Charlie Foxtrot Read online

  Text copyright ©2015 Lani Lynn Vale

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to my readers. You asked for him, and now you’re getting him!

  Acknowledgements

  Furiousfotog- yet another one hit out of the park. Words cannot explain how in love with these photos I am.

  Jonny Reid- the cover model. You take one heck of a photo, sir!

  Asli- my editor, once again, thank you for the work that you do!

  Other Titles by Lani Lynn Vale:

  The Freebirds

  Boomtown

  Highway Don’t Care

  Another One Bites the Dust

  Last Day of My Life

  Texas Tornado

  The Heroes of The Dixie Wardens MC

  Lights To My Siren

  Halligan To My Axe

  Kevlar To My Vest

  Keys To My Cuffs

  Life To My Flight

  Charge To My Line

  Counter To My Intelligence (January 2016)

  Code 11- KPD SWAT

  Center Mass

  Double Tap

  Bang Switch

  Execution Style

  Charlie Foxtrot

  Kill Shot (October 2015)

  Coup De Grace (November 2015)

  Chapter 1

  I don’t know why people think I’m such a dick. I’m a fuckin’ delight to be around.

  -Secret thoughts of Foster

  Foster

  “I need to speak to the officer that gave my grandfather a ticket. Right now,” I heard snapped over the phone.

  I shook my head and stood up out of my chair.

  “I’ll be there in a minute, Pat,” I said tightly, reining in my anger as best I could.

  Pattie Hightower was the front office receptionist who sat behind the wall of glass. The first person the general public saw once they entered the building.

  She had a shit job, and didn’t make enough. Everyone in the precinct was guilty of abusing her niceness, myself included.

  Limping around the desk, I winced as my leg started the familiar aching burn that usually came around when I’d done too much work with it.

  Which I had.

  I did every day, but today I’d re-qualified with the SWAT team.

  I’d run the obstacle course that every new potential member of SWAT had to run to be accepted into the fold.

  I’d previously been on the SWAT team, but an incident last Valentine’s Day with the crazy bitch that tried to take my brother, Miller’s, and my sister-in-law, Mercy’s, life had sidelined me temporarily.

  Linda Moose, a.k.a. Crazy Bitch, CB for short, had tried to plow her car straight through Mercy’s face.

  At the time, Mercy had been pregnant with my nephew. I’d seen her small body fold into my brother’s, and before I knew it, I’d started running.

  Right into the path of the stupid bitch’s bumper.

  CB had reversed, so I had, too.

  I’d stopped when my back had met the brick mailbox. Unfortunately, Linda had not.

  She backed straight into me, pinning my left leg in between the bumper and the brick mailbox from hell.

  Then she’d tried to leave.

  Bad for her, my gun had been in my hand before I’d even consciously thought about it.

  I’d shot her through the back glass.

  The first two bullets had passed through her left shoulder, and the next one had grazed the top of her head.

  She’d crashed after my last shots took out her tires.

  It was inconclusive whether she passed out from hitting the tree, or the bullet to the head.

  Regardless, I’d managed to stop her before my leg finally realized there wasn’t much left to stand on.

  I’d fallen to the ground and promptly passed out.

  Then had woken up in a hospital bed ten hours later, legless, and in a perpetual bad mood.

  “You got a live one, Crush,” Chief Rhodes said, eyes alight with laughter.

  I didn’t bother to respond.

  I’d somehow become the laughing stock of the station.

  They thought it was funny to call me Crush.

  I, on the other hand, thought it fucking sucked.

  I didn’t need to be reminded on a daily basis that I was missing my leg. Well, half a leg.

  I had a below the knee amputation.

  Which was better than, say, an above the knee amputation. Regardless, it was still an amputation and it had impacted my life greatly.

  I witnessed the fact every morning when I looked down. Every morning when I fitted the prosthesis on my leg. Every morning when I walked into work.

  My prosthesis looked like anybody’s leg when I was wearing jeans or long pants. The problem was that everyone on the force, as well as in the community, knew I was missing a leg. Knew the weakness I had.

  “No, I just want to talk to him. It won’t take but a minute,” I heard a woman’s voice say once I reached the lobby.

  Pushing the door closed behind me, I walked up behind the woman, surveying her.

  She was around five eight or nine. Full figure, round hips, perfect ass. Long legs encased in tight jeans.

  Curly, white blonde hair that was nearly the shade of mine came down to her mid back.

  The ends looked like they’d been dipped in purple paint.

  “Can I help you?” I asked the woman.

  She whirled around, her eyes narrowing on my face, then taking in my badge, gun, and posture before returning her eyes to mine.

  My breath caught as I got a load of her face.

  She was fucking beautiful.

  Her eyes were the shade of warm, melted honey.

  Her lips were luscious, and she had the cutest cleft in her chin that I’d ever seen.

  And that was saying something, since my nephew and niece had cleft chins. That was hard to compete with.

  I wanted to touch it. Badly.

  But then her snotty attitude cleared that want right up.

  “You’re Officer Spurlock? Badge number 654?” She asked, crossing her arms across her breasts.

  I raised my brows at her.

  She obviously had done her homework about me.

  Looking down at my badge, I pointed towards it with a finger. “That’s me.”

  She moved forward, closing the distance I’d left between us in milliseconds.

  “Let me tell you something, Officer Spurlock. What you did was despicable,” she hissed.

  I raised my eyebrow at her. “And what did I ‘do,’ exactly?”

  “You gave my grandfather, a veteran, and a fine man, a ticket for having a pocketknife on him,” she spat.

  I blinked.

  What the fuck?

  “Are you talking about that crazy old man that was wielding a butcher knife at me? That was anything but a ‘pocketknife.’ It’s closer to a machete than a pocket knife,” I clarified.

  Her eyes narrowed. “That was a pocket knife.”

  I gritted my teeth and pulled my phone out of my pocket. I’d show her how much of a ‘pocketknife’ it wasn’t.

  I flipped through my pictures, past the ones of my brother who thought it’d be funny to post a picture of his ass on my phone, over the stack of beer cans
we’d used to make a tower, and finally stopping on the one I was searching for.

  “Does this,” I said, holding my phone out to show her the picture. “Look like a pocketknife to you, ma’am?”

  Her brows lowered in confusion. “N-no. That’s not what he just told me…excuse me.”

  With that, she pushed past me.

  Caught off balance, I instinctually put my weight on my bad leg, and promptly ate dirt.

  The woman was gone before I even hit the floor.

  I was able to catch myself before I did any major damage to my person, but not in enough time to prevent the entire station from seeing me fall.

  There were men lined up behind the counter, all of their eyes wide as they looked at me, wondering what they should do.

  I could practically hear their thoughts.

  Should we help him?

  Can he get back up by himself?

  Oh, my God. That woman just made the cripple fall.

  Narrowing my eyes on them, I stood, making sure no one saw how awkward it was to actually stand, and walked out of the door.

  Once I reached the front steps, I crossed my arms and watched as the woman yelled at her grandfather. The old man that looked like the most innocent man in the world.

  The man who’d pulled the knife on me quicker than I could blink.

  He was lucky all I gave him was a weapons citation.

  I could’ve arrested him for threatening a police officer with intent to harm.

  When she spotted me, she started to march up the steps, coming to a stop two down from me.

  “He tells me you’re lying. That he had nothing more than his pocket knife,” she held up a fucking switch blade.

  I reached for it, and she warily placed it in my hand.

  Acting quickly, I pressed the lever, disengaging the blade and scaring the shit out of her.

  “This,” I said, holding my hand out to her, offering her the hilt of the blade. “Is a switchblade. This is not a pocket knife. It’s also illegal, because it’s double sided.”

  She looked at the knife now in her hand, then offered it back to me.

  “Just keep it.”

  I took the blade from her hands, collapsing the blade, and shoving it in my pocket.

  “What the fuck, grandpa! That’s illegal, too!” I heard just before she dropped down into her nineties model Camaro and closed the door.

  I couldn’t help the smile that overtook my face.

  For the first time in months, I had something to smile about.

  Chapter 2

  I hope a bird shits on your car.

  -Blake to Foster

  Blake

  “Way to go, Blake!” I cheered myself on. “Make yourself look bad when you’re about to start working there. There’s a good idea!”

  Jesus Christ.

  Fucking grandpa.

  I should’ve known he’d lie about that.

  He was a shit like that sometimes.

  Bursting through my mother’s door with Gramps at my heel, I immediately shouted, “Mom!”

  My mother was in her fifties and the proverbial ‘housewife.’

  She stayed at home while my father brought home the bread money, stating that she was staying at home to take care of the kids.

  Even now he was still working, and she was still keeping house.

  I found my mother in the kitchen rolling pie dough out on the counter.

  My mouth watered, and I got distracted from what I was going to tell her.

  “What kind of pie are you making, mama?” I asked, leaning over her shoulder to look.

  Peaches were sliced on the counter, and I think I zoned out for a few seconds, because I only caught the second half of her sentence.

  “…the garage. Would you mind?”

  “I’m sorry, what?” I asked, shaking my head and backing away from the food.

  I was on a diet, and I was determined to stick to it this time, no matter what.

  “I asked if you’d go get me the potatoes from the garage. Are you staying for dinner tonight?” she asked.

  I went to the garage and grabbed the potatoes, giving my gramps a glare when his eyes looked up from his car he was tinkering with.

  “Um, no. I’m not,” I told her.

  If I stayed, I was fairly positive I wouldn’t be able to skip the pie. I had willpower…kind of. Just not that much.

  “Oh, that’s sad. Are you going out with David for dinner?” She asked. “He called here looking for you.”

  I gritted my teeth, smoke nearly pouring out of my ears.

  “Actually, mom, no. I’m not planning on ever having dinner with David again, if I can help it. My next lifetime would be too soon.” I told her, turning my back on her pity filled face.

  David was my ex-husband.

  He was a cop with Kilgore Police Department, and we’d been divorced now for nearly a year and a half.

  “I don’t know why you have to be so uncivil towards each other,” my mother admonished.

  The tick that only ever came on when I thought about David started back up.

  David and I had fallen in love when we were teenagers.

  We got married when he was twenty one and fresh out of the police academy, and I was twenty.

  I’d gone the housewife route, although we’d never had any children. Thank God!

  I’d thought that we had an awesome relationship, too.

  I’d been so proud to be known as a police wife. The woman who stood behind her man. Supported him in his every endeavor

  Then he started working ‘mandatory overtime.’

  It started out as just here and there, and slowly morphed into over eighteen to twenty hours of extra time per week. At first, I hadn’t been suspicious.

  Then little things started to stand out.

  How he started changing at work and coming home freshly showered and shaved.

  How he’d be super sneaky with his phone, putting a passcode on it and forgetting to tell me the code.

  Then there were the random purchases on our account.

  Thirty dollars here at a flower shop. A hundred and fifty dollars there at a jewelry shop.

  When we’d first started our life together, David had been the one in charge of the finances.

  I’d trusted him to do what he needed to do, and had never needed to check our bank account.

  We lived modestly in a house his parents provided us when we got married. I also stayed home most of the day, rarely venturing out to do anything other than get groceries or essentials.

  Most of the things we needed I waited for David to do with me.

  But then he’d started being gone a whole lot more and I started to get suspicious.

  I don’t know if he thought that just because I was a blonde, and that I only had a high school education, that I was stupid. But I most assuredly wasn’t.

  I’d been taking online classes here and there throughout our relationship. Also, before I’d even graduated high school, I’d had nearly enough hours to graduate with an associate’s degree.

  I’d been in the top ten percent of our class when we’d graduated, so I wasn’t really sure if he was just that oblivious to my abilities, or if he thought his superior cop skills kept me from seeing what was going on right in front of me.

  Needless to say, I finally caught on, two years after denying it, and confronted him.

  One of the days he was supposed to be at work, I followed him. Right into the arms of his ‘beat wife.’

  A beat wife is someone you have while you’re on patrol.

  Berri Aleo was that woman.

  David had met her while he was on his patrol, and he visited her nearly every day while he was on duty, and on his ‘overtime,’ for two years before I finally called him on it.

  He’d been so surprised when I’d moved out of the house, emptied the bank account, and filed for divorce, all in one day, that he’d been in tears.

  Apparently, he didn’t love the other woman and it
was all a huge mistake.

  Whatever the fuck it was, I wasn’t going to be a part of it. I’d lost all respect for him.

  We’d been separated for a year and a half, and ‘officially’ divorced for six months.

  Luckily, my uncle was able to get me a job at the PD as a dispatcher. Something I was supposed to start tomorrow morning.

  I expected to be getting a call from him any moment, though, telling me I’d lost the job before I ever even truly had it.

  It’s not like I wanted to deal with listening to David on the police scanner all day long, but I’d do it if it got me money. Something I was in desperate need of, thanks to him.

  “Well, on that note, I’ve got to go. You need to talk to grandpa about his knife problem, though. He lied to me, the old coot. I still can’t believe he did that,” I snapped, eyes on my grandfather working merrily through the window to the garage.

  “Your grandfather was a cop for fifty years. He can lie to the best of them still. And he’s always carried that knife around with him. There’s no talking him out of it. It’s supposedly something really special,” my mother said, placing her pie dough into a pie plate and pressing it into the sides.

  “Hmmm,” I wondered. “If it was special, I didn’t know. I gave it to the cop that gave him that ticket. He said it was illegal.”

  “It is,” my father said, coming into the kitchen. “He should know that.”

  He followed up that comment by hanging his gun belt up by the back door, and hanging his hat beside it.

  My father was a state trooper for the State of Texas. At fifty nine, he still looked pretty badass and intimidating in his uniform.

  “On that note, I’ll see y’all later before Uncle Darren gets here…oh shit.” Uncle Darren pulled up in his police issued vehicle, and I darted for the backdoor.

  Running around the house, I came up to the side and waited until Uncle Darren climbed the front steps before I hightailed it to my car.

  Luckily, Uncle Darren didn’t block me in. Something he should’ve done if he’d wanted to talk to me.

  However, there was no reason for him to be here unless he was wanting to talk to me.

  Something I most definitely didn’t want to do with him right at this moment.

  “Bye, honey!” My grandpa called from the garage.