In Plain Sight

Joe pulled the trigger. Keeley’s head kicked back against the barn door and he slumped over to the side, dead. Even Joe couldn’t miss from an inch away.

WHEN JOE STOOD and turned, he saw Nate stumbling across the grass toward him. Nate was hurt.

“The son-of-a-bitch Wyatt coldcocked me when I looked away,” Nate said unsteadily. There was blood on the side of his head.

“Wyatt did that?” Joe asked, his voice disembodied due to what he had just done. He didn’t feel triumphant, or guilty. He didn’t know how he felt yet.

Behind Nate, a curl of smoke came out of an upstairs window of the ranch house. Then another. And the windows lit up with flame inside.

Joe approached Nate, his gun hanging limply at his side. He was numb everywhere. Although he knew what he was watching, it seemed as if it were on a movie screen; it didn’t seem real. He could still feel the sharp recoil of the gun in his hand, feel the shock waves shoot up his arm from the shot. Thought about the way Keeley had simply collapsed on himself and pitched to the side, like a side of beef, the evil spark gone that had once lit him up.

Thinking: Killing is easier than it should be. John Wayne Keeley probably had the same thought.

Then: What has happened to me? How could he have dared to threaten my daughters?

FLAMES WERE LICKING through the windows and front door, the roof was burning. Joe could smell the smoke, hear 120-year-old wooden beams popping inside the structure.

“Where’s Wyatt?” Joe asked, his voice seeming hollow, lifeless.

“I think he got out,” Nate said, now recovered enough to stand next to Joe.

“Nope,” Joe said, pointing. “There he is.”

Wyatt appeared on the side of the house through the smoke. He was hard to see clearly because of the pulsing waves of heat. But it was big-shouldered Wyatt, walking straight toward the house with something over his shoulder.

Opal. Stiff as a board.

Wyatt carried the mount of his mother through the front door, straight into the teeth of the fire.

“My God,” Nate said. “He’s making a funeral pyre.”

“I was sure wrong about Opal,” Joe said, his voice tinny and distant.

Nate said, “Before he thumped me, Wyatt told me his mother died of a heart attack that morning after some guide named Wayman threw her in the river. She died peacefully, and Arlen found her. Arlen buried her in secret because he knew about the will giving Hank the ranch, but Wyatt saw him and dug her up. Wyatt made her into what she always wanted to be—immortal. And what he always wanted her to be.”

“Pleasant,” Joe said.

“Hell of a legacy,” Nate said.

AS DUSK APPROACHED, Joe sat with his girls in Wyatt’s shack. Doris comforted Julie, whispering to her that things would be all right. Julie appeared catatonic. Sheridan reached out to her, held her hand.

The house continued to burn until it collapsed in on itself. The rain stopped and the sky cleared.

Joe was surprised to find out that telephone service was restored to Wyatt’s phone, and he called Marybeth.

“I’m with the girls,” he said. “They’re safe.”

He listened with tears in his eyes as Marybeth cried with joy, and handed the phone to Sheridan and Lucy so they could talk with her.

When they finally handed the phone back, Joe gave her an abbreviated version of what had happened. Since the girls were listening, Joe didn’t tell her about any of the details, only that J. W. Keeley had brought the girls to the ranch, that they’d been saved by Wyatt, and that Keeley and the Scarlett brothers had had a fight which resulted in the house burning down.

The story shocked her into silence.

“There’s a lot more to it, isn’t there, Joe?”

It was as if she knew he’d killed J. W. Keeley in cold blood.

“Yes, there is. But it’s for later,” he said.

She said the sheriff’s office had just called and they were sending the helicopter out. It should be there any minute.

“Is Nate still there?” she asked.

“Yes, but I haven’t seen him recently.”

“You might want to tell him the sheriff is coming,” she said.

Joe agreed and hung up.

JOE COULD HEAR the distant approaching thump of the helicopter as he walked the ranch yard. The smoke from the fire stung his nose and made his eyes tear up.

Nate was gone. So was a drift boat Joe had seen earlier leaning against the barn. And so was J.W. Keeley’s body. Joe guessed it was in the fire, where it would be discovered with the others. Neat and clean.

Joe drew his weapon and threw it as far as he could into the river. His holster followed.

It was crashing in on him now: what had happened, what he’d done, how J.W. had forever welded the fates of the Keeley, Scarlett, and Pickett families together by death.