Home Invasion (11 page)

Alex was circulating through the crowd in front of the hardware store, trying to calm them down, when she heard the commotion break out down the street. She had to lift herself on her toes and crane her neck to see what was going on. All she could tell was that there was some sort of fight in the supermarket parking lot.

She bit back a curse. This was exactly the sort of thing she had been worried was going to happen.

As she started pushing through the crowd, hurrying toward the disturbance, she keyed the mike on her shoulder and said, “Supermarket, now!” sending out a call to all the other officers to meet her there unless they were already involved in some other incident.

She wasn’t the only one whose attention the fight had attracted. Quite a few people began streaming in that direction, and some of them even yelled, “Fight, fight!” just like they were on a junior high school playground.

When Alex got closer, her heart plummeted for a second as she recognized Rowdy Donovan in the middle of the brawl. If Rowdy was involved, there was a good chance Jack was, too.

A second later, her fear for her son was mitigated somewhat by her anger at him. He
knew
better than to get mixed up in something like this, she thought.

So much for believing he would go home after football practice and do his homework.

A part of Alex wished she could pull the 9mm from the holster on her hip and blast a few shots into the air. That would settle things down in a hurry. Those Old West lawmen in books and movies had some advantages the modern police didn’t. Right now Alex wouldn’t have minded having a.45-caliber Peacemaker and a double-barreled shotgun.

Instead she settled for raising her voice and shouting, “Hey! Break it up! Everybody stop fighting! “ as she plowed into the melée.

She had a strong voice and experience at crowd control, but she had trouble making herself heard over the racket. A couple of guys were rolling around on the cement at her feet, wrestling. Disgusted, she reached down, grabbed the shirt collar of one of them, and hauled him to his feet.

“Mom!” Jack yelped as Alex found herself looking into her son’s face.

Before Alex could say anything, a siren snarled loudly somewhere nearby. After a couple of bursts of near-deafening sound, it shut down, only to be replaced by J. P. Delgado’s voice amplified through a bullhorn. “Break it up! Break it up! Or you’ll all be placed under arrest!”

Delgado had managed to get into one of the police cars parked in the lot, and between the bullhorn and the siren, he stunned the crowd into submission, at least for the moment. Alex gave Jack a little shake and said through clenched teeth, “Stay here. Do
not
throw another punch. You understand me?”

He jerked his head in an angry nod. His arm was bleeding from a scraped place and a bruise was already starting to come up on his jaw, but he didn’t appear to be badly hurt.

Alex shoved her way through the crowd to the police car. Delgado stood beside the open driver’s door, the bullhorn in his hand. She took it from him and lifted it to her mouth.

“Everyone disperse right now,” she ordered. “Off the streets! Go home! I’m declaring a curfew in effect!”

From the crowd, somebody yelled, “You can’t do that!”

Alex glared in his direction, swung the bullhorn toward him, and barked through it, “You wanna try me?”

Evidently nobody did.

The mob began thinning on the edges as people who hadn’t been directly involved in the fight decided it might be best to do as she said and go home. Alex lowered the bullhorn and asked Delgado, “Do you have any idea what started this?”

Before he could answer, a woman’s strident voice said, “I can tell you what started it. Those young racists you have growing up here attacked my cameraman!”

Alex turned to see an attractive blonde in her twenties standing there. Her clothes were a little rumpled and her previously perfect hair was in slight disarray. She had a microphone in her hand, and a man with a video camera was pointing it at her.

“That cameraman?” Alex asked.

The guy gave her a hostile glance. He had dried blood on his face from a split lip.

“That’s right, Chief,” the reporter said. “You
are
Chief Alex Bonner, aren’t you?”

“That’s right.”

“Do you have any comment about the riot that broke out here in Home this evening?”

“It wasn’t a riot—” Alex began.

“With all due respect, Chief, you weren’t right in the middle of it. Those rampaging citizens were out of control, and I was afraid for my life.”

With all due respect,
Alex thought bleakly. That was what leeches like this reporter said to people they didn’t respect at all.

The blonde went on, “That young man assaulted my associate, and I want him arrested.” She turned to point dramatically at Rowdy, who was standing now with Jack and Steve.

Alex narrowed her eyes at him. “Rowdy, what did you do?”

Before he could answer, the reporter said, “Excuse me? Rowdy? Did you say his name is
Rowdy
?” Her condescending smirk spoke volumes.

“Hey, there’s nothing wrong with that name, lady,” Rowdy protested. “If it was good enough for Clint Eastwood, it’s good enough for me.”

The blonde never stopped smirking as she said, “What about it, Chief? Are you going to arrest this young man and his friends?”

It was clear she meant Jack and Steve.

Alex faced the three boys. Steve had a hangdog expression on his face, but Jack and Rowdy still looked defiant.

“Did you start this?” Alex demanded of them.

“No,
they
did,” Jack replied. “She said that Mr. McNamara was to blame for everything that happened, including his wife getting killed.”

“We couldn’t let that go,” Rowdy said. “We just couldn’t, Mrs. Bonner.”

“I’m not Mrs. Bonner right now,” Alex snapped. “I’m Chief Bonner, and I’m putting all three of you in custody.”

Jack’s eyes widened. “Mom!”

Through gritted teeth, Alex said, “I told you, I’m not Mom right now. I’m the chief of police.” She turned to Delgado and added, “Put them in the backseat of your car.”

He nodded and said, “Come on, fellas.”

Jack still looked aghast at this turn of events. “You can’t be serious,” he argued. “They’re the ones who ought to be arrested. They came in here where they aren’t wanted and stirred up all this trouble!”

The blonde sneered and said, “There’s such a thing as freedom of the press, young man. You may not have heard of it, considering the sort of education you probably get in a place like this where all they teach you is football and hate.”

“Don’t push your luck, lady,” Alex snapped. She pointed to Delgado’s police car and said, “Go!”

They went, ushered over to the car by Delgado, who opened the back door and watched as they slid into the uncomfortable confines of the backseat.

Alex nodded to the reporter. “Now, are you satisfied?”

“That you did your duty as the police chief? I suppose. But I heard one of those boys call you Mom. Are
you
satisfied, Chief Bonner, with the job you’ve done of raising him?”

For a second, Alex thought about the days of the Old West again, when troublemakers could be tarred, feathered, and ridden out of town on a rail.

It sure was an appealing idea right now.

She took a deep breath and said, “I don’t comment on personal matters. I can promise you, though, that there’ll be a full investigation of what took place here tonight, and anyone who’s at fault…
anyone
… will face the full penalties allowed by law. Now get off the street.”

“You can’t—”

“I declared a curfew, remember? That goes for all civilians, including the press.”

The reporter glared at her. “I’m going to file a formal protest with the mayor and the city council.”

“Go ahead.” Alex hoped that Ed Ruiz and the other members of the council would support her on this, but even if they didn’t, it would be after the fact. The important thing was to get the streets cleared now, so there wouldn’t be any more trouble tonight.

“And my viewers are certainly going to hear about this injustice.”

“I’m sure they will. I don’t have any further comment.”

Alex turned away and surveyed the street and the parking lot. A few pockets of people still stood around looking surly, but they began to break up as Alex stared at them. The reporters were still there, too, of course, chattering away. Alex told her other officers to shoo them back to their motel rooms, then climbed into the passenger side of the front seat of Delgado’s patrol car.

“Mom, this is just wrong!” Jack protested through the wire mesh that separated the front seat from the back. “We shouldn’t be under arrest.”

“Shut up,” Alex told him, still more in cop mode than mom mode. “You’re not under arrest, any of you. I placed you in custody, that’s all. Delgado will take you all home.”

“You mean you did it just to placate that reporter?”

“I mean I was doing what I thought was necessary to defuse an explosive situation. But you should be damn glad you’re
not
under arrest for assault.”

Rowdy leaned over to Jack and said, “Hey, dude, your mom said ‘damn.‘”

Despite everything that had happened, Alex found it hard not to laugh just then. You could always count on Rowdy to be … well, Rowdy, she thought.

“This may not be over,” she warned them. “It’ll depend on what the reporter and cameraman do. They may press for criminal charges to be filed against you, and they can always file a civil lawsuit, too. So be prepared for more trouble as a result of this.” She paused. “You really should have gone home after football practice, all of you.”

”But it’s not fair, what they’re doing to poor Mr. McNamara,” Jack said.

“I guess maybe that reporter was right,” Alex said. “I haven’t done a very good job of raising you.” Jack frowned. “What do you mean by that?” “If I’d done my job, you’d know by now that life isn’t fair.”

By the next morning, what the media called “a riot tinged with racist overtones” was national news. Alex felt a surge of despair as she clicked between the various cable network talking heads while drinking her coffee, but the despair was quickly replaced by simmering anger.

How dare they distort everything that’s happened? she thought. The fact that Corona and Navarre were Mexican didn’t have anything to do with the outrage that filled the town … other than the additional fact that most of the crime within a hundred miles of the border originated in one way or another south of the Rio Grande.

Didn’t facts mean anything anymore?

Then she thought about the way things had played out politically in the United States over the past dozen years and realized that no, they didn’t. Facts didn’t mean a blasted thing anymore if they were inconvenient for the power-mongers on the left. They would just yell their lies even louder, and the media would parrot them.

It reminded her of the big stink over so-called ethnic profiling a number of years earlier, after the terrorist attacks on the U.S. The liberal mind-set that no one should ever, ever be the least bit offended by anything (unless they were white and middle-class, of course) had led to eighty-year-old grandmothers being detained and searched in airports while young Arab men in the country on expired visas swept blithely through security checkpoints.

The threat from the Middle East was still a problem, and one day it would come back to bite the country on the ass, big-time, Alex thought. But for now, the terrorist warlords in their caves had scaled back their activities. They
liked
the guy in the White House. They didn’t want anything happening on his watch that might damage his administration. That was Alex’s theory, anyway, and she knew a lot of people in law enforcement who shared it.

The bigger threat these days was much closer at hand, as the cartels in Mexico had grown so powerful that they were the de facto government south of the border. The Mexican politicians were just figureheads, mouthpieces for the various cartels, and the army generals took their orders from those same cartels.

Like feudal barons, the drug kingpins made war on each other, and those epic clashes often spilled across the border into the U.S. Alex could see a day coming when there might be an actual war down here, unless the United States was willing to meekly give up Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and a big chunk of California. Of course, if that same spineless bunch was still in power in Washington, that might be exactly what happened.

She forced those bleak thoughts out of her head as she finished her coffee. “Jack, you’d better be awake,” she called down the hall. “I’m leaving, and you’ve got school.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m awake,” came the sleepy answer. “Don’t worry, I’ll be there.”

“Straight there, straight home after football practice, remember?” She would ground him until he was thirty if she had to, and he could damned well like it. It was better than being arrested.

“Yeah, I got it.”

Alex rinsed her coffee cup, put it in the drainer, and left the house. Home appeared to be quiet this morning, she saw as she drove through town, and she was grateful for that.

Everybody was probably inside, watching TV as the reporters made them out to be a town full of monsters.

She was wearing a dress again, because she had to go back over to the county seat and be on hand if she was called by the defense to testify. Clayton Cochrum had rested his case. Now it would be up to Joe Gutierrez, Dave Rutherford, and the other defense attorneys. Alex didn’t expect the trial to last much longer. Everything was pretty cut and dried.

Or at least it would have been if not for that backstabbing federal bitch, Rosario Encinal, Alex reminded herself. After what had gone down yesterday, there was no telling what might happen today.

Ed Ruiz was waiting for her when she came into the station. “I need to talk to you about that curfew you declared last night, Alex,” he said, launching right into the business that had brought him here without any small talk, as usual.

“Sure, just a minute,” she said. It was early enough that Eloise was still on duty at the dispatcher’s station. Alex asked her, “Any trouble overnight?”

Eloise shook her head. “No, after you quieted everything down, it stayed quiet, Chief.” She added, “You look nice today.”

Alex smiled briefly. “Thanks.” She looked at Ruiz and nodded toward her office. “Come on, Ed.”

Once they were in the office, Ruiz said, “I just wanted you to know that we’ve already had an emergency meeting this morning, and the council voted to authorize the curfew. And we, uh, put yesterday’s date on the paperwork.”

Alex raised her eyebrows. “That’s putting your ass on the line to cover mine, Ed,” she told him bluntly.

“Maybe, but you’re our police chief and you’re trying to do what’s best for the town, so the council thinks you deserve our support.”

She noticed that he didn’t say the council had voted unanimously to take the action they had. She wasn’t sure which way Ed had voted. But he was willing to along with what the council decided and deliver the news to her, and she had to give him credit for that.

“Thank you,” she said, and meant it. “I appreciate that more than you and the other council members know. I just hope this mess is over soon.”

“It’s not going to end well,” Ruiz warned. “Not for Pete McNamara, anyway.”

Alex sighed, nodded, and said, “I’m afraid you’re right.”

“When she came into the courtroom forty-five minutes later, the first thing she noticed was that Joe Gutierrez and Dave Rutherford were sitting alone at the defense table with Pete McNamara. The crowd from the previous two days was gone.

Alex went to the railing, leaned over it, and called, “Dave.”

Rutherford turned around to look at her. His expression was grim as he stood up and stepped over to the railing.

“What happened to all the lawyers from the gun manufacturer?” she asked.

Rutherford shook his head. “They’ve cut and run.”

Alex stared at him in disbelief. “They’re not even going to defend against the suit?”

“Word is that they’re having a settlement conference with one of Cochrum’s associates later today. They’ll fight for a non-liability clause, but other than that they’re going to roll over and give Navarre whatever he wants.”

“My God,” Alex murmured. “So you and Joe are the only ones still fighting?”

“That’s right … and I advised Ed that it might be best to explore the possibility of the city settling, too.”

“No! You can’t. Everybody else has already deserted Pete.”

A rueful smile appeared on Rutherford’s face. “Don’t worry. Ed showed more backbone than I thought he would, although I’d deny under oath that I ever said that. He said fight it out to the end, so that’s what I’m going to do.”

“Well … good. Somebody needs to keep fighting.”

“Even though it’s a lost cause?”

“Do you really believe that?”

“After that press conference Cochrum and Ms. Encinal held yesterday, we don’t have a chance in hell,” Rutherford said, lowering his voice so that only Alex could hear.

Her heart sank at hearing it put into words like that. She said, “I hope you’re wrong,” and put her hand on Rutherford’s arm for a second to give it an encouraging squeeze. Then she went back out into the hall to wait and see what happened.

The morning was mostly a rehash of what had gone before, with Alex and the other officers being called to the stand to testify as to what they had seen and done on the night in question. Cochrum asked each of them two questions in cross-examination:

“Did you see the gun allegedly belonging to my client in his hand at any time?”

And, “Did tests indicate that the gun allegedly belonging to my client had been fired on the night in question?”

The answer to both questions was no, of course.

By the time the trial resumed after lunch, the only thing that was left was for the defense to call Pete McNamara to the stand to testify in his own behalf.

Rutherford told Alex later, “Cochrum’s cross-examination was awful. He never badgered Pete or anything like that that might have made him sympathetic to the jury. No, Cochrum was as polite and respectful as he could be. And he
still
made Pete seem like a doddering old fool who didn’t really know what happened that night and never should have had a gun in the house in the first place. It was terrible, Alex. You could see that the jury was actually sorry for Pete … but they blamed him for what happened, anyway.”

“But what about the fact that Corona and Navarre broke into the McNamara house?”

Rutherford sighed. “Cochrum took care of that in his closing. He put all the blame on Corona. He claimed Navarre had no idea Corona planned to burglarize the house. He said the only reason Navarre went inside was to try to talk Corona out of it. Then Pete busted in and started shooting with no warning, and for no good reason. Navarre claims that they both called out for Pete not to shoot and tried to surrender.”

“But Navarre never took the stand and testified to any of that!”

“Of course not. That would have opened him up to cross-examination.”

“Cochrum can’t get that sort of thing in during a closing statement, can he?”

“Joe and I both objected. Judge Carson overruled us.”

Alex looked around the courthouse hallway where they were sitting, waiting for the jury to return with a verdict, but she wasn’t really seeing her surroundings. She was too stunned by everything Rutherford had just told her.

“The fix is in,” she muttered.

“You’d better not say that in there,” Rutherford warned. “The judge will hold you in contempt of court.”

“But it is, isn’t it?”

Rutherford shrugged. “I honestly don’t think so. I believe that Judge Carson is just so dedicated to his liberal ideals that he’s willing to cut someone like Navarre any break that he possibly can. His instructions to the jury practically told them they had to find in Navarre’s favor.”

“Well, it’s just crazy.”

“How many times have you said or thought that since this whole thing started?”

“Too many,” Alex admitted.

“The only silver lining—and it’s a small one—is that they never really made any sort of case against the city. You and your people handled everything strictly by the book and made sure that Navarre’s rights were protected every step of the way.”

“You don’t know how hard it was to do that, either,” Alex said.

“I can imagine. But maybe we’re going to dodge the bullet on this one, at least liability-wise.” Rutherford winced. “That was a poor choice of words, wasn’t it?”

Alex looked down the hall to the chairs where Pete McNamara and Joe Gutierrez sat side by side. Joe was trying to talk to his client, but Pete’s head was down and he didn’t appear to be paying attention. He looked like he was in shock, the same way he had looked ever since that tragic night.

“Nobody’s dodged the bullet,” she whispered. “Least of all Pete.”

Rutherford shrugged and was about to say something else when the courtroom door opened and a bailiff stuck his head out.

“Jury’s back,” he called.

That started an immediate hubbub and a rush toward the courtroom.

“Isn’t that awfully fast?” Alex asked Rutherford as they stood up.

The city attorney nodded. “Very fast. A little less than an hour.”

“Is that a good sign or a bad one?”

“When you got whipped like our side did, all signs are bad.”

Alex hoped that wasn’t true, but she suspected Rutherford was right.

She was allowed to be in the courtroom while court was in session now, since the case was in the hands of the jury. Along with the other witnesses, a gaggle of reporters, and as many spectators could squeeze in, they crowded the courtroom while the jury was brought back in. The twelve men and women looked solemn and not the least bit happy, as if they had just performed an unpleasant task that left a bad taste in their mouths.

One of the bailiffs called on everyone to rise. Judge Carson came in and took his seat on the bench. When everyone had settled down again and an air of tense expectancy gripped the courtroom, Carson called on the jury foreman to rise.

“Has the jury reached a verdict in the matter before the court, the case of Navarre versus McNamara and the City of Home?”

Alex noted that the gun manufacturer had indeed been dropped from the lawsuit. They must have paid off handsomely for that, she thought.

The jury foreman nodded and said, “Yes, Your Honor, we have.”

Carson looked at Pete McNamara. “The defendant will please rise.”

Slowly, painfully, the old man climbed to his feet. Gutierrez and Rutherford flanked him.

“What is your verdict?”

The jury foreman took a deep breath. “We find in favor of the plaintiff, Emilio Navarre.”

Even though that was expected, hearing it caused a loud reaction from the crowd in the courtroom. Angrily, Carson gaveled for silence. When he finally got it, he turned again to the jury foreman.

“Do you find liability on the part of both defendants?”

“We do, Your Honor.”

“And in the matter of damages?”

“We recommend that the plaintiff be awarded actual damages of one million dollars and punitive damages of five million dollars.”

The courtroom erupted again. Alex felt sick to her stomach. She had seen Pete McNamara flinch with every word spoken. With every flinch, he seemed to shrink.

Beside him, Dave Rutherford looked stunned. Rutherford had at least held out some hope that his client, the city, would escape from the self-righteous liberal wrath. Now that hope had been dashed.

It took a while for the courtroom to quiet down again. When it had, Judge Carson told the jury members, “Your recommendation in the matter of damages will be taken into account. The court thanks you for your service, and you are dismissed. “ He picked up his gavel. “These proceedings will resume at nine o’clock tomorrow morning and take up the matter of damages and the final disposition of the case. Until then, court is adjourned.”