Charlie Foxtrot (Code 11-KPD SWAT 5)

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…unapproachable.”

“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.”