Charlie Foxtrot

by Lani Lynn Vale

  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 that 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 that 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 that had called the cops.

  Old people were busybodies like that.

  Most of the crime watchers, I’d found, were old. They were the ones that 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 of 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 towards 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 that 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…un
approachable.”

  “His accident?” I asked worriedly. “What accident?”

  She squinted at me. “Everybody knows about that. He was the cop that had his leg amputated a year or so ago.”

  My mouth dropped open.

  “That was him?” I gasped.

  Wow. He really didn’t look like he was missing a leg.

  In fact, I distinctly remember studying his boots yesterday, and there’d been two of them.

  “He’s missing a leg?” I whispered quietly.

  She nodded, and I sat there stunned.

  I’d heard about that.

  Hell, everyone in Kilgore had.

  It’d happened in front of about a hundred cops. Some of them out of state. Some of them on Kilgore’s Police Department, some County Sheriffs. Some of them, like my father, were Department of Public Safety.

  Hell, he’d even been the one to take the lady out and live to tell about it.

  “Wow,” I said quietly. “That’s pretty amazing. I didn’t know he was any different than what he used to be, though.”

  Pauline nodded. “He’s a lot different. He doesn’t play anymore. He’s the force’s top ticket writer. He picks up overtime that nobody else wants. Literally, he’s that cop. The one that nobody wants to mess with. The one that everybody knows and cringes when they pass.”

  “Aww, be easy on the kid. He’s had a rough year,” my uncle said from behind us.

  I inhaled half of my sandwich, very nearly choking to death, but my uncle was there. Always able and willing to save the day.

  He slammed his palm roughly down on my back, knocking the bread loose from my windpipe, as well as a few teeth for good measure.

  “Okay,” I groaned, pulling away from him.

  Was it just me, or was he hitting harder than he needed to?

  “Oh, Chief Rhodes!” Pauline said, standing.

  In the process, she knocked half of her lunch on the floor, and I barely contained the urge to roll my eyes.

  They treated my uncle as if he were a celebrity, being the chief of police. However, if they only knew that he was a horrible cheater at the game Go Fish, and the funniest drunk in the world, they’d never look at him straight in the eyes again.

  “Uncle Darren, what are you doing at work today?” I asked suspiciously.

  My uncle narrowed his eyes at me. “Oh, just seeing how your day was going so far. Just making sure everyone is treating you alright.”

  I wanted to smack him.

  He damn well knew that I didn’t want to be associated with him.

  I didn’t want people to look at me differently.

  I wanted to be me, not Chief Rhodes’ niece.

  Now they’d all treat me differently.

  In fact, Pauline was already staring at me like I was a bug she didn’t want to be anywhere near.

  Great.

  “Thanks for stopping by. You can go now,” I said through clenched teeth.

  He grinned at me. Seriously and truly grinned at me.

  Then he left, leaving only damage in the wake.

  By the end of the day, everybody knew I was the Chief of Police’s niece.

  Cops. Receptionists. 911 dispatchers. Felons.

  It was fucking perfect.

  Chapter 4

  I solemnly swear that I’m up to no good.

  -Blake before she eats a package of Oreos.

  Blake

  “Excuse me,” I said, keeping my head lowered to block the rain from getting under my hooded raincoat and saturating my hair.

  I was on my way home, descending the steps of the station, when I heard it.

  “Sorry, darlin,” an extremely familiar voice said to me.

  Shivers, and not the good kind, stole down my spine, filling up my lungs, and squeezing them to where I could hardly breathe.

  “David,” I said, nodding at him.

  I might have been able to leave, but there was another man there with David, and that was the man that I’d made a fool of myself in front of just a short week ago.

  Had it already been a week?

  This, luckily, had been the first time I’d run into both men, and I was grateful.

  I loved my job, but there was no way in hell I was going to keep working there if I had to see David often.

  I didn’t have enough bail money to accomplish that feat.

  I still, every night, thought about him.

  Thought about all that I’d thought we’d had.

  All that time I’d wasted being loyal to a man that didn’t extend the same courtesy to me.

  Then there was Foster.

  The tall drink of water in the middle of a hot Texas summer.

  He was freakin’ beautiful.

  His hair was wet from the rain, making it look more sandy blonde rather than snow white blonde. All those beautiful blonde curls were plastered to his head as he took me in.

  Were they friends?

  If they were, I’d never know Foster better. Even if I did have an incredibly high-school-like crush on him.

  I couldn’t be friends with someone that was friends with my ex. I didn’t want anything to do with David at all, even second hand.

  “Bye Officer Spurlock, good job today,” I said as I pushed past them and started down the steps.

  Foster had interrupted a hotel robbery in progress, answering the silent alarm that the receptionist had tripped the moment the crack head had asked her for the money.

  “Thanks,” Foster said, sounding surprised that I’d even offered the compliment.

  I tossed him a smile over my shoulder, rain wetting my face, and said, “That wasn’t anything more than a compliment, Officer Spurlock. Don’t let it go to your head.”

  The last thing I saw before the rain really started to pour down was David glaring at Foster, and Foster staring at me with a smirk on his lips. One that promised more things to come.

  I drove home in the near monsoon weather, past my old home that now had a different woman’s car in the driveway, and pulled into my driveway that was on the next street over.

  I’d looked and looked for a house that was anywhere but where I finally found one. But I literally couldn’t find anything anywhere else.

  What I received in the divorce settlement was enough to buy an affordable house just two streets over from my old home. Which is what I had to do. It was either that, or move completely out of Kilgore, and I wasn’t giving that royal dickhead the advantage of seeing me squirm.

  The very next week, the asshole had moved his ‘beat wife’ into my home, and proceeded to play house.

  At least they hadn’t gotten married…yet.

  It was a joy to get to see the other woman every day, though.

  My phone rang before I could get out of my car, and I decided to wait and answer it before I got out.

  “Hello?” I greeted my mother.

  “Uncle Darren wants you to meet him at dinner tonight. Bodacious,” my mother said excitedly.

  “Why?” I asked, confused as to why my uncle wouldn’t have called me himself.

  “He sent your dad a message on his cell phone. He’s talking to the Mayor of Kilgore right now, and can’t break away.”

  “Is it just him, or what?” I asked, studying my windshield as it started to rain a little bit harder.

  I hated when it rained.

  Seriously hated it.

  When I was sixteen, I’d had a wreck during a thunderstorm.

  It was nearly four hours after my accident that I was found pinned in the car.

  But that four hours would haunt me forever.

  When I’d crashed, I’d gone nose first into a ditch that was filled with water that was flowing fast.

  I’d spent the time watching as my car was dragged further and further down a gulley as lightning struck everything around me.

  I couldn’t get out of my car because of the pressure the water kept on the doors, and I couldn’t get one single window opened.

  I’d been scared to dea
th that I’d die that night, and ever since I’d had a phobia of thunderstorms.

  Now, as a precaution, I carried flares in my car, as well as a glass punch that would help me get out if it was ever needed again.

  That wasn’t enough to counteract the fear that I felt every time I drove in the rain.

  “It’s raining,” I hesitated.

  My mother’s voice became less cheery. “I know. He said he’d send someone out to get you.”

  I nodded, knowing I wouldn’t get out of it now.

  He wouldn’t have been sending someone for me if it weren’t important to him.

  “Fine,” I said. “What time?”

  “Seven thirty. Your ride will be there around seven fifteen,” she said excitedly.

  “Okay. Do you know who it is?” I asked.

  “Nope. He didn’t tell your daddy that,” she said evasively.

  I should’ve known when the familiar red truck that I’d helped shop for pulled into my drive an hour and a half later that it wasn’t going to be good, but I decided to be the bigger person.

  Closing the door to my house behind me, and locking it, I made my way down the driveway carefully.

  David got out and opened the passenger door, soaking himself to be the gentleman that we both knew he wasn’t.

  There must’ve been someone there, otherwise he never would’ve bothered to get out.

  He never used to.

  I ignored his outstretched hand and opened the backdoor.

  I was surprised to find two men already back there, one of which I couldn’t get out of my head no matter how hard I tried.

  Without waiting for them to move, I climbed over Foster’s lap, scooting my ass over his legs before I plopped down into the middle seat beside him.

  Foster looked surprised, while the other man beside him, one that looked eerily similar to Foster, grinned.

  “Hey, how’s it going?” I asked the man, smiling at him.

  He winked. “Pretty good. Although, I gave up the front seat so you could sit up there. Not so you could sit back here smashed between the both of us.

  “So go back up there,” I said, shrugging and turning my face forward.

  The front door slammed with unnecessary force, and I couldn’t help the smile that split over my face.