Home Invasion - J. A. Johnstone [1]
“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