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.
There were more people out on the streets here than Wade had seen so far in the rest of Darwin Gardens. They sat on couches on their front porches, hung up laundry on the line, and worked on their cars. Children played in their yards while teenagers huddled on the sidewalks in groups, their smiles turning to sullen glowers as the squad car passed.
Wade turned into one of the alleys, which was strewn with trash, broken grocery carts, soiled mattresses, stripped cars, rusted pipes, and cardboard boxes. The sides of the alley were lined with cyclone or wrought iron fences and graffiti?covered cinder block walls topped with razor wire. It made the backyards of the homes resemble prison yards.
Except for one yard, where a lush garden flourished behind the wrought iron fence. The centerpiece of the garden was a burbling fountain that spilled down a stack of rocks into a tiny pond that was surrounded by colorful flowers.
There was a man in filthy clothes standing on a crate outside the fence and pissing through the bars into the pond.
“Son of a bitch,” Wade said.
He gave a short burst of the siren, the loud noise startling the man so much that he tumbled off the crate, pissing into the air as he fell.
Billy laughed. “I wish I had that on tape.”
Wade got out and marched over to the man, who was scrambling to stuff himself back into his pants and zip up his fly. The man was in his thirties, with an enormous head of matted hair that looked like the end of a dirty mop. The skin on his arms was covered with dry scabs and fresh sores.
“What the hell did you do that for?” the man asked, sitting up. His gums had receded so far Wade could almost see the roots of his teeth. The man was obviously a crack addict.
“You were pissing on that nice garden,” Wade said. He glanced over his shoulder and was pleased to see Billy standing behind his open passenger door, backing him up as if they were handling a traffic stop.
“There’s no law against pissing,” the man said.
“Actually, there is,” Wade said. “Urinating in public is illegal. So is indecent exposure and vandalism.”
“I was just pissing,” the man said. “There was no place else to go.”
“You had the whole alley to piss on, but you dragged over a crate, stood on top of it, and aimed at the fountain.”
“I got to aim at something.”
Someone started clapping. Wade turned to see an elderly woman in a shapeless, flowered housedress and slippers applauding as she walked across the garden to the fence. Her face was blotched with age spots and she wore glasses that magnified the size of her eyes to horrific proportions. But Wade could see the adorable, bespectacled young woman that she’d once been. That woman was still there under the wrinkles, the gray hair, and the sagging body. It was how he saw his mother, right up until the end.
“Thank you so much, Officer,” she said. “You have no idea how many of my flowers he’s killed.”
“What’s your name, ma’am?”
“Dorothy Copeland,” she said.
“I’m Tom Wade, the sergeant at your local police station. The officer behind me is Billy Hagen.”
“We have a police station?” she asked.
“You do now.” He looked back at the man, who was in a sitting position on the ground. “What have you got against Mrs. Copeland’s garden?”
“She’s a crazy old bitch,” the man said. “Always yelling at people.”
“He makes a huge mess in the alley,” she said. “Look what I swept up this morning.”
She opened the lid of a garbage can. Wade glanced inside and saw syringes, beer bottles, fast?food wrappers, and used condoms on top of her neatly bagged trash.
“He left all of that?” Wade asked.
“He and his drug?addict friends come at night while I’m watching my programs,” she replied. “I try so hard to keep things clean, but the mess never ends.”
Wade regarded the man again. “What’s your name?”
“Terrill Curtis,” he said, scratching at his arm.
“You’re under arrest, Mr. Curtis, for public urination and vandalism.”
“You’re shitting me,” Terrill said.
“Stand up, put your hands on your head, and lean facedown over the hood of car,” Wade said.
Terrill did as he was told. Wade read him his rights as he patted him down, discovering a switchblade, a crack pipe, and a tiny square of aluminum foil, which he unfolded to reveal a pebble of crack cocaine.
“We’re charging you with possession of illegal narcotics on top of everything else,” Wade said.
Terrill glared threateningly at the woman.
Wade handcuffed Terrill and spun him so they were face?to?face.
“Mrs. Copeland and her garden are under my protection, Mr. Curtis. Whatever happens to her, or her flowers, will happen to you, whether you are the one responsible for it or not.”
“What if somebody else pisses on them?”
“Then I will piss on you,” Wade said.
“That’s not fair,” he whined.
“I got to aim at something,” Wade said and led Terrill over to Billy. “Put him in the car.”
While Billy got Terrill into the backseat, Wade went to the trunk, opened it, and took out a bullhorn, which he carried over to Mrs. Copeland.
“I’ll be back in the next day or two to check on you. In the meantime, Mrs. Copeland, I want you to have this.” He gave her the bullhorn. “You see anybody making a mess in the alley, just press the red trigger and yell at them with this. If that doesn’t work, you give me a call, any time of the day or night.”
He wrote his number down on a piece of paper and handed it to her.
“I can’t believe you’re doing all this for me,” she said.
“It’s my job, Mrs. Copeland.”
“This used to be such a nice neighborhood,” she said. “You should have seen it.”
“I still can.” Wade motioned to her garden. “Right here.”