Lee Goldberg: King City

It was a good thing his commute home would be just two flights of stairs.

His stomach growled loudly enough to startle him, and he realized that he’d worked right through lunch and nearly to dinner. It was time to venture out into the community for some meat, which he considered the one essential element of any satisfying meal. He’d eat a salad as long as there were chunks of meat in it somewhere.

Wade stepped outside, locked the door, slid the steel grate shut, and locked it too. It was warm and still, as if the air itself were hesitating.

He turned around and carefully surveyed the street, mindful that he presented an attractive target.

Not a lot had changed since morning.

A few more hookers milled around in front of the check?cashing place to his right on the northeast corner of Division Street and Weaver Street. They were out foraging for clients. There weren’t as many homeless around. They were out foraging for food and drinks.

The Escalade was gone, but there were half a dozen sullen?faced, tattooed young men huddled in front of the mini?mart directly across the street, watching him.

They wore bright?red bandanas or baseball caps turned backward, bright?white running shoes, sports team jerseys, and oversize pants that drooped off their asses to flash their boxers. Menace radiated off them like heat. He could almost see it shimmering from their skin, but he didn’t sense imminent danger.

Wade glanced to his left. There was a fifties?era coffee shop on the southwest corner of Division and Arness that had floor?to?ceiling windows all the way around. It had a red, sweeping roofline that seemed to soar off into the air, where its sharply pointed edge pierced a starburst?shaped sign that read “Pancake Galaxy.”

There was a buoyant optimism and wacky exuberance inherent in the space?age design that endured despite the decay, the desperation, and the poverty of the surrounding neighborhood. But that enthusiasm was expressed in more than the dramatic, accelerating architecture-it was the only building on the street without bars over the windows. That told him something about the people who owned the restaurant and how they were viewed by the neighborhood.

Wade looked both ways, crossed the intersection to the restaurant, and went inside.

The restaurant was like a museum exhibit of the 1950s, futuristic modernism. Free?form boomerang? and amoeba?shaped counters and architectural accents were set against a dizzying mix of surface materials: Formica, brick, stainless steel, lava rock, and ceramic tiles. The red vinyl bar stools were cantilevered away from the counters and over the terrazzo floors so they almost seemed to be floating. Enormous white globes of light hung from the ceiling like planets and made the silver flecks on the countertops sparkle like stardust.

There were framed illustrations everywhere of a happy?faced cartoon pancake with arms and legs. In each picture, the smiling pancake was dressed as something different-a pirate, an astronaut, a lumberjack, a doctor, a firefighter, an Indian, a football player, a chef, a scuba diver, a pope. He was a pancake for all people, all countries, and all seasons.

An emaciated hooker in latex hot pants and a loose?fitting tank top sat alone at a table, holding a stack of pancakes in her hands and eating it like a sandwich. She kept her eyes on him as she ate, oblivious to the dab of butter she’d put on the tip of her nose.

There was an old man wearing an emerald?blue Members Only jacket, cargo pants, and glasses with lenses the size of computer monitors sharing a booth with a woman whose sparse hair was puffed out into a dandelion do. They froze to look at him, the man as he lifted a coffee cup to his mouth, the woman as she stuffed a wad of Kleenex into her abundant cleavage.

A gaunt man with sunken cheeks and big owl eyes sat on a stool behind the cash register. He was well into his social security years and wearing a flannel shirt that seemed to be two sizes too big for him. He had a thin plastic tube under his nostrils that ran over his ears and down to an oxygen tank that was on wheels beside him. A curl of smoke rose from a cigarette in an ashtray on the counter.

“You know you’re not supposed to smoke around an oxygen tank,” Wade said.

“What do you care?” the man asked. His voice sounded like it was clawing its way through gravel.

“You might blow the place up, and I hadn’t planned on this being my last meal.”

“You never can tell,” the man said. “Especially down here.”

Wade took a seat at the counter, as far away from the cashier as he could get. The waitress approached and handed him a laminated menu.

She was in her late twenties and wore faded jeans and a loose, short?sleeve blouse that was open one button more than it probably should have been, a dream?catcher necklace drawing his eye to her chest. She had black hair tied back in a ponytail and a ballerina’s body, thin but strong, her skin an almost edible caramel.

“Don’t worry about Dad. He wouldn’t dare blow the place up until everybody has settled their checks,” she said, offering Wade her hand. “I’m Amanda. My friends call me Mandy.”

“Tom Wade,” he said, shaking her hand. He glanced back at her father, who was stealing a drag on his cigarette and couldn’t have been any whiter if he were chalk. Mandy didn’t get her Indian blood from him.

Mandy followed his gaze. “That warm, cuddly character is my father, Peter Guthrie, the inspiration for Peter Pancake.” She tapped the menu and the smiling pancake on the front cover.

“I see the resemblance,” Wade said.

“What can I get you, Officer?” she asked as she picked up a clear?glass coffeepot and filled the thick white mug in front of him.

“Call me Tom. I’d like a short stack of pancakes and a side of bacon-soft, not crispy, please.”

Mandy walked back into the open kitchen and tied on an apron. “I would have figured you for a crispy man, Tom.”

“Are you going to be disappointed if I put sugar in my coffee?”

“I won’t be disappointed but I’ll be surprised,” she said as she poured batter into a pan and laid some strips of bacon on the flat grill. The bacon sizzled instantly. “You strike me as a man who takes the bitterness as it comes and doesn’t try to sweeten things up.”

“You got all that from me already?”

“You’re not a hard man to read,” she said. “I watched you as you walked over here. It’s in your stride and in the way you wear your uniform. They call it body language for a reason.”

He thought about what she’d said. She’d been watching his body and how it moved.

Was she attracted to him?

It had been a long time since he’d asked himself that question about a woman or cared about the answer.

“And mine says crispy bacon and black coffee,” he said.

“It does to me,” Mandy said. “But I was only half right.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure, Tom,” she replied in a jaunty sort of way, like saying his name amused her. There was something of a tease in it too.

He liked it.

“Why don’t you have bars on your windows like everybody else?”

“If I wanted to live in a prison, I’d rob somebody,” Peter Guthrie answered for her in a rasp that soon gave way to a coughing jag.

“My mom and dad opened this restaurant forty?nine years ago,” Mandy said. “Not much else has lasted here. So we’re, like, on hallowed ground.”

“Everybody is welcome as long as they behave themselves,” Guthrie choked out between coughs.

“What happens if they don’t?”

“I’ve got Old Betty,” Guthrie said. Wade turned to see the old man lifting a sawed?off shotgun from its hiding place behind the counter. “This will cut a man in half.”