A Billy Coffey Collection by Billy Coffey

Author:Billy Coffey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2015-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

10

The wooden target out back of the sheriff’s office wasn’t Zach’s alone to use. The path leading to and from had been made by boots much larger than his, just as the deep gashes in the rings of the tree round had been made by one who threw Bessie with much more violence.

I stood at the head of that worn path now. My eyes blinked against exhaustion and strain as I stared at the target, giving it face after face.

There was Zach, who would be in school for another hour. With all that weighed on my mind, I still hoped my son had made his peace with Danny Blackwell that day. I hoped he would always make peace and always do the right thing so he would not grow up to lie to the woman and the town he loved.

Then came Kate, who had gone to the hills carrying both a box and my secret. I didn’t know what she would do with the latter, but I knew she’d use the former to take another step along a road with no end.

There was Trevor Morgan, who had done more to harm Mattingly in the last days than any devil.

My father was next, the almost-murderer who had come down from the mountains and claimed my place as town protector, and who in many ways had haunted me more than Phillip McBride ever could.

There came Taylor, who knew what I had done to Phillip in the Hollow the day Kate played her trick. The face I saw there was more a rendering and based solely upon Timmy Griffith’s description, but it was Taylor enough. His picture settled into the contours of the wood. My fingers twitched at my right side, wanting to move. It could not. That image was not real, yet I was as afraid of it as I was everything else.

Taylor’s likeness stretched out to the edges of the target and faded. I blinked, not understanding the image my mind conjured next. The skin on this face was gaunt and sallow. Dark, wide eyes stared out from beneath a black hat, cutting first right and then left, searching not for something to find but somewhere to hide. It was the face of a man stranded in a fate of his own making, caught by a rising tide upon slippery rocks.

My hand moved before that picture could change. I reached behind my back and drew the tomahawk forward, flipping the handle in the air and catching it behind my right shoulder in one smooth motion.

Bessie flew. Her arc held true, the blade cleaving the air between me and the target in mere seconds, striking the small space in the wood I saw as the drawn brows over my own eyes. The iron head lodged itself there to the hilt.

“Not bad.”

I looked to the door. My right arm crossed my body, frozen in the throw’s follow-through. Justus’s body took up nearly all of the doorway. The only bits of light that leaked

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