Home Invasion - J. A. Johnstone [89]
Now, several months later, it had finally gotten around to finishing the job of killing Pete McNamara, Alex thought, the job that Jorge Corona and Emilio Navarre had begun the night they broke into his house.
“All right, Ed. Thanks for telling me.”
“I kept hoping and praying that maybe the doctors were wrong, that maybe one of these days Pete would wake up and be himself again.” A hollow laugh came from Ruiz. “But if Pete had been aware enough to know what was going on in his hometown, he wouldn’t have wanted to live. He would have been so sickened by all of us that he would have rather been dead.”
“We don’t know that,” Alex said. “And we did what we had to do to keep a bunch of our people from getting thrown into some secret prison or worse. Nobody knows where they took Wendell Post and Elmer Davis. Dave Rutherford doesn’t think we’ll ever know … or see them again.”
“Maybe not. Maybe we don’t want to know. There’s nothing we can do about it, is there?”
Alex didn’t answer that. There was no answer she could make, not one that she wanted to admit to, anyway.
She said goodbye to Ruiz and hung up the phone. Knowing that she wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep, she got up and pulled on some jeans and a T-shirt. Jack would still be asleep—the phone wouldn’t have awakened him, since he could sleep through anything short of an earthquake—so she thought she might as well have a look around town before coming back here to fix some breakfast.
She clipped her holster to her belt, pulled her hair into a ponytail, and put on a cap. As she went out to her patrol car, she slipped on a pair of sunglasses. She drove downtown and parked in front of the bank.
Nothing was much quieter than a little town this early on Sunday morning. In a little while, people would start moving around more, pulling into the parking lots of the Baptist Church, the Methodist Church, the Catholic Church. One of the convenience stores at the crossroads was closed; the other was open but didn’t have any customers. A gasoline truck was parked at the side of the road, its driver filling the convenience store’s tanks. Alex leaned against the fender of her car and looked up and down, both ways along the highway and the farm road. Peace and quiet.
The whup-whup-whup eggbeater sound of a helicopter suddenly intruded on the tranquility. She looked up, searching the pale blue sky for the aircraft. When she spotted it off to the east, she realized it was coming toward Home.
It was low, too, and getting lower. Alex straightened from her casual pose, her muscles stiffening with tension. It looked like the blasted chopper was going to land somewhere in or near the town. She hurriedly got into the car as the helicopter dipped out of her sight.
The high school, she thought. It looked like the helicopter was landing on the high school parking lot.
And whatever it was carrying couldn’t be anything good, she thought as she gunned the patrol car in that direction.
CHAPTER 37
She was right. She recognized the tall, slender, expensively-dressed figure standing next to the helicopter with his longish dark hair blowing in the propwash. As she entered the school parking lot with a squeal of tires, the man turned his head to peer at the patrol car through a pair of sunglasses even darker than the ones Alex wore.
What the hell was that slimy weasel Clayton Cochrum doing landing in Home in a helicopter?
A moment later, Alex told herself she should have known the answer to that question. All became clear as an attractive blond woman climbed down from the chopper and joined Cochrum, followed by a cameraman.
Cochrum was here for a photo op, and he had brought his own tame news crew with him.
That bastard, Alex thought. He’s heard about Pete McNamara