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.”

Alex Cross 8 - Four Blind Mice

Chapter Forty-Two

On Saturday night the three killers made their way north to a small town in Virginia called Harpers Ferry. During the road trip, Brownley Harris's job was to study maps of the AT, as the Appalachian Trail was called by many of the people who hiked it regularly. The spot where they were headed was a particularly popular place for hikers to stop.