King City Read Free Page B

years old, but he felt and looked older. He was already seeing some strands of gray in his hair, though they were barely noticeable now that he’d trimmed it down to an almost military buzz cut.
    Still, there was a depth in his gaze and a weathered sturdiness to his stature and gait that suggested he’d lived more years than he had, time that cut scars and built calluses with its hard passing, but that somehow were less evident when his badge was in his pocket and his daily uniform was an off‐the‐rack suit.
    He took one last glance around the room to make sure everything was in order.
    Before he’d dressed, he’d straightened up the bathroom, folded his towels, and made his bed, even though it was the cleaning lady’s job. He hated to leave behind a mess.
    Satisfied with what he saw, he picked up his briefcase, left the room, and took the stairs one flight down to the clean, contemporary, and totally charmless lobby.
    It was decorated in a style that Alison would have called “Contemporary Motor Home.” There were a couple of couches upholstered in cloth with the same floral pattern as the bedspread in his room, a TV set tuned to CNN, and some fake potted plants that looked more lifelike than the perpetually smiling young woman behind the Formica‐paneled front counter.
    The lobby opened up onto a small dining room, where guests were offered a free continental breakfast. Wade didn’t know what was “continental” about dry toast, dry bagels, tiny boxes of dry cereal, and cubed pieces of canned fruit floating in an enormous salad bowl of sugary goop.
    The breakfast offerings were awful, but the dining room was crowded every morning anyway with traveling businessmen and vacationing families.
    Wade didn’t understand why people would enthusiastically line up to eat something disgusting and inedible simply because it was free.
    Dog crap was free too, but he wasn’t going to eat it.
    So he strode outside and across the parking lot toward the Denny’s next door.
    The sky was cloudless, but the blue was obscured by the toxic brown layer of carcinogens and greenhouse gases that hung over King City and seemed to get darker as it baked under the heat lamp of the unseasonably hot September sun. The weather was schizophrenic that month.
    The hotel was tucked up against the weedy freeway embankment. At night in his room, Wade could hear the traffic rushing by outside his window. He didn’t mind the noise. There was a pleasant rhythm to it, as natural in its own way as waves lapping at the shore.
    The rhythm of the freeway traffic was faster in the morning, infused with the energy of a waking city. Beneath the beat, like a jazz riff, was the irregular, sometimes discordant whoosh of cars speeding by on the street. It was a beautiful noise, as Neil Diamond would say, not that Wade would ever admit to owning one of his albums, though he had them all. He could blame his father for that embarrassing flaw in his character.
    Neil Diamond, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Tom Jones, Sammy Davis Jr., and Shirley Bassey were the only singers his father ever listened to.
    He hated the music when he was a kid but found himself liking it as a man. Either he’d matured into it, the way the elderly age into using walkers, or he drew some kind of comfort from the nostalgia and the connection to his dad, which was the explanation he chose to accept.
    The hotel and the Denny’s were located in a light‐industrial pocket of warehouses on the city’s east side, midway between downtown and the suburbs of Clayton, Denton, and Tennyson, which were built on farmland that had been subdivided into a sprawl of housing tracts, office parks, and shopping centers.
    The trio of communities was known collectively as New King City because that’s where the tech companies were, the new economic engine of the city, and where all the young, educated, and well‐off families lived.
    Until a couple of weeks ago, it was where Wade lived too, along with the