title: Casualties: A Novel of the Civil War
author:  David Rothstein 
description: David is a writer, photographer and student of the Civil War. He is working on a sequel to Casualties.
zlib_text: BLOOD ON THE 
  WATER
  By
  P. N. Elrod
  
  1
  It was war, then. The quiet kind that you notice only as an impersonal 
  paragraph in the paper you read over the morning coffee or in the evening 
  relaxing, after work. Bold black letters might spell out "Shooting Victim 
  Found," and then go on to give some sparse details of the person's age, 
  where they lived and died, and that the police were following some 
  promising leads. Most of the time you never learn if they turned up 
  anything  or  not.  Life  moves  forward  and  new  paragraphs  on  other 
  casualties appear in the paper. New, but with a dreary similarity to all the 
  others, as in any war.
  In my case I might not even get that much of an epitaph. Vaughn 
  Kyler's enemies tended to simply disappear. Without an inconvenient 
  body to trip over, the cops couldn't be expected to make an arrest.
  I gripped the wheel more tightly to control the tremors in my hands and 
  took a second look in the rearview mirror. The Cadillac was still there and 
  fo