Home Invasion by William W. Johnstone Page A

universities. He knew his grades were good enough for him to get in, but he didn’t know if they would get him a scholarship.
    He told himself that it didn’t matter. He would work to put himself through college if he had to. He would do whatever it took to get him out of Home.
    His friend Steve already had things figured out. Steve was going to Texas A&M as a pre-med, following in his father’s footsteps and becoming a doctor. Jack always felt a little confused and aimless around him. Luckily, Rowdy was even more aimless than Jack and didn’t have any plans beyond the first football game of the season the next Friday night.
    Jack’s mom was wearing a dress that morning instead of her usual police chief’s uniform. “I probably won’t be here when you get home this afternoon,” she told him. “I don’t know when I’ll be called to testify.”
    “The Navarre case, right?”
    “That’s right.”
    Jack had kept up with it over the summer. You couldn’t really avoid it unless you never watched TV, listened to the radio, surfed the Internet, or read the newspaper. Jack did all of those things except read the newspaper; print took too long and was boring.
    “What happens if he wins?”
    “He can’t win,” Jack’s mom said. “He and his friend broke into the McNamara house. They committed a felony. Mr. McNamara acted in self-defense.”
    She sounded like she was trying to be sincere, but in the back of her voice was a nagging uncertainty.
    “Yeah, but what happens if he does win?”
    She shook her head. “I don’t know. As crazy as the world is these days … I just don’t know.”
    It was rare for his mom to admit something like that, Jack thought. She was always in charge, with such a firm grasp of what was right and what was wrong and no hesitation whatsoever about telling somebody what they ought to do. What they
had
to do, in his case. To Jack’s way of thinking, she had taken the worst traits of being both a cop and a mom and elevated them to even higher levels. Her attitude had driven him crazy for a while, and he had delighted in pushing back against her, until he realized his life would go along a lot smoother if he just let her believe he was cooperating with her. That way, whenever she wasn’t around, he could do what he wanted … as long as he was careful about it.
    “Well, don’t worry about me,” he told her. “I’ve got football practice after school, so I’ll be late getting home, too.”
    She smiled across the kitchen table at him. “Gonna get off the bench more this year?”
    He gave her a thumb’s up and said, “Way to boost the kid’s self-esteem, Mom.”
    She laughed, and at that moment, he kind of liked her again. They didn’t have as much of the ol’ give-and-take as they used to when he was younger. He had decided she was too oblivious to get most of his humor and she probably figured he was just a smart-ass kid, but every now and then they still laughed together.
    Maybe when he was older, things would be better between them.
    She left for the county seat, and he headed for school shortly after that.
    Rowdy and Steve were waiting for him in the parking lot. They greeted each other with colorful obscenities, the way teenage boys usually did at the sprawling school. It had been built forty years earlier, but many people in town still called it “the new high school.”
    “How’s your mom think the trial’s gonna go today? “ Steve asked.
    “She won’t really say,” Jack replied with a shake of his head. “She acts like she’s confident Navarre will lose, but I think she’s worried that he’ll win.”
    “Things’ll really hit the fan around here if he does,” Rowdy said. “I mean, how can you break into a guy’s house and then sue him for shootin’ you?
    Jack shrugged. “People have been doing that for a long time. And sometimes they win, too. I read about some cases like that on the Internet.”
    “You should be a lawyer,” Rowdy suggested. “You