Authors: Harry N. MacLean
"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.
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 ditch weed 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 on duty in the sheriff's office when the call came in around 11 am, 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 guys 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" fucking son of a bitch, goddamn"-anything he could think of.
Jackson walked up to the truck and looked at the victim, then reached in and pressed his thumb against the carotid artery. He came up with nothing. Jackson leaned over and looked at the wound in the man's cheek. The hole was so big and clean that he could see through it to the pattern on the seat cushion behind him. The man's face and neck were already mottled with swatches of purple and white. The purple coloring would have appeared fifteen or twenty minutes after the heart stopped pumping, but Jackson couldn't tell how long ago that had happened. He checked the man's eyes and found them dilated and fixed. The dark blue pupils didn't respond when he shone a flashlight into them.
From the looks of the body, the man had been dead nearly an hour. Jackson's partner came over with the drug box and the heart monitor. He pulled the victim's bloody shirt up, slapped the pads on his chest, and turned the machine on. A straight line moved across the screen. He ran a strip of paper to document the absence of any electrical activity and turned the machine off.
Estes walked over and started yelling: "Do something! Do something, for Chrissakes!"
"Danny, there ain't nothing to do. The guy's dead."
"Fuckin' son of a bitch!" Estes yelled, then walked off.
About four steps away, he whirled and yelled, "Well get him the hell out of here then!"
Some of the people in the crowd mistook the heart monitors for heart stimulators, and they thought the medics were trying to start up McElroy's heart.
"Is he still alive?" someone asked softly.
"He's not alive, is he?"
The person standing next to Cheryl gave a small cry. "Oh no, he's still alive!"
If he's still alive, Cheryl thought, they'll just have to shoot him again, or else he'll figure out everyone who was in the pool hall and come after them one by one.
Up until that point, nobody in the crowd had made a move toward the Silverado or said a word to Jackson or his partner. But as they rolled the cart up to the side of the truck, a couple of older guys came across the street and offered to help.
Jackson turned to one of them and asked, "Who is this guy?"
The old man looked at Jackson as if he were stupid and said, "This here is Ken McElroy."