Home Invasion Read Free Page A

home she liked it loose. Eventually she was going to get too old to wear it this long. Mature women had to look dignified, and forty-five was pretty doggone mature.
    She wasn’t being vain, though, when she told herself she could still pass for thirty-five. Well, thirty-eight, maybe, depending on whether it was a good day or a bad day. Her work kept her in good enough shape that she could still wear her jeans a little tight. Not like when she was eighteen, of course, but when she wasn’t wearing her uniform she could still draw some interested looks from men.
    She paced over to the front window. Those thoughts weren’t doing any better a job of distracting her than the blasted magazine had. She parted the curtains a little and looked out, eyes searching for headlights coming along the farm-to-market road. A car went past, but it didn’t turn in at the long driveway, didn’t even slow down.
    “You’re gonna be grounded until you’re thirty, kid,” she muttered.
    Two nights earlier, Jack had been out running around with Rowdy and Steve in Rowdy’s pickup when they’d run into a cow that had gotten loose and wandered into the road. Running into a cow wasn’t all that uncommon in West Texas, and while it was unfortunate and had done quite a bit of damage to the pickup—not to mention the poor cow—the kicker had been the fact that the sheriff’s deputy investigating the accident had smelled alcohol on Rowdy’s breath.
    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,
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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,