Four Blind Mice

Chapter Forty-One

Thomas Starkey had been born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and he still loved the area passionately. So did most of his neighbors. He'd been away for long stretches while he was in the Army, but now he was back to stay, and to raise his family as best he possibly could. He knew that Rocky Mount was a great place to bring up kids. Hell, he'd been brought up here, hadn't he?

Starkey was devoted to his family, and he genuinely liked the families of his two best friends. He also needed to control everything around him.

Just about every Saturday night, Starkey got the three clans together and they barbecued. The exception was the football season, when the families usually had a tailgate party on Friday night. Starkey's son Shane played tailback for the high school. North Carolina, Wisconsin and Georgia Tech were after Shane, but Starkey wanted him to put in a tour with the Army before he attended college. That's what he had done, and it had worked out for the best. It would work for Shane, too.

The three men usually did all the shopping and cooking for the Saturday night barbecues and the tailgate parties. They bought steaks, ribs, hot and sweet sausages at the farmers' market. They selected corn on the cob, squash, tomatoes, asparagus. They even made the salads, usually German potato, coleslaw, macaroni and, occasionally, Caesars.

That Friday was no exception, and by seven-thirty the men were in their familiar positions beside two Weber grills, staying downwind from the wafting smoke, drinking beer, cooking every meal 'to order'. Hell, they even cleaned up and did the dishes. They were proud to deliver the food just right, and to get pretty much the same kind of applause given to their sons on football nights.

Starkey's number two, Brownley Harris, tended to intellectualize He'd attended Wake Forest and then gone to grad school at UNC. “The irony is pretty thick here, don't you think?” he asked as he gazed at the family scene.

“Fuck all, Brownie, you'd see irony in a turkey shoot, or a cluster fuck in a rice paddy. You think too goddamn much,” Warren Griffin said, and rolled his eyes. That's your problem in life."

“Maybe you just don't think enough,” Harris said, then winked at Starkey, who he considered a god. “We're going off to kill somebody this weekend, and here we are calmly barbecuing thick sirloin steaks for our families. You don't think that's a little strange?”

"I think you're fucking strange is what I think. We've got a job to do, so we do it. No different than the way it was for a dozen years in the Big Army. We did a job in

Vietnam, in the Persian Gulf, Panama, Rwanda. It's a job. Of course -I happen to love my job. Might be some irony in that. I'm a family man and a professional killer. So what of it? Shit happens, it surely does. Blame the US Army, not me."

Starkey nodded his head toward the house, a two-story with five bedrooms and two baths he'd built in 1999.“Girls are coming,” he said. "Put a lid on it.

“Hey, beautiful,” he called, then gave his wife, Judie, a big hug. Judie "Blue Eyes' was a tall, attractive brunette who still looked almost as good as she had on the day they were married. Like most of the women in town, she spoke with a pronounced Southern accent, and she liked to smile a lot. Judie even did volunteer work three days a week at the playhouse. She was funny appreciative, a good lover, and a good life partner. Starkey believed he was lucky to have found her, and she was lucky to have chosen him. All three of the men loved their wives, up to a point. Hell, that was another juicy irony for Brownley Harris to ponder late into the night.

“We must be doing something right,” Starkey said as he held Judie in his arms and toasted the other couples.

“You sure did,” Judie “Blue Eyes' said. ”You boys married well. Who else would let their husbands sneak off for a weekend every month or so, and trust that they were being good boys out there in the big, bad world?"

“We're always good. Nobody does it better,” Starkey said, and smiled good-naturedly at his closest friends in the world. “It doesn't get any better than this. It really doesn't. We're the best there is.”