Then he shoved me hard. I let it go, but Sampson pushed again. That was when I lunged at him. I’d had enough of his drunken shit. The two of us tumbled down the wooden steps and onto the lawn. We wrestled on the ground and then he tried to throw a punch. I blocked it. Thank God he was too messed up to throw a straight punch.
“You fucked up, Alex. You let Cooper die!” he yelled in my face as we both struggled to our feet.
I refused to hit him, but he struck out at me again. The punch connected with my cheek. I went down as if I didn’t have any legs. I sat there, stunned, my eyes glazing over.
Sampson pulled me up, and by this time, he was gasping and wheezing. He tried for a headlock. Christ, he was strong. He connected with a short, hard punch to the side of my face. I went down again but struggled back up. We were both groaning. I hurt where he’d hit me on the point of my cheekbone.
He threw a roundhouse punch that missed by an inch. Then a hard blow caught my shoulder and made it ache. I warned myself to stay away from him. He had me by four inches and forty pounds. He was drunk, angry, insane as I’d ever seen him.
He wouldn’t stop coming at me. Sampson was filled with rage. I had to take him down if I could. Somehow. But how?
I finally hit him with an uppercut to the stomach. I jabbed his cheek. Drew blood. Then I fired a short right hand into his jaw. That one had to hurt.
“Stop it! Stop it right now! Both of you, stop!”
I heard the voice ringing in my ear. “Alex! John! Stop this disgraceful behavior. Stop it, you two. Just stop it!”
Nana was pulling the two of us apart. She was wedged in between us like a small but determined referee. She’d done it before, but not since we were twelve years old.
Sampson straightened up and looked down at Nana. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “I’m sorry, Nana.” He looked ashamed.
Then he stumbled away without saying a word to me.
Chapter 40
I WENT DOWN to breakfast the next morning a little before six. Sampson was sitting there, eating eggs and his personal favorite, farina. Nana Mama was across from him at the table. Just like old times.
They were talking quietly, as if sharing a deep secret that no one else should know.
“Am I interrupting?” I asked from the doorway.
“I think we have it sorted out now,” Nana said.
She motioned for me to sit at the breakfast table. I poured coffee first, popped in four slices of whole wheat toast, and then finally sat down with Nana and Sampson.
He had a big glass of milk propped in front of him. I couldn’t help remembering back to when we were kids. Two or three mornings a week he’d show up about this time to break bread with Nana and me. Where else could he go? His parents were junkies. In a way, Nana had always been like a mother or grandmother to him too. He and I had been like brothers since we were ten. That’s why the fight the night before was so disturbing.
“Let me talk, Nana,” he said.
She nodded and sipped her tea. I’m pretty sure why I chose psychology for a career, and who my original role model was. Nana has always been the best shrink I’ve seen. She’s wise, and compassionate for the most part, but tough enough to insist on the truth. She also knows how to listen.
“I’m sorry, Alex. I didn’t sleep last night. I feel awful about what happened. I was way over the line,” Sampson said. He was staring into my eyes, forcing himself not to look away.
Nana watched the two of us as if we were Cain and Abel sitting at her breakfast table.
“You were over the line all right,” I said. “That’s for sure. You were also crazy last night. How much did you drink before you came over?”
“John told you he was sorry,” Nana said.
“Nana.” He turned to her, then back to me. “Ellis Cooper was like a brother to me. I can’t get over the execution, Alex. In a way, I’m sorry I went to see it. He didn’t kill those women. I thought we could save him, so it’s my fault. I expected too much.”
He stopped talking.
“So did I,” I said. “I’m sorry we failed. Let me show you something. Come upstairs. This is about payback now. There’s nothing left but payback.”
I brought Sampson to my office in the attic of the house. I had notes on army murder cases pinned all over the walls. The room looked like the hideout of a madman, one of my obsessive killers. I took him to my desk.
“I’ve been working on these notes since I met Ellis Cooper. I found two more of these remarkable cases. One in New Jersey, the other in Arizona. The bodies were painted, John.”
I took Sampson through the cases, sharing everything.
“Along the way,” I told him, “I learned that the Pentagon has been working to prevent over a thousand deaths the peacetime military suffers every year from high-speed car crashes, suicides, and murders. Still, during the past year more than sixty soldiers have been murdered.”
“Sixty?” Sampson said, and shook his head. “Sixty murders a year?”
“Most of the violence has to do with sex and hate crimes,” I said. “Rapes and murders. Homosexuals who’ve been beaten or killed. A series of vicious rapes by an army sergeant in Kosovo. He didn’t think he’d get caught because there was so much rape and killing going on there anyway.”
“Were any other bodies painted?” he wanted to know.
I shook my head. “Just the two cases I found, New Jersey and Arizona. But that’s enough. It’s a pattern.”
“So what do we really have?” Sampson shook his head and looked at me.
“I don’t know yet. It’s hard to get information out of the army. Something very nasty going on. It looks like soldiers may have been framed for murder. The first was in New Jersey; the latest seems to be Ellis Cooper. There are definite similarities, John. Murder weapons found a little too conveniently. Fingerprints and DNA used to convict.
“All of these men had good service records. In the Arizona murder-case transcripts, there was a mention of ‘two or three men’ seen near the victim’s house before the homicide took place. There’s a possibility that innocent men have been framed and then wrongfully put to death. Framed, then wrongfully executed. And I know something else,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“These killers aren’t brilliant like Gary Soneji or Kyle Craig. But they’re every bit as deadly. They’re expert at what they do, and what they do is kill and get away with it.”
Sampson frowned and shook his head. “Not anymore.”
Chapter 41
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 as 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 also 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 barbecued. The exception was during 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, and 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, cole slaw, macaroni, and, occasionally, Caesar.
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 ord
er.” 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 in a clusterfuck 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, whom he considered a god. “We’re going off to kill somebody this weekend, and here we are calmly barbecuing 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 from 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 U.S. 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. “It doesn’t get any better than this. It really doesn’t. We’re the best there is.”
Chapter 42
ON SATURDAY NIGHT the three killers made their way north to a small town in West 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.
Harpers Ferry was tiny, actually. You could walk from one end of town to the other in less than fifteen minutes. There was a point of interest nearby called Jefferson Rock, where you could see Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia. Kind of neat.
Starkey drove for the entire trip, no need for any relief. He liked to be at the wheel and in control anyway. He was also in charge of entertainment, which consisted of his Springsteen’s Greatest Hits tape, a Janis Joplin, a Doors, a Jimi Hendrix anthology, and a Dale Brown audiobook.
Warren Griffin spent almost the entire trip checking the team’s supplies and readying the rucksacks in back. When he was finished, the packs weighed about forty pounds, a little more than half of what they used to carry on their recon missions in Vietnam and Cambodia.
He had prepared the packs for a “hunt and kill,” the kind of ambush Colonel Starkey had planned for the Appalachian Trail. Griffin had packed standard-issue canteens; LRPs, meals that were pronounced “lurps”; hot sauce to kill the taste of the LRPs; a tin can for coffee. Each of them would have a K-Bar, the standard military combat knife; cammo sticks, with two colors of greasepaint; boony hats; poncho liners that could do double duty as ground cover; night-vision goggles; a Glock as well as an M-16 rifle fitted with a sniper scope. When he was finished with the work, Griffin uttered one of his favorite lines, “If you want to get a good belly laugh out of God, just tell him about your plans.”
Starkey was the TL, or team leader. He was in control of every aspect of the job.
Harris was the point man.
Griffin was rear security, still the junior guy after all these years.
They didn’t have to do the “hunt and kill” exactly like this. They could have made it a whole lot easier on themselves. But this was the way Starkey liked it, the way they had always committed their murders. It was “the army way.”
Chapter 43
THEY MADE CAMP about two klicks from the AT. It was dangerous for them to be seen by anybody, so Starkey established an NDP, a night defense position for the camp. Then they each kept watch in two-hour shifts. Nostalgia rules.
When Starkey took his shift, he passed the time thinking not so much about the job looming ahead of them as the job in general. He, Harris, and Griffin were professional killers and had been for over twenty years. They’d been assassins in Vietnam, Panama, and the Gulf War; now they were assassins for hire. They were careful, discreet, and expensive. The current job was their most lucrative and had involved several murders over a period of two years. The curious thing about it — they didn’t know the identity of their employer. They were given new targets only after the previous job was completed.
As he stared into the dark, restless woods, Starkey wanted a cigarette, but he settled for an Altoids. Those little fuckers kept you awake. He found himself thinking about the blond bitch they had offed near Fayetteville, pretty Vanessa. The memory got him hard, which helped the time pass. While they were still in Vietnam, Starkey had discovered that he liked to kill. The murders gave him a powerful feeling of control and then elation. It was as if electricity were passing through his body. He never felt guilt, not anymore. He killed for hire; but he also killed in between jobs, because he wanted to and liked it.
“Strange, scary stuff,” Starkey muttered, rubbing his hands together. “Scare myself sometimes.”
The three of them were up and ready by five the next morning, which was shrouded in a thick, bluish gray fog. The air was cool but incredibly fresh and clean. Starkey figured the fog wouldn’t burn off until at least ten.
Harris was in the best physical shape of the three, so he was designated as the scout. He wanted the job anyway. At fifty-one, he still played in a men’s basketball league and did triathlons twice a year.
At 5:15, he set off from camp at a comfortable jogging pace. Christ, he loved this shit.
Nostalgia.
Harris found that he was wide-awake and alert once he was on the move. He was operating beautifully after just a few minutes on the trail. The hunt and kill was a satisfying combination of business and pleasure for him, for all three of them.
Harris was the only one up this early on the AT, at least on this particular stretch. He passed a four-person dome tent. Probably some white-bread family. Most likely “section hikers,” as opposed to “through hikers,” who would take up to six months to do the entire trail, finally ending at a place called Mount Katahdin, Maine. Around the dome tent he noticed a camp stove and fuel bottles, ratty shorts and T-shirts laid out to air. Not a target, he decided and moved on.
Next he came upon a couple in sleeping bags just off the trail. They were young, probably “go see the world” types. They slept on self-inflatable air mattresses. All the comforts of home.
Harris got up close, no more than ten yards from them, before he finally decided to move on. He could tell the girl was a looker, though. Blond, cute face, maybe twenty. Just watching her sleep with her boyfriend got his jets going pretty good. They were a definite maybe.
He saw a second couple already up and exercising near their tent about a qu
arter mile farther on. They had high-tech internal frame packs and $200 hiking boots, and looked like snooty city slicks. He liked them as potential targets, mainly because he disliked the couple so much immediately.
Not far past the couple’s camp, he came upon a single male hiker. This guy was definitely in for the long haul. He had a high-tech pack that looked light and tight. He would probably be carrying dried food, trail mix, protein drink powder — fresh food was too heavy and difficult to haul around on your back all day. His wardrobe would be no frills too — nylon shorts, tank tops, maybe long underwear for the colder nights.
Harris stopped and watched the single hiker’s camp for a couple of minutes. He let his heartbeat slow and controlled his breathing. Finally, he slipped right into the man’s camp. He wasn’t afraid, and he never doubted himself. He took what he needed. The hiker never stirred from his sleep.
Harris checked his sports watch and saw that it was only 5:50. So far, so good.
He walked back to the trail, then began to jog again. He felt invigorated, excited about the hunt and kill out here on the nature trail. Man, he wanted to kill somebody, bad. Man or woman, old or young, it didn’t much matter.
The next camp he came upon was close — another couple, still asleep in a two-person dome tent. Harris couldn’t help thinking how easy it would be to take them out right now. Ducks on a pond. Everybody was so vulnerable and trusting out here. What a bunch of loonies. Didn’t they ever read the funny papers? There were killers on the loose in America, lots of them.
A little less than a mile beyond, he reached the camp of another family. Someone was already up.
He hid in the pine trees and watched. A fire had been started and was throwing up sparks. A woman of about forty was futzing around with a rucksack. She wore a red Speedo swimsuit and seemed in good physical shape — well-muscled arms and legs, a nice ass too. She called out, “Wakee, wakee!”
Moments later, two shapely teenage girls emerged from the larger tent. They had on one-piece bathing suits and were slapping their lithe bodies with their hands, trying to get warm in a hurry, trying to “wakee, wakee.”