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.
CHAPTER 4
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 hou
se, 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.”
CHAPTER 5
An ambulance and two police cars were already at the McNamara place by the time Alex got there, their flashing lights splashing garishly over the street crowded with onlookers from the neighborhood. Every light in the house seemed to be on.
Alex parked behind the ambulance. On the drive over here, she had been able to force thoughts of her problems with Jack out of her head and concentrate on the horrific crime that had taken place tonight in her town.
Several of the neighbors called out to her as she walked across the yard toward the front porch. They wanted to know what had happened, and you couldn’t blame them for that. Evidently there had been a lot of shots fired inside the McNamara house, and then the cops and the ambulance had shown up. You didn’t have to be a genius to figure out that something really bad had gone down.
J. P. Delgado stood just inside the open front door with his thumbs hooked in his belt. His lean, handsome face was set in solemn lines as he looked at Alex and shook his head.
“It’s bad, Chief, mighty bad.”
“Inez is really dead?” Alex asked, keeping her voice pitched low.
Delgado nodded, then inclined his head toward a hallway on the other side of the living room. “She’s still in there, down the hall by the den. The M.E. isn’t here yet. Dead guy’s still in the den, too. Clint’s got Mr. McNamara in the kitchen, and the EMTs are working on the wounded perp.”
“Is he going to live?”
Delgado shrugged. “He was hit twice, shoulder and leg, but Mr. McNamara got him with an old.45 automatic. Those things can kill you sometimes, even if they just tag you.”
Alex knew that. That was why the.45 had been the standard sidearm in the army for many years.
“Eloise said it looked like Mr. McNamara interrupted a burglary in progress. That the way it looked to you?”
She valued Delgado’s opinion. Despite his relative youth—he was only thirty-five—he had been a cop for quite a while in Laredo before coming back to Home to care for his aging grandmother. Alex had been happy to hire him and add his experience to her department, although the city couldn’t afford to pay him what he’d been making in Laredo.
He said, “I don’t think there’s any question that’s what happened. The two guys are both Hispanic, no I.D.s, probably drove up from the border just to rob somebody. My guess is that they were after Mr. McNamara’s guns. There’s a constant need for weapons in t
he cartels.”
“You think these two are part of a cartel?”
“There’s not much free-lance crime in Mexico anymore except the really low-level stuff. The cartels are like feudal kingdoms in medieval Europe, always at war with each other. There’s no effective centralized power in the country anymore.”
Delgado came out with stuff like that that would surprise you if you didn’t know that he had a history degree from the University of Texas. The academic world didn’t really appeal to him, though. He preferred being a cop.
A couple of EMTs maneuvered a gurney out of the hall and into the living room. The man strapped onto it appeared to be unconscious. Some of his clothes had been cut away, and bloodstained bandages were wrapped around his shoulder and leg in their place.
“This one’s going to the hospital, Chief,” one of the ambulance men said to Alex.
“Is he going to make it?”
“Don’t know, but my guess is yes. He lost a lot of blood, but we’ve got him stabilized right now. Have to wait and see.”
Alex nodded and said, “Thanks,” as they wheeled out the wounded burglar. She gestured to Delgado. “Go with them. Don’t let the son of a bitch out of your sight.”
“You got it, Chief. “ Delgado followed the gurney out of the house.
Alex took a deep breath to steady herself. It didn’t help much because there was still a faint reek of gunfire in the air. Waiting wouldn’t make it any better, so she stepped over to the hall and looked down it.
She saw the bullet holes in the wall between the den and the hall, her brain automatically noting their location. When the crime scene team from the sheriff’s department got here, those holes and all the rest of the physical evidence would be documented with digital photographs and video.
Alex’s eyes were drawn to the blanket-shrouded figure lying on the floor of the hall. The EMTs had draped that blanket over Inez McNamara because there was nothing they could do for her other than protect her from the indignity of having people stare at her.
Home Invasion Page 2