He was in the process of writing the checks when he heard a series of explosions outside. At first, he thought one of the gravel trucks was backfiring as it descended the hill. Then two cashiers rushed through his office shouting, “Someone’s been shot! Someone’s been shot!”
Hurner looked out his window and saw Steve Peter and Trena McElroy on the ground, about five feet apart, between the Silverado and a car. The cashiers were standing at the back door of his office looking out. He pulled them back in and said, “If you’re going to watch, watch from the window. You don’t want anyone knowing that you’re seeing what’s going on out there."
A minute or two later, Jack Clement brought Trena in the front of the bank and motioned to the two cashiers. “This is Trena,” he said. “She hasn’t been hit. Take care of her.”
Lois was just leaving the bank, when Trena appeared in the doorway. Seeing Lois startled Trena, and she tried to back up, but Jack Clement maneuvered her on in. As Trena screamed and sobbed, Lois thought
sarcastically, Well, Trena, I haven't seen you in a while. Without saying a word, Lois returned to the store.
Still screaming. Trena fell into a chair and gripped its arms. Blood speckled her shirt and arms, and tiny slivers of broken glass glittered in her hair. Between sobs, she cried out, “They shot Ken! They shot Ken! They didn’t have to do that!”
A brown-haired woman in her forties walked up to Trena and said adamantly, “Yes, they did. You didn’t leave us any choice!”
Hurner walked into the main room and was approached by an excited customer, a man from Savannah.
“What’s the matter with that girl? What’s going on here?” Hurner
did not respond.
“What is wrong with that girl?” the man demanded. “Why is she screaming like that?”
“You don’t want to know what’s going on,” said Hurner. "Just get into your pickup and drive south out of town.”
“Why are you so unfriendly?” said the man.
“If you go around that corner and look, you might be in trouble,” the bank president warned.
The man left, mumbling under his breath.
Looking over at Trena, Hurner saw the blood and glass and noticed that Trena’s pants were wet at the crotch. A puddle had formed on the floor beneath her chair. The cashiers, whom Trena knew, came over and tried to take her into the bathroom to help clean her up. But she only screamed louder and grabbed the chair tighter. She had heard Jack Clement tell the women to “take care of her,” and she was afraid to go anywhere with them. She kept screaming at the top of her lungs, until the cashiers thought they would go crazy. After about ten minutes, when they realized they couldn’t do anything for her, Hurner decided to call Tim McElroy.
‘Tim,” Hurner said, “there’s been an accident involving Ken down at the tavern. Trena’s in the bank. You better come get her.” Five minutes later, Tim drove his truck up the hill, slowing only slightly as he passed the Silverado. Tim came into the bank, looked around, thanked Hurner for calling him, and took Trena by the arm. As they walked out, she was sobbing and trying to tell him what had happened.
“Let’s go check on Ken,” Tim said.
“No, no, he’s dead,” sobbed Trena. “Take me home, and you come back.”
Without looking in the direction of the Silverado, they climbed into Tim’s truck. The truck sped up this time as it passed the Silverado on the way out of town.
Hurner walked through his office and looked out the back door to see whether anyone had removed the body. McElroy was still there, in the same position, and nobody was near the Silverado. All the trucks that had been on the other side of the street were gone. He walked back through the bank and out the front of the grocery store, where he asked whether anyone had called the ambulance. Someone said it had been called, so Hurner went back to work.
Inside the store, Cheryl was trying to steady herself. For a few moments, the pain she felt in her body was worse than the fear she had felt when McElroy was alive. It was a deep, aching pain, as if poison had been released in her bones. She and Bo stepped out on the loading dock for a minute and looked at the bent figure in the truck. Neither spoke. Eventually, she went out the front and saw Tim leading Trena across the street to his pickup, holding her and talking quietly to her. Cheryl didn’t feel the slightest twinge of sympathy for either of them; she smiled at the sight of Trena’s soaked jeans. Cheryl went back into the store.
A few minutes later, deciding to move her truck and the Bowenkamps’ station wagon from the scene, Cheryl went back outside. She would really look this time, she told herself. She walked slowly up to the riddled track. The passenger door was hanging open. She paused, leaned in and took a nice, long look. She had never seen a dead person before, but the sight of McElroy’s corpse didn’t bother her at all. Blood was all over him— covering his face, spilling over his front, and flowing slowly down his back. Large green flies buzzed and snapped around him in the hot sun. On the seat lay Trena’s purse and the paper sack with the six-pack of beer in it. After fifteen months of terror, he was sitting there looking like a big, dumb, dead ape. Cheryl felt better than she had in a long time.
Evelyn Carter, who lived on a farm with her husband, Junior, northwest of town, was standing in front of the B & B Grocery talking with a friend when she heard what sounded like a string of cherry bombs going off. She glanced across the street at the men standing in front of Sumy’s station and noticed the tense expressions on their faces. A group of men came running up the hill, moving fairly fast for a bunch of farmers. Putting their
expressions together with the sounds, she realized that rifles were firing and assumed that Ken McElroy was involved one way or another. The door to the grocery store opened, and a woman motioned her to come inside. Evelyn pulled away, thinking that the grocery store would be the worst place to be if McElroy were coming after the Bowenkamps again. She and her friend crossed the street to Birt Johnson’s station, where several of the running farmers had gathered. They stood like a collection of wooden soldiers, staring silently down the street.
“What happened?” she asked of nobody in particular, staring down the street herself now.
“McElroy got shot.” Not “somebody shot McElroy,” but “McElroy got shot.”
She sighed with relief. The ordeal was over. After a few minutes, she crossed back over to the grocery store to do her shopping. She walked up and down the aisles, thinking about what had happened and forgetting what she had wanted to buy. Finally, she just stuffed an assortment of items in her basket. At the checkout counter, Lois seemed calm. She didn’t say anything about the shooting, just rang up the items, bagged them, and went on about her business.
A little embarrassed, Evelyn decided to drive down the street, even though it wasn’t on her way home, and see for herself. She had expected to find McElroy slumped over the wheel, but he was leaning back with his head hanging forward, as if he were taking a nap. Once past the Silverado, she sped up and hurried home to tell her husband and listen on the scanner for the ambulance and police calls.
40
One of the boys who had been hanging around the tavern before Bo was shot was still in bed when a friend came to the door and told him not to go to town, because McElroy had been shot. The boy dressed quickly, and walked over to the main street. When he passed the cafe, he saw people with their faces pressed against the window, looking up the street. They turned and watched him without expression or recognition as he walked by. Approaching the truck, he noticed blood dripping from a crack in the door, and a small puddle forming on the ground. McElroy was beginning to turn blue, and the boy could see one hole in his face and another in his neck. Blood was everywhere, even on the shards of glass that remained in the rear window. Jesus Christ, the boy thought, he needed killing, but this was a helluva way to do it.
Tom, one of the kids who stole for McElroy, was in Graham when he heard about the shooting. He drove to Skidmore, parked by Sumy’s, and walked down to the
Silverado. Looking in the blown-out driver’s window, he saw Ken’s head slumped on his chest and some of his teeth up on the dash. Tom felt bad, as if it were his father sitting there, dead. He wasn’t really surprised. He knew the trouble Ken had been causing, but this was a rotten thing to do—shoot him from behind, then leave him in the street like a dog. Tom’s stomach churned, sweat broke out on his forehead, and he decided to get the hell out of town as fast as he could.
Jerry T. worked the night shift at a factory in Maryville, and on occasion he partied by himself when he got off work. At 10:30 or so on the morning of July 10, after smoking some Missouri ditchweed, he chugged into Skidmore on his motorcycle to have a beer or two at the tavern. Seeing the familiar Silverado with a figure behind the wheel parked in front, he pulled in next to it. As he slapped the kickstand down with his heel and switched off the ignition key, he turned toward the truck, waved, and said, “Hi ya, Ken!”
Jerry’s hand wasn’t yet off the key before the bloody hole in McElroy’s face came into focus through the shattered window. In an instant, the haze lifted completely, and he kicked up the kickstand and switched on the key. Without taking another look, he backed the cycle up a few feet, headed down the hill, and roared east out of town at full throttle. He didn’t slow down until he reached the V turnoff, where he pulled over beneath the Punkin’ Show sign. He closed his eyes for a second while the images rushed over him. What the hell had happened back there? Where the hell was everybody?
Karen Rowlett was in the kitchen baking cookies when the phone rang.
“You’re not going to believe this,” a friend said.
“What?”
“They just killed Ken McElroy.”
At first Karen didn’t believe it, but her thoughts soon turned to the possibility of retaliation by Trena or by McElroy’s friends or relatives. She found her sons and brought them in the house, then called Larry, who had gone to work when he heard of the continuance, and told him.
“Ding dong, the witch is dead!” Larry hooted over the phone.
David Dunbar had also planned to go to Bethany for the hearing that morning, but when he received a phone call around 6:30 saying that the hearing had been canceled, he decided, like Rowlett, to go to work on the pipeline instead. When a friend called him at work with the news that McElroy had been shot, he let out a loud whoop and danced a little jig.
The sun slipped a few degrees higher in the sky as Ken McElroy sat alone in the Silverado. In its ascent, the thin yellow disk of early morning had gradually turned to a shimmering white orb, so hot that it seemed to have parched the blue out of the surrounding sky. Now, as the hour approached midday, a red halo sparkled around its edges.
At the end of McElroy’s heavily muscled arm, his hand still gripped the Bic lighter. His heart had stopped pumping, and the blood around the holes was beginning to thicken. In the heat from the roof and the pavement below, his heavy body was hardening, and its fluids were congealing.
The killers had to dispose of their weapons. According to one credible version, three or four men gathered at a farm west of town within an hour of the shooting, took the murder weapons out back to the barn, smashed the stocks off with a sledgehammer, and threw them into a stove. One of the men then fired up a blow torch and cut each barrel into fifteen or twenty pieces. The men divided up the pieces and threw half of them in wells seventy or eighty feet deep on farms west of town, and the other half in equally deep wells on farms south of town.
Deputy Sheriff Jim Kish had never had as much sympathy for the people of Skidmore as some of the other cops had. In his view, McElroy was nothing more than a bully, and the problem had developed because the town let him get away with everything he did for close to twenty years. If the townspeople had stood up to him when the trouble started, none of this would have happened. Instead, they would come into the sheriff’s office to report McElroy’s misdeeds, but they were nowhere around when the time came to sign a complaint. Kish knew that his boss, Danny Estes, was scared of McElroy, but to Kish, McElroy looked like just another pot-bellied man pushing fifty.
Kish was in the sheriff’s office when the call came in around 11 a.m., about forty-five minutes after McElroy was shot.
“My name is Richard McFadin, and I have a call that my client has been shot.”
“Who is your client?”
“Ken Rex McElroy.”
“We haven’t heard of it. We’ll check into it and call you back.” Kish turned to Danny Estes. “Danny, there is a report that McElroy has been shot.”
“Bullshit,” Estes responded.
An instant later, they heard the call for an ambulance on the scanner: There had been a shooting in Skidmore. Estes and Kish jumped in the Mercury and took off with lights flashing and siren howling, and arrived in town at 11:20, a few minutes before the ambulance. The streets were empty. Kish looked at the Silverado in amazement: the truck was full of holes, and broken glass was everywhere, as if a gang with guns had gone crazy and turned the vehicle into a shooting gallery. He could see the figure inside, and he wondered if McElroy might still be alive and armed.
By then, a few people had materialized to witness the law in action. One of them was Cheryl Brown. She laughed to herself when Kish pulled a shotgun out of the car and went creeping across the street and along the side of the truck with the shotgun on his hip, as if he were in a movie. McElroy was long past hurting anyone, but leave it to the cops who were afraid of him when he was alive, to go charging around in the streets with their guns now that he was dead.
Pressing his back against the side of the cab, Kish reached around inside, felt McElroy’s neck for a pulse, and knew instantly that he was dead. At that moment, two men walked by with glasses of iced tea in their hands and said loudly enough for Kish to hear, “I wonder who that is inside the truck. Do you know?” “No, I don’t, but he sure looks deader than hell, don’t he?”
Kish opened the door, and blood spilled out on the dirty pavement like thick, red glue. Christ, he thought, looking at the pool, there’s no way the man could possibly be alive. Down the front of McElroy’s shirt, in the scarlet spill, were pieces of bone and hair. His skin was turning blotchy, and rigor mortis was obviously setting in.
When Kish walked up to the truck, Estes strode over to the few men standing around. His face was red, and his arms were flapping, like an excited rooster.
“Goddamn it, people,” he said. “You were just supposed to watch him, not blow him away!”
He saw one man in particular coming around the corner from the bank
and walked over to him. Still gesturing wildly, Estes yelled at him, “You son of a bitch, you set me up!”
“I don’t know anything about it,” the man said, almost apologetically, “I didn’t do nothing.”
Estes turned back to the small crowd that had gathered and paused for a moment, trying to collect himself. “You weren’t supposed to blow him away, goddamn it!,” he yelled, his voice rising on the last two words.
Steve Jackson was drinking coffee in the ambulance barn in the back of St. Francis Hospital when his beeper sounded. He and his partner grabbed their equipment, jumped into the ambulance, and contacted the operator. She told them their destination was Skidmore, where a man had been shot. Jackson normally worried when responding to gunshot cases: He never knew if what had happened was really over. He called the Maryville police, which was standard procedure when running a siren through town. They confirmed the shooting and said that officers were on the way, so Jackson hit the lights and siren and took off.
On the way, Jackson thought back to the night a year earlier when the grocer had been shot. He remembered the crowds of people standing around and the hostile, sullen atmosphere. Driving across the rolling hills now, he wondered if this shooting was related. He knew it was serious, because about halfway to Skidmore, Danny Estes, who was a cousin of his, got on the radio and yelled, “Hurry the fuck up! Get out here now!”
Picking up the pace, they were
flying by the time they hit the east edge of town. They found the truck with the body parked on one side of the street and a crowd, maybe twenty or thirty people, standing on the other side. Not one of them was moving or talking; they just stood there and looked over at the truck, as if waiting for something else to happen. Usually, when the ambulance arrived, Jackson and his partner found people clustered around the victim, trying to help and discussing the details of what had happened. But not these folks. There might as well have been a radioactive zone around the truck. The man obviously hadn’t been moved or tended to in any way. The only sound was Danny Estes, who was real hot, pacing up and down the street, swearing and cursing—“fuckin’ son of a bitch, goddamn”—anything he could think of.
Jackson walked up to the truck and looked at the victim, then reached in
In Broad Daylight (Crime Rant Classics) Page 34