King City Read Free Page A

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    The neighborhood was run by criminal warlords who operated with virtual impunity. Any cops who entered became chum for shooters looking for target practice. For the people who lived there, it was survival of the fittest—which was how the neighborhood had earned its nickname.
    The city fathers ignored the problems there because it would cost far too much in blood and money to make a difference in a place that didn’t matter. And because the people who voted, and paid the most taxes, and financed campaigns didn’t live there anymore.
    They’d start caring about Darwin Gardens only when the crime came to their doorsteps in Abbott Park, Meston Heights, or the swanky shops along McEveety Way.
    Wade looked at the chief’s big fat grin. “When did you start giving a damn about Darwin Gardens?”
    “Not until I needed a shithole to put you in,” the chief said.
     

The last time Wade wore his uniform was a few years earlier at a police funeral. Two rookie cops had chased a stolen car into a cul‐de‐sac in Darwin Gardens and an ambush. More than two hundred bullets were recovered from their vehicle and their obliterated bodies.
    The police staged a massive crackdown, arrested anyone who didn’t look middle class and white, and that was it. Things went back to the way they were before.
    Wade wasn’t going to a funeral today, although as far as Chief Reardon and the department were concerned, he was. His law enforcement career was dead and they wanted him to mourn his lost future every time he put on his uniform.
    But Wade didn’t look at things that way, not even now as he dressed in a dreary, fifty‐bucks‐a‐night hotel room, most of his belongings in a padlocked storage unit across the street.
    Wearing his blues, seeing that badge on his chest again, reinforced something essential about himself, but if you asked him what it was, he probably couldn’t have found the words. Eloquence wasn’t one of his qualities. He knew only that it felt right in a way few things in his life ever did.
    If the chief thought that Wade would see this as an indignity, that it would make him quit and go away, it only showed how little he knew him, as if that hadn’t been proved dramatically already.
    He was proud of the uniform. It was why he did what he did and lost what he lost. His father taught him that standing up for what you believe in comes with a price but that backing down exacts a toll that your soul never stops paying.
    It was customary, but not required, for King City police officers to wear a Kevlar vest under their uniforms. Most of them did. All Wade wore was the white T‐shirt that he’d carefully ironed and lightly starched the night before.
    He buckled on his duty belt and then looped the leather snaps known as “keepers” to the black belt that held up his pants. Four keepers were standard, two in the front of the duty belt and two in the back. But he’d had two extra ones added on either side of his holster to secure it more rigidly, making it easier for him to quickly and smoothly draw his Glock. He had another gun in an ankle holster, but he’d never had to use that one.
    His duty belt also carried handcuffs, a cell phone, a collapsible baton, a tiny flashlight, and a canister of pepper spray, a piece of masking tape affixed to it that read, “Bat Shark Repellant,” in Alison’s handwriting, encircled by a rough approximation of the 1960s Batman logo. She’d put the tape on the canister in a playful moment years ago and he had no intention of peeling it off now.
    A fully loaded duty belt weighed about twenty‐five pounds. There were more cops on disability from the back strain of lugging around their equipment on their waists than from injuries sustained in assaults, shootings, or car accidents.
    But Wade liked the extra weight.
    It wasn’t punishment for him to be putting on his blues again. It was more like therapy. It was exactly what he needed, now more than ever.
    Wade was thirty‐eight