Do Not Forsake Me(96)
“I saw them too,” Jake said quietly.
Jessie gritted her teeth. “How in hell can you sit there on that horse, Jake Harkner, and tell me so casually about my son and my man bein’ dead—and you bein’ the one who killed them!”
Jake lit the cigarette and waved out the match before dropping it. “I can sit here and tell you casually, because Lloyd and I saw what they did to an innocent fifteen-year-old girl, Jessie—an innocent young girl who’d never been touched by a man till they got through with her. So no—it didn’t bother me at all to shoot them both down, and it doesn’t bother me to talk about it.”
Jessie finally set the gun aside and folded her arms. “They was still my husband and my son. Ain’t you got no feelin’s about that? You’ve got a son.”
“And my son knows that if he ever did something like what we found, I’d damn well shoot him myself for it! Are you saying it’s okay what they did? They not only raped that girl, but they robbed a bank and shot an innocent man who happened to be inside.”
Jessie looked away, blinking back tears. “I ain’t sayin’ that. But you have a lot of nerve ridin’ in here like this. Get the hell off my property, Harkner.”
“Well, right now, you’re still basically a squatter who’s here only because a judge is allowing it, which means this part of Oklahoma belongs to the federal government until they open it up for settlement, so I have every right to be here, Jessie. And before you claim I have no feelings, I could easily have shot Brad last week, but I didn’t. I thought about you losing Bo, so I took Brad down a different way so you’d have one son left.”
“Well, ain’t that just fucking decent of you!” The words were shouted from near the doorway, and a moment later, Brad appeared, looking much thinner than he had the day Jeff watched Jake throw the kid off the boardwalk in Guthrie. He walked outside, bent over like an old man. “I still can’t stand up straight, Harkner! I ain’t never had so much pain in my life.”
“At least you’re alive,” Lloyd told him. “Consider yourself lucky, seeing as how it was Jake Harkner who took you down.”
“Yeah, well, your old man took me by surprise, else I’d have beat the shit out of him,” Brad bragged.
“Well, when you’re all healed up, you come on into town and I’ll take you on myself,” Lloyd answered.
“There’s other ways of getting revenge,” Brad told him with a sneer.
“Yeah? What’s that?”
Brad grinned. “Just ways, that’s all. Family is family, Lloyd.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Ole Jake here has a family of his own, that’s all. He ought to find out what it’s like to lose a loved one.”
As though sensing its rider’s fury, Lloyd’s horse whinnied and jerked backward.
“You filthy sonofabitch!” Lloyd spat back. He reined his horse to a standstill and started to dismount.
“Stay on your horse, Lloyd!” Jake warned, eyeing Jessie.
“He threatened the family!” Lloyd growled.
“Killing him won’t help!”
“Maybe not, but it would feel real good!” Lloyd glowered at Brad. “I’m real close to coming over there and breaking every rib in your body, you bastard! How does it feel having the shit kicked out of you by a fifty-six-year-old man? Kind of humiliating, isn’t it? Next time it will be somebody your own age, and you’ll spend a hell of a long time getting on your feet again, if ever!”
“You might not live long enough to try!”
Just then a movement came from Jake’s right. In an instant, his gun was out and fired. Jeff’s horse skittered sideways at the boom and Jeff hung on tight, also keeping hold of the packhorse as it jerked its head at the sound. A man at the far end of the porch fell with a hole in his chest.
The moment Jake fired the gun, Lloyd was off his horse, his gun drawn. He charged past Brad and into the house. Jeff’s eyes darted in every direction, his heart pounding.
“Where in hell did that man come from?” Jake demanded.
“That’s Luke Cummings,” Brad answered. “He was in the kitchen—must have snuck out the back door after Lloyd came around from behind the house. We didn’t give him no orders to shoot. He’s just a hired hand.”
“And you thought it best not to tell us he was in there?” Jake answered, putting his gun back in its holster.
Jeff stared at the dead body—another man shot as casually as lighting a cigarette.
“Maybe he didn’t even mean to shoot you,” Brad objected. “How do you know he wasn’t just comin’ to see what was goin’ on?”