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Chapter One
(read or print)
The first bullet ruined Hoyt Ready's heart, and he was dead before the quick second one came. He never saw the killer, never heard the killer, either.
Hoyt Ready hadn't heard the kitchen screen door open. He didn't hear the floor creak as the killer came stealthily from the kitchen into the living room-dining room of the well-kept, white-frame, two-story farmhouse. The Readys lived out in the country, half a mile west and half a mile north of Cash County's Essaquahnahdale School and nearly a half mile from nearest neighbors.
There had been no car noise when the killer arrived. Ready's wife, Inez, upstairs changing clothes, would have heard that for sure. The killer had parked in a WPA-built American-elm-and-black-locust windbreak 150 yards west and had walked to the house.
The Readys were just back from Sunday morning services at the First Methodist Church in Vernon, the southwest Oklahoma county seat, where Hoyt ran the bank. Inez, middle-aged, prim, and thin as a praying mantis, clunked in her heavy black dress shoes up the stairs to their bedroom to take off her black-crepe Sunday dress and put on a wraparound workday smock.
Downstairs, Hoyt Ready took off his black suit coat, opened the closet door next to the framed color print of the Last Supper, and hung the coat neatly on a wooden hanger he found there. Hoyt liked everything neat and in its place. He also liked to eat on time, and he was used to being boss.
"Jesus Christ, Inez!" he hollered up the stairs. "I hope you're not going to take all day on putting out dinner."
She came to the head of the stairs, and called down, "I left it in the oven, warming. Won't take a minute after I get my clothes changed."
"What?" Hoyt yelled. As a child in Kansas, he'd suffered a high fever that had left his hearing impaired.
Inez didn't answer. Hoyt picked up the weekly Vernon Herald from the table and pulled a straight-backed oak dining chair over to the west window. He pushed the ivory-colored lace curtains apart to get a better light, then sat down facing toward the narrow, steep stairs, his back to the kitchen.
The small-town banker hadn't even finished reading the lead front-page story of the local weekly's latest edition--a story headlined, "Oklahoma 1935 Farm Foreclosures Reach All-Time High"--when the killer poked the barrel of the semiautomatic .22-caliber rifle through the chair back's rungs, almost touching the cloth of the starched white shirt, fired point-blank, then quickly fired again. Neither bullet exited.
Hoyt Ready's body slumped forward, shirt back reddening. Brilliantined black hair, which he combed from low on the left side over a spreading bald spot, fell down over his eyes. The killer reached to pull the body back to keep it in the chair.
"What was that?" Inez said loudly, alarmed, as she came hurriedly down the stairs barefoot, tying her flowered cotton smock in front. "Hoyt?"
She came to a quick stop at the bottom of the stairs as she saw her dead husband in the chair, head lolling to one side, and at the same time took in the person with the gun standing behind him. Her eyes went wide. She put her hand over her mouth. But she didn't cry out. It was almost as if she had been expecting something like this.
The killer looked her squarely in the face. Neither said anything during the instant it took the killer to take two quick steps forward and shoot her in the left breast.
Inez Ready sat down heavily on the top step. She looked down at the rapidly spreading bright red patch of blood on her smock front, and then rolled over on her knees, as if to pray.
"Oh, Lord, I'm dead," she said.
"Not yet," the killer said grimly, taking another step toward the wounded woman and deliberately placing a second shot midway up on the left side of her back. The woman slumped face forward onto the stairs. Now, sure enough dead.
Not rushing, the killer leaned the rifle against a wall and went carefully about arranging things. The Readys were made to sit, side by side, at the dining table. It wasn't hard putting them there. Hoyt Ready was small and lean. He weighed little more than his wife, always having preached that overeating was a sin.
The kitchen screen door banged once and soon banged again, as the killer exited and quickly reentered with a red five-gallon can of kerosene, or coal oil, as people called it.
The rag rug that Inez Ready had made herself, the tablecloth she'd crocheted, and the off-white lace curtains she'd hemmed by hand for the room's two windows--all these were drenched. The last gallon of kerosene was splashed over the Readys' heads and shoulders.
The killer dropped the kerosene can just inside the kitchen screen door, then took a box of matches from the kitchen counter. Using four matches, the killer carefully set fire to the curtains at the two windows, then the tabletop, and, finally, the rug beneath the table.
Outside again, the killer waited a full minute to be sure the flames were catching fully. They were. Turning then, the killer began to jog toward the secreted vehicle, knowing that there was not the slightest possibility that the nearest volunteer fire departme
nts--Vernon's, five miles north, or Wardell's, five and a half miles east--would receive an alarm and get to the farmhouse until well after everything had been reduced to charcoal.
Old Sore-eyed Cecil and two of his ragged little girls were on the corner in front of the bank, braced against a stiff early-November wind. He heard my cowboy boots on the sidewalk and held out a thin hand.
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