King City (10 page)

Mandy went off to get the pie. Wade took a sip of his coffee.

“I heard you had a little scuffle yesterday,” Fallon said.

“Nothing I couldn’t handle.”

“You were lucky. Did you know that the last cops who came here were gunned down?”

“A couple of rookies who were pursuing a stolen car,” Wade said. “I went to their funerals.”

“It was a sad, tragic day,” Fallon said. “I’d hate to see it happen again.”

“So would I,” Wade said.

Mandy came up and set a slice of pie, with a scoop of vanilla ice cream on it, in front of Fallon.

“Enjoy,” she said and turned away.

“Thanks, sweetie,” Fallon said and started to devour his pie.

Wade studied Fallon and sipped his coffee.

He was aware of Mandy and her father looking at them while trying to appear as if they weren’t. There were no other customers to serve and the tension created by the emptiness, and the presence of Duke Fallon, was palpable.

He was aware of Timo outside, leaning against Fallon’s car, staring hard at Wade. It was a wonder the window didn’t shatter from the intensity of the hatred.

It was a moment or two, and several mouthfuls of apple pie à la mode later, before Fallon spoke again.

“This can be a peaceful neighborhood if everybody follows the rules.”

“I agree,” Wade said.

“What you and I need to have is an understanding,” Fallon said.

“That would be good,” Wade said.

“So here’s what you need to understand. I make the laws here,” Fallon said, poking himself in the chest with his thumb. “Now that you’re a resident, you’re going to have to follow them just like everybody else.”

“What are your laws?”

“There’s only one,” Fallon said, leaning over the table toward Wade and looking him in the eye. “You stay out of my fucking way, or I will lay waste to your little station and everybody in it. I’d probably get a big gift basket from the chief for doing it too.”

Fallon leaned back, satisfied with himself. Wade held out a napkin to him.

“You need this. You got ice cream on yourself while you were terrifying me.”

Fallon looked down at the ice cream on his chest.

“Shit!” He snatched the napkin and dabbed madly at the stain, rubbing it in even deeper, matting the silk. “This is a twenty‐five‐hundred‐dollar tracksuit.”

“Maybe you should wear a bib,” Wade said.

Fallon lifted his head and glared at Wade. “Maybe you should watch your fucking mouth.”

Wade took a sip of coffee and set down his mug. “Has it occurred to you, Duke, that ‘laying waste’ to me and the police substation might be exactly what the chief wants?”

“Isn’t that what I just said?”

“It’s the excuse the chief needs to invade with five hundred officers, decimate your operation, and parade you and all of your crew in chains past the media.”

“There’d be a lot of cop funerals before that happened.”

“Yes, but what better way is there than a war on crime to rehabilitate the department’s image and push the corruption scandal out of the news? You might still get that big gift basket from him, but it will be delivered to you in your prison cell.”

Fallon tossed the wadded‐up napkin on the table and pushed his plate away. “Either way, you lose.”

“You too,” Wade said.

“At least I won’t be dead.”

“What makes you so sure?”

Fallon mulled that possibility for a moment. “It sounds to me like we may have a common interest.”

“We might,” Wade said.

“So let’s compromise,” Fallon said.

“What do you have in mind?”

“You can walk old ladies across the street, write a few parking tickets, scold the kiddies who swipe candy from the mini‐mart, and lock up the drunks who puke on the sidewalks. But you’ll stay out of everything else. If you run into something you can’t avoid, you come to me and I’ll handle it. That way, everybody’s happy.”

“I have an even simpler solution.”

“I’m all ears,” Fallon said.

“I’ll do my job the best that I can and hope that everything works out.”

“That isn’t a compromise,” Fallon said.

“No, it isn’t.” Wade slid out of the booth and stood up. “Thanks for the coffee. How was the pie?”

“It’s so good I fantasize about it while I’m fucking,” Fallon said.

“I’ll have to try it sometime,” Wade said.

“I’d make it soon, if I were you,” Fallon said.

Wade walked out of the Pancake Galaxy without acknowledging Timo’s presence and strode back to the station like he was taking a casual stroll along Riverfront Park. If they were going to gun him down now, he figured that hurrying across the street wouldn’t change anything.

Charlotte was waiting for him behind the counter in the station, her hands on her hips, giving him the same indignant look that she’d had on her face when she’d first walked in.

“You need some serious psychiatric help,” she said.

“How’s Billy?” Wade asked.

“He’s outside, cleaning the cars and grinning like a fucking idiot. He thought getting shot was awesome and he wants me to try it. He’s going to have an enormous bruise that will hurt like hell once the shock wears off.”

“Good,” Wade said.

“You could have killed him,” she said.

“He wasn’t getting my point,” Wade said. “It was one that he needed to understand.”

“Maybe you ought to shoot me too, because the only point I got is that you’re mentally unstable and extremely dangerous.”

“Being a cop, and surviving a potentially deadly situation, isn’t about weapons or vests,” Wade said. “It’s about one thing.”

“Luck,” she said.

“The badge,” he said.

“Oh, Christ,” she said. “Not again.”

“You’ve got to have confidence in what it represents and be willing to stand for it. People sense that. Or they don’t, and in that case, a vest isn’t going to save you.”

“That’s what you wanted to say when you shot Billy?”

“No,” Wade said. “I wanted to say that he’s stupid.”

“You
did
say that.”

“He wasn’t listening,” Wade said and walked over to his desk, where he had the gun locker that used to be in the trunk of his Mustang on the floor.

“Is your life so simple that your badge can be the answer for everything?”

“I wish it were. But it’s the one answer I can always depend on.”

He lifted the locker up, set it on the counter, and opened the lid. The guns he’d gathered from Timo and his crew were in evidence bags. She looked at them.

“Where did you get all these guns?”

“I recovered them on the street outside.”

“They were just lying on the ground?”

“They were after I asked the people who were pointing them at me to drop them.”

“How did you do that?”

“I made a persuasive argument,” Wade said, closing the lid on the locker and sliding it toward her. “You need to go home and get some rest before your shift. On your way, I want you to drop these off at the crime lab at One King Plaza for ballistic and fingerprint checks against any open cases.”

“I’ll drop them off,” she said, picking up the locker. “But I can’t promise that I’ll be back tonight.”

“Fair enough.”

Wade walked her to the door and locked it after her. Then he went out back, where Billy was drying the exterior of one of the squad cars.

“Ready for action?” Wade asked.

“Hell yes,” Billy said and tossed his rag.

____

They moved their personal vehicles into the fenced‐in parking lot behind the station for safety and headed out in a squad car that smelled like piss‐scented disinfectant.

Wade drove and Billy called in their status to the dispatcher, a woman who sounded startled to hear from them.

“We’re officially open for business,” Wade said.

“What do you think our first radio call will be?” Billy asked, playing with the hole in his shirt.

“Someone reporting the discovery of a corpse.”

“That’s optimistic,” Billy said.

“It’s the only reason anybody down here ever calls the police. And even then, it’s only because they can’t take the smell anymore.”

“I know how they feel.” Billy rolled down his window.

Wade rolled down his window too.

They headed east toward the river and cruised slowly past the derelict King Steel complex of warehouses, foundries, machine shops, and welding sheds.

The cavernous buildings were decaying. The windows were shattered, the weathered bricks were covered with graffiti, and the rusted, corrugated metal siding was peeling off like flakes of dry skin.

Between the buildings, Wade caught glimpses of the river and the pilings that poked through the water, all that remained of the jetties that had eroded away against the relentless pounding of the current.

There were a dozen abandoned factories along the shoreline. The rusted tangles of pipes, gantries, tanks, conveyor belts, and smokestacks looked to Wade like massive piles of entrails that had spilled from the guts of disemboweled iron giants.

The giants bled thousands of jobs, turning what had been a prosperous working‐class neighborhood into a blighted, crime‐ridden hellhole. But many of the giants survived their wounds and moved to Mexico, India, Asia, and South America.

The vast parking lots around the factories were cluttered with discarded furniture and appliances, the hulks of stripped automobiles, and dry weeds as tall as cornstalks. Scraps of snagged plastic bags and paper fluttered like flags in the razor wire that ringed the tops of the cyclone fences that surrounded the dilapidated properties.

Most of the restaurants and bars that had once lined the opposite side of the street and served the factory workers were boarded up and decaying. The few that managed to remain were in disrepair, their paint chipped and faded, their signs missing letters and lightbulbs.

The few people that Wade saw on the street matched their environment. They limped along, old and weathered, decaying and abandoned. He guessed that they were the same men and women who’d once hung out in those same bars after work, but now that the work was gone, they spent their days there too.

Only a couple of the people bothered to look up at the squad car as it cruised along, and those who did regarded the officers with weariness and disdain.

It made Wade angry. Not at the people on the streets, but at the police department for deserting this place after the mills and factories did, ceding the south side to poverty and crime because the big tax dollars just weren’t there anymore.

Wade faced huge obstacles establishing a beachhead against crime in Darwin Gardens, but he knew that his biggest battle wouldn’t be making the streets safer—it would be proving to anyone who lived there that the police gave a damn, that they could be relied upon, and that they were worthy of respect.

It would be hard to prove because they were lies.

The department
didn’t
care. They would abandon this place again the instant Wade and his rookies were taken down.

The people didn’t know that, of course. They knew the new station wasn’t opened to serve their interests, though, but for some other, political purpose. They knew that the patrols wouldn’t last, that it was just part of the show.

They knew all that to be true because they no longer existed, a fact underscored whenever they looked at a King City map, or at their desolate streets, or at their own sorrowful reflections in the mirror.

He turned the corner and headed east on Clements Street, working his way into the former Belle Shore housing tract that was built for the factory workers in a postwar wave of prosperity and optimism.

The homes were one‐story, identical stucco boxes, built fast and cheap with detached garages that opened onto rear alleys. Over the years, some homeowners had tried to spruce up and individualize their houses by adding siding, brick, or stone, window planters or exterior shutters, and by building new rooms. The clumsy results reminded Wade of the shoeboxes his daughter’s preschool class had decorated with ribbons, glitter, macaroni noodles, buttons, and globs of Elmer’s glue.

As he drove down the street, Wade decided that the real money to be made in Darwin Gardens wasn’t from drugs, prostitution, gambling, or other crimes. It was in wrought iron. Every home had bars on the windows, iron‐mesh screens on the doors, and wrought iron fences around the property.

There were no white picket fences here.

Most of the residents had let their plants die, using their fenced‐in front yards as dumps, storage areas, dog runs, or parking lots for their motorcycles, boats, and cars.

The vehicles were almost always newer, more upscale, and much better maintained than the houses they were parked in front of.

It made no sense to Wade.

To him, cars were simply machines to get you from one place to another, but a home was something more than shelter. It was where you
lived
. He couldn’t understand how anyone could value a car more than a nice home.

The few houses that were well kept stood out dramatically from the rest, their fresh paint, blooming flowers, and green lawns giving them a surreal, Technicolor glow, like Munchkinland in
The Wizard of Oz.