CHAPTER ONE
Texas, the El Sueño ranch, July 2014
IT WAS MIDNIGHT, and General John Hamilton Wilde was drunk.
Not just drunk.
Drunk as a skunk, in Texas parlance, though if he could still come up with a word like parlance, maybe he wasn’t quite drunk enough.
The thought called for another drink.
John Hamilton reached for the crystal glass half filled with Jack Daniel’s finest Kentucky sour mash whiskey.
Good man, Jack Daniel.
But the glass wasn’t half filled. It was close to empty.
“Damn,” he said, reaching for the bottle.
It wasn’t doing much better than the glass. Only a couple of inches of ol’ Jack left.
In that case, he decided, raising the bottle to his lips, to hell with the glass. Might as well drain it straight from the source.
Yes.
That was much better.
The whiskey went down like silk.
He just hoped to hell there was another bottle in the house.
Odds were there would be.
One of his sons managed El Sueño now, but the place still belonged to him. To four star General John Hamilton Wilde. He owned it, by God, lock, stock and barrel. Jacob had the power to buy and sell livestock, lease out the oil rights, hire and fire ranch hands, cooks, maids, the small army that kept a ranch the size of a small kingdom going, but the boy would surely not be foolish enough to have made any changes in how the house itself was stocked or furnished.
The boy?
His son was far from boyhood. He had a wife and a child.
A wife and a child.
Such a nice, simple equation. One wife. One child.
John Hamilton took another sip of ol’ Jack.
Not three wives.
Well, two wives. Plus one if you got hung up on technicalities.
No technicalities about how many children he had.
He had six.
He had four.
He had six plus four and that equaled ten…and goddammit, if he could add up those numbers, he definitely wasn’t drunk enough.
“Shit,” John Hamilton Wilde said, and he rose to his feet, took a second to get his footing, staggered across the porch, yanked open the back door, went into the big den with all those dead, dumb animals staring glassy-eyed from the walls. They were his father’s trophies, not his; his kids—his six kids—used to plead with him to get rid of those pathetic heads and he’d always said no, he wouldn’t, they were his father’s, and the house, the entire ranch, in fact, belonged not just to whatever generation presently occupied it, but to all the generations that had preceded it…
“Pure and utter bullshit,” John muttered.
He reached up, wrapped his hands around the rack of a bull elk dead probably seventy, eighty years, and yanked hard. The thing didn’t move. John Hamilton grunted, set his feet apart, yanked harder. His face reddened; sweat popped out on his forehead. The damn thing still wouldn’t move.
He stood back, breathing hard.
The elk was as unmovable as the man who’d killed it.
“Tomorrow,” he told the dead beast.
Then he turned his attention to the cabinet on the far wall and, yes, there was a full bottle of Jack’s inside.
It was a beautiful sight, all that excellent whiskey just waiting for him. After all, only the best would do. He was an officer and a gentleman. He was General John Hamilton Wilde, four-star General John Hamilton Wilde, leader of men, West Point graduate. Mustn’t forget that West Point graduate thing despite the fact that he wasn’t the one who was supposed to have gone to the Point or gone into the army as a lieutenant or climbed the ladder to the top.
He wrenched open the cap of the whiskey bottle, tilted the bottle to his lips. Took a long- but-not-long-enough swallow. Wiped the back of his hand over his mouth and collapsed into a big leather chair.
The chair was another legacy from his old man.
Jesus Christ. His entire life was a legacy from his old man.
The general took another drink. And another. He thought about his sons.
“Jesus,” he whispered, the word more a plea than an oath—except even bombed, he knew damn well that not all the pleas or prayers in the world could help fix this screw-up.
The cat was out of the bag. The beans had been spilled. However you wanted to phrase it, his secret was a secret no more.
He had five sons. Five sons. Five grown men. Good-looking. Healthy. Successful. Jacob. Caleb. Travis. Luca. Matteo.
And he had daughters. Five daughters. Hey, why not keep the numbers balanced? Five beautiful, bright girls. Not girls anymore, though. They were women. Emily. Jaimie. Lissa. Alessandra. Bianca.
Two sons and two daughters in Italy. Three sons and three daughters in Texas..
Wrong.
They were here. All of them. His sons. His daughters. They were here, at El Sueño, and the decades-long nightmare that had started on a high school football field, of all places, on a fall evening a million years ago, was finally turning into reality.
That rated another drink. Then another. And the memories came flooding back, because time could never erase them.
CHAPTER TWO
BACK THEN, HE wasn’t John Hamilton Wilde.
He was Johnny Wilde.
Seventeen years old. Tall. Reckless. Good-looking.
And completely lacking in ambition.
That was what his father said. His teachers, too. Everybody was always on him to straighten up and be more like his brother, Alden. His twin brother, though they were nothing like twins.
Alden was into books. Johnny was into cars. Alden was into classical music. Johnny was into heavy metal. Alden had a girlfriend, a shy kid as smart as he was. Johnny was literally and figuratively into cheerleaders.
The twins didn’t even look alike.
Johnny had the dark hair of his Apache and Comanche and who-knew-what-else ancestors, the blue eyes of his Celtic forebears, the height and leanly muscled build that came from Viking DNA.
Alden was slender and fair, with the classic beauty of their mother.
At least, that was what their father said.
There was no real way to know. All they had of her were photos, because Celia Wilde had died in childbirth.
To be precise, she’d died during the delivery of the second of her twin boys.
Johnny.
Johnny was the reason their mother was dead.
“Your mama left us while giving you life,” Amos Wilde would say when he was drunk, and he was drunk a lot. Not falling-down drunk. Not mean drunk. Amos was a Wilde, after all. He was also a full colonel in the United States Army. Retired Colonel Amos Jefferson Wilde, to be exact.
He did everything with discretion.
He was even discreet about wishing to God Johnny had never been born, but the message was clear anyway and, hell, who could blame him?
Alden was the son worth having.
Johnny… Johnny had been a mistake from the second he’d exited his dying mother’s womb. Everybody knew that, including Johnny.
“Don’t,” Alden would say whenever Johnny cut school or smoked w
eed or drank beer until he puked. “Don’t live down to the old man’s expectations, John. You’re better than that.”
And Johnny would laugh and slap his brother on the back and assure him that he was perfectly happy exactly the way he was.
“You’re the one who’s gonna make us all proud, man,” he’d say, because he knew it was true—and because he loved Alden with all his heart, just as Alden loved him.
In a small Texas town where being a jock was everything, Alden was as out of place as a bluebird in a meadow of starlings, but things would be different soon.
Alden, who’d taken so many honors classes that he was a year ahead of Johnny in school, would graduate this June. Half a dozen prestigious universities had tried to recruit him, but Alden wanted entry to only one place.
West Point.
Johnny thought he was nuts.
“Jesus, man, you really believe in all that crap the old man spews about the Wildes and their warrior bloodlines?” he’d said the first time Alden had told him that the Point was what he wanted. “Or is it because he’s a West Point grad, because two zillion generations of Wildes have been West Point grads, and it’s what he wants for you?”
“It’s not any of that stuff,” Alden had replied. “It’s just what I want to do.”
Johnny had to admit that that was the truth. Alden believed in God and Country and The American Way, all in caps. Johnny…
Johnny believed in having fun.
He was a football hero, a tight end, fearless and tough. He drove a cherry-red Mustang he’d bought when it was mostly a piece of junk and spent a summer working on it until it was bright and shiny and could go from zero to sixty before you could blink. And if he’d ever cracked open a book, there sure as hell was no way to prove it.
He was smart, but he hid it well.
It didn’t matter.
The principal put the football awards he won on display in the lobby.
His teachers winked at his failed tests and all the papers he never turned in.
His schoolmates treated him like a rock star—the guys because he was a jock, the girls because they said he was movie-star gorgeous.
And because he was all those things, kids tolerated Alden’s occasional presence. If they didn’t, they had Johnny to answer to, and nobody wanted that. They didn’t go so far as to include Alden in whatever partying was going on, but that was OK. Alden wasn’t into partying…
Until that Friday night in September.
The Friday night that would change the world in ways that were inconceivable.
There was a football game that night. The stands were packed.
They almost always were. Football, especially high school football, was almost a religion in lots of small Texas towns. Wilde’s Crossing was no exception, but this wasn’t just any game.
It was a division playoff. If the Wilde Cats won, they’d be on their way to the state finals.
And Alden was there.
He didn’t love football, but he loved his brother with the same ferocity as Johnny loved him. Knowing Alden was there, watching and cheering, made Johnny feel great.
The opposing team was tough. The score reflected that. Seven to seven in the first quarter. Fourteen to fourteen at the end of the half. The Wilde Cats held their own through three quarters of the second half and then…
Then, disaster.
Fourth quarter and a minute left on the clock.
The other team scored with a field goal.
The Cats got the ball back. They made a first down, but it was a long, long way to the end zone and time was ticking away.
Fifty seconds.
Thirty.
Twenty seconds. Third down.
The Cats huddled one last time. Tim Santos called the play.
The Cats lined up. “Blue forty-two,” Tim shouted. “Texas nineteen. Hut, hut, hut…”
He stepped back.
After that, things went to slow motion.
For the first time all night, Johnny got two steps behind the safety.
Tim cocked his arm and threw.
Johnny saw the ball.
Watched its trajectory.
His body told him the pass had gone wrong, that it was uncatchable, but his brain said Fuck that, and he leaped into the air, higher than he ever had before, wrapped his big hand around the ball, saw the safety turn towards him, and he took off on the endless race for the goalposts.
The crowd roared.
Johnny could feel his legs pumping, his heart banging. The end zone was a yard away. Half a yard. A couple of feet.
Crunch!
He went down, hard, tackled by three gorillas who’d come out of nowhere.
He felt the air rush from his lungs; the taste of Texas dirt soured his tongue as the force of his landing filled his mouthpiece with earth and grass.
He must have blacked out for a couple of seconds because everything seemed to stand still…
And then he was on his feet, the crowd not just screaming but shrieking, his teammates pounding him on his shoulders, his helmet, his back…
“What happened?” he said, because his head was ringing.
Everybody laughed.
“We won, man! We took the division!”
Johnny blinked. “We did?”
“What they mean is that you won it, John!”
Johnny looked around. “Alden?”
His twin brother grinned. “Man,” he said, “you were incredible!”
Johnny grabbed him. Hugged him. Lifted him off his feet. He made sure that Alden stayed with him straight into the locker room, through the cheers and all the goofing around.
“Wait right there,” he told him when he went off to shower.
Alden laughed, leaned back against Johnny’s locker, tucked his hands in his jeans pockets and hung in until all the guys were dressed. When they exited the locker room, what looked like half of Wilde’s Crossing swarmed them.
“Got to go celebrate,” Santos yelled.
Everybody cheered and started heading for their cars and trucks. There was only one place to celebrate—Angie’s Café. Angie’s was out on the highway and she kept open twenty-four hours a day. Hamburgers, fries, no beer because they were almost all underage, but that wasn’t a problem.
Half the team had six-packs of Bud stashed inside their vehicles, Johnny included.
Alden punched his brother lightly in the arm.
“I’ll see you later,” he said. “Just remember, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
They both laughed at the admonition, but when Alden started to turn away, Johnny reached for him.
“Where you goin’?”
“Home. It’s late, and—“
“Late, hell. You’re coming with us.”
“John. You guys don’t need me along.”
“I need you! Could I celebrate bein’ the hero of the century without you by my side?”
Alden grinned. “Such modesty.”
“Listen, we both know it’s bullshit. Next time out, it’ll be somebody else they cheer for, but tonight it’s me. You really want me to bask in all this glory without a Boswell along to take notes?”
His brother laughed. “Your fans should only hear you, Wilde. They’d be shocked at you knowing the name of a famous old guy like Boswell.”
“See? That’s what I mean. You’re the only one knows the real me. Tell you what. In your honor, I won’t even pop the tab on a Bud.” Johnny held out his hand. “Deal?”
Alden rolled his eyes. “How can I refuse such an offer?”
The brothers shook hands, exchanged high fives, and then Johnny opened the door of his souped-up Mustang. Three girls ran over—two blondes and a brunette—and scrambled into the minuscule back seat.
Johnny and Alden climbed into the front.
“You behave real good,” Johnny told Alden, “I’ll share.”
Everybody laughed, including the girls, but it was only a joke because they knew that Alden was faithful to his mouse of
a girlfriend.
Tim Santos’s pickup roared out of the parking lot. The other vehicles fell in behind it, horns blasting, headlights bright, music blaring from radios and eight-track-tape players.
By the time they hit the highway, the convoy was doing seventy.
Then eighty.
A light rain was falling. It had begun toward the end of the game; now, it left a soft sheen on the road.
The girls had popped open a beer. They were passing it back and forth, drinking and giggling.
“Want one, Johnny?” the brunette said.
Johnny did, but his brother was seated right beside him and he’d promised him he wouldn’t drink. So he grinned, slapped Alden’s knee and said he’d pass on the beer until they got to the lot at Angie’s.
Besides, if he didn’t drink, he was OK driving a little faster…
Until Alden said, very softly, that the road was a little slick.
“My brother,” Johnny said, “the weatherman.”
The girls laughed. Alden smiled and Johnny thought, what the hell, he could handle the Mustang on any surface, but how often did he have his brother beside him to celebrate a victory? So he sighed, said “Yeah, OK,” and eased his foot off the gas until they were doing fifty.
Ten miles per hour under the speed limit.
“See?” he said. “I’m keeping things completely legit.”
Alden grinned. Johnny grinned back.
Seconds later, life changed forever.
It didn’t happen in slow motion like his game-winning touchdown. It was fast, so fast that he had no time to do anything but react.
A semi was travelling towards them.
One instant it was in the oncoming lane.
The next, it skidded and jackknifed on the wet roadway.
The girls screamed.
“John,” Alden yelled, “Jesus Christ, John…”
Johnny braked and yanked the steering wheel hard right, avoiding the truck by inches. The maneuver would have worked…
But the car gave a sickening lurch as the right front tire left the pavement.
The steering wheel was wrenched from his hands.
He heard a high, girlish scream. Heard Alden shout as the Mustang began to flip over.
After that, there was only darkness.
* * * *
He woke to a world of bright lights, noise and pain.