Read In Broad Daylight for Free Online

vehicles sliding into ditches and fence posts. One hundred yards before V intersects with 113 to enter Skidmore from the east, a well-maintained gravel road cuts south from the blacktop. Called the Valley Road, it runs straight for about a mile, through pasture lands and fields of beans and wheat and past white frame farmhouses, then curves east. Two miles further, the road passes the place where Ken McElroy grew up and learned to hunt coon.
    Ken Rex McElroy was rarely called Kenneth or Rex or Ken Rex; to his friends he was Ken, pronounced something like "kin," or Kenny. To everyone else he was McElroy. Ken McElroy was not quite a month over forty-seven-years old when he died on the main street of Skidmore. At 5 feet 10 inches and 230 pounds, he was grossly overweight, but except for a huge gut, he was mainly solid flesh. His shoulders were broad, he had a massive, barrel chest, and his arms were thick as tree trunks. His hair was naturally a dark brown, but he had dyed it pure black for years. (Alice Wood had seen pictures of him when he was younger with brown hair and a pencil-thin mustache.) He always kept it oiled and slicked back, 1950s style.
    McElroy was dark complected, attributable no doubt to the fact that his father's mother was a full-blooded Cherokee Indian. His eyes were dark blue, sometimes blue-black. (Many people in Skidmore recall him as having pitch black eyes and being well over six feet.) He had a broad forehead and heavy black eyebrows, and his eyes were set far apart. When he looked straight ahead, only the bottom three-quarters of the irises were visible, leaving white quarter-moons beneath. When he was young, girls saw his eyes as "sexy, but kind of cold"; when he was older, they became "icy black eyes that could see into your soul." Full, wide sideburns reached just below his ears, almost even with the corners of his mouth. Thin lips, like a slash below the prominent nose, turned down at the corners, the left side turning up slightly when he smiled. In his younger days, he was a handsome, almost dashing man, but in middle age his huge belly threw him out of proportion, making his legs seem almost a little too short for his body. And his face had become fleshy, a bit loose in the jowls.
    McElroy had several tattoos. On his lower right forearm was a tattoo of a cross, and within the cross were the letters MOM (or WOW). The fingers of his right hand bore the name KEN. On his upper left arm was scratched the word LOVE and beneath that was a dagger inscribed with the name JOAN. On the back of his left hand was written the word OLETA, the name of both his first wife and his second child by his third wife.
    McElroy took pride in his appearance. When he left the farm, particularly if he was going to town, he usually cleaned up, combed his hair, and put on good clothes-dark knit slacks and a western shirt or a nice T-shirt and cowboy boots. He was never seen in public looking dirty or wearing seedy clothes. He wore many of his shirts loose to conceal a .38-caliber pistol in a leather holster, custom designed to lie flat on his rib cage beneath his left armpit. Even in the winter he seldom donned a coat, and he never wore a hat.
    When he wasn't angry, McElroy was usually soft-spoken. He could sit unnoticed at a bar in Maryville, talking so low the waitress would have to lean over to hear him. When he played pool, he usually won, and he always graciously bought the next game. But he seldom laughed. When he did, in the words of a family member, it "was from the outside, not the inside" there was never a belly laugh, just a ha, ha, ha, and then it was over. McElroy moved slowly and deliberately, with a heavy person's easy grace. When he stepped out of his truck, his head would turn slightly in several directions as his eyes flicked about, automatically scanning his surroundings. Outside his home ground, Ken moved about with even more caution, always very aware of everything around him. Until the very end, he sat