I’d fucked up.
And now my daughter would forever think this was her fault.
Which was why I did the next stupid thing I did.
I called 911 on my cell phone. Doing exactly what the little pecker head wanted me to do.
I wanted to make sure the bastard paid. He needed to go down, and I’d make sure he did if it was the last thing I did.
***
Foster
“911 call came in a minute ago, just like you said it would,” John confirmed. “Managed to get Pauline to take the call. Blake knows it’s her dad, though. He says he was taken hostage, and the man is making him place the call.”
I swallowed the bile that formed in my throat as I thought of her having to listen to her father calling in.
Goddammit, I was so stupid. Never in a million years would I have thought Lou would go off halfcocked as he’d done, otherwise I would’ve never told him.
Never.
And I just got my future wife’s father killed, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.
“Have you pulled the blueprints of the apartment, yet?” Luke asked John.
“They’re on their way to your computer right now. The bottom half of the building is under construction. So you won’t have to worry about the elevator. Only one set of stairs, and two apartments on the second level. He’s the first door. Second door is occupied, but the tenant isn’t there. The police have him behind the police line,” John explained.
“10-4,” Luke confirmed. “Going black now.”
We all took the stairs, two at a time, eyes trained in front and behind us.
Luke and I were at the top, Miller and Michael behind us, then Bennett and Nico
“James,” Luke said once we reached the top. “You got any eyes?”
“Negative,” James answered immediately. “Blinds are pulled. Not to mention the glass is covered in what looks like fake snow. I’ve got nothing.”
“Fuck,” Luke sighed. “Alright boys. Let’s move.”
Luke signaled with his hands, and I dropped my shotgun over my shoulder, the strap catching the gun just about my mid-back.
Then I took what was deemed the ‘door knocker’ and rammed it into the entryway.
It opened like a twig snapping off of a branch.
I dropped down low to allow my fellow officers to cover me, and that’s when the shooting started.
My world exploded, and the last thing I saw before the ‘red haze’ set in was Lou’s blood spraying all over the white wall.
Except when the dust settled, and the gun that was peppering the wall above my head with bullets finally hit its end, I realized that there was wasn’t anyone ‘human’ shooting at us. Whoever had been here had escaped. The only thing left was an AK-47 rigged to fire once the tension on the door was relieved.
Something I’d done myself when I’d knocked the door through with the door knocker.
All of it had been for nothing.
I ran inside, shotgun up to my cheek and pointed at the gaping hole in the floor. Most likely where Quentin Ortiz had disappeared.
Dropping down to my knees beside Lou, I moved until my ear was next to his mouth.
I didn’t need to see his wounds to know it was serious.
It was beyond serious.
The AK-47 had nearly torn Lou in half since he’d been placed in front of the gun.
He’d fallen to the side at the last second, but it hadn’t helped. Not enough, at least.
He still had at least eight rounds lodged in his belly.
“The new wife,” Lou croaked. “That’s where he’s going to go. The new wife.”
I dropped my forehead down to Lou’s. “You’re going to be okay.”
He laughed but started coughing before he even had the air out completely. “Don’t lie. Just take care of her. Promise.”
I was pushed to the side by the medics, unaware of when they’d arrived, but happy that the scene had been cleared and they had done it so fast.
“I will, Lou. I will. Now let them take care of you,” I said, getting to my feet.
He looked at me. Straight through me, actually.
“I’ll make it until I can say goodbye to her. Won’t go until then,” he croaked.
As they took him out of the room, I made a promise.
Nobody would ever know that Lou “The Shank” Rhodes wasn’t actually on shift that day. All they’d know was that he’d died a hero, and I’d make damn sure of it.
***
Blake
I dropped to my knees, the strength quickly draining from my upper legs as the past twenty minutes just played on repeat over and over again in my head. Had I done all that I could? What should I do now? Did my mom know? Would she even care?
I’d just had to listen as my daddy, the man I’d looked up to for my entire life, called in his own 911 call.
I, luckily, hadn’t been the one to catch the call.
It’d been Pauline.
But I’d heard the call go through, nonetheless.
It’d also been an officer distress call; which meant that while Pauline took the caller, I called in the backup and gave them real time information.
The door to dispatch was flung open, and my uncle, looking disheveled, threw himself through the open door.
He saw me there, on my knees, and immediately dropped to the floor beside me, gathering me into his arms.
“It’s going to be okay, honey,” he whispered. “Let’s go. We can make it to the hospital in ten minutes.”
“But Pauline will be by herself,” I cried.
He shook his head, hauling me to my feet as he stood. “Don’t worry about her. She’s got the hatch tightened down. She can handle it for ten minutes until the backup arrives.”
I nodded, not knowing what else to say.
Pauline looked at me as I passed, still on the line with whoever she’d been talking to for the last ten minutes.
I didn’t know, and I didn’t really care.
My dad was shot and was on the way to the hospital.
I knew, though.
I knew down deep that he wasn’t going to make it.
It would be a small miracle if we arrived, and he was alive.
But I guess miracles did happen, because by the time I ran through the hospital doors behind Uncle Darren, and straight back to Trauma room one, he was alive.
But he didn’t look good.
At all.
“Daddy,” I breathed, looking at him.
The room surrounding him was a mess.
Nurses were slipping on my father’s blood that was pouring out of his chest at an alarming rate; the doctors were trying to staunch the flow with little success.
My daddy was looking right at me.
His hand, covered in old and new blood, extended out to me.
One lone finger crooked, and a sob caught in my throat.
I went to him.
I didn’t have a choice.
I’d never, ever not given him what he wanted.
“Hey,” a dark, pissed off voice said. “Get her out of here.”
I ignored the command, sidestepping another nurse, who slid and then fell on her ass in the blood at her feet.
I didn’t let my dad’s eyes go, though.
“Baby girl,” he rasped.
Blood ran from his mouth, and he coughed.
My eyes started to leak, and the tears I’d been holding back by sheer force of will finally spilled over.
“Daddy,” I pleaded, capturing his head with my face. “Don’t leave me. Please, don’t leave me.”
I wasn’t twenty-four years old anymore. I was my daddy’s baby girl. His only girl. The same little girl who used to crawl into bed with him and snuggle into his side.
The same little girl who used to go shooting with him on the weekends for some father-daughter time.
The girl who asked her fathe
r to prom because her boyfriend, at the time, had come down with a stomach virus.
The girl who was supposed to have her fairytale wedding…with her father walking her down the aisle.
The breath in my lungs hitched as I heard him gasp, then the life I saw there started to dwindle.
“Give me one more hug, baby girl. I love…” Then he was gone.
“No,” I cried. “Please. Fix him!”
It came out shrill and devastated.
Everything that I was feeling in that moment was pushed into my words, and I knew I wasn’t being rational. No one could survive what he had gone through.
“Time of death 0202,” a saddened male voice said above me.
“Daddy,” I whispered. “God. Please don’t leave. Please.”
My voice was hoarse by the time I felt hands curl around my upper arms.
Then I turned to see Foster, dressed out fully in his SWAT uniform, even the hood still partially covering his beautiful face, standing behind me.
His eyes, though. Those were haunted. Devastated. Gutted.
“Foster,” I cried softly. “He’s gone.”
“I know, baby girl. I know,” he said.
“Do you want to donate his organs?” a female voice asked from in front of me.
I looked up into the eyes of a small woman with dark black hair the color of ash.
I nodded, knowing that was exactly what he’d wanted. “Yes.”
Then they took him away, and I lost it.
I’d never hear him call me baby girl ever again either.
Never again.
Never.
Ever.
Chapter 23
They say time heals all wounds… well, those fuckers can suck it. Time doesn’t heal nothing. Only Jack Daniels does.
-Note to self
The funeral of Officer Louis ‘Shank’ Rhodes
Three days later
Blake
I had a rose in my hand, and I plucked the petals, one by one, as I listened to my uncle Darren give a speech about what a difference my father made in his life.
It was a good one.
A really good one.
But I knew if I listened, if I actually became invested in the speech like others around me were doing, that I’d crumble.
I’d fall to my knees and start wailing like a child.
I knew I couldn’t do that.
Not in front of this many people.
Oh, they’d understand, but I’d never forgive myself.
I just had to be strong. Just had to get through the next three hours, and then I could go home. I could curl into Foster’s arms and cry myself to sleep like I’d done the last two nights in a row.
The stupid knot, the one that’d been there for days, started to widen as my uncle walked down the stairs and moved straight to my father’s coffin.
The coffin itself was beautiful. But you couldn’t see much of it due to the American Flag that draped the coffin.
A large picture of my father in the last photo he’d ever taken. It was standing behind the coffin with a huge sash of the metals my father had collected over his career hung off the frame’s corner.
I gasped.
I’d been trying so hard to keep the cry in that I’d inadvertently attracted more attention to myself.
“Baby,” Foster said, pulling me into his side.
Then my tears burst free, and I cried in front of a couple thousand people.
Broke down was too small of a word.
More like broke period.
But then the funniest thing happened.
Instead of “Tears in Heaven” coming on like I’d chosen, “I Shot the Sheriff” blasted through the speakers instead.
My head snapped up, and I looked around, startled.
Finally, I found the source of the mischief.
It was the expression on the attendant’s face that had my giggle escaping.
That was so like my father, controlling things all the way from heaven.
I stood up and walked straight to the attendant who was frantically trying to change the song.
It was divine intervention, though. In my opinion, it wouldn’t be changing any time soon.
Placing my hand on the man’s hand that was furiously clicking the huge X at the top of the screen, I stilled his fingers and said, “It’s okay. I like this song better.”
He looked at me, searching my eyes, then reluctantly withdrew his hand.
Taking over the mouse, I turned down the volume instead of turning the song off completely, then made my way to the podium.
A new strength taking over my body.
As I passed my father’s casket, I ran my fingers over the length of it, smiling sadly.
At his picture, I pressed a kiss to my fingers, and then laid it upon my father’s cheek before climbing the stairs.
We were having the funeral at the local stadium.
There was literally nowhere big enough to hold the people that were expected to show.
And show they’d done.
Every single bleacher, fixed seat, and hilltop was taken over.
Hell, there were even some on the crosswalk that ran over the street.
I took in the people.
Familiar faces, and not.
I skipped over my mother.
She was in the very back, standing next to her sister.
She was wearing all black, as if she hadn’t just served my father with divorce papers only three days before he’d died.
He’d chosen me when she’d made him choose, and she’d followed through with her promise of divorce. She’d gone so far as to have it all done online, having the papers sent to my father while he’d been at work.
And I hadn’t spoken to her since
Skipping over my mother’s scowling form, I finally focused on Foster.
Uncle Darren and Aunt Missy on the other side of him. A space in between them where I’d been sitting only moments before.
“I wasn’t going to get up here,” I told the crowd, eyes roving over the many sad faces. “In fact, up until that song came on, I was fairly sure I was going to die of heartache.”
I wasn’t going to lie. It still hurt. Hurt so hard it was hard to breathe… but I knew I’d survive it.
If only for him, I’d be strong and say what was in my heart to make him proud of me from where he was watching over me.
I’d kick ass at life and make him proud.
“A few days ago, I was interviewed by the local paper.” I swallowed. “I really, really didn’t want to talk to the reporter, but I felt that my dad’s story needed to be remembered. That he deserved to be remembered.”
I looked down at the podium and told them what I’d refused to tell that reporter.
“She asked me what my favorite memory was of my father, and I couldn’t pick one,” I swallowed. “I was lying, though. I had one. Everyone has one. But one in particular, changed the course of my life. And it only happened a few weeks ago. The last time I was able to spend with him before he was shot and killed in that shooting.”
***
Foster
I held Blake’s gaze as she said what she had to say next. And I knew before the words even left her mouth that they were going to gut me.
They were going to rip out my heart and stomp on it.
And I was right.
It was a good kind of hurt, though.
“I was out back, drinking a beer with my daddy as he told me that my mother had decided to leave him,” she said softly.
The microphone picked up her pain, though, and radiated it through the entire stadium for all to hear.
“I asked him what the point of love was if divorce was possible after being with someone for thirty-some-odd years,” she said, wiping a lone tear. “Then his reply to me was to pull my head out of my ass.”
She burst out laughing through her tears, and I wanted nothing m
ore than to go up there and pull her into my arms.
But I left her there to tell the story that I knew she needed to get off her chest.
“After a moment of shocked silence, I berated my father for his bad language, and he gave it to me straight.” She smiled, the corner of her lip kicking up higher than the opposite. “He said, ‘Blake Boston Rhodes. I didn’t raise no dumbass. You’ve got a man who’s one bad ass son of a bitch. Even tougher than I am. You wanna know why? Because I saw the way he looked at you.’”
She’d deepened her voice, even going so far as to put a little twang into her connotations.
“After a moment of shocked silence on my part, I asked him what he meant. And his reply was, ‘Honey, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist. Your mother and me, we had a good time. We lived, we loved, but what we had wasn’t pure like what you and that boy have. What you have will withstand the challenge of time. He’d move fucking mountains for you. All you have to do is let him in. Tell him what you want. And when he comes and asks for your hand in marriage, which I damn well know he will, I’ll tell him no. Then he’ll come and take you from me anyway. That… that right there is what tells me he wants you. He doesn’t care that the woman he loves is the daughter of Shank Rhodes. He cares that you’re happy, and you’re you. That’s what he cares about. So when he asks you to be his, you’ll be the smart girl I know you are, and you’ll say fuckin’ yes.’”
I coughed, laughing with the rest of the people in the stadium as she recounted what her father had said.
I remembered, though, what he’d said to me only one day later when I’d asked him.
“Yes. A thousand times yes. Because I know you’ll treat her like she deserves. But you tell her I said no, because she needs to know I’m there to protect her if she needs it. And know I’ll always be watching you, even if I’m dead and gone. I’ll find a way to kick your ass from the other side of the grave, boy. Fuck up, and you’ll see.”
“Then he’d given me a hug and brought me another beer where we proceeded to get drunk and celebrate him being a ‘free man’ as he liked to call it,” she laughed. “I’ve never been drunk in my life, but that night, for him, I did it.”
Then, as if in a freakin’ movie, every single member of the SWAT team’s pager started going off.
Code 11- KPD SWAT Box Set Page 97
