Shielding instinct, p.1
Shielding Instinct, page 1
SHIELDING INSTINCT
Team Charlie
FIONA QUINN
Dedication
This book is dedicated to the wonderful people I met in St. Croix
while researching this book,
especially the real-world Beans and Lucky,
two amazing young men.
Table of Contents
Dedication
Table of Contents
The Players
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Epilogue
WORLD of INIQUUS Novels
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
The Players
Cerberus Tactical K9 Team Charlie
Hawkeye Kesse and K9 Cooper
Halo and K9 Max
Levi and K9 Mojo
Ash and K9 Hoover
Reaper Hamilton – trainer
FBI
Petra Armstrong
Tamika Bradly
Rowan Kennedy and Avery Goodyear
Frost
Finley
Prescott
Chapter One
Petra
From the moment she first blinked awake to answer the phone, Petra Armstrong knew today was destined for the crapper.
This morning started with a five-thirty phone call that Petra snatched up on the second ring. “What?” she’d croaked. “Who?”
“I was at the emergency room last night.” It was her friend Tamika, and she sounded rough. “I have a bad case of norovirus, and it is truly an experience to behold.”
Petra flung her covers to the side. “Okay, I’m coming. Are you home? What do you need me to pick up?” She pulled her legs from the warm nest of blankets and planted her feet onto wooden floorboards that radiated cold into her bare toes.
“Nothing,” Tamika said. “Right now, I’m set. Diamond’s daddy came to pick her up last night to get her away from my kooties. He’s getting her to school today. And I’ve got backup to help me if necessary. Though child, I’m just sayin’, no one should come near me cuz no one needs to catch this mess.”
“I’m so sorry this happened.” Petra flopped back onto her pillow and pulled the covers back in place. The sound of ice pinging against her windowpanes made for the kind of morning when it felt good to snuggle under the covers. “Are you home now?”
“Home, and I’m all set up. I’m tucked into a sleeping bag that I laid out on the bathroom floor, and I’ve got bottles of electrolytes and a box of saltines within reach.”
“Gross.”
“You don’t even know the half of it,” Tamika’s voice was weak and raspy.
Petra looked at her phone to get the time. “Okay, you just rest and recover. I’ll call the airlines and cancel our seats.”
“You’ll do no such thing. Now listen, I know you hate changing things up. You are, my friend, the antithesis of spontaneity. And if I didn’t see first-hand how fast you shift gears to become the go-to gal in any emergency, I’d never believe it. You know it can take a lot of patience and cajoling to get you on board with a new plan. You’re like a barge on the ocean.”
“Too early. Too preachy,” Petra already knew what Tamika would tell her—go without me.
“Now—I’m saying this with love in my heart—you’re still going to St. Croix even though I can’t be there,” Tamika said. “Period. End of sentence.”
Yup. There it was. “But—”
“No buts. You just go on and pretend that I’m in the bathroom, which is, in fact, where I’ll be. You do what we planned. The only thing that’ll be different is that I’m not sitting next to you,” Tamika was using her mom-voice, the one she used on Diamond when Tamika was laying down the law.
Petra pulled her brows in tight. “But—”
“Uh-uh. Off you go. Have a cocktail on the beach for me. Call me from St. Croix and tell me you love it.”
Petra blinked at the patch of light on her wall made from the glow of the streetlamp.
St. Croix by herself; she tried on the idea.
Petra traveled alone all the time for work. She couldn’t remember a time when she went on a solo trip for pleasure. That wasn’t, in her mind, fun at all. Travel was for creating shared stories.
That wasn’t even the issue. Petra just wasn’t a St. Croix kind of person. She had only been going down to the island to support Tamika as she went to see where her parents got married, and to scatter their ashes in the ocean.
Petra couldn’t bring herself to make the shift from supporting a friend to being down there all alone and without purpose. “Cocktails on the beach feels kind of sacrilegious given our reason for going in the first place,” she said softly so as not to sound like she was rebuking her friend.
“I knew you’d say that. So how about this? Do a rethink and make this a retreat of sorts—communing with nature, stilling your mind, exercising your body, getting ready for your new job title.”
“That feels like it ticks the right boxes. Although, St. Croix isn’t a place I would’ve chosen to do on my own.”
“Listen, a body in motion tends to stay in motion. Just keep going with the plans. Take nice hikes, enjoy beautiful sunsets, get good sleep, and maybe find a fine man to tumble around with. Cuz when you get back, you’re going to be busy saving the world.”
“Yeah, I’ll get right on that,” Petra laughed, “as soon as I get home.” She laid a cool palm on her forehead to focus her thoughts. “I’ll admit I was looking forward to eating without needing to cook and clean up after myself.” She tried to rally some enthusiasm so Tamika wouldn’t feel bad that their plans had gone awry.
“Admit it, you were just thinking about pizza in bed in front of a movie.”
“Guilty pleasure,” Petra retorted. “Don’t judge.”
Tamika was panting loudly, then mustered, “I shouldn’t have said pizza. Ugh. Got to go—in every sense of the word.”
The phone clicked; the call had ended.
Petra wrinkled her nose, feeling a wave of sympathy-nausea sweep over her. Once it passed, she toggled on her bedside light, climbed from her bed, and headed toward her toothbrush.
She made it as far as the bathroom when, at five-forty, a text from the airline struck her with the next blow of bad news.
Winter weather elsewhere rerouted their plane. The airline was consolidating two smaller flights onto a single larger plane. Please check your tickets for your updated seating assignment.
Elsewhere? It wasn’t even six in the morning. What plane could have been in the sky when it hit winter weather?
Petra hadn’t upgraded and paid for a better seat on this flight because Tamika was pinching pennies as she saved for Diamond’s inevitable braces. Before she even tapped the link, Petra knew that choice would come back to bite her.
All through her military and FBI careers, Petra was taught to preserve her reaction space—keeping people or situations outside of arm’s length gave her time to observe, decide, and react.
On a plane, that wasn’t simple to accomplish.
When traveling for work, Petra did her best by choosing aisle seats on emergency exit rows.
Why yes, she was able and willing to be helpful should the plane go down.
Today, though, she’d be traveling in the backety-back-back. The farthest seat from an emergency door.
While Petra didn’t love flying, she also didn’t hate it. Flying was a conveyance, a means to get from Point A to Point B. So, the seats in and of themselves weren’t upsetting. It was just that the images of the upside-down plane on the Canadian runway with people dangling from their seatbelts and the exit with the jet fuel waterfall were all pretty vivid in her mind’s eye.
At the back of the plane, in her new seat, with a plastic indentation for a window and the toilet behind her head, Petra would be the very last passenger off the plane in an emergency.
Normally, Petra’s brain wouldn’t immediately go to the possibility of escaping a crash, but today kind of had the taste of a soup sandwich.
She rolled her lips in and gave herself a minute to adjust. “This is fine,” she cajoled herself. “You had a plan all along. In this seat or that, you can still work your plan.”
And she did have a plan. Borne of both nature and career training, she always had a plan. And a contingency plan.
In this case, her pl ans might be helpful, but they could also be making life so much harder than it needed to be.
Like Tamika, Petra was exhausted.
Unlike Tamika, Petra’s exhaustion was by design. She’d purposefully stayed up all night reading a thriller, thinking that once seated and up in the air, she could sleep through the whole event and not fight the fidgets and discomfort of being on a flight for seven hours.
Her plan had been to sleep until she and Tamika reached St. Croix, where the beautiful white sands and clear turquoise waters would surround them—it would have been good.
“It’s going to be good,” Petra rallied herself. She knew that Tamika would, for sure, suffer a guilty conscience if Petra didn’t go to St. Croix and come back with some good stories.
Petra did as was required of her—she got ready, got into a taxi, and got to the airport. She deposited her suitcase on the conveyor belt and made her way through security.
Sure, they lost her shoe in the X-ray machine.
Then, with her hands over her head, she got buzzed twice before she got a full pat down by TSA.
And when she filled her water bottle, the gasket was missing, so it leaked on everything.
But these were minor annoyances.
She reminded herself that it was a trick of the brain, amplified by fatigue, that made her hyper-aware of the things that went awry.
It was merely the idiom, “I woke up on the wrong side of the bed.”
While linguists speculated that the phrase dated back to ancient Rome and that it referred to getting out of bed on the left side (sinister being the Latin word for left), Petra had always believed that it was a reference to waking up with bad thoughts or to a bad turn of events—a direction of the mind and environment more than the person’s actual body placement. After all, who would get out of bed on the left if they knew that bad would follow them around all day? “Yeah, that didn’t make any sense at all,” she murmured under her breath as she hiked her way toward the gate.
There were, in fact, psychological studies that supported the theory that the way you woke up determined the way the day lay ahead. Those first moments imposed a rudimentary lens through which the brain saw things unfold.
It was a survival filter.
On sunny, happy days, the brain relaxed. On high-stress days, the brain agitated the waters to see what hidden awfulness lay beneath.
After all, it was the brain’s job to keep its body alive.
And since Petra woke up to a shit show, a shit show today would be.
Tomorrow, she’d wake up to a glorious sunrise, and life would be golden.
Right?
Chapter Two
Petra
In her fatigue, Petra swayed back and forth, her backpack hanging heavily from her shoulders. There were zero chairs available in the waiting area, but once seated on the plane, she reminded herself, it would be noise-canceling earmuffs, a blackout eye mask, and some much-anticipated sleep.
She looked around the room at the other passengers, many of whom had decided to wear pajamas for the flight. They must have the same strategy in mind.
With a glance at her phone, Petra realized it was only half an hour until loading. She slid a foil packet from her pocket, tore it open, and extracted the film with the medicated patch that helped with travel sickness. Peeling off the backing, Petra stuck it behind her ear, then squirted hand sanitizer on her hands and wiped them with a tissue.
Petra found the medication to be an overall boon to flying. It relieved any nausea; it took the edge off any unease during turbulence, and it did a great job keeping her just fuzzy enough—like a couple of cocktails without the inebriation and the day-after effects—to rest if not sleep – the whole way to her destination.
Just a few minutes more, an anxious moment of disorganization as people settled into their places, an announcement from the flight crew, and she’d be asleep.
That sounded so good.
On today’s flight, humanity would be packed in tightly. The attendant had already begged the travelers to come forward and let ground crew check in roller bags for free. There wasn’t going to be enough room in the cabin. If things weren’t sorted voluntarily, they’d just stop folks at the door.
Some people dragged their bags toward the desk.
Petra had learned long ago to keep two days of supplies in her backpack and send a prayer to the gods of flight that her suitcase arrived at the same time she did. But wrangling a roller bag onto a plane jumbled her nerves, and Petra didn’t like that sensation.
She hoped that even though she was in a bottom-scraper of a seat, there would be space in the overhead bin. In a window seat, she wouldn’t be able to wrangle the depth of her backpack properly under the seat in front of her.
Patting over her heavy winter coat—an absolute necessity for today’s Washington D.C. December weather, but something that she wouldn’t touch once she was down in St Croix with its steady daily temperatures in the mid-eighties—Petra was considering the deep pockets. Could she move items from the backpack so that she had a better chance of keeping her bag with her? She was loathe to hand it off to anyone since her laptop was stowed inside.
The attendant lifted the microphone to her mouth. It looked like she’d been dealing with peoples’ feelings all damned day long.
It was only eight thirty.
Petra braced for news about delays, but instead, she heard, “Hermione Armstrong, please see the desk attendant.”
Petra blinked.
It was unexpected that her legal name be called out—and Petra didn’t like it. It felt like a violation of privacy. She moved forward quickly lest the woman call her name a second time and maybe throw in her middle name like a child summoned to the principal’s office.
Was she getting bumped? Par for the damned course. If she were bumped, that would be her sign that she should go home and stay there with her cozy bed and new book.
“Hermione Armstrong?” the woman staffing the desk asked.
“That’s me.”
“We have an unusual situation. Your name was chosen for an upgrade. Your points allow us to upgrade you to our comfort designation with the added benefit of bulkhead space.” A little too cheerful, a little too smiley, this woman was trying to sell something to Petra.
As her mind sprinted around looking for a reason that an upgrade would need a sales pitch, the only thing Petra could land on was an article she read about a couple that had to fly next to a corpse because the man in their aisle seat had suddenly died on their flight.
Petra wasn’t down with anything like that. “Oh?”
“The person assigned that seat would like to switch because they don’t like dogs.”
“Dogs.” Petra’s gaze followed the attendant’s line of sight to a woman in a cat sweater. “Does she know where I was sitting? She’d prefer my seat?”
“She was informed that we upgraded by list and that she’d have to accept whatever seat was being vacated. And she said she prefers that.”
That seat would have been a claustrophobic squeeze for Petra and this woman…
Who knew? Maybe she liked the feeling of compression.
“This is the situation.” The staffer leaned forward, pulling her smile even wider. “We have four working dogs who are traveling to the island. The dogs need the extra room of the bulkhead. On the left-hand side, the dogs will sit in the bulkhead seats at A, B, and C. Their handlers will sit right behind them. On the right-hand side, there will be a handler in bulkhead seat D, a K9 in E, and the seat we are offering you is the window seat, F.”
“With the bulkhead space.” Images of the K9s at her base in Afghanistan came to mind. They were deadly dangerous. “What kind of working dog?” Petra glanced around, but only the hand-held-sized dogs were in view – the kind their owners could stow in a carrier under the seat, or hug to their chests for emotional support; like that chihuahua over there.
“The one in your row,” the staffer looked down at a piece of paper with a scrawl of illegible blue script, “is a German shepherd named Cooper.” She threw her shoulders back and nodded with emphasis that Petra read as pride. Or satisfaction? Patriotism? No, Petra couldn’t figure out what the woman was trying to convey with her body language.
For her part, the look on Petra’s face must not have read as enthusiastic because the staffer added, “You’ll receive free drinks and the upgraded meals and services of the comfort seat section.”
