Lee Goldberg: King City

He shifted his gaze back to the chief. “They had a broad interpretation of disrespect,” Wade said. “Men were hung for demanding safer working conditions in the factories.”

“It kept the peace,” the chief said.

“It was intimidation to prevent anyone from challenging the rampant corruption and abuse of authority.”

“Those were violent, chaotic times. The law had to take a hard line to maintain order,” the chief said. “As a result, King City was probably the safest, cleanest, and most productive city in America.”

Wade sighed and put his 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 stats.

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.