Home Invasion

H
OME
I
NVASION

WILLIAM W.
JOHNSTONE

with J. A. Johnstone

All copyrighted material within is
Attributor Protected.

PINNACLE BOOKS are published by

Kensington Publishing Corp. 119
West 40th Street
New York, NY 10018

Copyright © 2010 William W. Johnstone

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE
Following the death of William W. Johnstone, the Johnstone family is working with a carefully selected writer to organize and complete Mr. Johnstone’s outlines and many unfinished manuscripts to create additional novels in all of his series like The Last Gunfighter, Mountain Man, and Eagles, among others. This novel was inspired by Mr. Johnstone’s superb storytelling.

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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eISBN-13: 978-0-7860-2585-5
eISBN-10: 0-7860-2585-5

First printing: December 2010

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America

Home, Texas, is a town that lives up to its name a small, peaceful, off-the-beaten-track West Texas community that seems like a throwback to a kinder, gentler America. Yeah, they have satellite Internet service, but they also have a Dairy Queen where you can go in for breakfast and know everybody there. The school mascot, an antelope, is painted on the water tower at the edge of town, along with the proud declaration 1A STATE CHAMPS 1977. A long time ago, but nobody has forgotten. The words are repainted every year.

Home is a town where on a quiet Sunday morning the main thing you hear are hymns being sung in the local churches. The interstate highway is thirty miles away, so you can’t hear the rumble of the eighteen-wheelers. But the mountains, thirty miles the other way, seem to be right in the town’s backyard because the air is so clear. Home may not be very big
—POP. 1280,
reads the sign at the edge of town—but the people who live there like it. Many of them have lived there their entire lives.

They don’t realize that Home is about to become Hell.

Peter McNamara was sound asleep when his wife, Inez, took hold of his shoulder and shook it. Of course, he was asleep. It was ten-forty-five at night, wasn’t it? Pete hadn’t been awake past ten-thirty since Johnny Carson retired.

“Pete. Pete!”

He rolled over, let out the sort of moaning sound that a sixty-eight-year-old man makes when he rolls over, and asked, “What is it?”

“Somebody’s in the house,” Inez whispered. Pete frowned and lifted himself on an elbow. “What do you mean, somebody’s in the house? Nobody’s supposed to be here but us.”

“You think?”

He swallowed the irritation he felt at her tone of voice. “We don’t have burglars around here. Everybody knows everybody else.”

“The border’s less than an hour from here.”

That was true, and Pete knew what went on down there, below the Rio Grande. Over the past decade, Mexico had descended into a state of near-anarchy as the power of the government shrank and the power of the drug cartels grew and grew and grew.

Mexico City and the other large cities were armed camps, patrolled day and night by the army. The problem there was that the army was so corrupt that now it was little more than a branch of the cartels.

Few Americans crossed the border anymore except those bent on some sort of criminal activity. The only places where it was still safe for Americans to visit were the coastal resorts, and those were heavily guarded by special police.

Those special police actually worked for the cartels, although the tourists didn’t know that. They didn’t want nervousness to interfere with the steady flow of
tourista
dollars.

The only reason Pete knew about it was because Inez had a couple of cousins who worked for one of the hotels in Cancun, and she had heard about it from them.

Violence from the gang wars among the cartels was rampant along the border, on both sides of the river. The Texas Rangers, the Border Patrol, and the local police managed to keep reasonable order in the border towns on the Texas side, but there were still a lot of cartel-related incidents. Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas all had their share of problems directly related to the cartel rivalries.

But that sort of trouble hadn’t touched Home yet. The biggest problem around here were the fights that sometimes broke out in the honky-tonks out on the state highway on Friday and Saturday nights. Pete read the Home
Herald
from cover to cover every week, and the police report hadn’t listed any burglaries in he couldn’t remember when.

So even though Inez was worried about somebody breaking into the house, Pete didn’t think it had really happened. She’d been dreaming, or she’d heard something else. They didn’t have a cat, but they did have a little dog that sometimes knocked things over.

“What did it sound like?” he asked her.

“I heard floorboards creaking. Somebody’s walking around out there.”

This was an old house, built in 1947. It made noises, like all old houses do. But Pete humored his wife and asked, “Which way were they going?”

“Down the hall, toward the den.”

For the first time since waking up, Pete felt a stirring of unease. If burglars
were
going to break into the McNamara house, the den was where they would find the things most worth stealing. Both computers were there, the desktop that Inez used and the laptop that Pete used while sitting in his recliner. Most of his guns were in the den as well, the handguns in a locked gunsafe, the rifles and shotguns in a couple of locked cabinets. Pete had hunted a lot when he was younger, and he still enjoyed having the guns around even though he didn’t use them much anymore.

But he still practiced enough to keep his shooting eye, and not
all
the guns were in the den.

He sat up, swung his legs out of bed, and put his bare feet on the floor.

“What are you going to do?” Inez asked.

“Check it out. That’s what you want me to do, isn’t it?”

“I’d appreciate it. You want me to come along?”

To tell the truth, deep down he did. Inez was a brave woman—hell, she had put up with him for more than forty years, hadn’t she?—and she had done enough hard work in her life that she was still tough and strong despite getting older.

But Pete didn’t say that. He said, “No, you stay here. I’ll be right back. I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about.”

His eyes were adjusted to the darkness. There was a big moon in the sky outside casting silvery illumination through the curtains, and he had no trouble moving across the room to the closet. He opened the door silently, reached up onto the shelf, and touched the wood-grained plastic box first try. He took it down, set it on the dresser, undid that latches, and lifted the lid.

His fingers curled around the butt of the.45 Colt automatic and took it out of the box. He had carried it in Vietnam and then in West Germany as an MP during his two hitches in the army, and he took it to the range often enough and shot well enough that he thought he might still be able to qualify with it if he had to.

He opened his underwear drawer, slid his hand down beside the stacks of clean underwear, and found the loaded magazine and the box of extra ammunition. He didn’t think he would need any more rounds than what were in the magazine, so he didn’t bother opening the box. Besides, his pajamas didn’t have any pockets. What the hell were they thinking these days, making pajamas without pockets? Just because a man was going to bed, he’d never need to carry anything?

Pete slid the magazine into the automatic until it clicked into place. He pulled back the slide to put a round in the chamber, but he did it quietly. If somebody
was
in the house who wasn’t supposed to be, there was no point in giving them any more warning than he had to.

“Be right back,” he whispered to Inez.

He went to the door of their bedroom, eased it open, and stepped out into the hall.