Foster’s shoulder went up in a shrug, but he didn’t answer because he was drinking his beer.
“I…”
All of our cell phones went off at once.
The emergency app on my phone alerted us to a SWAT call in progress.
“That’s not too far from here,” I said, standing up.
Reese ducked her head as I swung my leg over her.
The men in the kitchen were already up and moving toward the front door.
We all were driving our company issued vehicles, meaning all of our gear was luckily here and not at the station seeing as we’d have had to backtrack if we didn’t have our shit.
“Ohh, is the chief going to come play with the boys?” Downy, my best friend, asked.
He’d been quiet today, and honestly, I was impressed with how much restraint he’d had.
There wasn’t one inappropriate joke to be had the entire meeting.
We had team morale meetings every month, and this one was the first one that we’d had with the twelve new members.
One by one, each of the old members were taking a step back.
Downy and Miller were now working as just regular officers when they weren’t teaching classes at the local college. Michael was working with a new task force for school safety and acting as our resident civilian coordinator. Nico was still with the force as well. He was the officer that trained all the newbies.
Foster and Bennett were still with the SWAT team, but as the SWAT team leaders/coordinators. They didn’t do much grunt work anymore. They were the ones to stay on the sidelines, giving direction, making sure everything was good on the outside.
Which was what they needed.
“Yep,” I agreed, getting my gear out of the back of my truck.
It wasn’t often that I got to go to SWAT calls anymore.
There were just too many things to do in the day as a chief of police. Taking the fun calls wasn’t one of those things that a chief was allowed to do all that often. Meaning when I did finally get to go, I was fucking excited.
Pushing paper wasn’t the most interesting job ever.
But it also kept my officers safe, which is what I wanted. Now and for always.
We were all dressed and ready to go in less than ten minutes, piling into cars and heading out.
I waved at Reese in the doorway, and she blew me a kiss.
Catching it, I placed it against my heart and turned to face forward, not bothering to look at the smirk on my son’s face.
“You should’ve just stayed home,” he suggested. “That way she wouldn’t worry about the both of us.”
“She’s a rock, Derek. She’ll handle it.”
He snorted. “I know she will. All I’m saying is that your time is over. It’s time to hand the reins over. Hell, you’ve kept your foot in the door, and I think it’s time to take it out.”
He had a point. I wasn’t getting any younger.
And, believe it or not, I loved that he pointed out the flaws in my thinking.
“I’m only going as a backup, Bud,” I told him. “Don’t worry.”
“It’s not you I’m worried about. I’m worried about Mom,” he explained. “I think it’s time for you to give her a little peace.”
I snorted. “Your mom knew who I was when she married me. And, believe it or not, she gets just as worried about you as she does me.”
“She shouldn’t,” he said. “I’m a perfectly capable adult that’s able to take care of himself.”
I looked at him with the irony written all over my face.
“You’re annoying.”
He flipped me off.
Chapter 2
Straight out of money.
-me after Christmas
Nico
“No, baby,” I said, pinching the bridge of my nose. “I swear, we’re only here as backup. We’re not doing anything at all that’ll require us to be going in. This is all as a support system. The first time the boys go in by themselves without any of us there.”
There was a long, silent pause and then Georgia said, “I don’t feel like this is going to end well. I have a really bad feeling.”
My Georgia and her bad feelings.
The first time she had a ‘bad feeling’ I ended up needing stitches because I’d been pushed down a flight of stairs and had whacked my head pretty fuckin’ good on the side of said stairs. The second, I’d been coming around a corner at another SWAT call only to have a Glock shoved into my face and nearly fired point blank. The only thing that saved me was that the fucker holding the gun had tripped and fallen. All that happened from that incident was a busted eardrum from a gun firing too close to my ear.
The third and fourth were both bullet grazes to the shoulder blades and the back of my thigh.
It continued on like this, but each time she ‘got a feeling’ I had to be extra super careful while on call that day. The only problem was, the more times that she got the feelings and was proven right, the more times she was proven right and I had to placate her fears.
“Baby,” I repeated. “I’m not going in. I swear.”
She drew in a deep, steadying breath, and then blew it out. “I swear to Christ, Nico. You get hurt, I’m getting pregnant with another baby.”
I choked. “You’re fucking nuts.”
“I could do it and you know I could,” she challenged.
I was fifty-five years old, and she asked me every other day if I was sure that I was done having babies with her.
The problem was, I wasn’t done. The problem was that my body was done.
After our last baby, something had changed and things hadn’t been as easy as it once was to get her pregnant. She’d wanted to be tested to find out why we couldn’t have anymore, but I’d known that it was likely my problem.
After one too many gunshot wounds and hard fought infections, I had a feeling that I was no longer shooting fertile arrows, but blank ones.
Sure, I didn’t have this confirmed or anything, but we’d been going at it for years now with no more babies to show for it.
“Totally serious,” she said. “I’ll even go seek professional help.”
I rolled my eyes and began lacing up my boots. “Love you, baby.”
She sighed. “Love you too. Keep our babies safe.”
Then she was gone, leaving me with dead air pressed against my ear.
“Mom needs to chill,” Booth said as he leaned against the armored vehicle. “Is she going to do this every single time we leave for a call?”
I looked at them both, seeing so much of me in their eyes that it was almost comical.
“When you find that woman that makes your heart skip a beat like mine does every single time I see your mom, then yes, she’ll stop calling you. Because that worry, though will forever be hers to feel, will also be split between another woman. She’ll let your woman make the call, and she’ll just wait for updates like she’s supposed to. But until then, she doesn’t have to share.”
Booth rolled his eyes at my words.
Bourne, however, went thoughtful.
That was also a Georgia trait. The thoughtfulness. The way he thought through every single decision he made, down to the last single detail, before he ever made a decision.
“Ready when you are, Nico,” Luke’s deep, baritone voice said.
I looked over at my friend of many years and nodded, then turned back to the boys. “Head out, boys. This is your show now.”
Booth and Bourne shared a look with me, each so much different but also so the same, and then turned as one and left.
“They’re trouble,” Luke muttered, voice rough.
I looked at him, then looked for Derek in the crowd of men, finding him standing next to Ford.
“They are,” he agreed. “What the fuck did I do to deserve them?”
Luke chuckled darkly, then wrapped his hand around my neck and squeezed.
“Let’s go see what the
y got to deal with. Remember, no fucking talking at all, okay?” he ordered. “You let them run the show.”
I already knew that.
It’d been my goddamn idea, after all.
I rolled my eyes at his snort of annoyance and stood up, following him to the other men that were on our old team.
Downy, Michael, Bennett, Foster, and Miller filled out the rest of the team, all watching and waiting for what Luke had to say next.
All of us stayed silent as we watched the new SWAT team come up with their own plan.
They split up into two teams, which had Luke grunting in approval.
“What I would’ve done,” Downy muttered, keeping his voice low.
“Me too,” I commented.
“I would make a…”
“We need team leaders,” Booth supplied. “I’m going with the first and second hired.”
“…team leader.” Michael finished his sentence, grinning wide.
“Sounds good to me. That would be Ford and Derek,” Saint supplied. “Who has the schematics of the building? And where is the first officer that was on scene?”
And they were off, doing what needed to be done. Some of it being what they were taught by us over the last six months, and other stuff that they’d learned on their own throughout their time in the military.
When they finally breached the building over an hour later? We may be proud as fuck, but we were also just as goddamned scared.
“Now what?” I asked.
“Now we wait,” Luke answered.
Chapter 3
Can’t touch this.
-Elf on the Shelf
Downy
“I’m so fuckin’ glad that I don’t have a kid on this team,” I muttered to no one in particular.
“You have a kid that pulls over people that are just as fuckin’ dangerous all goddamn day, and rides a motorcycle. I’m fairly fuckin’ sure he’s in just as much danger,” Foster supplied.
I sighed. He was right.
My kid had gotten his ass in a sling only yesterday. He’d pulled a car over for speeding and had been walking up to the man’s window when the man had thought better of letting the cop know that he wasn’t insured. The kid had almost ran my son over.
If it wasn’t for his quick thinking, and even faster gun drawing skills, the kid would’ve run him over and my kid would be in the hospital right now instead of spending time making fucking Christmas cookies at my house.
“Still.” I rubbed my aching chest. “Your kids spent just as much time as my kids did at my house growing up. I feel like I’m sending my babies off to their first day of school.”
Foster chuckled and slapped me on the back.
“I hear that you’re having a new grandkid,” he said.
I gasped.
“What?” I barked.
Foster tilted his head and stared at me.
“Blake told me that she saw them at the hospital today. They thought that Saylor had a royal case of food poisoning. But it ended up being not food poisoning and actually the fact that she’s pregnant.” Foster paused. “They didn’t tell you?”
“I’m going to fucking blow you motherfuckers up!” a guy yelled from the window on the second floor. “Seriously. You come inside my house, I’m going to blow y’all up.”
“Fucking Marty,” I grumbled, glaring at the old coot that lived to make our days living hells. We got a call from this address once a fuckin’ week. Though since the new SWAT team had been formed, Marty hadn’t had a single call run on him. Meaning the entire SWAT team hadn’t experienced all that was Marty.
Though he yelled loud, he was ultimately harmless.
“A baby?” I barked again.
The men around me chuckled.
“A baby,” Foster said. “Try to act surprised when he tells you. Patient confidentiality and all that bullshit. Blake could get into trouble.”
“Blake wasn’t at the hospital as her doctor or anything, moron,” Miller said. “She was there because she was taking your daughter to go get birth control.”
Foster snorted. “Actually, I have no idea why they were there. Now that I’m thinking about it, they neglected to mention any of why they were there. They immediately went into seeing Lock and what they knew…”
“You better go call them and figure out what the fuck,” Miller suggested. “Because now they have me curious.”
No fuckin’ joke.
I had no doubt in my mind that Lock had found out that he was having a kid today—holy shit I was going to be a grandfather—but there was likely more to the story.
Beckham, Foster’s girl, had broken up with her boyfriend a couple of months ago. Since then, she’d been incredibly quiet about everything that had gone on with the couple.
But, I knew that Foster was very protective of his girl, and there were likely things that he wasn’t told because Foster would overreact.
Meaning we would overreact because, again, Foster’s kids, or Miller’s kids, or Luke’s kids… hell, they were all like our own. They might not have been my DNA, but shit those were my kids just as much as my kids were Foster’s. Which was why he sounded so fuckin’ excited when he was telling me about Lock and the soon-to-be baby.
“I agree,” I commented. “Call. Find out what’s up.”
Foster walked off to find out what was going on while the rest of us watched the team divide up. One team went to the front of the house while the other went to the back.
Two from each team stayed behind, one to talk to Marty, while the other found him a spot to look from a higher vantage point.
Three of the men had been chosen for advanced sniper training, not that all of them weren’t cut out for it. It was just that three of them were excessively good and more loners than the rest of the team. They’d make good snipers and James would make them the best.
Speaking of James.
“Where the fuck is James?” I asked.
“He’s actually at his own training in Norfolk,” Luke muttered. “They wanted him to teach a class to sniper recruits. He agreed because all of his family wanted to go on a cruise to the Bahamas for Christmas, so he and the wife went to Norfolk.”
“Interesting,” I grunted. “Never thought of going on a cruise for Christmas. Now that the kids are older, I bet it’d make a whole lot more sense than buying them useless shit that they won’t ever use.”
“You’ve been buying them useless shit since they were babies, Downy.” Bennett chuckled. “I don’t think I’ve bought one thing for my kids over the years that’s still used on Christmas of the next year.”
“Amen,” Michael muttered. “Christmas is a punk holiday. Nikki starts buying shit in October. It fills up my fuckin’ spare bedroom by Christmas. Such a waste of money.”
Foster’s voice started to rise right along with a few of the members of the first team as they breached the front door.
“They’re in,” I said, stating the obvious.
“They are,” Luke confirmed.
“Do you think Marty’s got a collection of poo for them this time?” Michael asked.
I snorted. “That fucking sick bastard. I can’t believe he did that to us.”
“Did you talk to Saint about his new job?” I questioned Luke.
Saint being the new Saint, the actual Saint, not Michael.
Saint was a new member of the SWAT team and the man that I’d chosen to take over my job as negotiator.
Luke nodded. “He’s going to be taking the courses you suggested next month. He should be good to go by the spring.”
Chapter 4
Naughtyish.
-Coffee Cup
Miller
I crossed my arms over my chest and tried to will my pounding heart to calm the fuck down.
“You know,” I said as I watched the last of the boys enter the building. “I’m fairly sure that I’m freaking the fuck out.”
Michael snorted. “Yo
u don’t look like you’re freaking the fuck out.”
“I feel it,” I said, rubbing my chest. “Right the fuck here.”
“Samuel’s a smart cookie, Miller,” Luke rumbled, talking about my son. “Just like they all are. We trained them well. They’re smart. They have common sense. They’re exact replicas of what we were at that age. They’re ready.”
“Who are you trying to convince?” Downy asked. “Us or yourself?”
Luke scratched his head. “Myself. And you. Fuck, they’ve been going in on ops for months now. I know that they’re ready. Derek tells me all the time that I need to chill the fuck out. But Jesus Christ. It’s like allowing my unprotected heart to walk around outside of my body. And I’m just supposed to be okay with it?”
“How do you think our wives feel?” Nico asked. “They’re in there. We’re in there. Maybe not so much so anymore, but we didn’t retire from our day jobs. Sure we won’t be getting texts at zero three hundred in the morning anymore, but we’re still going to know when shit’s going down. Know that our kids are out there, bullets being aimed at their chests.”
“We’re not in Dallas, though. Nor Houston. This is Kilgore. Population is small. It could be worse,” Michael offered.
I looked over at Michael.
“How many fucked up situations have we gotten ourselves into while we were working?” I asked. “I don’t care if we’re not some big ass town like Dallas or Houston. You remember that motherfucker that ran a car through the goddamn bank lobby and then held everybody hostage with a lighter?”
A couple of the men groaned at that.
He remembered all right.
That had been one particular operation that hadn’t ended well. Bennett had suffered third-degree burns on his hands and had been out for months. Downy had them on his fucking knees and shins. Luke, his back.
It’d been a goddamn clusterfuck of epic proportions.
“They’re ready,” I finally said. “We can’t teach them anymore than we’ve already done. They’re ready, and it’s time for us to cut those strings and allow them to be adults. Allow them to make their own decisions.”
And they were.
This was something that I’d discussed at length with Mercy. Something that we’d talked about a lot over the course of the last year as Samuel Adams made his way into the position with SWAT team.
Code 11- KPD SWAT Box Set Page 145
