Home Invasion - J. A. Johnstone [54]
“How’s Mr. McNamara?” Jimmy asked.
Alex shook her head sadly. “Not too good. He’s really sick, Jimmy. He may not get well.”
“I’m gonna … pray for him.”
“That’s a good idea.” She pushed open the front door and paused. “Say one for the rest of us while you’re at it, why don’t you?”
She had a feeling they could use all the help they could get this evening.
She wasn’t going to take a car out, not with the streets hopelessly jammed like they were. Instead she set out on foot, using her portable radio to check in with the other officers as she made her way downtown.
One by one they reported in and gave her their locations. Delgado was at the supermarket where the brawl had broken out the night before. Clint was on the corner where a farm-to-market road crossed the state highway at the very center of town. There were two convenience stores, the bank, and an insurance office at that intersection, along with a mob of angry people, Clint informed her. Jerry, Lester, Betsy, and Antonio were scattered around town, at the lumberyard, the hospital, the Dairy Queen, and Sally’s Steak House, respectively. The sheriff’s deputies were using the same frequency, and they called in as well, letting Alex know that they were at the hardware store, the auto supply store, the propane company, and the telephone company offices.
Between them, they had the town pretty well covered, Alex thought. No matter where trouble broke out—if trouble broke out—an officer wouldn’t be too far away.
She hoped she was wrong, but she had a feeling there was no if about it.
As she made her way along the street, a lot of people stopped her to ask her if she’d heard anything more about Pete McNamara. When she told them she hadn’t, they expressed their anger about the whole situation.
“I hear you,” Alex said each time. “I feel the same way. But it won’t help Pete or anybody else to cause trouble.”
“We didn’t start it, Chief,” more than one person protested, using similar words to lambaste the politicians, the media, and everybody else who had completely lost touch with the regular people of the country.
Something Alex didn’t see were the news trucks with the dishes on their roofs for their satellite uplinks. The media seemed to be avoiding Home this evening. Maybe for once they were acting half as smart as they claimed to be. When night fell, she began to hope that maybe people would start to return to their homes now that they had blown off some steam. Maybe she and the officers could actually skate by tonight without any real trouble.
In the back of her mind, though, she knew that was too much to hope for, and sure enough, around seven o’clock hordes of people began to stream toward the western edge of town as if they had all heard some sort of announcement.
Alex grabbed a man’s arm as he went past her and stopped him. “Where’s everybody going?” she asked.
“I heard that there’s gonna be a prayer rally at the high school football field for Pete,” the man replied. “Haven’t you heard about it, Chief?”
“Not until now,” Alex said. She let the man go.
This might be a good thing, she told herself. Get everybody in the stadium instead of milling around the streets. Praying was bound to calm them down a little.
She looked toward the high school and saw the big lights on their tall standards around the football field flicker on as somebody threw a switch.
How much trouble could a prayer rally cause, anyway? But still, she knew she needed to be there. She joined the crowds headed in that direction, feeling a little like a lemming, and used the radio to tell her officers to converge on the football field.
Despite all the terrible things going on in this part of the country, and all around the world as well, it was a beautiful evening. The sun was going down and lighting up the sky with a glorious display of red, gold, and orange against a backdrop of deep blue, and the air was pleasantly warm with just a hint of welcome coolness. Alex found it somehow reassuring that while