Home Invasion - J. A. Johnstone [93]
“Now what?” Delgado asked as he slowed the car.
“We need to get to the police department. That’s where all our other weapons are. Maybe the rest of the officers will head for there, too, and we can fort up inside the building. Word of what’s going on here is bound to get out, and maybe we’ll get some help from outside.”
“That’s going to be our only chance,” Delgado agreed. “The problem is that Garaldo will be smart enough to know that he needs to take out the police station as soon as he can.”
The shift change was at eight o’clock, so Eloise Barrigan was getting ready for Jimmy to show up, and then Clint would swing by the station and pick her up so they could go home. Their schedule made it hard for them to attend church on Sunday morning, but they always showed up for the Sunday evening service.
It had been a peaceful night and was turning into a mighty quiet morning. Too quiet, Eloise suddenly thought, like in those old Western movies when the hero starts to worry that the Indians are sneaking up on him. She picked up the microphone on her desk and said, “Clint, you hearin’ me?”
There was no answer.
“Hey, Jerry? J. P.? Anybody out there?”
Alex had tried to talk Eloise into being more formal on the air, but it was hard when she had known all these people for years and considered them to be her friends.
Still getting no response, she picked up the phone and hit the speed-dial button that would connect her to her husband’s cell phone. It took her a second to realize that the phone wasn’t dialing. In fact, there was no dial tone on it at all. The landline was dead.
Well, that was odd, Eloise thought. She opened the drawer where she kept her purse and reached inside to take out her own cell phone.
No service. Stubbornly, Eloise tried to call Clint anyway, but what the display told her was true. The cell phone was as dead as the landline.
“Well, if that doesn’t beat all,” she said as the front door of the station opened. Eloise looked up, figuring it was Clint coming in. Maybe he’d have some explanation for why the radio and all the phones were out.
Instead, the cell phone slipped out of Eloise’s fingers and fell to the floor as she stared in shock at the men with guns who were coming into the station.
Jimmy Clifton didn’t have a driver’s license, but he had the best bike in the whole town and could get anywhere he wanted to in Home without any trouble. This morning he had gotten up and made breakfast for himself because his mom and dad were still asleep. While he was eating his cereal, he thought he heard some odd sounds from somewhere else in town, like somebody hammering nails real fast, but he wasn’t sure. Whatever it was, it didn’t have anything to do with him.
Now he was on his way to work, and as always, that thought never failed to make him experience a surge of pride. He knew perfectly well that he was different from most folks and couldn’t do a lot of the things they could do, but he could do some things they couldn’t, too. He had won awards for his excellence as a dispatcher. He might get mixed up about some things, but he never got a call wrong.
He recognized trouble when he saw it, too. When he came around the corner on his bike and started pedaling toward the station two blocks away, he spotted armed men entering the building.
That was wrong, really wrong. The men weren’t soldiers, like the ones who had come into town a few days ago and taken everybody’s guns. These men looked more like criminals. And those sounds he had heard earlier … could they have been gunfire?
Jimmy brought the bike to a skidding halt and frowned as he thought about what he had seen. His heart pounded with fear for his friend Eloise.
He didn’t hear any shots from inside the station, though, so maybe she was all right.
Somebody else was going to have to figure this out and tell him what to do. Clint would know, or J.P., or the chief.
That was it. He would go to the chief’s house and tell her what he had