the darkness from a small garden he kept beside the house. By noon, the petals would begin to droop. Then they would curl and dry, and he would mark time with those petals, increasingly lighthearted as they withered, shrunk, and died. Thinking of X, he hummed quietly as he adjusted the flower just so.

  “Perfect.”

  That’s what his life would become. X would die, and the warden’s family would find its heart again. They would travel; they would heal. Eventually, they would choose a place to start over, France or maybe Italy, some high, windswept place with views of the Mediterranean.

  First, he had to manage the day.

  “The last day.”

  He offered his reflection a solemn nod, then turned off the bathroom light, and moved quietly through the still-sleeping house. At the bedroom door, he peered in at his wife. She knew only that X would die the following day, nothing about the money or the new life it would afford them. He wanted to surprise her with the news, to make the grand gesture. Maybe she would look at him like she used to. Maybe her eyes would sparkle.

  More determined than ever, he took his heavy heart into the light, sweet air of a perfect daybreak. The car started easily. The drive was thoughtful but pleasant. At the prison, he cleared security, and was ushered through an armored door, and into an underground parking garage beneath the administrative building. It was a small garage—eight spaces—and he only allowed a few others to use it. One of them was there and waiting.

  “Warden.”

  The warden locked his car, frowning. “Captain Ripley. Is there some kind of problem?”

  “Not necessarily a problem. Something you should know about, though.”

  “Walk with me.”

  So early in the morning, the subbasement corridors were empty, not that the warden worried about Ripley’s discretion. They’d both endured too many hard lessons for that. It was no accident that X had contrived to live as he had for so many years. The warden, alone, could not guarantee the liberties X enjoyed. No warden could. But if a guard spoke out of turn, he paid a heavy price. Same with other prisoners. Even rumors were quashed without mercy, and the first time a reporter had come sniffi
ng after a story of favoritism and graft, he’d disappeared as quietly as a setting sun. A second reporter showed up six months later, and died within the week. No one knew how many informants X had on the inside or how many enforcers worked for him beyond the walls. He knew so many things, touched so many things.

  Ripley waited until they were in the corridor, then said, “X has had four visitors already.”

  “Four?” The warden stopped mid-stride.

  “It makes me nervous.”

  It made the warden nervous, too. Surviving X was about understanding X. “He’s never had so many in one day.”

  “And never so early.”

  “What’s his mood?”

  “Like he could eat a baked baby for breakfast.”

  “Explain.”

  “White-lipped. Agitated. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Ripley’s concern made a lot of sense. X was the most disciplined man either of them had ever seen, so in control of thought and emotion that he rarely showed more than pursed lips or a lifted eyebrow. For those who understood the man, little more was ever needed.

  “You have the names of his visitors?”

  Ripley rattled off four names, and the warden recognized two of them. Enforcers. Killers. “Where are they now?”

  “Off-grounds, and thank God for it. He’s been asking about Byrd, though.”

  “What about our arrangements?” The warden started walking.

  “Prisoner French will attend the execution. It’s not the normal thing. We’ll need an excuse.”

  “I’ll come up with something. What about after?”

  “Like we discussed.”

  “Good. Good.” The elevator dinged, and the doors opened. “Did he, uh … Did X want to see me?”

  “He didn’t mention it.”

  Nodding in relief, the warden stepped into the elevator, and waited as it carried him to his office. This early, he was alone there, so he made the coffee, and stood at the east window, looking out across the prison as color bled into the world. He wanted peace of mind, but had so many concerns about the execution, so many demands on his time. The governor would attend, and that alone had caused a week of sleepless nights. He also expected two state senators, the U.S. attorney general, and twenty-nine family members of X’s long-dead victims. And they all needed to be handled.