Home Invasion
HOME
INVASION
WILLIAM W.
JOHNSTONE
with J. A. Johnstone
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Attributor Protected.
PINNACLE BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp. 119
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Copyright © 2010 William W. Johnstone
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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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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.
CONTENTS
BOOK ONE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
BOOK TWO
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
BOOK THREE
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
BOOK FOUR
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
BOOK FIVE
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
Epilogue
BOOK ONE
CHAPTER 1
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.
CHAPTER 2
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, squealin
g 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!”
CHAPTER 3
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.