King City (13 page)

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.

Once they got to the station, Charlotte led the two deputies to the holding cell, uncuffed them, and locked them inside. Wade took the woman to a seat at Billy’s desk and gave her a bottled water. Charlotte gestured to Wade and met him at the counter.

“You won’t arrest prostitutes and drug dealers, but you’ll arrest two sheriff’s deputies,” she said, her voice low so the others wouldn’t hear them.

“I’m picking my battles,” Wade said.

“You’re starting wars.”

“Do you disapprove of what I’ve done?”

She glanced back at the deputies in the cell, who were both making calls on their cell phones. “Actually, much to my astonishment, I don’t.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that.” Wade reached into his pocket and handed her a crumpled twenty‐dollar bill. “Do me a favor and get this lady something hot to eat and make her comfortable. I’m going to try to get a few hours’ sleep before morning.”

She tipped her head toward the cells. “What about the paperwork on them?”

“Start filling it out,” he said.

“I’m going to tell it the way it happened,” she said.

“I would expect nothing less,” he said. “Get me if anything comes up.”

Wade made the long commute up the two flights of stairs to his new home. He undressed, plugged his phone into the charger on top of one of the boxes, and went to take a shower. He let the shower run for five minutes, waiting for the muddy‐brown tinge to clear and for the water to heat up. It must have been years since anybody had used the shower. The water was lukewarm when he got in, but it felt good anyway after his long day. It washed away the tension.

A lot had happened since the previous morning, but what stuck with him most was the intimate relationship that had developed with Mandy. It was a change in his life he hadn’t seen coming, and now that it was here, he wasn’t quite sure how to handle it.

Then again, that was becoming a familiar feeling in his life lately. Ever since his first meeting with the Justice Department, every day felt like he was venturing into unexplored territory. Some people craved that discomfort, that mystery. It made their lives exciting. He preferred predictability and routine. Excitement wasn’t something he valued much.

He decided to deal with Mandy the same way he tackled everything else—he’d take things as they came and trust his instincts, not that they’d served him too well lately. That same approach had landed him in Darwin Gardens, living alone in a squalid apartment, the last fourteen years of his life packed in a dozen cardboard boxes.

And yet, he felt more centered, and more sure of himself, than he had in years.

Wade dried off, wrapped a towel around his waist, and went into the living room, where he unpacked some sheets and blankets from a box and tossed them on the mattress in a clump.

He tossed the towel, slipped on a pair of boxers, and crawled onto the mattress, pulled the mass of sheets and blankets over himself, and went to sleep.

____

It seemed like only seconds later when he was awakened by his ringing phone, but the sunlight coming through the newspapers taped to his windows told him at least a few hours had passed. He grabbed the cell phone from the charger and answered the call, his teeth sticky and tongue dry.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Sorry to wake you, Sergeant,” Charlotte said. He could tell from the stiff and formal tone in her voice that she was not alone. “There’s an assistant district attorney here who’d like to speak with you.”

“I’ll be right down,” Wade said.

He pulled on a T‐shirt and a pair of sweats, washed his mouth out with Listerine, spit it out in his kitchen sink, and then trudged barefoot down the stairs to the station.

Because he was groggy, and still not entirely used to his new surroundings, there was an off‐kilter, dreamlike quality to what he was seeing. The sight of the deputies in the cell, the homeless woman sipping a Coke at a desk, and the ADA, a woman in a business suit clutching the handle of her slim briefcase like it was a life preserver only made it seem more surreal.

Charlotte stood beside the prosecutor and watched Wade with a mix of wariness and amusement.

He trudged past them to his desk, where he’d dumped all the junk food that they’d bought that night, and picked out a Milky Way bar, which he unwrapped as he turned to face his guest.

“May I help you?” he asked.

“I’m assistant district attorney Pamela Lefcourt and I am here to tell you that you are way, way out of line.” She pointed to the cells. “I’m ordering you to release those deputies right now.”

Wade took a bite out of his Milky Way bar and nodded to Charlotte, who got up and unlocked the cells. Just the taste of the chocolate and caramel seemed to clear his head, though he knew he was one long blink away from sleep.

Lefcourt took a step toward him. She was in her thirties, her dark suit perfectly pressed, her silk blouse open just enough to show a trail of freckles leading into her cleavage. Her hair was pulled back tight, making her face look even more severe than it already was.

“What the hell were you thinking arresting them?”

“I was thinking that abducting people off the street of one city and transporting them to another against their will is kidnapping.”

“You are meddling in matters so far above your pay grade they are in a galaxy far, far away.”

“Way, way and far, far,” Wade said. “My, my.”

He took another bite of the Milky Way bar as the deputies, smirking at Wade, gathered their weapons from where they’d been left on Charlotte’s desk.

“I don’t appreciate your attitude,” Lefcourt said.

“You ought to. I’m letting these boys walk out of here as a courtesy to you,” Wade said. “But I will arrest anybody I see dumping people here.”

“You have no authority to do that.”

“I think I do. But if you like, we can go talk to a judge about it. I’m sure bringing me back into a courtroom to discuss illegal activities by law enforcement officers won’t create too much attention,” Wade said. “Or maybe I’ll just follow your example and start ferrying our homeless out to the suburbs. I hear the parks are big and beautiful out there.”