King City (21 page)

Thirty minutes later, sitting in a crowded theater at the Clayton Commons shopping center, he wished that he’d followed Brooke’s advice and taken those Advils.

The movie Brooke dragged him to was one of those big‐budget comic book adaptations where good‐looking people in colorful costumes tried to work out their superficial super‐angst by throwing cars at each other and making as much noise as possible.

It gave Wade a splitting headache. He closed his eyes, which seemed to help, and it put him right to sleep. Wade slumped down in his seat, spilling the kernels and crumbs that remained at the bottom of his popcorn bag all over his lap.

Brooke wasn’t offended by her father napping through the movie. He’d obviously needed the rest and she was glad just to be with him. But she was thankful that his snores were drowned out by the cacophony of super‐heroic destruction, sparing her embarrassment if any of her friends happened to be in the audience.

She nudged him awake over the closing credits. He blinked hard, sat up in his seat, and rolled his head to work out a kink in his neck.

“Sorry that I fell asleep,” he said, wiping the crumbs off his lap. “Are you mad at me?”

She shook her head. “I’m glad you slept through the movie. It made it a lot less awkward for me to watch the blow‐job scenes.”

“Shhh,” Wade said, looking around. “I know there weren’t any sex scenes in this movie because superheroes don’t have sex. They fly around instead. And you shouldn’t be using words like that.”

“Like blow job?” she said, smiling with amusement.

“It’s not something thirteen‐year‐old girls should be saying.”

“But there are plenty of thirteen‐year‐old girls giving them.”

“I hope you’re not one of them.”

“I’m not. I’m just saying that asking me not to use the word doesn’t mean that I don’t know about oral sex or that you’re protecting my innocence.”

“I know that, believe me. I see the harsh realities of life every day. But you were just using the word for shock value.”

“And it worked,” she said. “You’re wide‐awake now.”

They walked out of the theater into the Commons, a shopping center designed to look like a quaint European village that just happened to be in the middle of Washington State.

The center was a bizarre mishmash of architectural cues—a Danish windmill atop a pharmacy, a German half‐timbered facade on a grocery store, an Italian café facade on a Subway franchise, and an assortment of French
colonnes
, stand‐alone pillars topped with onion‐shaped iron domes that displayed wraparound advertising for things like discount bikini waxes.

Wade and Brooke went for lunch at Panda Express, which had a Spanish‐Moorish facade, and sat at a table outside, facing a small lake filled with ducks and a three‐story Big Ben replica with an enormous Rolex clock face that was the centerpiece of the Commons.

The center was remarkably clean, and the pressed concrete sidewalks, made to look like aged but inexplicably shiny cobblestones, gleamed in the afternoon sun.

“Where do you live?” Brooke asked.

It was a topic he’d been hoping to avoid, especially with Alison, though he knew he couldn’t evade the issue for long. But he needed time to settle in and then figure out the best way to present it to the two of them.

“I’d rather talk about you,” Wade said.

“Besides my parents splitting up, and having my first period, my life hasn’t changed much,” she said. “I live in the same house, I go to the same school every day, I get good grades, and I often wonder what’s happening with my dad.”

“You can call me anytime,” he said.

“The same goes for you,” she said. “But I’m always the one who calls.”

“I’ve been busy and distracted, that’s all. I miss you very much. The hardest thing for me to live with has been not coming home to you each night and having breakfast with you every morning.”

“But at least you can picture what I’m doing,” she said. “What my world is like, where I am, what I am up to. I can’t even do that because I don’t know where you are or who you’re with.”

Brooke wasn’t going to let go—Wade could see that now. She’d always been stubborn and tenacious, but something had changed about her since the divorce. It seemed to Wade that she saw him in a different, more objective way, apart from him being her father.

Whenever they got together now, she seemed to be taking his measure, comparing the man he was to the man she thought she knew. And she was discovering his flaws.

Those changes were probably a natural part of growing up, but he wondered if the divorce hadn’t sped things along a bit. It would be foolish to assume that the divorce, not to mention the trial and the media frenzy that surrounded it, hadn’t changed some of her attitudes about him.

Wade decided that she deserved straightforward answers to her questions, regardless of the difficulties or discomfort it might cause for him now.

“I’m working in a tiny precinct in Darwin Gardens,” Wade said. “And I live in an apartment in the same building.”

Her eyes went wide. “Why would you want to be there?”

“Because that’s where I’m needed most.”

“But it’s not safe,” she said.

“That’s why they need me,” he said. “To make it safe.”

“Wouldn’t you rather be somewhere like this?”

He looked out at the fountains with their jets set in time to the Sinatra standards playing on hidden speakers, at the French statuary imported from a crumbling chateau in Bordeaux, and at the security guards rolling around on their futuristic Segways.

“Not really,” he said. “There’s not much use for a cop here.”

He was about to look back at his daughter when something else caught his eye: a shiny Escalade with distinctive custom chrome work and tinted windows.

“OK,” she said, “but why do you have to live there?”

“I have to live somewhere,” he said, shifting his gaze back to his daughter.

“There are other places you can live that are a lot nicer and far less dangerous than Darwin Gardens.”

He’d let his guard down driving out to New King City. He wouldn’t let that happen again.

“I’m sure that there are. But I’m trying to send a message to the people there.” Sitting across from her now, he felt a circle being closed. He remembered a Saturday afternoon he’d spent fishing on Loon Lake with his father, who told him roughly the same thing that he was about to tell her. “What’s important is what you stand for and how strong you stand for it. I can’t think of a better way of showing it than making their home mine too.”

She studied him for a long moment and then nodded. “Neither can I.”

He’d assumed she’d throw more questions at him, that she’d challenge his decision and try to reason with him. But instead, he got simple acceptance and understanding, something he never knew that he needed or wanted from her. It was a jarring realization for him to discover that he did and that he was thankful for it.

Wade wondered how she would interpret the code that he’d lived by, how she’d shape it for herself, and how she’d pass it on to her children. He hoped that, unlike his father, he’d be around to see it.

“I’m glad that you understand,” he said, reaching down as if to scratch his leg, but using the move to unsnap the strap holding his gun in his ankle holster.

“You’ll make that point to them even stronger when you bring me there on the weekends.”

Her comment took him completely by surprise. He sat back in his chair, shaking his head, literally distancing himself from the idea.

“No way,” he said. “It’s not safe for you there.”

“I’ll be with an armed police officer,” she said. “How much safer could a citizen of King City possibly be?”

“It’s too dangerous for you there now, especially with a cop at your side,” Wade said, glancing again at the Escalade in the parking lot. “It’s what I’m trying to change, but that’s going to take some time and maybe some bloodshed before it happens.”

“Are there families in Darwin Gardens?”

“Of course there are,” he said.

“Do they have kids?”

“Of course they do,” he said.

“So what you’re saying, and what you’re standing for now, is that you’re a cop who can’t even protect your own kid, much less the ones who live there. You can’t say it any stronger to them, or to me, than by being too afraid to bring your own daughter home.”

On one level, he admired the intelligence of Brooke’s argument and how deftly she’d boxed him into a corner with his own words. He was proud that she wasn’t doing it over something trivial and childish, like wanting to get her belly button pierced, but rather, over a matter of principle and her desire to be with him.

But the very thought of bringing her to Darwin Gardens terrified him, overshadowing whatever pride he felt over how she’d argued her case.

“I’ll think about it,” he said, but he knew that he wouldn’t have to. As soon as Alison heard where he was living, and was pissed off about getting important family news from Brooke rather than from him yet again, she would certainly forbid him from taking his daughter to his new place.

It would make Alison the bad guy with Brooke and not him, but that was the only upside. He’d still end up with both women furious with him. Brooke for not fighting Alison’s decision and Alison for once again being the last to know about Wade’s decisions.

Wade didn’t wear his Kevlar vest in Darwin Gardens, but he thought he might have to start wearing it to visit his family.

“Good,” she said and excused herself to go to the restroom. He used the opportunity to get up and walk over to the Escalade. Seth Burdett must have worked overtime to repair it.

Timo rolled down the window. He was alone in the car. “Your daughter looks soft. Would you like me, maybe a few guys I know, to break her in for you? I think she’d like that.”

“If I see your face here again,” Wade said, “I’ll put a bullet in it.”

“You won’t see me.” Timo grinned. “But she might.”

Wade started to turn, as if to go, then lashed out his fist so fast that Timo didn’t see it coming until it made contact with his nose, smashing it like an egg.

Timo toppled, stunned, over his center console, blood all over his face. Wade reached inside, took the keys from the ignition, then grabbed Timo by one ear, pulling him close.

“Listen up, dumb shit,” Wade said, his voice barely louder than a whisper. “You pull anything up here and it won’t be about me anymore. You’ll bring total Armageddon upon Darwin Gardens. The entire police force will march in and decimate it. But before that happens, I’ll find you, jam my gun so far up your ass you can lick it, and then I’ll blow your head clean off.”

He released Timo, tossed the keys into a gutter, and walked back to the restaurant just as his daughter was coming out again.

“Who were you talking to?” she asked.

“An Indian with a broken nose,” Wade said. “You ever see him hanging around, you let me know right away.”

She looked past her father to the Escalade but couldn’t see anyone behind the tinted glass.

“Why?” she asked. “Is he dangerous?”

“Not as much as I am,” Wade said, putting his arm around his daughter and leading her away.

The wedge‐shaped glass office tower, at the corner of Grant Street and McEveety Way, stood on the original site of what had been McEveety’s General Store in the frontier days, the hub of commerce and gossip for the area’s settlers, farmers, and ranchers.

Vincent McEveety was one of the four founders of King City, and the third incarnation of his store on that property, a two‐story brick‐and‐stone structure, had survived well over a century after his death from liver disease.

The general store grew over time in size, if not influence, and became McEveety’s Department Store in the early 1900s, which it remained until it was sold in the 1960s to the Cartwell’s chain, which ran it until they went under in the 1980s.

Over the following fifteen years, the building housed many different businesses, none of them lasting long, and decayed with the neighborhood around it.

When developers, supported by the city, proposed tearing down the building and replacing it with an office tower as part of an ambitious upscale revitalization and gentrification of McEveety Way, several citizen groups banded together and blocked the move in court, hoping to delay the project while they tried to have the building declared historically significant.

The opponents were making headway, getting support from all over the state, but before the matter could be legally resolved, the building and most of the city block were destroyed in a massive gas explosion. The cause of the leak, and what ignited it, was never determined, despite an initial determination by investigators that it was arson. The rubble was cleared, and McEveety Tower, named in honor of the historic building that it replaced, went up within a year.

Wade figured McEveety, a ruthless developer himself, would have appreciated the fate of his store and seen the tower, and the victory of commercial interests over historical preservation, as a far more fitting memorial to him, and the values of King City, than his old building.

The fourth floor of McEveety Tower was occupied by Burdett Shipping, which was what brought Wade and Charlotte there late that Saturday night, though Wade had intended to come the previous evening before getting sidetracked by the mini‐mart robbery.