Four Blind Mice

POINT IN being subtle. Sampson and I took out our guns. We held them with the barrels down, not pointed at anyone. The three of them didn’t appear to be armed.
Just a friendly little game, right?
    “Nothing’s going to happen here,” Starkey called to us. “This is where my wife and children live. It’s a good neighborhood. Decent people in all these houses up and down the street.”
    “And it’s also where you keep your porn collection,” I said. “S and M, bondage. Memories of your sweethearts from the war.”
    He smiled thinly, nodded. “That too. You’re detectives, right? D.C.? Friends of Sergeant Ellis Cooper. Seems to me that you’re a long ways from home. Why don’t you go back to Washington. It’s safer there than here in Rocky Mount. Believe it or not.”
    “We know what you’ve done,” I told him. “Most of it anyway. We don’t know why yet. That’ll come. We’re getting close. The An Lao Valley in Vietnam? What happened there, Colonel Starkey? It was real bad, right? Things got out of control. Why are Three Blind Mice still in operation?”
    Starkey didn’t deny the murders or anything else I said. “There’s nothing you can do to us. Like I said, I think you should go home now. Consider this a friendly warning. We’re not bad guys. We’re just doing our job.”
    “What if we don’t go?” Sampson asked. “What if we continue the investigation here in Rocky Mount? You killed a friend of mine.”
    Starkey clasped his hands together, then he looked at Harris and Griffin. I could tell they weren’t into friendly warnings.
    “Don’t come near any of our houses again,” Starkey said. His eyes were cold and hard. The assassin.
We’re not bad guys. We’re a whole lot worse than that.
    Brownley Harris pushed himself away from the hood of the Suburban. “You hear what the man said? You two niggers listening? You
oughtta
be. Now clear the fuck out of here and don’t ever come back. You don’t come to a man’s house with this shit. Not the way it’s done, you hear? You fucking hear me?”
    I smiled. “You’re the hothead. That’s good to know. Starkey is the leader. So what does that make you, Griffin? You just muscle?”
    Warren Griffin laughed out loud. “That’s right. I’m just muscle. And artillery. I’m the one who eats guys like you for breakfast.”
    I didn’t move a muscle. Neither did Sampson. We continued to stare at the three of them. “I am curious about one thing, Starkey. How do you know about us? Who told you?”
    His answer shook me to the core.
    “Foot Soldier,” he said. Then Colonel Thomas Starkey smiled and tipped his ball cap.

Chapter 85
    SAMPSON AND I rode the Interstate back to Washington late that afternoon. I was really starting to dislike, or at least tire of, I-95 and its thundering herd of slip-sliding, exhaust-spewing tractor-trailers.
    “The circumstances could be better, but it’s good spending all this time with you,” I said as we tooled along in the passing lane. “You’re too quiet, though. What’s up? Something’s bothering you.”
    He looked my way. “You remember a time — we were about eleven — I came over? Spent a couple of weeks with you and Nana?”
    “I remember a lot of times like that,” I told him. “Nana used to say we were brothers, just not flesh-and-blood ones. You were always at the house.”
    “This time was different, sugar. I even know why you don’t remember. Let me tell it.”
    “All right.”
    “See, I never used to go home after school. Reason being, nobody was there most of the time. That night I got home around nine, nine-thirty. Made myself corned beef hash for dinner. Sat down to watch some tube. I used to like
Mission: Impossible
back then, wait for it all week. There was a knock at the door.
    “I went to see who was there, and it was Nana. She gave me a big hug, just like she still does when she sees me. Asked me if I had some corned beef hash for her too. Said she liked hers with eggs on top. Then she cackled her cackle, you know.”
    “I don’t remember any of this. Why was she at your house so late at night?”
    Sampson continued with his story. “My father was in prison that year. Nothing unusual. That afternoon my mother was convicted for possession of heroin, with intent to sell. She’d been sentenced. Social Services came by, but I was out. Somebody called Nana Mama.
    “So Nana came over, and she actually ate a little of the hash I’d cooked. Told me it was pretty