King City

Chapter twelve

Wade let Charlotte drive the squad car to give her a chance to feel in control of her situation and to discover the neighborhood on her own. But mostly, he did it because he was feeling pleasantly, postcoitally languid and wanted to enjoy it. She kept stealing suspicious glances at him and he pretended not to notice.

“You didn’t seem surprised to see me,” she said.

“I shot Billy, not you. It’s not bothering him any.”

“Because he’s an idiot.”

“He’s smarter now than he was yesterday,” Wade said.

“I came back because I realized all that bullshit you said about this being the one place I could make a difference actually wasn’t bullshit.”

“Good to know. What did forensics say when you dropped off the guns?”

She gave him a long look, clearly disappointed that he wasn’t treating her admission with the gravity she felt it deserved. He looked out the window at the dark, abandoned factories.

“They asked if it was related to a specific case.”

“What did you tell them?”

“I told them that the weapons were recovered on the street outside of our station,” she said.

“Did they give you an idea when we might get the fingerprint and ballistic results on the guns?”

“I got the impression it would be after hell froze over,” she said. “But before dogs have evolved to the point where they can walk upright and speak English.”

His cell phone vibrated on his gun belt. He’d forgotten that it was there and that it was on.

“Excuse me,” he said and answered the call. “Wade.”

“It’s me, Dad,” Brooke said.

The instant he heard her voice he felt a deep, painful stab of guilt. It must have shown on his face, because Charlotte immediately looked away and concentrated intensely on her driving.

“Where have you been?” Brooke continued.

“I am so sorry,” Wade said. “I’ve been totally distracted by work.”

“You’re working?” She sounded like a young, innocent version of Ally. They shared the same vocal patterns, even the same laugh.

“Yeah,” he said.

“What are you doing?”

“What I’ve always done. I’m a cop.”

“I thought you weren’t anymore,” she said.

“I never stopped being one,” he said. “But now I’m back on the job.”

“Mom said that would never happen.”

“I guess she was mistaken,” Wade said.

“Will I still see you this weekend?”

“Every weekend,” Wade said. “I’ll come by on Saturday morning and take you to the movies. But it will have to be an early show. I’m working nights.”

But even in daylight, he would still hesitate to leave Charlie and Billy alone even for a few hours. He’d take her to one of the downtown multiplexes so he wouldn’t be too far from the station if his rookies got into trouble.

“What do you want to see?” Brooke asked.

“Anything that doesn’t have cartoon animals.”

“I’m thirteen, Dad. I am way past that. It’s Mom who isn’t.”

Ally wasn’t past a lot of things, Wade thought.

“See you Saturday,” he said. “Sweet dreams.”

“You too, Dad.” She kissed the receiver and hung up.

Wade stuck the phone back on his belt and saw Charlotte steal a glance at him. “That was my daughter. She’s thirteen.”

“How many kids do you have?”

“Just the one,” he said.

“How long were you married?”

“Fourteen years,” he said.

“What happened?”

“I went to the Justice Department and told them that everyone I was working with in the Major Crimes Unit was corrupt.”

“So your wife felt that you were betraying the department.”

“She didn’t know about any of it until it was over.”

Charlotte turned to look at him, dismayed. “You didn’t tell her?”

“It seemed like the right thing to do at the time.”

Charlotte shook her head and kept driving, heading south. She slowed as they passed Duke Fallon’s strip club, a windowless place called Headlights that was known for the giant neon sign shaped like a woman, her boobs flashing. It was just one of Fallon’s legitimate businesses in King City and his headquarters in Darwin Gardens. Wade wondered if the choice was influenced by The Sopranos or if Fallon just liked being around topless women. Maybe it was both.

They kept heading south until they reached the projects, the southernmost boundary of Darwin Gardens, where the river curved in a wide arc toward the east. Wade was sure they weren’t there by accident. Charlotte was smart and had probably spent the hours since he’d last seen her researching the neighborhood instead of getting rest.

The three twenty?story apartment towers were enormous tombstones marking the death of King City’s industrial core. The Alphabet Towers, named after the A, B, and C buildings that comprised the triangular complex, were built in the late 1970s as premium residences for the well?paid white?collar workers who wanted to be close to their executive offices at the south side factories.

But in the last twenty years, with the fall of the factories, the towers had gone from swanky to skanky, teeming with poverty?stricken families living in slum?like conditions. Now they were known collectively as the Projects.

They were high?rise slums, except for the penthouses, which were owned by Duke Fallon. He’d restored the building B penthouse that he lived in far beyond its previous grandeur, complete with an outdoor pool, a driving range, and an unrestricted, 360?degree view of the entire city.

Fallon’s penthouses in the other towers supposedly housed his most sensitive criminal enterprises, including the labs where he produced meth and processed heroin and cocaine for sale on the street.

Wade could appreciate Fallon’s choice for his home base. The towers were easy to defend from attack, from the ground or the air, whether it came from gangland rivals or law enforcement. There were surveillance cameras everywhere and lookouts posted on the rooftops. And the twenty floors of slum apartments overflowing with poor families loyal to Fallon offered the crime lord plenty of human shields, creating a potential for devastating collateral damage that kept the King City police, the DEA, and the FBI from attempting raids.

At street level, the property was ringed with a wrought iron fence, surveillance cameras, and steely eyed men dressed in black who patrolled the perimeter. The men were undoubtedly armed from their black boots to their black berets.

Wade shared all of this information with Charlotte as they drove past the towers, but he had the feeling she knew it all already and was just playing along.

“Do you think we can take him down?” she asked.

“Not tonight,” Wade said.

Wade and Charlotte stopped in at a few liquor stores and mini?marts to introduce themselves to the clerks, the people they were most likely to meet again as robbery victims. None of the clerks seemed particularly happy to meet them.

Even so, Wade bought snacks or soft drinks for the station in each store they visited, just to be sociable.

He’d taken over the driving at some point and parked them in the shadows on a side street with a view of Mission Possible.

“What are we doing here?” she asked.

“Eating,” he said, tearing open a bag of Cheetos and offering her the first handful.

She declined. They sat there in silence for another forty?five minutes, watching hookers and drug dealers ply their trade, much to Charlotte’s obvious, and increasing, discomfort.

“Something bothering you?” Wade asked, washing down his dinner of Cheetos and CornNuts with a Coke.

“We’re seeing flagrant drug use, public drunkenness, and prostitution.”

“It appears so.”

“But we aren’t doing anything about it.”

“Nope.”

“Even though we are officers of the law and these are illegal activities that we are witnessing.”

“Yep.”

“So why aren’t we arresting anybody? Or at least giving a few stern warnings?”

“There isn’t much a person down here can do to escape their troubles besides getting high or having sex, and I’d feel bad punishing them for it.”

“You’re joking,” she said.

“We have to pick our battles.”

“In other words, we’re going to arbitrarily decide which laws are worth enforcing and which aren’t.”

“I wouldn’t put it like that,” he said.

“How would you put it?”

“There’s only three of us, and we can’t possibly take on all of the crime that’s happening here. There’s just too much of it. We are outnumbered and outgunned.”

“Then what are we doing here?”

“The same thing we are doing everywhere else.”

“You’ve lost me,” she said.

“The police are always outnumbered and outgunned, Charlotte. The difference is that everywhere else, the people respect the law, abide by it, and expect the police to enforce it. Here, they don’t. That’s what we’ve got to change. We have to convince the community that the law matters and that it will make their lives better.”

Charlotte gave him a skeptical look. “And you think we can do that by buying junk food from liquor stores and letting the hookers, drug dealers, and drunks do as they please?”

If he’d been talking to a superior officer, he would have characterized his strategy as fluid, offering maximum flexibility to react to the ever?changing situation in the field with an appropriate and measured response. But since he was talking to a rookie police officer, this is what he said:

“Yeah, that sounds about right.”

A sheriff’s squad car rolled through the intersection in front of them and stopped at the curb outside of the mission. Wade started the car.

Charlotte noticed. “What’s up?”

Wade didn’t answer. He watched as a deputy shaped like a pear got out of the passenger side of car, opened the back door, and dragged a woman out of the backseat.

The woman had matted hair and a weather?beaten face and wore five or six layers of filthy clothes. The deputy dumped her on the sidewalk and hiked up his pants in a futile attempt to keep them from riding under his gut.

Wade hit the gas and peeled out of the side street, startling the deputy and coming to a screeching halt in front of the squad car.

Before Charlotte could ask what was happening, Wade had already bolted out of the cruiser and was marching toward the second deputy, who’d practically leapt out of the driver’s seat of his car onto the street.

“What do you boys think you’re doing?” Wade asked, walking right past the second deputy as if he weren’t even there, to confront the one who’d yanked the woman out of the car.

“Bringing this woman back home,” Deputy Pear said.

“I see.” Wade crouched beside the filthy woman. “Where do you live, ma’am?”

The woman was missing a good many teeth, and the ones she had left didn’t look as if they’d be staying much longer. Her gums had receded nearly to the bone.

“Under the overpass by Lincoln Park,” she said.

Wade looked up at the deputy. “Lincoln Park is out in Tennyson.”

By this time, both Charlotte and the second deputy were standing a few feet behind Wade. It was the second deputy who spoke up.

“And if you’ve been out there, you know it’s a nice area, real clean, full of families and kids. She belongs here.”

This deputy was more muscled than his partner and had a crew cut that was so short it wasn’t clear why he bothered to keep any hair at all.

Wade stood up and looked over at Charlotte to see how this was playing with her. She had her hands on her hips and a glare on her face that was even more judgmental than the one she’d given him after he’d shot Billy. He liked that.

“You can’t take people off your streets and drop them here,” Wade said.

“It’s no different than taking the trash to the dump,” Deputy Crew Cut said.

Charlotte spoke up, her body rigid with anger. “It’s kidnapping.”

“Call it what you like, but that’s how things are done, and there’s nothing you can do about it,” Crew Cut said, then shared a glance with his partner. “Let’s go, Fred.”

The two deputies started back to their car. Wade thought about what Charlotte had just said and came to a quick decision.

“You’re not going anywhere,” Wade said. “You’re both under arrest.”

The deputies stopped, but only so they could turn around and laugh at the two cops.

“Fuck yourself,” Deputy Pear said.

Wade drew his gun and shot out the rear tires of the squad car with two quick shots. The deputies instinctively went for their guns, but Charlotte had already drawn hers, though she seemed surprised to see it in her hand.

“You’re crazy,” Deputy Crew Cut said to Wade.

“So there’s no telling what I might do next,” Wade said. “If I were you, I’d play it safe, drop your guns, Tasers, batons, and pepper spray, and assume the position on your vehicle.”

They glanced over to Charlotte, to see if she was wavering in her resolve, but she was standing her ground.

“You heard the man,” she said.

The deputies did as we they were told but were mightily pissed off about it.

The gunshots had drawn out Friar Ted and everyone else in Mission Possible, who stared in stunned disbelief as Charlotte cuffed each of the deputies, read them their rights, and led them to the police car.

Wade gathered the deputies’ weapons, put them in the trunk of his car, then helped the homeless woman to her feet and set her in the backseat with them for the ride back to the station, which they made in silence.