Home Invasion - J. A. Johnstone [2]
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