Lee Goldberg - King City

Tom Wade was asleep in bed beside his wife when the call came. He had a pretty good idea what the call was about before he answered the phone. He’d been dreading it for the last few days.

“Yeah,” he whispered, rolling over onto his back.

Alison stirred and grumbled something unintelligible.

“We moved on all of them thirty minutes ago.” It was Carl Pinkus, the prosecutor Wade had been working with at the Justice Department.

Wade checked the alarm clock. It was 2:00 a.m. The green glow of the numbers glinted off his badge on the nightstand.

He could guess how it went down. All across the city, strike teams made up of FBI and ATF agents kicked down the doors at the homes of all seven men at precisely the same instant, hoping to surprise them in bed, naked and defenseless.

It was standard operating procedure in situations like this, designed to minimize risk and prevent any of the targets from being warned that the law was coming for them.

It usually worked.

“You could have waited until morning to tell me,” Wade said, sitting up.

“It is morning,” Pinkus said.

“What went wrong?” Wade asked. His wife was wide?awake now-he could tell from her breathing.

“I’m outside of Roger Malden’s place. He wants to see you, Tom.”

“I’ve got nothing to say to him.”

“He must have something real important to say to you,” Pinkus said. “He’s holding his wife and kids hostage, and if you don’t get your ass down here now, he’s going to kill them.”

“I’ll be there in four minutes,” Wade said and hung up the phone.

Roger lived two miles away in a tract home with the same floor plan as Wade’s. They even had the same pool man. That wasn’t all that they had in common.

He threw back the sheets, stood up naked, and went to the easy chair where he’d draped the clothes he’d been wearing last night-a sweatshirt and a pair of jeans. He could feel Alison’s eyes on his back. He pulled his sweatshirt over his head.

Wade was six feet tall, fit and lean. He had the hands of a man who worked with them-wielding an ax, a shovel, or a pick-but that came more from heredity than it did from hard labor, though he’d done his share of that before he became a cop.

“What is it?” she asked.

Alison was used to the late?night calls but not the troubled undercurrent that was in Wade’s voice during the short conversation. He knew that she’d pick up on it.

“A hostage situation,” he said, turning to look at her as he pulled up his pants and buckled his belt.

Alison was sitting up, not bothering to cover her nakedness. Wade couldn’t have a discussion naked and uncovered, but she was totally comfortable with it. In the semidarkness, she looked just the way she did the first night that they’d slept together twenty years ago.

“You’re not a hostage negotiator,” she said.

He hadn’t planned to tell her about it like this. For weeks, he’d been rehearsing exactly what he was going to say, how he would explain the two long years of subterfuge.

“It’s Roger. He’s threatening to kill his family.”

Her breath caught in her throat. She shook her head. “No, I don’t believe that. Not Roger.”

“The FBI raided his house tonight, Ally. He’s been indicted on corruption charges.”

“That’s crazy,” she said. “He’s a good man.”

“They’ve arrested the entire Major Crimes Unit.”

She stared at him, realization slowly dawning on her. “But they didn’t come for you.”

He reached for his badge. “We’ll talk about this when I get back.”

Wade hung the badge on a lanyard around his neck and hurried out. It felt like he was running away from her. He’d never run away from anything before.

Detective Roger Malden’s two?story tract home was illuminated like a movie set, bathed in the harsh white glow from portable arc lights that had been brought in on trailers.

The residents of the adjoining homes had been cleared out and were being kept behind a police line at the end of the block.

Wade drove up in his department?issued Crown Vic, which might as well have been a badge on four wheels. The uniformed officers waved him through without a glance or a check of his ID. They looked confused. He couldn’t blame them. They had no idea what was going on. Nobody in the department did.

He parked behind an FBI armored assault unit. As he got out of his car, he noted the sharpshooters on the rooftops and the Kevlar?vested agents crouched behind their vehicles, aiming their guns at Malden’s house as if it might leap from its foundation and attack them.

Carl Pinkus was easy to spot among the agents. He wore a Kevlar vest over his suit and a tactical helmet on his head and was wielding his BlackBerry instead of a gun, firing off text messages with his thumbs. He pocketed the device when he saw Wade approach.

“What’s the situation?” Wade asked.

“You’re standing out in the open, asking to be shot,” Pinkus said from behind a car. “Take cover.”

“If I wanted cover, I would have stayed in bed.”

“You didn’t tell us that Roger is an insomniac.”

“I didn’t know.”

“He saw the agents coming,” Pinkus said. “He fired off some warning shots before we even got close. We think he’s herded the family into the kitchen.”

Wade nodded and started toward the house.

Pinkus grabbed him. “Put on a vest before you walk in there.”

“You think that would make my head off?limits for him to shoot?”

“We need you alive to testify.”

“Thanks for giving me something to live for.”

Wade sauntered across the street and up the front walk as if he were going to another one of Roger’s weekend barbecues. He knocked on the door.

“It’s me,” he yelled.

“Are you alone, Tom?” Roger asked in a loud voice from deep inside the house. Wade didn’t hear panic or desperation underscoring his words. He heard bitterness.

“Yeah, but I’m carrying a gun in each hand and a stick of dynamite in my teeth.”

“So am I. Come on in and we’ll party.”

Wade opened the door and stepped into the darkened house. Same floor plan but different furniture, electronics, and art. Roger’s stuff was more upscale and contemporary than what Wade had. But Wade didn’t have Roger’s money.

He walked to the kitchen. After every Walden barbecue, Ally always raved about their travertine floors, granite countertops, and stainless steel appliances.

Roger sat on the edge of the center island, near the stove top. He was wearing a terry cloth bathrobe over a T?shirt and drawstring pajama pants. He didn’t have a stick of dynamite, but he was holding a Glock in each hand.

“I figured the traitor had to be you,” Roger said. “You are always so fucking self?righteous, whether you’re making an arrest or a sandwich.”

Wade glanced to his right and saw Sally Malden and her daughters, ages nine and eleven, all in their nightgowns and huddling together on the floor, their legs curled up against their bodies. She held her daughters close to her, one under each arm. They were all crying silently, trails of tears and snot running down their faces.

He focused his gaze back on Roger. “You don’t want to hurt your family. You want to hurt me. I’m here now. Let them go.”

“They need to see this,” he said.

“Please,” Sally cried. “Think of the children.”

“I am,” he snapped, waving a gun in her direction. She tensed up, pulling the kids tighter to her bosom. “Why do you think I did it? So you could have the house you wanted, the clothes you wanted, everything you wanted.”