Nothing had ever really been the same since Frank’s older son was killed in Vietnam. Sonny couldn’t remember a single day Frank spent sober after getting that news. Two years drunk. Frank functioned well enough, but he’d lost a step. When Frank had outlined his most recent plan, Sonny had worried that grief over his son might be blinding Frank to certain realities. Volunteering to carry out the will of a mob boss like Carlos Marcello was like dealing with the devil. When Sonny pointed out that almost everyone associated with the JFK assassination was now dead, Frank had told him he ought to apply for work in the ladies’ underwear section at Coles, the Jew department store downtown. Sonny had shut up after that, but he’d never felt quite right about what they were doing.

Something had changed inside him during the past four years. The early operations back in ’64 had felt like war. But what Frank had pushed him to do to get Jimmy Revels out of hiding had left Sonny sick with shame and confusion. Like what the nips had done to the Chinese at Nanking. Sonny had never turned down a free piece of ass, but rape was something else. And raping a woman you cared about … that made you want to crawl in a dark hole and never come out again. But what could you do, with Frank Knox giving the order and going first?

As he trolled the boat between the great cypresses, searching for familiar landmarks, Sonny recalled how fired up they’d been after capturing Revels and his big bodyguard, Luther Davis, who was Jimmy’s drummer and a former army infantryman. But then death had taken Frank from them, as surely and randomly as it had taken friends in the islands during the war, and Snake had gone batshit crazy. Left to his own devices, he’d have crucified Jimmy Revels on a telephone pole in the center of Natchez, then waited for the big shots to fly in for the protests and the funeral, like ducks to a decoy. But before he could, Brody Royal had sent word that the Eagles were to abort the operation. Royal wanted Jimmy Revels and Luther Davis dropped into a hole so deep that no one would ever find them, and Sonny knew why. The millionaire didn’t trust Snake to carry out the operation without landing all of them in prison.