He nodded in the direction of the man in the three-piece suit and tie sitting catty-corner to David. “Old guy, 0300.”
0300.
Military time.
“Do all cops use military time?” I asked.
I never could quite grasp the whole 2400 hours thing. It didn’t matter how many times I tried to figure it out, it just wasn’t happening for me.
Foster shrugged, and his indifference annoyed me.
The earlier nice guy was nowhere to be seen, and in his place was the same man who had looked at me like I was a dumb blond just a short week ago.
Dammit.
I was destined to be forever known as that girl.
“I was in the Navy,” he said once the waitress served us.
I’d ordered sweet tea, while Foster had ordered a bottle of beer. Foster’s, to be exact.
“You’re drinking the same beer as your name,” I said smartly.
His brother, who’d sat across the table from me, piped in with, “We’re named after the beers.”
My mouth dropped open. “That’s cool! I was named after my grandmother’s dog.”
The two men stayed silent for a few moments, processing that, and finally asked, “Why?”
I shook my head. “I haven’t a single clue. Blake is a boy’s name, yet I’ve been called that since birth. I don’t know what my parents were thinking.”
“They were thinking,” my uncle said, sitting down beside Miller. “That they liked the name, and it meant something to them.”
“He was my grandmother’s dog. Apparently, he saved my mom when she was eight months pregnant, alerting her to a carbon monoxide leak in the house. The dog died about two weeks before I was born because he was hit by a car, so they chose to name me after the dog,” I explained more fully.
“Well, that’s a shitty story,” Foster muttered, taking a hefty gulp of his beer before placing it down and picking up his menu, effectively dismissing us.
Miller glared at his brother, or tried to at least. The menu blocked him from everyone’s view but my own.
His face was weathered and tired, and a small tic was playing at the corner of his mouth.
His face was what I would describe as rugged.
He had a dark brown beard that covered the lower half of his face.
It wasn’t unkempt like some, though. It was very well maintained, and the edges precise.
He had a scar along his right temple that extended into his hairline, followed by a small mole behind his ear.
I could barely make out what used to be an ear piercing, as well.
He certainly no longer had it, but it was nice to see that he used to be able to let loose.
“So, what do you want?” my uncle asked, his bushy eyebrows raised in question at me.
I shrugged.
That was the eighty-three million dollar question, wasn’t it?
Chapter 5
What’s she have that I don’t? A magic vagina that compliments the size of your micropenis?
-Blake’s secret thoughts
Blake
I didn’t bother saying thank you for the ride.
In fact, I was pretty sure that David tried his freakin’ hardest to make the drive as horrible as possible.
First, he’d dropped the other two off first, effectively leaving me in the car with him, trapped and unable to go anywhere, for another ten minutes more than I wanted to be.
Then he’d driven erratically, purposefully hitting huge puddles, and accelerating a little too fast.
On top of it all, it’d started raining impossibly harder than it had been the moment I no longer had Foster as a buffer, allowing me to focus solely on the two things I hated.
David and the rain.
“Don’t bother with Spurlock. He’s a womanizing prick,” David said, snottily, once Foster walked inside his door.
I didn’t bother to glance up at him in the rearview mirror. There was no point.
That was rich, coming from him, but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of allowing him to think he knew me.
He didn’t know me.
If anything, handing that challenge over would only spur me on, not make me run the other way.
Regardless, I ignored him.
It wouldn’t do to break my year and a half accomplishment of ignoring him.
“I tried calling you this weekend,” David said, clearing his throat. “I want to know if I can have the bassinet. The one my father gave you before he died.”
I blinked, turned to him, and smiled.
The evilest smile I could muster.
Yeah fucking right.
He could have that over my cold, dead body.
His dad was also an officer, and I secretly thought he’d always loved me more than his own son.
I’d admired the beautiful woodwork on the bassinet about a month before David and I had married, and Cary saw me admiring it.
Cary had bought it for me.
Had driven back three hours where we’d been not even a half day before and had bought it.
He’d then given it to me as a wedding present.
Me. Not David.
“You’re not going to be civil about this, are you?” David asked, pulling onto my street.
I shook my head.
No, I wouldn’t be.
I’d loved Cary, and that was the only thing I had left of him, except my memories.
That was the one and only thing, besides my clothes, that I’d taken with me that day I’d left David.
He, of course, hadn’t noticed it until he needed it, but that wasn’t my fault.
Instead of pulling into the driveway, allowing me to get as close to the house as he could get me, he stopped in the middle of the road.
I got out.
The moment my feet hit the pavement, and I turned to reach for my bag and umbrella, David sped off in a hail of water.
Luckily, I’d had my hand around the strap of my purse, or he would’ve taken off with it.
“You stupid motherfucker!” I yelled, the rain soaking me to the bone.
Lightning rent the sky above me, and my heart started to pound as I sprinted for my front door, and refuge.
I was thankful for the overhang that shielded me from the rain, but I was still soaked to the bone by the time I got my front door open.
“You’re home! You’re home!” my Macaw, Boris, crowed the moment I opened the front door.
I grinned.
Boris always had my back.
A loud boom of thunder shook the house, and I cringed against the couch.
“Boom goes the dynamite,” Boris continued.
Boris wasn’t a fan of loud noises, thunder and explosions from the TV included.
I’d gotten Boris when I’d moved into my new place and was happy that I’d chosen to get him.
He was better than a freakin’ watch dog.
Walking over to Boris’ cage, I picked up a Cheeto and offered it to him.
“Thank you, Hot Mama,” Boris called out before crunching the Cheeto into a mess of crumbs at his feet.
Boris also liked to call me ‘Hot Mama.’
He’d called me that since the moment he’d heard the song Hot Mama on the radio during our drive home.
Apparently, the trip had been a memorable one, and my title stuck.
Covering up his cage after sending him a kiss through the air, I walked into my room, stripped down to my bra and panties, then went to bed.
My sleep was fraught with David stealing my bassinet, and the hot, angry brown eyes of Foster saving it for me while wearing a kilt and holding a sword.
He was a hero even in my sleep.
***
I woke up and went for a run.
My mind was in a fog the entire way.
So much so, that I ended up running right past David’s house.
I saw him in the front yard, heading t
o his shift.
He had his arms wrapped around Berri’s shoulders, holding her to him as he kissed the life out of her.
Something he used to do to me.
I ran harder, closing my mind off to where it was only me and the road.
Pushing my legs so hard that I was all the way down a country road before I even realized I’d gone way farther than I’d intended.
I turned around, but instead of running, I started to walk.
That’s when I realized I was on the same road where David had dropped off the two men yesterday.
It looked a lot different in the light of day, and with no water pouring down out of the heavens, but no one could mistake those bluebonnets.
They were so beautiful that I stopped and stared out over the open meadow.
I hadn’t realized that I’d gained an audience until I heard a woman’s amused voice from behind me.
“I still do the same thing every morning,” the woman’s soft, melodic voice came from my side.
I turned to find the woman standing there in her bathrobe, her morning paper in her hand.
“Yeah, I didn’t realize we had somewhere like this in our town,” I said stupidly.
The woman was beautiful, even in her bathrobe. Something I’d never, ever in my life, be able to accomplish.
Her long brown hair tumbled down over her back and shoulders in waves.
She had wide brown eyes and a soft smile on her face.
“We just moved in. The old owners didn’t like to advertise that this was here, so not many know about it. Even the ones who have lived here their whole lives,” she said understandingly.
I nodded. “I’ve lived here since I was five. I was sure I’d missed something. This doesn’t just happen overnight,” I said, waving my hand to encompass the woman’s house.
She bobbed her head in agreement. “I agree. You’re welcome to come up and check it out from the top if you’d like.”
I shook my head animatedly. “No, I have to be getting back. I have to work in…” I looked at my watch, eyes bulging when I saw that I had less than an hour to get back, get changed, and then get to work. “Shit. I’m late. Thank you for offering! Have a good day!”
I started out at a quick pace but eventually had to slow way down when I realized I wouldn’t be making it back at all if I didn’t moderate my pace.
That was, of course, when I saw him.
He was shirtless, wearing only a pair of black track pants.
He had on bright neon green running shoes, but if I was being honest, that wasn’t what had my attention.
It was the man’s upper body that had my jaw-dropping.
I swallowed thickly and kept my head down, surreptitiously glancing up as I got closer and closer to him.
Oh, God. His abs were magnificent.
I swear there were at least ten of them. Possibly even thirty-eight… but who was counting?
Was that even possible?
And his shoulders and arms were massive. Not behemoth, I work out at the gym three times a day massive, but an honest massive. The kind you get from working your ass off doing hard labor and just living life.
Something I hadn’t realized when they’d been hidden under those t-shirts he wore.
If that were me, and I had that smoking hot body, I’d be wearing shirts that accentuated it, not took attention away from them.
Then again, I’d been praying since I was fourteen for boobs that extended over the B cup that I currently was, and I’d yet to see that eventuality.
I kept my eyes down as I passed him, but I didn’t need to bother. He’d never even acknowledged me.
Not even an eye twitch.
Which only served to make my already depressed mood even worse.
That was when I decided that maybe I should just stop caring.
Maybe I was meant to be alone.
Maybe, just maybe, there was no one out there for me.
With that thought on my mind, I finally made it back to my house, on time.
Although, when I opened my front door, what I found made me late once again.
I could tell someone had been there.
Who, I didn’t know.
Nothing was overtly obvious. Only little things.
A picture frame there. A candle here.
My computer was on when I distinctly remembered turning it off.
Then there was the missing photo album.
The one I found myself looking at last night, torturing myself over what I used to have.
So I called the one person I knew would be there for me when I needed them.
My daddy.
Chapter 6
Sticks and stones may break my bones, but lights and sirens excite me.
-T-shirt
Blake
They say that, as a dispatcher, you take calls that you’ll never know the outcome to.
They also say that dispatchers have to have a warped sense of humor because of what they deal with on a daily basis. Kind of like cops and firefighters do.
They’re the first ones to make official contact with the patient.
They get no letters of commendation, no awards for saving a child from a burning building.
What we had, though, was a sisterhood.
Our entire outfit was compromised of fifteen women ranging in age from my twenty-four to the eldest at seventy-one.
They all told me their stories. Some good, and some really, really bad.
I guess I never really thought about anything that ‘bad’ happening to one of my callers.
I was all prepared for a car accident or a woman in labor.
I hadn’t had very many ‘true’ 9-1-1 calls yet.
I’d had mostly stupid calls.
My car won’t start. My power’s out. I think my wife’s sleeping with another man.
Why people would call 911 because of those things, I didn’t know, but they freakin’ did. Constantly.
So as I answered my line, ten minutes past midnight, never in a million years would I have thought that I’d hear what I heard.
“911, what’s your emergency?” I answered, tracing the call the moment I could.
“There’s someone in my house,” a quivering teenage voice said through my line.
I immediately started to dispatch a unit to her address.
“Can you tell me what’s going on, honey? Where are you?” I asked her.
My voice didn’t even show a hint of the fear that was coursing through my veins. I was a fucking rock.
“I’m here alone with my little sister and big brother. My parents are away for the weekend,” she whispered. “I live in apartment 1B. Town Royal Apartments.”
I blinked, typing the information into my computer and immediately letting the closest responding officer know what was up.
“What’s your name, honey?” I asked.
“Amy Lynn,” she said shakily. “What’s yours?”
I assumed that was out of politeness that she asked, so, out of politeness, I answered her.
Typing in the information I was receiving, I said, “My name’s Blake. Now, Amy Lynn, can you tell me what you hear?”
She didn’t answer, and I waited, hoping that what I thought was happening wasn’t actually happening.
“Amy Lynn?” I asked after another few long moments of silence.
“Nobody in here,” a deep male voice said gruffly. “Thought you said there was another girl.”
“There is,” a young man’s voice said. “She must be gone with the parents. Let’s just get the stuff and leave.”
“Hmm,” the gruff voice hugged. “Fill your bag.”
My fingers were typing away furiously, letting the responding officer know what was going on, such as the number of assailants, and what I would guess their ages at being.
Since this was my first official call by myself, I’d been left alone with barely anyone in the roo
m surrounding me.
We ran a two-woman crew. Both Pauline and I worked swing shift. Eight p.m. to four a.m.
I’d been informed that, on holidays that were busy ‘run days’, we’d get one more person to work with us. Calls on our shift were the busiest. It was when the crazies came out to play.
Like now, for instance.
Two people breaking into a house while children were quivering under their beds. Utterly defenseless.
“Ohh,” a cooing voice said chillingly. “What do have here?”
“Amy Lynn,” I whispered. “Amy Lynn!”
Then, an ear-piercing wail rent the air, making me wince as the sound pierced my eardrum.
“Get off me!” the girl shrieked. “Get your filthy hands off me!”
Then, as if in a movie, she started to describe them. Almost like the girl did in Taken, the movie. Except Amy Lynn’s detailed description was a lot more… colorful.
“You’re so fucking ugly, with your stupid black hair, and your ugly brown eyes. You’re ugly as fuck, and that green shirt is the worst I’ve ever seen. And where’d you get those stupid khakis? They’re supposed to fit, not sag around your knees, you dumbass,” Amy Lynn screeched.
My heartbeat started to pound in time with my fingers as I started freaking out.
On the inside, that is. On the outside, I was cool, calm, and collected. Mostly.
I switched my mic over to the police band, immediately letting the officers know what was going on, knowing that the shaking of my fingers wouldn’t allow me to type right then.
“We need any available units to apartment 1B. Town Royal Apartments,” I said, voice quivering. “They’ve found the girl.”
Then I listened as the girl started to get beaten.
Slap after slap had me leaning forward and closing my eyes.
Each distinct smash of the perp’s fists hitting Amy’s body made my stomach roil, and tears push past the lids of my eyes.
***
Foster
“Dispatch, this is unit 4. I’m on scene. The front door’s wide open with no one in sight. I’m going to breach the property,” I said as I got out of my cruiser.
My gun was in my hand, held pointed at the ground, but at the ready, as I walked slowly toward the door.
The moment I entered the apartment, I knew the men who’d broken in were gone.
The boy who was suspected to be there, was on the couch.
Code 11- KPD SWAT Box Set Page 85