Home Invasion - J. A. Johnstone [6]
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 house, 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