Her brows lowered in confusion. “N-no. That’s not what he just told me… excuse me.”
With that, she pushed past me.
Caught off balance, I instinctually put my weight on my bad leg, and promptly ate dirt.
The woman was gone before I even hit the floor.
I was able to catch myself before I did any major damage to my person, but not in enough time to prevent the entire station from seeing me fall.
There were men lined up behind the counter, all of their eyes wide as they looked at me, wondering what they should do.
I could practically hear their thoughts.
Should we help him?
Can he get back up by himself?
Oh, my God. That woman just made the cripple fall.
Narrowing my eyes on them, I stood, making sure no one saw how awkward it was to actually stand, and walked out of the door.
Once I reached the front steps, I crossed my arms and watched as the woman yelled at her grandfather. The old man who looked like the most innocent man in the world.
The man who’d pulled the knife on me quicker than I could blink.
He was lucky all I gave him was a weapons citation.
I could’ve arrested him for threatening a police officer with intent to harm.
When she spotted me, she started to march up the steps, coming to a stop two down from me.
“He tells me you’re lying. That he had nothing more than his pocket knife.” She held up a fucking switchblade.
I reached for it, and she warily placed it in my hand.
Acting quickly, I pressed the lever, disengaging the blade and scaring the shit out of her.
“This,” I said, holding my hand out to her, offering her the hilt of the blade. “Is a switchblade. This is not a pocket knife. It’s also illegal, because it’s double-sided.”
She looked at the knife now in her hand, then offered it back to me.
“Just keep it.”
I took the blade from her hands, collapsing the blade, and shoving it in my pocket.
“What the fuck, grandpa! That’s illegal, too!” I heard just before she dropped down into her nineties model Camaro and closed the door.
I couldn’t help the smile that overtook my face.
For the first time in months, I had something to smile about.
Chapter 2
I hope a bird shits on your car.
-Blake to Foster
Blake
“Way to go, Blake!” I cheered myself on. “Make yourself look bad when you’re about to start working there. There’s a good idea!”
Jesus Christ.
Fucking grandpa.
I should’ve known he’d lie about that.
He was a shit like that sometimes.
Bursting through my mother’s door with Gramps at my heel, I immediately shouted, “Mom!”
My mother was in her fifties and the proverbial ‘housewife.’
She stayed at home while my father brought home the bread money, stating that she was staying at home to take care of the kids.
Even now he was still working, and she was still keeping house.
I found my mother in the kitchen rolling pie dough out on the counter.
My mouth watered, and I got distracted from what I was going to tell her.
“What kind of pie are you making, mama?” I asked, leaning over her shoulder to look.
Peaches were sliced on the counter, and I think I zoned out for a few seconds, because I only caught the second half of her sentence.
“…the garage. Would you mind?”
“I’m sorry, what?” I asked, shaking my head and backing away from the food.
I was on a diet, and I was determined to stick to it this time, no matter what.
“I asked if you’d go get me the potatoes from the garage. Are you staying for dinner tonight?” she asked.
I went to the garage and grabbed the potatoes, giving my gramps a glare when his eyes looked up from his car he was tinkering with.
“Um, no. I’m not,” I told her.
If I stayed, I was fairly positive I wouldn’t be able to skip the pie. I had willpower… kind of. Just not that much.
“Oh, that’s sad. Are you going out with David for dinner?” she asked. “He called here looking for you.”
I gritted my teeth, smoke nearly pouring out of my ears.
“Actually, Mom, no. I’m not planning on ever having dinner with David again, if I can help it. My next lifetime would be too soon.” I told her, turning my back on her pity filled face.
David was my ex-husband.
He was a cop with Kilgore Police Department, and we’d been divorced now for nearly a year and a half.
“I don’t know why you have to be so uncivil toward each other,” my mother admonished.
The tick that only ever came on when I thought about David started back up.
David and I had fallen in love when we were teenagers.
We got married when he was twenty-one and fresh out of the police academy, and I was twenty.
I’d gone the housewife route, although we’d never had any children. Thank God!
I’d thought that we had an awesome relationship, too.
I’d been so proud to be known as a police wife. The woman who stood behind her man. Supported him in his every endeavor
Then he started working ‘mandatory overtime.’
It started out as just here and there, and slowly morphed into over eighteen to twenty hours of extra time per week. At first, I hadn’t been suspicious.
Then little things started to stand out.
How he started changing at work and coming home freshly showered and shaved.
How he’d be super sneaky with his phone, putting a passcode on it and forgetting to tell me the code.
Then there were the random purchases on our account.
Thirty dollars here at a flower shop. A hundred and fifty dollars there at a jewelry shop.
When we’d first started our life together, David had been the one in charge of the finances.
I’d trusted him to do what he needed to do and had never needed to check our bank account.
We lived modestly in a house his parents provided us when we got married. I also stayed home most of the day, rarely venturing out to do anything other than get groceries or essentials.
Most of the things we needed, I waited for David to do with me.
But then he’d started being gone a whole lot more and I started to get suspicious.
I don’t know if he thought that just because I was a blonde, and that I only had a high school education, that I was stupid. But I most assuredly wasn’t.
I’d been taking online classes here and there throughout our relationship. Also, before I’d even graduated high school, I’d had nearly enough hours to graduate with an associate degree.
I’d been in the top ten percent of our class when we’d graduated, so I wasn’t really sure if he was just that oblivious to my abilities, or if he thought his superior cop skills kept me from seeing what was going on right in front of me.
Needless to say, I finally caught on, two years after denying it, and confronted him.
One of the days he was supposed to be at work, I followed him. Right into the arms of his ‘beat wife.’
A beat wife is someone you have while you’re on patrol.
Berri Aleo was that woman.
David had met her while he was on his patrol, and he visited her nearly every day while he was on duty, and on his ‘overtime,’ for two years before I finally called him on it.
He’d been so surprised when I’d moved out of the house, emptied the bank account, and filed for divorce, all in one day, that he’d been in tears.
Apparently, he didn’t love the other woman, and it was all a huge mistake.
Whatever the fuck it was, I wasn’t going to be a part of it. I’d lost all respect for him.<
br />
We’d been separated for a year and a half, and ‘officially’ divorced for six months.
Luckily, my uncle was able to get me a job at the PD as a dispatcher. Something I was supposed to start tomorrow morning.
I expected to be getting a call from him any moment, though, telling me I’d lost the job before I ever even truly had it.
It’s not like I wanted to deal with listening to David on the police scanner all day long, but I’d do it if it got me money. Something I was in desperate need of, thanks to him.
“Well, on that note, I’ve got to go. You need to talk to grandpa about his knife problem, though. He lied to me, the old coot. I still can’t believe he did that,” I snapped, eyes on my grandfather working merrily through the window to the garage.
“Your grandfather was a cop for fifty years. He can lie to the best of them still. And he’s always carried that knife around with him. There’s no talking him out of it. It’s supposedly something really special,” my mother said, placing her pie dough into a pie plate and pressing it into the sides.
“Hmmm,” I wondered. “If it was special, I didn’t know. I gave it to the cop who gave him that ticket. He said it was illegal.”
“It is,” my father said, coming into the kitchen. “He should know that.”
He followed up that comment by hanging his gun belt up by the back door and hanging his hat beside it.
My father was a state trooper for the State of Texas. At fifty-nine, he still looked pretty badass and intimidating in his uniform.
“On that note, I’ll see y’all later before Uncle Darren gets here… oh shit.” Uncle Darren pulled up in his police-issued vehicle, and I darted for the backdoor.
Running around the house, I came up to the side and waited until Uncle Darren climbed the front steps before I hightailed it to my car.
Luckily, Uncle Darren didn’t block me in. Something he should’ve done if he’d wanted to talk to me.
However, there was no reason for him to be here unless he was wanting to talk to me.
Something I most definitely didn’t want to do with him right at this moment.
“Bye, honey!” my grandpa called from the garage.
I waved at him and blew him a kiss before I dropped into my car, slamming the door behind me.
I backed out of the driveway and cringed when I saw my uncle on the porch watching me leave. His hands were at his hips, and I prayed he wouldn’t follow me.
I already felt stupid enough.
I’d intended to go in to this afternoon with a lot more tact.
Then that man with his incredible smile and beautiful brown eyes had looked at me like I was the stupid blonde that everyone thought I was, and I lost it.
I just hoped I didn’t have to see him anytime soon.
I’d be lying, though, if I really believed that.
Chapter 3
I like big… batons… and I cannot lie.
-Blake’s secret thoughts.
Foster
“Unit 4. Possible 223 at 555 Wimberly Lane,” the dispatcher said through my mic.
Even the shitty radio couldn’t stop my cock from hardening as I heard her voice through my speakers.
Fuck.
I hadn’t known she was a dispatcher.
Motherfucker. Was she new?
“10-4. Unit 4 responding,” I said, pulling into traffic and heading to the opposite side of town.
Normally, this would’ve been Luke’s, my boss and head of the SWAT team, beat. Today, though, he was tied up in an officer involved stabbing.
Although we’d all responded, Luke had been the first on scene, and had been the one to witness the act.
Chief Rhodes had sent him home for a day of R&R, which meant the rest of the cops on duty had to pick up the slack. Not that it was hard or bothersome. It wasn’t. It’d just take me longer to get there than usual.
“Motherfuc—” I heard through the mic before the sound was abruptly cut off.
I smiled, knowing that the dispatcher knew exactly who it was that she’d just dispatched.
I arrived on scene with little fanfare, pulling up to the house in question, and stepping out of my car.
Yet again, my leg took a few seconds to work properly, but I was doing pretty good, considering.
I heard the fighting between the couple who lived there immediately after stepping out of my car.
My eyes scanned the area, taking in the two men under their front porch’s awning two doors down from the house I was responding to. As well as the older couple at the windows of their own house directly behind me.
I suspected they were the ones who had called the cops.
Old people were busybodies like that.
Most of the crime watchers, I’d found, were old. They were the ones who were home the most. Sure, there were a few young ones interspersed throughout, but by far the most prevalent was the elderly.
Mostly because they wanted to live their lives in peace.
Something they were most definitely not getting right now due to the ‘whore fucker’ this and the ‘cock sucker’ that coming from the home in front of me.
Walking up the walk, I stood just to the side of the door and knocked.
“Who is it?” the man bellowed.
“KPD Police. Can you come out here, please?”
I’d tried for stern and menacing, but I wasn’t sure how much actually got through the fighting, as well as the door.
This time, when I knocked, I made sure to put a pound behind it, rattling the doorframe with its intensity.
The fighting stopped instantly, and two large, pounding feet made their way to the door.
Stepping back, I crossed my arms over my chest and waited.
Which I didn’t have to do long by the way the boots hightailed it to the door.
A man in his thirties, dressed in shabby clothes that looked like they needed to be washed a month ago, yanked open the door.
Eyes wild, he asked, “What?”
“I’ve had a complaint about the fighting that was going on over here. Where is the woman you were fighting with?” I asked, staring around him into the house.
It was trashed. Tables overturned. Lamps on the floor. Glass figurines smashed to smithereens.
The woman was behind the man, peaking around a wall.
At the mention of her, her eyes got wide and she started forward.
“Renee, get over here so he can see I’m not hitting you,” the man said.
‘Renee’ walked out slowly, coming toward the man and the door like it was the very last thing she wanted to do.
“Can you tell me what’s going on here?” I asked, taking in the two.
“Yeah, my girlfriend,” he spat. “Kicked me out of the house because I supposedly cheated on her. I’ve been living in a tent in the backyard. Then I find out that she’s been seeing some fucker for two fucking months, having sex in our bed while I been outside sleeping on the hard ground. Ain’t gonna happen no more. This here’s my house, and she’s just going to have to move out. In fact, I was just about to call you. She needs to get gone.”
“You’re not married?” I asked for clarification.
The man and the woman both shook their heads.
“Whose name is on the deed? How long have you both been together?” I asked.
“Six months. And that would be me whose name is on the deed,” the man said. “Need proof?”
I nodded.
“Yes, if you’re serious about having her leave your property,” I said carefully.
Twenty minutes later I had the girl in the back of my patrol car.
“Where do you need to go?” I asked.
I’d have let her find her own way, but she’d looked so damn pitiful walking down the street with a garbage bag full of clothes that I’d stopped and picked her up.
“I don’t have anywhere to go,” she cried.
I didn’t
feel sorry for her. She’d made her bed; she needed to lie in it.
She’d admitted to sleeping with the other man in her boyfriend’s bed. There was no wonder he’d kicked her out.
Hell, I’d have been a lot more livid about the entire situation than he had been.
Pulling a U-turn at the next light, I drove her directly to the mission.
She could stay there for a few nights before she was asked to leave.
“Alright, ma’am. Here you are,” I said, getting out and opening the backdoor for her.
She got out warily, looking at the building as if it was a venomous snake. “I’m not going in there.”
She sounded like a stuck-up bitch… not that I’d tell her that.
“All units be advised, we have a BOLO out for a white male, late forties, black hoodie, and blue jeans. Red and white Nike’s. He’s a suspect in a convenience store robbery on 3rd Street,” my new favorite dispatcher said.
Without waiting for a goodbye, I got into my cruiser and got back on the streets, all under the hate-filled eyes of the woman I’d just dropped off at the mission.
***
Blake
“Oh, my God. The first freakin’ call and I say a curse word on the open air,” I muttered into my sandwich.
“It’s okay, honey. It won’t be your last, either,” Pauline, the woman that was training me, said.
Pauline was nearly ten years older than my twenty-four and had been working with KPD Dispatch for going on fifteen years now.
She was the ‘best of the best’ according to all the girls in dispatch, and I was kind of excited to be working with her.
I’d had a ton of fun in the four hours I’d been here, and I couldn’t wait to go back.
Especially since I got to hear that sexy, growl of a voice that I’d learned was nicknamed ‘The Crush.’
“Hey,” I said, picking at my sandwich. “Can you tell me more about that guy? Foster?”
“Crush?” Pauline clarified, raising her brows at me in question.
When I nodded, she continued. “Not really much to tell. He’s on the SWAT team. I’m sure you know everybody on the SWAT team is badass. Crush, though, is more than most. There’s something about him since his accident that makes him so… unapproachable.”
Code 11- KPD SWAT Box Set Page 83
