Williams shook his head. “I didn’t ever have a chance,” he said. “Not a real one. Not in this county; not with these people always running things.” He waved the barrel toward Mr. and Mrs. Kitchings. “This man’s daddy locked my grandpa in the jail on a trumped-up charge and let him burn to death in there.” He took a step toward the old couple. “Who made y’all the lords of Cooke County? Tell me — who? Your people been treatin’ my people like we was dirt for as long as we can remember. And we remember back a long damn way.”
The old man had looked stooped and broken ever since Art had come after him. Now his spine straightened and fire flashed from his eyes. “You don’t remember back near as far as you ought to, then. You start feeling proud, you just recollect the Civil War and the damn Home Guard. Your people was galloping around, waving rebel flags and stealing food and burnin’ barns and killin’ folks that was just trying to stay alive. Struttin’ around like y’all was doing your patriotic duty. Well, bullshit. If y’all been treated like you was second-class, it’s nothin’ but what you’uns deserve. You was common back then, and you’re common now. Just…common.” He spat out the word with such loathing and contempt that it somehow became the nastiest slur I’d ever heard.
It must have sounded nasty to Williams, too, because I saw his teeth clench and his nostrils flare. The barrel of the hunting rifle jerked in the minister’s direction. I opened my mouth to shout — a warning, a protest, a formless shriek, I’m not sure what — but before I could, the deputy’s finger clenched and the gun roared. Reverend Kitchings gasped and crumpled to the floor, slipping from his wife’s feeble grasp. Everyone stood frozen for a moment, and then I heard a high, keening wail coming from Mrs. Kitchings.
As Williams jacked the rifle’s lever to load another round in the chamber, Art lunged for him. Williams swung the rifle, and the stock caught Art in the cheekbone. He staggered and sank to his hands and knees.
I looked away, appalled and sickened. And that’s when I saw it: a small, dark dot on the southern horizon. The wind was booming again from the north, drowning out the sound, but I’d seen enough helicopters in the past few days to recognize another one. Whose it was, or how it happened to be swooping toward us, I had no idea. But I prayed the wind would mask its approach until someone inside could get off a shot at Williams. But would they, even if they had a chance? My heart sank as I realized that the deputy — the one person in a law enforcement uniform — was probably the last person another officer would fire on. I looked back to the porch and down at Art — still on his knees — and noticed his eyes flick toward the horizon and register a sign of hope. He’d seen it, too.
All I could think to do was stall for time, distract Williams for a few crucial moments. Maybe once the chopper landed, we could shout for help, shout out an explanation of some sort — if nothing else, as we were gunned down ourselves, maybe one of us could shout that it was Williams who had shot Orbin and the reverend. “I don’t see how you expect to get away with this,” I said loudly. “You’ll have to kill all of us, and the TBI’s going to find that mighty suspicious.”
He shook his head scornfully. “Naw, they’re just gonna find it real tragic,” he said. “I’d warned you to stay away from Mr. and Mrs. Kitchings here. Crazy with grief, blaming you for the death of Orbin, Reverend Kitchings here blasted y’all with both barrels. If only I’d arrived thirty seconds sooner.” As he said this, he stooped and reached for the shotgun with his left hand, keeping his right hand on the trigger of the rifle, which was cradled in his arm. “When the reverend reloaded and aimed at me, I had no choice but to shoot him.” He paused to compose the next lines of his story. “Imagine my surprise when his wife grabbed the shotgun as he fell, and then she turned on me. Broke my heart to have to shoot an old woman, but what else could I do?” He looked from the rifle to the shotgun and back again, as if considering which murder weapon to employ first. He seemed to reach a decision, for he set the shotgun back down, raised the hunting rifle to his shoulder, and aimed at Mrs. Kitchings.
The chopper was tantalizingly close now — no more than a hundred yards — and I knew he’d hear it any second. His finger tightened on the trigger. “No!” I shrieked desperately. “I don’t want to die! Don’t kill us! Please don’t kill us! No, no, no, no!” He hesitated, staring at me in confusion and annoyance, then shifted his stance and turned the barrel toward me. But it was the wrong gun — he was planning to shoot Art and me with the shotgun — and he hesitated.
At that moment a Bell LongRanger bearing FBI markings dove toward the parking lot. Even before it slammed down, a door burst open and a figure leapt out and sprinted toward the house, bellowing. Williams spun, astonished. “Gun!” shouted Art. “Up on the porch! He’s got a gun!”
Despite twenty years, forty pounds, a knee injury, and a mild heart attack, Tom Kitchings still ran with the power and determination worthy of a halfback. Williams began to fire. The sheriff dodged and juked as if he were headed for the goal line in Neyland Stadium, and I saw something of the speed and agility that had once electrified fans by the thousands. Williams levered off two quick shots, but Kitchings was still churning, still closing the distance, when Art launched himself at the deputy and knocked him to the porch. Williams struggled beneath him, but Art drove a knee into his solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him, then wrenched the rifle free with a finger-snapping yank. Scrambling to his feet, he jammed the barrel against Williams’s temple. “Give me a reason,” Art gasped. “Give me any little reason to shoot you. Come on, do it!” Williams slumped, limp and defeated.
Tom Kitchings half-vaulted, half-fell up the steps and onto the porch. “Hey, Sheriff, that was some run,” I said. “Looks like you haven’t lost your form after all.” He ignored me and sank to his knees beside his dazed mother and his dead father.
“Oh, Mama,” he cried. “Oh, Mama, what’s happened to us? What has happened to this family, Mama?” He was gasping and sobbing.
She wrapped her arms around him. “Terrible things,” she said. “God’s judgment. We brought it down on our own selves. We did. Ever one of us but you.”
He choked on the words. “Oh, Mama, I tried. I tried so hard to make good.”
“You did. You done real good. You always made me proud. You just keep on, no matter what.”
“It’s too late, Mama. Too late.”
“No it ain’t. You got a good heart, Tommy, and you’re all I got left in this world. You got to keep on making me proud.”
“I can’t, Mama. I’m shot. I’m shot, and it’s bad.” Only when he said the words did I notice the bloom of crimson spreading across the back of his khaki shirt. He sagged against her, then slid to the porch, and just like that, he was gone.
Two more men thundered up the porch steps, weapons drawn: Steve Morgan and “Rooster” Rankin. “TBI,” shouted Morgan, “don’t move!” But he and Rankin were the ones who froze as they surveyed the carnage at their feet: two men dead, a third facedown with a rifle barrel to his head, an old and broken woman weeping beside the bloody corpses of her husband and son.
Art never shifted his gaze or his aim from Williams. “Police officer,” he called out. “Arthur Bohanan, KPD. This is Dr. Bill Brockton, state forensic anthropologist. This deputy here has committed at least three murders.”
“It’s okay, Art,” said Rankin. “It’s Agent Rankin and Agent Morgan. We know all about this asshole’s handiwork now. Let me just get in there and cuff him, if you don’t mind.” Rankin knelt and yanked Williams’s hands behind his back, then jerked him to his feet, dragging him down the stairs and shoving him toward the chopper.