King City (3 page)

But Wade didn’t look at things that way, not even now as he dressed in a dreary, fifty‐bucks‐a‐night hotel room, most of his belongings in a padlocked storage unit across the street.

Wearing his blues, seeing that badge on his chest again, reinforced something essential about himself, but if you asked him what it was, he probably couldn’t have found the words. Eloquence wasn’t one of his qualities. He knew only that it felt right in a way few things in his life ever did.

If the chief thought that Wade would see this as an indignity, that it would make him quit and go away, it only showed how little he knew him, as if that hadn’t been proved dramatically already.

He was proud of the uniform. It was why he did what he did and lost what he lost. His father taught him that standing up for what you believe in comes with a price but that backing down exacts a toll that your soul never stops paying.

It was customary, but not required, for King City police officers to wear a Kevlar vest under their uniforms. Most of them did. All Wade wore was the white T‐shirt that he’d carefully ironed and lightly starched the night before.

He buckled on his duty belt and then looped the leather snaps known as “keepers” to the black belt that held up his pants. Four keepers were standard, two in the front of the duty belt and two in the back. But he’d had two extra ones added on either side of his holster to secure it more rigidly, making it easier for him to quickly and smoothly draw his Glock. He had another gun in an ankle holster, but he’d never had to use that one.

His duty belt also carried handcuffs, a cell phone, a collapsible baton, a tiny flashlight, and a canister of pepper spray, a piece of masking tape affixed to it that read, “Bat Shark Repellant,” in Alison’s handwriting, encircled by a rough approximation of the 1960s Batman logo. She’d put the tape on the canister in a playful moment years ago and he had no intention of peeling it off now.

A fully loaded duty belt weighed about twenty‐five pounds. There were more cops on disability from the back strain of lugging around their equipment on their waists than from injuries sustained in assaults, shootings, or car accidents.

But Wade liked the extra weight.

It wasn’t punishment for him to be putting on his blues again. It was more like therapy. It was exactly what he needed, now more than ever.

Wade was thirty‐eight years old, but he felt and looked older. He was already seeing some strands of gray in his hair, though they were barely noticeable now that he’d trimmed it down to an almost military buzz cut.

Still, there was a depth in his gaze and a weathered sturdiness to his stature and gait that suggested he’d lived more years than he had, time that cut scars and built calluses with its hard passing, but that somehow were less evident when his badge was in his pocket and his daily uniform was an off‐the‐rack suit.

He took one last glance around the room to make sure everything was in order.

Before he’d dressed, he’d straightened up the bathroom, folded his towels, and made his bed, even though it was the cleaning lady’s job. He hated to leave behind a mess.

Satisfied with what he saw, he picked up his briefcase, left the room, and took the stairs one flight down to the clean, contemporary, and totally charmless lobby.

It was decorated in a style that Alison would have called “Contemporary Motor Home.” There were a couple of couches upholstered in cloth with the same floral pattern as the bedspread in his room, a TV set tuned to CNN, and some fake potted plants that looked more lifelike than the perpetually smiling young woman behind the Formica‐paneled front counter.

The lobby opened up onto a small dining room, where guests were offered a free continental breakfast. Wade didn’t know what was “continental” about dry toast, dry bagels, tiny boxes of dry cereal, and cubed pieces of canned fruit floating in an enormous salad bowl of sugary goop.

The breakfast offerings were awful, but the dining room was crowded every morning anyway with traveling businessmen and vacationing families.

Wade didn’t understand why people would enthusiastically line up to eat something disgusting and inedible simply because it was free.

Dog crap was free too, but he wasn’t going to eat it.

So he strode outside and across the parking lot toward the Denny’s next door.

The sky was cloudless, but the blue was obscured by the toxic brown layer of carcinogens and greenhouse gases that hung over King City and seemed to get darker as it baked under the heat lamp of the unseasonably hot September sun. The weather was schizophrenic that month.

The hotel was tucked up against the weedy freeway embankment. At night in his room, Wade could hear the traffic rushing by outside his window. He didn’t mind the noise. There was a pleasant rhythm to it, as natural in its own way as waves lapping at the shore.

The rhythm of the freeway traffic was faster in the morning, infused with the energy of a waking city. Beneath the beat, like a jazz riff, was the irregular, sometimes discordant whoosh of cars speeding by on the street. It was a beautiful noise, as Neil Diamond would say, not that Wade would ever admit to owning one of his albums, though he had them all. He could blame his father for that embarrassing flaw in his character.

Neil Diamond, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Tom Jones, Sammy Davis Jr., and Shirley Bassey were the only singers his father ever listened to.

He hated the music when he was a kid but found himself liking it as a man. Either he’d matured into it, the way the elderly age into using walkers, or he drew some kind of comfort from the nostalgia and the connection to his dad, which was the explanation he chose to accept.

The hotel and the Denny’s were located in a light‐industrial pocket of warehouses on the city’s east side, midway between downtown and the suburbs of Clayton, Denton, and Tennyson, which were built on farmland that had been subdivided into a sprawl of housing tracts, office parks, and shopping centers.

The trio of communities was known collectively as New King City because that’s where the tech companies were, the new economic engine of the city, and where all the young, educated, and well‐off families lived.

Until a couple of weeks ago, it was where Wade lived too, along with the majority of King City cops. The schools were better, the grass was greener, the skies were bluer, the smiles were brighter, and the streets were safer. Or maybe it just seemed that way because everything was so new and you were never more than ten yards away from a Jamba Juice.

He used to pass this Denny’s sign on his morning commute, a landmark telling him that he was ten minutes from seeing the river and the downtown skyline and twenty minutes from pulling into his parking spot at One King Plaza, depending on the congestion on the bridge.

Now the Denny’s sign marked home.

He made a conscious effort not to look at the newspaper kiosks outside the restaurant door. The corruption story was still playing out on the front page even though the major plot twists, revelations, and denouement were past. Reading about it all now was like watching a TV series based on a hit movie that had already produced three crappy sequels that nobody liked.

The moment he stepped inside the restaurant, everybody became self‐conscious and awkward. He was used to it. All uniformed cops were.

Even law‐abiding citizens felt guilty of something with a cop in the room; as if they were afraid that he could read their darkest thoughts or that they might be seized by a sudden, uncontrollable urge to commit a major felony.

In his experience, only children greeted the sight of a police officer with enthusiasm and pleasure. Children like order and security. Most adults do too, but those feelings are complicated by issues of ego, dominance, control, status, and sex, all of which come bubbling up from the bog of the unconscious when you are confronted with a man with the power to take your freedom or your life.

Wade took a booth facing the cash register and the front door on the remote chance that the place got held up while he was eating.

A waitress slouched beside his table, poured him a cup of coffee, and offered him a laminated menu. She’d waited on him before. She was laminated in the transparent bitterness and disappointment that had coated her for thirty years.

He ordered a Grand Slam breakfast with scrambled eggs so he wouldn’t dribble any yolk on his uniform. She snatched up the menu and walked away.

While he waited for his breakfast, he opened up his briefcase and took out the files on the two officers who’d be working under his command.

The chief had given him a choice yesterday in the park—he could quit or he could take the assignment and get killed. Either way, Wade got fucked over and the department won.

He took the reassignment without protest, even though he was well aware of what the chief was doing.

The way Wade looked at it, cops are supposed to go to dangerous neighborhoods and make them safe.

If he was unwilling to do that, he shouldn’t have become a cop to start with.

He’d put off reading the two personnel files until breakfast because he knew that he’d be stuck with what the chief considered the dregs of the department, the fools, the addicts, the pariahs, the cops that no other cops could stand.

Cops like him.

He opened the first file.

Billy Hagen, twenty‐two, the lowest scoring officer among the new class at the police academy. A rookie. He grew up in the north end, in one of the old row‐house neighborhoods. His parents were divorced, mother worked as a waitress, father was a mechanic. He barely graduated from high school and, judging by his transcripts, he had bluffed his way through community college too. Billy’s last job before becoming a cop was at Best Buy, selling electronics.

The only reason Billy made the cut was because the department was desperate for new manpower. Considering that the pay was awful, the benefits were pitiful, the risk of bodily harm was high, and nobody trusted or respected cops anymore, they couldn’t be too picky.

Wade studied Billy Hagen’s picture. The kid was blond haired and fresh faced and had a cocky, mischievous smile.

He’d probably get Wade killed if he didn’t get himself killed first. Still, a rookie was better than getting a drunk who’d been on the job for twenty years. Hagen was too inexperienced to have picked up any bad habits yet. The challenge for Wade would be keeping Hagen alive long enough to learn something.

The waitress dropped his plate of eggs, bacon, hash browns, and toast in front of him, freshened his coffee, and dragged her ass away.

Wade closed Hagen’s file and opened the next one, which he perused as he ate.

Charlotte Greene, twenty‐four, African‐American, top of her class at the academy. Another rookie. She grew up in a nice housing tract in New King City about a mile away from his house. Her father was a shrink and her mother was a lawyer. Professional liberals, Wade decided. She was a straight‐A student in high school and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in sociology from the state university.

Obviously, Charlotte Greene wanted to reform society and rescue the oppressed and was talked into thinking a badge was the way to do it.

Since African‐Americans made up less than 3 percent of the King City population, and even fewer were high school graduates, it was clear to Wade that she’d been recruited as part of the halfhearted public relations effort to diversify the department with women and people of color and create some positive press in the wake of the corruption scandal.

But this was a reform that was doomed to failure. Chief Reardon was a conservative bigot who believed women were biologically incapable of police work and that having a skin color other than Caucasian was probable cause for arrest.

She was too smart, too liberal, and too black to be a King City cop. And she wasn’t going to be very happy when she discovered that for herself.

Wade knew she’d fight him on everything. Maybe that was a good thing too. Her anger and tenacity would help her survive.

He motioned to the waitress for his check, put the files in his briefcase, and closed it. He had one day to get settled in before his officers showed up for work.

Three experienced officers weren’t enough to man an outpost in a violent neighborhood like Darwin Gardens. But he was going in with two rookies.

The assignment was meant to be a death sentence for him. Maybe he deserved it, but Hagen and Greene certainly didn’t. He’d have to find a way to protect them.

The waitress approached the table.

“It’s on the house,” she said.

This was how the rot started, with little gratuities like that, until you thought you were entitled to them and much more.

“I appreciate the gesture,” Wade said. “But I’d prefer to pay.”

She shook her head. “We never charge the police. It’s our policy.”

“You charged me yesterday,” he said.

“I didn’t know you were a cop.”

“Pretend that you still don’t.”

“I haven’t got much of an imagination,” she said, turned her back to him, and went on to take another customer’s order.

He didn’t understand why she fought him. It would have taken far less effort to just accept his money. And she looked like someone who’d given up on making any effort years ago.

Wade left enough cash on the table to cover his bill, the tax, and a tip and walked out.