Free The Devil and the River by R.J. Ellory Page A

She knew her faith had figured prominently in his return. He had survived, but he was not unharmed. None of those who returned were unharmed. As Narosky had said, In war, there are no unwounded soldiers .
    It was during the first weeks of his return that he befriended Bob Thurston. Thurston was a good deal older than Gaines, and he would spend time with Gaines when he visited Alice. Thurston would give her morphine, and while she slept, he would sit with Gaines and listen to the war stories. Thurston became John Gaines’s confidant, his confessor, most of all, his friend.
    It was Thurston who advised he apply for the sheriff’s department.
    “You have to have structure. You have to have a schedule. You cannot spend the rest of your life smoking weed and listening to Canned Heat.”
    “I don’t want to make any decisions until later …”
    “Later? You mean after Alice has died? That could be years, John, seriously. She is a tough woman, and the cancer she has is not so aggressive. It will be a long battle before she gives up. She still believes she has to look after you.”
    So, in May of 1969, Gaines did as Thurston had advised. He was accepted immediately. He was young, single, a Vietnam veteran with a service medal and a Purple Heart. He attended the police academy in Vicksburg, graduated in November of 1969, and was assigned to the Breed County Sheriff’s Department in January of 1970. In February of 1971, he was promoted to deputy sheriff, and then on October 21, 1973, the day following Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre, Whytesburg sheriff, Don Bicklow, fell down dead from a heart attack in the front hallway of his mistress’s house. His mistress was a fifty-two-year-old widow who lived out near Wiggins. Taking into consideration the fact that there was an election scheduled for January of 1974, an election that Bicklow would have won without contest, Breed County Council asked Gaines to hold Bicklow’s position for the intervening two months. After six weeks, no one having come forward to apply for the job, Breed Council petitioned for Gaines’s permanent assignment without election. Gaines did not contest the application, nor did the assigned representatives of the County Seat. So, at thirty-three years of age, John Gaines became Mississippi’s youngest sheriff. He proved himself competent, not only in the day-to-day management of the department, but also in the small-minded politics of the thing. Seemed he had been born for the job. This was what people said. He did not speak of it, and perhaps was not fully aware of it himself, but Gaines did the job because the job was all he had. No wife, no girlfriend, no children, no father, his mother taking the long road to her grave, the routine and regularity of his existence punctuated solely by her sporadic but intense outbursts, her mutterings, her diatribes and polemics against Nixon and his cabinet, the morphine-induced hallucinations that she so vigorously believed were true. This was Gaines’s life. Had been his life until now, until July 24, 1974, when the rain had uncovered a twenty-year-old murder.
    One morning, no more than a week before he’d been wounded, Gaines shot a Vietnamese teenager in the face. He hadn’t meant to get a head shot. He’d intended to scare him, to warn him, to cause him to flee, but the guy dropped suddenly as he fired, perhaps thinking to turn the other way. However, why ever, it didn’t matter. Gaines triggered, the guy dropped, and he took a face shot right through the bridge of his nose and out the other side. He lay there surprised. Dead, but surprised. His eyes wide, his mouth agape, he looked like he’d been about to say something important and then had simply forgotten the necessary words.
    Gaines had walked over there, looked down at the plain black shirt, the black pants, the rubber sandals, the body inside them. The dead boy was no more than eighteen or nineteen. He had been carrying a French 9mm MAT machine gun,