Home Invasion (25 page)

“So … we all have to die?” Bud asked.

Stone held up the canister. “As soon as I open this valve, the nerve gas inside it will spread all over Home. No one will be left to tell the truth of what happened here, and the President will be safe to continue his work.”

“His work of murdering everybody who disagrees with him, you mean?”

Stone smiled and holstered his gun. “It’s not murder if it’s in a good cause.”

He reached for the valve on the canister.

Bud was ready to jump him and try to stop that valve from being turned, even though he knew he’d probably get a faceful of the gas and die instantly. But before he could make a move, a shot blasted somewhere behind him. Stone’s head jerked back as a red-rimmed black hole appeared in the center of his forehead. His knees unhinged and the canister slipped from his fingers as he fell.

Bud didn’t know if being dropped would make the gas start to escape, but he didn’t want to take that chance. He made a desperate dive forward, stretching out his arms as far as he could.

The canister dropped into them, and he stopped its fall a handful of inches before it struck the pavement.

Realizing that he held death in his hands, Bud cradled the canister carefully against him and rolled over. He saw Chief Alex Bonner standing at the corner, her service revolver grasped in her right hand while her left gripped the other wrist to steady it. Bud knew she was the one who had made the shot that killed Stone.

She lowered the gun and started toward him. “Is that—” she called.

“Yeah,” Bud said. “It is.”

A harsh voice demanded, “Give it to me!”

Now
what the hell?

Bud hoped the radio was still transmitting. He looked over his shoulder and saw a dark-faced man in military fatigues stalking toward him, covering him with a rifle he held one-handed while dragging Wilma along with the other. Bud was happy to see that she was still alive, even though she was a pain in the ass sometimes.

“Give me the canister!” the man said again.

Alex called, “Drop it, Garaldo!”

So this was General Garaldo, the leader of the cartel forces, Bud thought. It figured. No sooner was one dangerous maniac put down than another one popped up to take his place.

“Back off, bitch!” Garaldo snarled at Alex. “I’ll shoot that fool and the canister, and the gas will be released.”

“Then you’ll die, too,” Alex warned.

“Better death than defeat!”

“Wilma!” Bud yelled. “Catch it!”

He threw the canister high in the air.

Just as Bud had figured would happen, Garaldo let go of Wilma and turned his head to follow the flight of the canister. She turned and sprinted to get under it.

Alex shouted, “Bud, get down!”

He sprawled on the pavement, getting as far out of the line of fire as he could. Garaldo pulled the trigger, making his rifle chatter insanely, but shots came from all around him and slammed into him. The impacts jarred him back and forth in a bizarre dance for what seemed longer than the two or three seconds it really was.

Then the rifle slipped from his fingers and he followed it to the pavement, landing in a bloody heap that didn’t move again.

Bud watched as Wilma caught the canister. He pulled the radio from his pocket and saw that the switch was still locked in the transmit position.

“This has been Bud Conway reporting,” he said hollowly. “I hope you folks got all that.”

Then he fainted dead away.

“Mom! Mom!”

Her son’s voice was the sweetest thing Alex had ever heard. She saw him rushing toward her and ran to meet him. Rowdy and Delgado limped after him, bloody from minor wounds but still alive.

Alex caught Jack in her arms and hugged him like she never intended to let him go. She whispered his name over and over and asked if he was all right. She felt his tear-streaked face against hers as he nodded.

“What about you?” he asked.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” she said, and at that moment, she was. She was surrounded by death, destruction, and tragedy, but she had never been finer.

Her son was alive.

Emergency responders from the county seat arrived less than fifteen minutes later, followed shortly by the State Police, the Texas Rangers, and the National Guard. They were able to contain the fires that had broken out, as well as arresting the members of Rey del Sol who had survived the battle. There were only a handful of them.

All the members of the Federal Protective Service had been killed in the fierce fighting. For a short time, bureaucrats in Washington tried to deny that the helicopter and the black-uniformed men came from the FPS, but the presence of General Weldon Stone’s body, plus the broadcast that had gone out over the radio, made it impossible to sell that story.

Within an hour, the audio of that broadcast was the most downloaded file on the Internet, with billions of hits on thousands of websites. The genie was so far out of the bottle that it could never be put back. At first the White House claimed that General Stone had gone rogue, acting on his own to establish the nerve gas project at Casa del Diablo. The man was obviously deranged, the White House press secretary said over and over again. It didn’t matter that everyone had heard Stone saying the President had ordered those criminal actions. For a day, the media seemed to be on the verge of buying the story and trying to sell it to the rest of the country.

Then the President’s Chief of Staff had murdered a woman named Julia Hernandez and followed that up by taking his own life, leaving a long, detailed letter telling everything he knew about Casa del Diablo, which was plenty.

That left everything in the hands of the politicians in Congress, and the country held its breath, waiting to see if once, just once, those men and women would finally do the right thing.

In Home, people were too busy to pay all that much attention to what was going on in Washington.

There were multiple funerals, every day for a week.

Clint and Eloise Barrigan, Jimmy Clifton, Jerry Houston, Lester Simms, Betsy Carlyle, and Antonio Ruiz were all buried with full honors and hundreds of fellow law enforcement personnel from all over the country in attendance. Dave Sutherland, the city attorney, had been killed in the fighting, too. Alex hadn’t even known he was part of it until it was all over. Twenty-seven other citizens of Home, twenty-one men and six women, had met their deaths in the battle, too, and they were laid to rest in solemn ceremonies.

Brad Parker’s body was taken back to his home in California for burial. Alex didn’t know where Clayton Cochrum was buried and didn’t care. They could have cinched up his body in a garbage bag and left it at the curb, as far as she was concerned.

Lawrence “Fargo” Ford, although badly shot up, survived the battle and was in the hospital, as was Earl Trussell, who had been questioned by every law enforcement agency under the sun about his involvement with Casa del Diablo, which had been closed down and sealed by the FBI, pending a full investigation.

Rye Callahan, the leathery old rancher, had come through the ruckus without a scratch and gone to see what was left of his home.

There were so many government lawyers and personal injury attorneys in Home that the sidewalks were always crowded. It was a lawsuit boomtown. Alex wished they would just all go away. She craved normalcy.

But as one of the heroes of the Battle of Home, she knew she might not ever get that again.

“Don’t wear him out,” Dr. Boone advised her as he left her in Ford’s room at the Home Community Hospital. Ford could have been transferred out to a big-city hospital, but he had insisted on staying right where he was.

“I’ll try not to,” Alex said with a smile.

Ford grinned up at her from the hospital bed when they were alone. His leg was twice its normal size under the covers from all the bandages. He slapped it anyway and tried not to wince.

“Doc says I ought to be able to walk again. Probably not without a limp, though.”

“You’ll still be able to get around,” Alex said. “That’s what matters.”

“Yeah.” He looked at her uniform. “You’ve probably been pretty busy keeping the peace. I assume that’s why you haven’t come to see me until now.”

“The county sheriff has sent a bunch of deputies in to help out until I can recruit some more officers,” she said. “Anyway, I was here several times. You just didn’t know it because you were laying around taking it easy.”

“In a coma, you mean.”

“Well … yeah, if you want to get technical about it.”

Ford’s eyes narrowed. “Have you, uh, heard anything through the grapevine about whether there’ll be any charges against me?”

“You’re overestimating my connections, Fargo. I’m just a small-town police chief. Nobody at the CIA talks to me.” She paused. “I don’t see how they could take any action against you, though. Everything you did was justified.”

“Some people won’t see it that way. And some of them are pretty powerful.”

“If you’re worried about the President, I think he’s got plenty on his mind right now without plotting vengeance against you.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that.” Ford sighed. “Anyway, I think it’s a foregone conclusion that I won’t be doing any more field work. Not with a bum leg
and
a cloud over my head. It might be time for me to retire and go into some other line of work.”

“I have openings for police officers,” Alex said. “My son and his friend Rowdy have decided to go to college and major in criminal justice so they can become cops, but it’ll be a while before they’re ready to step in.” She shrugged. “The pay’s not very good, but it’s a nice place to live.”

“You know,” Ford drawled, “that’s not a bad idea.”

Alex looked at him in surprise. She had been halfway joking, but she saw something in Ford’s eyes that told her he wasn’t taking the offer as a joke. Not at all.

And suddenly, deep inside, she was glad.

She rested her hand on his and squeezed, then looked out the window at what she could see of Home. Satellite news trucks were still everywhere, competing for space with the lawyers. Bud and Wilma were stars now and could write their own tickets at any network. Alex still didn’t like the blonde, but Bud had turned out to be an okay guy.

No, Home wasn’t back to normal yet, she thought as she smiled at Ford, but maybe someday it would be.

She was willing to wait.

“The stand-off at the White House continues today as the former President, although impeached and removed from office, refuses to leave. In her first act as president, following the resignation of the former vice-president, the former Speaker of the House has ordered the Secret Service not to use force to make the former President vacate the premises. ‘We will allow this unfortunate situation to run its course,’ she was quoted as saying. ‘I’m sure that in time the poor man will come to his senses and realize that he’s no longer the Commander-in-Chief.’

“In other news, the new President vowed to see that Congress acts swiftly to pass the National Education and Re-education Act. ‘In times so obviously perilous as these,’ she said, ‘it’s imperative that we do everything in our power to see to it that each and every student in our schools knows exactly what to think….‘”