Gods and Fathers Read Free

crazy.”
    “Not all of them.”
    “You have a trust problem.”
    “Politicians scare me.”
    “Caligula was a tyrant, not a politician.”
    “His palace guard killed him. He thought they were his friends.”
    “Have you ever killed anybody, Matt?”
    “Not without a good reason,” Matt said, smiling, deciding to let Healy think he was taking this question as a joke, though he knew it wasn’t. So he knows, Matt thought. So be it. I was cleared, honorably discharged. I’ve got other things to worry about.
    His father, the toughest guy he would ever meet, the ex-jarhead who had survived, unscathed, at the age of twenty, five Pacific island invasions, would be dead in two weeks of lung cancer, the only enemy he couldn’t beat. His marriage of seven years had ended bitterly. His six-year-old son seemed distant, already taking his mother’s side. Could that be possible? Or was he just paranoid, guilty? And then there was the young blonde law clerk he was seeing. There was something different about her now. Her ambition seemed to be showing for the first time, like an old-fashioned slip beneath the hem of a skirt. Or had he missed it before? Yes, lots of other things to worry about, but these did not include the size of his heart or the fight in him. These, he knew, would not fail him, no matter what the future held.

Chapter 1
    Pound Ridge, New York,
Friday, January 30, 2009,
7PM
    When he saw the silver BMW parked in front of the garage, and the lights on in his house as he turned into the driveway, Matt DeMarco knew that his son, Michael, a graduate student in Boston, was home, and that his weekend would be ruined. When Michael was a boy, Matt, chafing under the rigid visitation schedule imposed by his bitter ex-wife, had yearned for spontaneity in his relationship with his son. Now he dreaded it.
    He took a deep breath of the cold night air as he turned the key in the front door, letting it out slowly as he entered and hung his winter coat in the hall closet. The television was on in the living room, where the remains of a half-eaten pizza sat congealing on the coffee table. In the kitchen he put his briefcase on a counter and splashed some scotch over ice. He could hear the thud-thud-thud of a lopsided load in the washing machine in the adjacent laundry room, and, over that, the angry cadences of rap music coming from upstairs. Back in the living room, he flicked off the television and then headed to his bedroom at the back of the house, shaking his head as he went, trying to ignore the pizza, the misuse of the washing machine, and his son’s nasty music.
    In the bedroom, a small sanctuary with a sitting area facing a fireplace and a study tucked into a corner, he placed his drink on his dresser and changed into khakis and an old sweater. As he turned to pick up his scotch, his eye was drawn to the nearby gleaming gold frame of a color photograph of him and his son taken on the day of Michael’s graduation from high school in Manhattan. He picked it up and stared at it.
    They were standing side by side at the ornate front door of the Parnell International School on Central Park West. Michael’s thick head of hair was a deep, lustrous brownish-black, like Matt’s, but unlike Matt’s it contained streaks of light brown, as if sand had been mixed with ebony, the result of his mother’s northern Italian genes. Other than those sandy streaks, they could, from not too great a distance, be taken for twins. They were both the same lithe and graceful six-foot in height; they both had the same wiry, hard muscled bodies, and both had the same deep-set raven-black eyes above high, wide cheekbones and full lips. Their dusky complexions, aquiline noses, and hooded, piercing gazes spoke of a bloodline that had spawned desert nomads and medieval warriors, its feral nature never quite yielding to the civilizing influences of Europe and America. That nature, Matt knew, thinking of the scene he had made in court that afternoon,