“Jake won’t blame any of you for this,” Lloyd soothed. “He’ll likely blame himself, but he’ll never blame you boys.”
“The light from the barn fire must have helped them see to get away,” Cole surmised. “They knew once that fire was over it would be too dark for us to follow.”
The three boys jumped, and Lloyd looked up when Jake roared Randy’s name from the upstairs bedroom. Minutes later he came stumbling out, and Lloyd saw him—the fire in his dark eyes, the thunder in his presence, the dark aura that seemed to hover around the man. His heart fell when he saw that Jake Harkner the outlaw had returned full force.
Thirty-six
Jake came down the stairs, fully clothed, his guns strapped on. He headed for a locked cabinet where he kept his shotgun and repeater, other rifles, and another six-gun. He didn’t even stop to unlock it. He kicked in the glass and ripped open one of the doors, nearly making the entire cabinet fall over.
Ben started crying harder.
Jake reached inside and pulled out the extra handgun, shoving it into his belt at the back, then took out an extra cartridge belt, which he hung over his shoulder. He grabbed both the shotgun and carbine, taking them over to the kitchen table and literally throwing them onto it, along with the cartridge belt. He came back to grab boxes of shotgun shells.
The room was full of his presence. It seemed as though the whole house almost shook. Lloyd watched Jake closely.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Lloyd asked, slowly rising from where he’d knelt in front of the boys.
“What do you think I’m doing?” Jake answered darkly. “I’m going after my wife! My wife!”
Brian came in with Evie and hurried over to the boys with his doctor bag.
“Daddy!” Evie exclaimed at the sight of him.
“Don’t call me Daddy!” Jake seethed. He turned and glared at her. “I’m nobody’s daddy right now, Evie! I’m nobody’s father and nobody’s grandfather, and I likely won’t be anybody’s husband after this! I’m a man none of you has ever seen, and who I am has likely destroyed the only person who made me human! I felt this coming! I felt it in my bones! This is what happens when you let people who wrong you live!”
“Pa, you can’t go after them in the dark. You’ll only mess up good tracks trying to figure out which way they went,” Lloyd argued. “There’s enough snow on the ground that they’ll be easy to follow by morning. We can—”
“By morning my wife will be dead or wishing she was dead!” Jake roared. “My Randy! My reason for living!”
“Pa, use your head!” Lloyd yelled, walking closer. “We need to think this out—get some of the men together. You do this your way, and you’ll end up riding into a trap—or if you succeed, you could end up back in that courtroom!”
“If I lose your mother, I don’t care if they hang me, so do you really think I give a damn right now about going back to jail?”
“No, Jake Harkner, I don’t think you do give a damn!” Lloyd roared back. “I think of you right now as Jake—not my father—just Jake! And if you want to be the man I hated when he went to prison, you go ahead and be that man! You show your grandsons how you are when your own father takes over and creates a mean sonofabitch who goes out and kills first and asks questions later and then goes to prison for it!”
Jake charged into Lloyd, and Evie screamed and ducked out of the way when he slammed Lloyd against a wall. Lloyd shoved back, grabbing his father’s shirt and jerking him around to pin him in return. “You listen to me, Jake Harkner, or I’ll put another bruise on that jaw! I’ll fucking shoot you before I let you go out there and destroy everything you’ve taken thirty years to build—thirty years to overcome—thirty years my mother put up with and hung on to and loved you through!”
Jake grabbed his wrists and shoved, but Lloyd hung on, pushing back. “Go ahead! Be your father, Jake!” Lloyd seethed. “Show the boys what he was like! Now your grandsons can meet him! And then you can go out there and kill all those men without thinking first—and you can kill him all over again, just like you did with all the others!”
“Daddy,” Evie softly whimpered.
Brian tried to comfort the three boys, all of them bleeding and shaking.
Jake and Lloyd just stared at each other.
“She said that,” Jake said quietly, obviously speaking only to Lloyd. “That night in the wagon all those years ago when we…” He closed his eyes. “Let go of me.”