Home Invasion (2 page)

Jorge Corona and Emilio Navarre had grown up together in Piedras Negras, joined a street gang together when they were ten, and committed their first murders when they were twelve. By the time they were recruited to the gang that worked for the Rey del Sol cartel when they were twenty, Jorge had killed seventeen people, Emilio only fifteen. In the three years since then, Emilio had managed to cut Jorge’s lead to one. They were best friends, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t have a little friendly competition between them.

There were two old people in this house, Emilio knew. If he could kill both of them, he would pull ahead.

They had been in Home—and what a stupid name for a town, they both thought; only the Texan
viejos
could come up with something like that—for several days, just checking things out, deciding what they would do. Every morning they sat near the table in the Dairy Queen where the old men gathered.

Listen carefully to the old men talking, without appearing to do so, and before too long you would know everything that was going on in a small town… who was getting married, who was having a baby, who was leaving town, who had cancer, who had a prostate the size of a dang grapefruit.

You could also get an idea who had the most guns, because these Texans loved to talk about their guns.

A man named Pete McNamara seemed to be a likely candidate. From the way the other old men talked, this hombre McNamara had quite a collection of firearms. Jorge and Emilio were particularly interested in the pistols and shotguns. Hunting rifles didn’t really come in handy in their line of work very often. But a nice heavy handgun was always a good thing to have, and nothing was better than a shotgun for sending straight to hell some fool who dared to cross Rey del Sol.

McNamara’s hair was mostly white, with only a little gray left in it. He had a gray mustache that he probably thought gave his lined, weathered face some dignity. There in the Dairy Queen, he wore a flannel shirt, even though it was hot outside. That told Jorge and Emilio that his blood ran thin and he was always cold.

His hand trembled a little, too, when he reached for his coffee cup. A man such as that, so weak, so useless, he might as well already be dead.

The only purpose in life he still served was to be robbed and killed by strong young men.

Jorge and Emilio left the restaurant while the gathering of old men still went on, although it appeared it would be breaking up soon. They waited in the car they had stolen in Eagle Pass and driven up from the border. Emilio pretended to talk on his cell phone so they would have a reason to be just sitting there.

Ten minutes later, McNamara came out, got into a pickup, and drove off. Jorge followed him to an old but well-kept-up frame house on the edge of the town. The house was painted green and had a dark green roof. McNamara parked in the driveway, in front of an attached, one-car garage that had a sedan in it. The wife’s car, no doubt. A breezeway connected the garage to the house and had the washer and dryer in it. As Jorge drove slowly past, he and Emilio saw the woman in there, watched as she greeted McNamara. A thick-bodied woman with dark hair, and even the quick glimpse was enough to tell Jorge and Emilio that she was Hispanic.

“Marry a gringo, you deserve whatever happens to you, you dumb bitch,” Emilio muttered as Jorge drove on past the house. “Tonight?”

Jorge nodded. “Tonight.”

There was no need to wait any longer. They wouldn’t find a better target than this. Soon they would be on their way back to Mexico with a carful of guns and whatever else they could loot from the house.

The lights in the house went out a little after ten o’clock. The two amigos waited half an hour, then waited a little longer still, just to be sure. It wouldn’t really matter all that much if they woke up the house’s inhabitants, because they planned to kill the two old people anyway, but it would be easier to dispose of them if they were asleep. It would be a simple job, no torture, no rape, just murder and robbery. No fuss, no muss, as the anglos said.

They got out of the car and circled around to the back of the house. Back windows were usually easier to break into. And in a place like this, they didn’t take elaborate security precautions to begin with.

These people thought they were safe.

A simple hook-and-eye held the screen on the kitchen window. It took Jorge all of ten seconds to cut the screen, reach inside, and unhook it. He lifted the whole screen out of the window frame.

Emilio used a tiny LED flashlight to check for locks on the window. There were none. What was wrong with these people? Did they still believe it was the Twentieth Century?

Emilio slipped the light back in his pocket and started to raise the window. To his surprise, it didn’t budge. He got the light out and looked again.

“Painted shut,” he whispered to Jorge.

That wasn’t good, but it wasn’t an insurmountable obstacle. It just meant the window might make a little more noise when they opened it.

They had brought small pry bars. They used their knives to whittle out places in the sill where they could work the bars under the window, then working together, they heaved on both bars and broke the window loose. It made a scraping, squealing sound as it rose.

Jorge and Emilio looked at each other and shrugged. What happened, happened.

They climbed inside.

This wasn’t their first burglary. They knew how to find their way around in a strange house. Within minutes, they had located the den. They knew from eavesdropping on the conversation in the Dairy Queen that this was where McNamara kept his guns. First they would check out the haul they were going to make, then they would deal with the old people.

But as Emilio flashed the little light around the den with its gun cabinents and display cases, its big TV, its stuffed animal heads on the walls, Jorge suddenly gripped his arm and whispered, “Somebody’s coming!”

Pete’s chest started to hurt when he saw the reflection of the light darting around inside the den. Somebody was definitely in there. Up until now, he had hoped that Inez was wrong, that nobody had actually broken into the house where they had lived for decades, where they had raised their kids, enjoyed the good things, and endured the bad things that all married couples do.

Somebody was in their
house,
by God. Somebody who wasn’t supposed to be here.

Pete’s throat was tight with anger, but he had to keep swallowing his fear, too. He’d had a few hairy moments as an MP, but overall his life had been remarkably free from violence and danger.

He stood in the hall considering his age. He could go back to the bedroom, shut the door, and sit there with the gun, waiting if they tried to come in but otherwise letting them take what they want and go. Yeah, he could do that.

But he wasn’t going to.

He took a step toward the open door of the den, and damned if he didn’t ram his left leg into the little telephone table that stood there, with a cordless phone on it that he owned now, instead of the black rotary dial phone he’d rented from the phone company for all those years. Running into furniture in his own house. How stupid was that?

Pretty stupid, Pete realized, because it warned the guys in the den that he was out here. He heard the swift whisper, couldn’t make out the words, but knew there had to be at least two of them.

The element of surprise was lost. Might as well get in there.

He stepped into the doorway and hit the light switch with his left hand as he used his right to thrust the Colt out in front of him.

“Hold it!” he shouted.

The problem was, the sudden burst of light blinded him just as much as it did the intruders. Wincing from the glare, holding his hand up to shade his eyes, Pete tried to take in the scene as quickly as he could so he would know what he was facing.

Two men stood over by his gun cabinets. He could see the shapes of their bodies, even though he couldn’t make out many details. He jabbed the gun toward them and said, “Don’t move! I’ve got a gun!”

Well, they could see that, of course. And now he could see the guns in their hands, too, big, ugly things with extended magazines for a lot of firepower.

Pete suddenly knew that he was about to get the shit blown out of him.

Unless he blew the shit out of the burglars first. And that was the funny thing. All the fear and the other distractions cleared out of his mind. He didn’t feel anything except a certain sense of urgency, didn’t see anything except what was right in front of him. The annoying little tremor that cropped up in his hands more and more often these days went away. His grip was rock steady as he leveled the.45.

He fired two shots fast, a quick one-two, at the man on the left. He was aiming at the body, the biggest target, and both bullets struck the man in the chest with enough force to knock him back against the cabinet behind him. He threw his arms out to the sides, and as he did, his finger must have jerked the trigger of the gun he held, because it erupted with flame from the muzzle and the most god-awful racket Pete had ever heard. The slugs hammered against the wall of the den in a ragged line from the door to the corner of the room, punching easily through the sheetrock on both sides of the wall.

Pete was half-stunned. Between the double blast from the Colt and the intruder’s gun going off, he was deaf. But even though he couldn’t hear anything, he could see and knew the second man was still a threat. Pete grabbed his right wrist with his left hand to steady it and pivoted.

Three, maybe four seconds had gone by since he’d stepped into the room and flicked on the lights. It seemed longer than that. The second man had had time to lift his gun and point it at Pete. The only reason he hadn’t fired yet was because he was looking at his buddy, who stood there braced against one of the gun cabinets, bloody froth already bubbling from the holes in his chest as he tried to breathe with bullet-torn lungs.

Then his eyes flicked back to Pete, and the two men locked gazes for a heartbeat.

Pete saw a stocky man about five-nine, with dark, curly hair, a mustache, and a heavy jaw. He wore a short-sleeved shirt, and his arms were covered with tattoos. His dark eyes were wide with surprise.

Pete knew what the man and his companion must have thought. Nobody here but a harmless old couple. Wouldn’t be any trouble to break in and steal whatever they wanted. They didn’t have to worry about the people who lived here.

Now the first guy knew different, and so did the second one, because he jerked his gun toward Pete as his finger tightened on the trigger.

Pete was just a hair faster. The Colt roared again and the.45 round shattered the burglar’s right shoulder, knocked him halfway around, and made him drop his gun. Pete’s aim had been just a little off this time, but it got the job done.

Pete didn’t stop pulling the trigger, though. The intruder was still on his feet. Pete wanted him on the floor, where he wouldn’t be a threat to him or Inez any longer. Three more shots blasted out from the Colt, but only one of them actually hit the man. That one shattered his right kneecap into a million pieces and knocked him down.

The first man had slid down the gun cabinet to a sitting position by now, leaving bloody streaks on the wood. He sat there with his legs sticking out in front of him, leaking more blood on the carpet.

Pete backed out of the den into the hall. Now that the light in the den was on, enough of it spilled out into the hall for him to glimpse something from the corner of his eye. He turned to his left and saw the crumpled figure lying on the floor.

Inez.
She must have followed him after all, despite him telling her to stay in the bedroom.

Then Pete thought about the way those bullets from the burglar’s gun had punched right through the wall like it wasn’t there….

He dropped his own weapon and nearly tripped and fell over his own feet, he was moving so fast as he ran to her side and dropped to his knees and got his arms around her so he could lift her. He saw the way her head rolled loosely on her neck and felt how wet her pajamas were as he pulled her against him, and he screamed her name, even though to his still half-deafened ears the voice didn’t sound like his and seemed to come from miles and miles away.

In the dim light, he saw Inez’s eyes flutter open for a moment. She looked up at him, but he couldn’t tell if she actually saw him or not. Later he liked to think she did. Her lips moved, but he couldn’t hear the words, couldn’t hear the last thing his wife of more than forty years said to him. It could have been
I love you
or
I told you there was somebody in the house
or
Oh, God, it hurts.

Pete liked to think it was
I love you.
But he would never know.

Alexandra Bonner tossed the magazine onto the coffee table. She couldn’t concentrate tonight. She had read the same paragraph about how to destress your life four or five times before she realized what she was doing.

The simple fact was that she wouldn’t be able to think about much of anything until Jack got home.

It wasn’t really that late. She glanced at the clock. Just eleven. Not that late at all for a seventeen-year-old boy to be out on a summer night, when there was no school the next day. Jack had been out that late lots of times.

But not when he was grounded and wasn’t supposed to be out of the house at all. Not when he’d snuck out to do God knows what with those friends of his, Rowdy—what kind of boy went by “Rowdy” in this day and age?—and Steve.

She stood up and raked her fingers through her long, dark blond hair. At work she wore it in a ponytail most of the time, to keep it out of the way, but at home she liked it loose. Eventually she was going to get too old to wear it this long. Mature women had to look dignified, and forty-five was pretty doggone mature.

She wasn’t being vain, though, when she told herself she could still pass for thirty-five. Well, thirty-eight, maybe, depending on whether it was a good day or a bad day. Her work kept her in good enough shape that she could still wear her jeans a little tight. Not like when she was eighteen, of course, but when she wasn’t wearing her uniform she could still draw some interested looks from men.

She paced over to the front window. Those thoughts weren’t doing any better a job of distracting her than the blasted magazine had. She parted the curtains a little and looked out, eyes searching for headlights coming along the farm-to-market road. A car went past, but it didn’t turn in at the long driveway, didn’t even slow down.

“You’re gonna be grounded until you’re thirty, kid,” she muttered.

Two nights earlier, Jack had been out running around with Rowdy and Steve in Rowdy’s pickup when they’d run into a cow that had gotten loose and wandered into the road. Running into a cow wasn’t all that uncommon in West Texas, and while it was unfortunate and had done quite a bit of damage to the pickup—not to mention the poor cow—the kicker had been the fact that the sheriff’s deputy investigating the accident had smelled alcohol on Rowdy’s breath.

That was enough to justify testing all three boys in the car. Rowdy admitted to having one beer, and his blood alcohol level was so low, he’d probably been telling the truth. Jack and Steve told the deputy they hadn’t had any, and their tests proved it. Rowdy was underage, of course, but the deputy had decided to let it go, but not before calling all three sets of parents to let them know what was going on. Jack had driven the pickup back to Rowdy’s house, just to be on the safe side, and by the time they got there, the parents had gathered to read the riot act to them. All three boys were grounded for two weeks and not allowed to hang around together.

In most places these days, one beer and three teenage boys would have been such a minor matter nobody would have thought twice about it.

But this wasn’t most places. This was Home.

The beer incident wasn’t the only thing that had caused problems with Jack over the past few months, either. There had been the business with the Internet porn—gee, it would have been handy to have Jack’s dad around to handle something like that, if only he hadn’t, you know,
left
years ago, she had thought bitterly more than once—plus the falling grades and the fact that he’d barely passed the standardized test, whatever they were calling it now, to get him from eleventh grade to twelfth, plus the general surly attitude that drove her crazy.

Was he a good kid at heart? She thought so. She hoped so. But the defiance and poor judgment he’d been exhibiting lately worried the hell out of her. She tried to tell herself that he was just being a teenage boy, but her instincts told her it might be more than that.

You couldn’t really get away from drugs these days, even in a place like Home. She knew that as well or better than anybody, and it just scared her to death.

There was another car coming. Was it slowing down? Yes, it was. The headlights clicked off before it turned into the driveway. He was going to at least try to sneak back in without her noticing, although he was decidedly not very good at it.

The cell phone clipped to her belt rang.

She muttered and shook her head. This was not good timing, not when she was about to catch Jack in the act of sneaking in and rip him a new one.

But they had known at work that she was going home and wouldn’t be bothering her if it wasn’t something important. She took the phone off its clip and answered it.

“Chief Bonner.”

“Sorry to bother you, Alex, but we’ve got trouble.”

Instantly, Alexandra the worried mom was gone, replaced by Alex the chief of police in Home. “What is it, Eloise?”

Eloise Barrigan had worked as the night dispatcher for years. Her husband, Clint, was one of Alex’s officers and usually had the night duty, too, so that worked out well for them.

“We got a call about shots being fired on Randall Street, so I sent Clint to check it out. One of the neighbors was out waiting for him to get there, and when he did, the man told him the shots came from Pete and Inez McNamara’s house.”

“Pete might’ve had a coyote nosing around and tried to scare it off.” Alex knew the McNamaras, just like she knew most of the people in Home. Good folks.

“I wish,” Eloise said. “Nobody came to the door when Clint rang the bell, but he could hear crying inside.”

“Oh, no.”

“Yeah. He went around back, found a window open, went in that way, and found Pete and Inez in the hall. Inez had been shot. “ Eloise paused to swallow hard. Alex heard it over the phone. “She’s dead, Alex.”

“Pete would
never
hurt her.”

“Oh, no, no! It wasn’t that. There’s a dead man in Pete’s den and another one who’s been wounded pretty bad. They were both armed. Looks like Pete surprised a couple of burglars and shot it out with them, and Inez got hit by a stray bullet.”

Alex closed her eyes for a moment and pressed her fingertips to her forehead. This was awful. Nothing like this had ever happened in Home since she’d been on the force, not while she was an officer and not while she was chief. It was going to be a terrible mess, but more than anything else, her heart went out to Pete McNamara. To have to defend your home against armed intruders and then to have your wife killed by them … It was almost too much to imagine.

The demands of the job took over and shoved the human reaction out. “Has Clint secured the scene?”

“Yeah. I sent Delgado over there right away to give him a hand. You want me to call the sheriff?”

“No, I’ll do it while I’m on my way.” The city of Home had an agreement with the sheriff’s department to handle anything the local police couldn’t. With all the complicated demands this crime scene would entail, Alex knew her little four-man force would need help.

“Okay, Alex. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

“Thanks.”

Alex closed the phone and went to get her gun and badge from the bedroom, along with the wind-breaker that had the word POLICE in big letters on the back. It was too warm tonight for a jacket, but she figured she’d better wear it anyway.

A light shone under the door of Jack’s room. As she went by, Alex paused and opened it.

“Hey! “ he said from the chair in front of his computer. He was slouched down so far there was no telling how much damage he was doing to his spine, Alex thought. “What happened to respecting each other’s privacy?”

“What happened to grounded for two weeks?” she shot back at him. “It’s now a month, that’s what happened.”

He jumped up. “What?”

“I know you snuck out, Jack. I checked your room earlier, and I saw you drive in with your lights out a few minutes ago.” She gestured toward the badge she’d clipped to her belt. “Chief of police, remember? I’m observant.”

He shook his head and glared at her. “This is totally unfair.”

“No, I’ll tell you what’s unfair,” Alex said. “I have to go out now and look at two dead people, including a woman I’ve known for years and considered a friend. Now
that’s
unfair, Jack.”