Lee Goldberg: King City

“I didn’t say the walls and the roof would be solid,” Claggett said. “Just that they’d be there. Are your friends coming back to finish up?”

“I don’t think so,” Wade said.

Claggett looked at him. “Can I ask you a personal question, Officer?”

“Go ahead,” he said.

“What did you do wrong to end up here?”

“My job,” Wade said.

“Maybe you’re in the wrong job.”

“Or I’m in the right job with the wrong people.”

“You’re pretty sure of yourself.”

“That’s what they tell me,” Wade said.

“Or you’re a damn fool.”

“They tell me that too.”

“So which is it?”

“Could be they’re the same thing.” Across the room Wade saw a door that was ajar, revealing a staircase beyond it. “What’s upstairs?”

“An apartment nobody wants,” Claggett said. “Tenants down here usually use it as storage space.”

“I’d like to see it,” Wade said.

Claggett led him through the door and up the stairs. He unlocked the door and held it open for Wade, who walked past him into the apartment.

There was a kitchenette without appliances, a living area, and a separate bedroom and bath. The carpet throughout was filthy and stained. The walls had a piss?yellow, weathered tinge from age and sun damage. The barred windows in the bedroom and living room overlooked Division Street.

A cell with a view.

Wade went to one corner of the living room, crouched, and pulled up the edge of the carpet to expose the hardwood floor underneath. With a little work, it would clean up nice. All the walls needed were a coat of white paint.

He stood up again. “I’ll take it.”

“You’ve already got it. It comes with the space downstairs.”

“I want to rent it for myself as a place to live.”

“You want to live here?” Claggett asked, incredulous.

“How does seven hundred and fifty dollars a month sound to you?”

“But you could stay up here for nothing,” Claggett said.

“You’re not much of a businessman,” Wade said. “Do you have a problem with making money?”

“I’m out of practice. I don’t get the opportunity very often.”

“Bring me a rental agreement to sign.”

“You want it made out for week to week?”

“Month to month,” Wade said. “I’ll pay you the first and last in advance.”

“Do you really think you’re going to be here that long?”

“I’m optimistic,” Wade said.

“You’re fucking nuts,” Claggett said.

They went back downstairs. Claggett gave Wade a set of keys to all the doors and locks in and around the building and then hurried out.

Wade found the keys to the squad cars on one of the desks and went out back to his fenced?in parking lot to inspect his fleet.

The first squad car was filled with trash, as if someone had emptied a few neighborhood garbage cans into it. Amid the papers, cans, and bottles, he saw soiled diapers, rotting food, and even a dead bird. The upholstery in the front seat was patched with filthy duct tape. He glanced at the odometer-a mere 287,000 miles.

The second car had about the same number of miles on the odometer as the first one but wasn’t filled with trash. The molded plastic backseats and floor were coated with dried vomit and feces instead.

The third car was practically new, with just 215,000 miles on the engine, but the interior looked and smelled as if the entire police department had used it as a urinal and then invited a few stray dogs to relieve themselves in it too.

He walked around the cars and checked the tires. They were inflated and the treads were in pretty good shape. Anything above bald was better than he’d expected.

Wade popped the hoods and opened the trunks on all three cars.

The engines seemed intact and the vehicles were stocked with crime scene kits, first aid kits, and all the other necessary equipment.

They’d even given him radar guns. He wasn’t planning on writing any speeding tickets. That would just piss people off. He had bigger problems to deal with.

The cars were old, beaten up, and purposely filled with filth by his fellow cops as a not?so?subtle message to him about how enthused they were to have him back. But the vehicles seemed to be in basic working condition. That was good enough for him.

He closed the hoods and the trunks, locked up the cars, and went back inside.

Wade spent the next few hours doing a thorough inventory of the equipment, weapons, ammunition, and office supplies that had been left for him. To his surprise, he found everything that was needed for the proper operation of the substation.

He knew the department hadn’t done it out of concern for his safety or for the good of the community. It was about limiting the blowback. The chief wanted to be sure that when Wade or his two officers got seriously injured or killed that the bloodshed couldn’t be blamed on substandard or missing equipment.

With the inventory done, Wade unpacked and organized his station. He arranged the desks and made sure that all the computer terminals were linked to the police network, which utilized the cable lines that were strung up on telephone poles all over the old part of King City. It wasn’t the best system. A couple of years ago, a runaway trash truck knocked over a pole and shut down the police communications network for hours.

Wade double?checked that the radios were hooked up to the dispatcher, which they were, though he didn’t expect to be sent out on many calls. People in Darwin Gardens didn’t call the police when they needed help.

Not yet, anyway.

It was late afternoon by the time he finished setting things up. There was still a lot of cosmetic work to do in the station, mostly patching and painting, but all of that could wait. The important thing was that the station was functional and ready for the arrival in the morning of his two rookie officers.

But he wasn’t quite ready for them yet. He sat down at one of the desks, took out a legal pad, and gave some serious thought to the shift schedule.

Ordinarily, patrol shifts were broken down into three eight?hour chunks.

He knew from experience that the day shift, 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., was when most of the nonviolent crimes occurred, like shoplifting, check forgery, and minor domestic squabbles.

From 4:00 p.m. to midnight was when most of the crimes?in?progress calls came in and officers had to deal with burglaries, carjackings, and robberies.

The graveyard shift, from midnight to 8:00 a.m., was aptly named. It wasn’t just the dead of night-it was also when most of the rapes, drive?by shootings, drunk?driving accidents, overdoses, and murders occurred. The bloodshed was especially heavy between 10:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m., so sometimes a fourth shift was added from 8:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. to put more officers on the streets.

But Wade didn’t have the manpower for that. He barely had the manpower for three shifts, since he wasn’t ready to trust his rookies alone. They were coming to him with four hundred hours of field training, but it wasn’t done down here.

Rookies usually got stuck with the graveyard shift, the long nights of blood and vomit, while the senior officers got the easier days and the good nights’ sleep and family face time that came with it.

The problem with the day shift was that the brass, the bureaucrats, the press, the politicians, and the special?interest groups were awake too, and looking over your shoulder, which could be worse than dealing with rapists, drunks, and cold?blooded murderers.

That was one problem Wade wouldn’t have. He sketched out a shift schedule for the first few weeks that involved each of them taking twelve?hour shifts. Greene and Hagen weren’t going to like it, but they could take some satisfaction that the schedule would be a lot more brutal on him. He couldn’t send them out alone yet, not during the deadliest hours, so to be there with them, he’d allotted himself only five hours of sleep a night.