King City Read Free

hands in his pockets. “Is there a reason we aren’t having this thrilling historical debate in your office?”
    The chief turned to him, gave him the once‐over, and frowned with disgust at what he saw.
    “I wanted a smoke and it’s against the law in public buildings. You might call the feds on me. Besides, the place is full of men with loaded weapons who’d like to shoot you. I’m pretty tempted right now myself.”
    “Gee, was it something I said?” Wade asked.
    “I promoted you to the MCU because I thought you were made out of the right stuff. I didn’t think you’d go crying like a little girl to the Justice Department the minute you saw some mischief.”
    “We aren’t talking about hardworking cops stepping on a few civil rights or bending a few regulations to get the job done,” Wade said. “They were taking bribes, extorting drug dealers for a cut of their action, skimming from the cash and drugs that they seized as evidence, and running a protection racket right out of police headquarters.”
    “You should have come to me,” the chief said. “I would have handled it.”
    “You would have buried it.”
    “I would have done what was best for the department,” the chief said. “That’s our sworn duty.”
    “Our duty is to enforce the law.”
    “We are the law,” the chief said.
    Wade nodded. “That’s why I went to the Justice Department.”
    “You spied for them for sixteen months, bugging conversations, taking pictures, stealing papers. You lied to everyone. Your fellow officers. Your family. And then you shot one of your own in his kitchen, right in front of his wife and kids.”
    “He was holding them hostage,” Wade said.
    “You drove him to it,” the chief said. “All of that ugliness, all of the embarrassment you caused the department, would have been avoided if you’d just come to me. Instead, you betrayed us all. Even your wife can’t stand to look at you anymore.”
    Wade took a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying to keep his rising anger in check. He wasn’t going to let himself be baited.
    “Seven detectives that you considered the best of the best are sitting in prison for the next twenty years,” Wade said. “Apparently, you’re a lousy judge of character, so you’ll have to forgive me if I’m not all broken up about losing your respect. Are we done here?”
    The chief’s face reddened with rage. Wade looked him right in the eye, unapologetic and unbowed.
    “Not yet,” the chief said. “I’m launching a new community policing initiative by establishing substations staffed by a few uniformed officers in some of the city’s most troubled areas. You’re going to work in one of them.”
    “You’re demoting me,” Wade said.
    “Hell no, I wouldn’t do that,” the chief said. “You might see that as retribution and use it as grounds for a lawsuit.”
    “So what’s this?”
    “A reassignment, a lateral move. You’ll have the same rank, pay, and benefits as you do now.” The chief picked up two files that were on the picnic table beside him and slid them toward Wade. “You’ll have two officers under your command and we’ll leave you alone.”
    That meant no support, no backup, stuck on his own in some urban Siberia.
    “Where is this substation?”
    The chief smiled. “Darwin Gardens.”
    Wade knew the place. Every cop did.
    It was four miles from where Wade was standing, fifty miles from the lake where he grew up, and light‐years away from anywhere any sane person would want to be.
    It was the old industrial core of King City, bordered on the east by the rotting factories and docks along the river, by a Berlin wall of squalid apartment blocks to the south, and by the decaying railroad yards and the freeway to the west.
    Darwin Gardens had the highest homicide rate in the city, but that was a dirty little secret that the chief, the police commission, and the chamber of commerce kept to themselves and didn’t factor into the official