King City

Chapter five

They went back downstairs. Claggett gave Wade a set of keys to all the doors and locks in and around the building and then hurried out.

Wade found the keys to the squad cars on one of the desks and went out back to his fenced?in parking lot to inspect his fleet.

The first squad car was filled with trash, as if someone had emptied a few neighborhood garbage cans into it. Amid the papers, cans, and bottles, he saw soiled diapers, rotting food, and even a dead bird. The upholstery in the front seat was patched with filthy duct tape. He glanced at the odometer-a mere 287,000 miles.

The second car had about the same number of miles on the odometer as the first one but wasn’t filled with trash. The molded plastic backseats and floor were coated with dried vomit and feces instead.

The third car was practically new, with just 215,000 miles on the engine, but the interior looked and smelled as if the entire police department had used it as a urinal and then invited a few stray dogs to relieve themselves in it too.

He walked around the cars and checked the tires. They were inflated and the treads were in pretty good shape. Anything above bald was better than he’d expected.

Wade popped the hoods and opened the trunks on all three cars.

The engines seemed intact and the vehicles were stocked with crime scene kits, first aid kits, and all the other necessary equipment.

They’d even given him radar guns. He wasn’t planning on writing any speeding tickets. That would just piss people off. He had bigger problems to deal with.

The cars were old, beaten up, and purposely filled with filth by his fellow cops as a not?so?subtle message to him about how enthused they were to have him back. But the vehicles seemed to be in basic working condition. That was good enough for him.

He closed the hoods and the trunks, locked up the cars, and went back inside.

Wade spent the next few hours doing a thorough inventory of the equipment, weapons, ammunition, and office supplies that had been left for him. To his surprise, he found everything that was needed for the proper operation of the substation.

He knew the department hadn’t done it out of concern for his safety or for the good of the community. It was about limiting the blowback. The chief wanted to be sure that when Wade or his two officers got seriously injured or killed that the bloodshed couldn’t be blamed on substandard or missing equipment.

With the inventory done, Wade unpacked and organized his station. He arranged the desks and made sure that all the computer terminals were linked to the police network, which utilized the cable lines that were strung up on telephone poles all over the old part of King City. It wasn’t the best system. A couple of years ago, a runaway trash truck knocked over a pole and shut down the police communications network for hours.

Wade double?checked that the radios were hooked up to the dispatcher, which they were, though he didn’t expect to be sent out on many calls. People in Darwin Gardens didn’t call the police when they needed help.

Not yet, anyway.

It was late afternoon by the time he finished setting things up. There was still a lot of cosmetic work to do in the station, mostly patching and painting, but all of that could wait. The important thing was that the station was functional and ready for the arrival in the morning of his two rookie officers.

But he wasn’t quite ready for them yet. He sat down at one of the desks, took out a legal pad, and gave some serious thought to the shift schedule.

Ordinarily, patrol shifts were broken down into three eight?hour chunks.

He knew from experience that the day shift, 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., was when most of the nonviolent crimes occurred, like shoplifting, check forgery, and minor domestic squabbles.

From 4:00 p.m. to midnight was when most of the crimes?in?progress calls came in and officers had to deal with burglaries, carjackings, and robberies.

The graveyard shift, from midnight to 8:00 a.m., was aptly named. It wasn’t just the dead of night-it was also when most of the rapes, drive?by shootings, drunk?driving accidents, overdoses, and murders occurred. The bloodshed was especially heavy between 10:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m., so sometimes a fourth shift was added from 8:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. to put more officers on the streets.

But Wade didn’t have the manpower for that. He barely had the manpower for three shifts, since he wasn’t ready to trust his rookies alone. They were coming to him with four hundred hours of field training, but it wasn’t done down here.

Rookies usually got stuck with the graveyard shift, the long nights of blood and vomit, while the senior officers got the easier days and the good nights’ sleep and family face time that came with it.

The problem with the day shift was that the brass, the bureaucrats, the press, the politicians, and the special?interest groups were awake too, and looking over your shoulder, which could be worse than dealing with rapists, drunks, and cold?blooded murderers.

That was one problem Wade wouldn’t have. He sketched out a shift schedule for the first few weeks that involved each of them taking twelve?hour shifts. Greene and Hagen weren’t going to like it, but they could take some satisfaction that the schedule would be a lot more brutal on him. He couldn’t send them out alone yet, not during the deadliest hours, so to be there with them, he’d allotted himself only five hours of sleep a night.

It was a good thing his commute home would be just two flights of stairs.

His stomach growled loudly enough to startle him, and he realized that he’d worked right through lunch and nearly to dinner. It was time to venture out into the community for some meat, which he considered the one essential element of any satisfying meal. He’d eat a salad as long as there were chunks of meat in it somewhere.

Wade stepped outside, locked the door, slid the steel grate shut, and locked it too. It was warm and still, as if the air itself were hesitating.

He turned around and carefully surveyed the street, mindful that he presented an attractive target.

Not a lot had changed since morning.

A few more hookers milled around in front of the check?cashing place to his right on the northeast corner of Division Street and Weaver Street. They were out foraging for clients. There weren’t as many homeless around. They were out foraging for food and drinks.

The Escalade was gone, but there were half a dozen sullen?faced, tattooed young men huddled in front of the mini?mart directly across the street, watching him.

They wore bright?red bandanas or baseball caps turned backward, bright?white running shoes, sports team jerseys, and oversize pants that drooped off their asses to flash their boxers. Menace radiated off them like heat. He could almost see it shimmering from their skin, but he didn’t sense imminent danger.

Wade glanced to his left. There was a fifties?era coffee shop on the southwest corner of Division and Arness that had floor?to?ceiling windows all the way around. It had a red, sweeping roofline that seemed to soar off into the air, where its sharply pointed edge pierced a starburst?shaped sign that read “Pancake Galaxy.”

There was a buoyant optimism and wacky exuberance inherent in the space?age design that endured despite the decay, the desperation, and the poverty of the surrounding neighborhood. But that enthusiasm was expressed in more than the dramatic, accelerating architecture-it was the only building on the street without bars over the windows. That told him something about the people who owned the restaurant and how they were viewed by the neighborhood.

Wade looked both ways, crossed the intersection to the restaurant, and went inside.

The restaurant was like a museum exhibit of the 1950s, futuristic modernism. Free?form boomerang? and amoeba?shaped counters and architectural accents were set against a dizzying mix of surface materials: Formica, brick, stainless steel, lava rock, and ceramic tiles. The red vinyl bar stools were cantilevered away from the counters and over the terrazzo floors so they almost seemed to be floating. Enormous white globes of light hung from the ceiling like planets and made the silver flecks on the countertops sparkle like stardust.

There were framed illustrations everywhere of a happy?faced cartoon pancake with arms and legs. In each picture, the smiling pancake was dressed as something different-a pirate, an astronaut, a lumberjack, a doctor, a firefighter, an Indian, a football player, a chef, a scuba diver, a pope. He was a pancake for all people, all countries, and all seasons.

An emaciated hooker in latex hot pants and a loose?fitting tank top sat alone at a table, holding a stack of pancakes in her hands and eating it like a sandwich. She kept her eyes on him as she ate, oblivious to the dab of butter she’d put on the tip of her nose.

There was an old man wearing an emerald?blue Members Only jacket, cargo pants, and glasses with lenses the size of computer monitors sharing a booth with a woman whose sparse hair was puffed out into a dandelion do. They froze to look at him, the man as he lifted a coffee cup to his mouth, the woman as she stuffed a wad of Kleenex into her abundant cleavage.

A gaunt man with sunken cheeks and big owl eyes sat on a stool behind the cash register. He was well into his social security years and wearing a flannel shirt that seemed to be two sizes too big for him. He had a thin plastic tube under his nostrils that ran over his ears and down to an oxygen tank that was on wheels beside him. A curl of smoke rose from a cigarette in an ashtray on the counter.

“You know you’re not supposed to smoke around an oxygen tank,” Wade said.

“What do you care?” the man asked. His voice sounded like it was clawing its way through gravel.

“You might blow the place up, and I hadn’t planned on this being my last meal.”

“You never can tell,” the man said. “Especially down here.”

Wade took a seat at the counter, as far away from the cashier as he could get. The waitress approached and handed him a laminated menu.

She was in her late twenties and wore faded jeans and a loose, short?sleeve blouse that was open one button more than it probably should have been, a dream?catcher necklace drawing his eye to her chest. She had black hair tied back in a ponytail and a ballerina’s body, thin but strong, her skin an almost edible caramel.

“Don’t worry about Dad. He wouldn’t dare blow the place up until everybody has settled their checks,” she said, offering Wade her hand. “I’m Amanda. My friends call me Mandy.”

“Tom Wade,” he said, shaking her hand. He glanced back at her father, who was stealing a drag on his cigarette and couldn’t have been any whiter if he were chalk. Mandy didn’t get her Indian blood from him.

Mandy followed his gaze. “That warm, cuddly character is my father, Peter Guthrie, the inspiration for Peter Pancake.” She tapped the menu and the smiling pancake on the front cover.

“I see the resemblance,” Wade said.

“What can I get you, Officer?” she asked as she picked up a clear?glass coffeepot and filled the thick white mug in front of him.

“Call me Tom. I’d like a short stack of pancakes and a side of bacon-soft, not crispy, please.”

Mandy walked back into the open kitchen and tied on an apron. “I would have figured you for a crispy man, Tom.”

“Are you going to be disappointed if I put sugar in my coffee?”

“I won’t be disappointed but I’ll be surprised,” she said as she poured batter into a pan and laid some strips of bacon on the flat grill. The bacon sizzled instantly. “You strike me as a man who takes the bitterness as it comes and doesn’t try to sweeten things up.”

“You got all that from me already?”

“You’re not a hard man to read,” she said. “I watched you as you walked over here. It’s in your stride and in the way you wear your uniform. They call it body language for a reason.”

He thought about what she’d said. She’d been watching his body and how it moved.

Was she attracted to him?

It had been a long time since he’d asked himself that question about a woman or cared about the answer.

“And mine says crispy bacon and black coffee,” he said.

“It does to me,” Mandy said. “But I was only half right.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure, Tom,” she replied in a jaunty sort of way, like saying his name amused her. There was something of a tease in it too.

He liked it.

“Why don’t you have bars on your windows like everybody else?”

“If I wanted to live in a prison, I’d rob somebody,” Peter Guthrie answered for her in a rasp that soon gave way to a coughing jag.

“My mom and dad opened this restaurant forty?nine years ago,” Mandy said. “Not much else has lasted here. So we’re, like, on hallowed ground.”

“Everybody is welcome as long as they behave themselves,” Guthrie choked out between coughs.

“What happens if they don’t?”

“I’ve got Old Betty,” Guthrie said. Wade turned to see the old man lifting a sawed?off shotgun from its hiding place behind the counter. “This will cut a man in half.”

“You know it for a fact,” Wade said and wondered how long ago Guthrie had found that out for himself.

That’s when Mandy came out of the kitchen holding a plate in each hand. She laid them down in front of Wade.

The six buttermilk pancakes were hot, fluffy, and huge, with a ball of butter nearly as large as a scoop of ice cream melting on top. And this was the short stack. But he wasn’t going to complain. The six strips of bacon were thick and meaty and had a smoky aroma.

Wade was practically salivating as he tucked a napkin under his collar. “You should serve this with a side of Lipitor.”

“Would you like some maple syrup with that?”

“What does my body language tell you?”

She poured syrup on the pancakes for him and set the bottle down next to his plate. “You respect tradition. Pancakes and maple syrup go together, so that’s how you’ll take it. Besides, you wouldn’t have put on that napkin if you weren’t afraid of dripping on yourself.”

“You should have been a detective,” he said.

Wade took a bite of his pancakes. They were the best that he’d ever had, thick with buttermilk and yet so light they were like flavored air. The maple syrup was sticky sweet and natural; he could almost taste the bark that the sap had bled through. He quickly had another bite.

“How about you?” she asked.

“Been there,” he said. “Done that.”

“Is that why you’re here?”

“Don’t you already know the answer to that question?”

“There are limits to how much you can learn from studying someone’s body language.”

He did some studying of his own, looking for signs of insincerity in her expression. What he saw was a woman who was relaxed and amused, in no hurry to do anything else but stand there talking to him. “Don’t you read the paper or watch the news?”

“I’ve been away for a while and I’ve been preoccupied since I got back. Are you somebody I should know?”

“I hope so,” he said, instantly regretting his words and hoping she wouldn’t take them as a suggestive come?on.

Then again, he thought, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if she did.

Before he could find out one way or another, he heard the sound of breaking glass, followed by whoops, hollers, and loud metallic thunks coming from outside.

Mandy looked past him to the street, her smile doing a fast fade, her entire body tensing up. Her father reached for Old Betty.

Wade took another bite of his pancakes, swiveled in his seat, and looked outside.

The gang of men who’d been standing across the street from the station before was now gathered around his Mustang, attacking it with tire irons and crowbars.