“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.
Chapter twenty two
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.
They strode into the marble lobby and up to the circular burled?walnut front desk, where an old security guard with a pear?shaped head sat in the center, watching the monitors embedded in the counter in front of him.
The guard looked up as Wade approached and immediately broke into a smile of recognition.
“I’ll be damned. Tom Wade.” The guard stood right up and eagerly shook Wade’s hand. “After what you did, I thought for sure that you’d be someplace where the sun don’t shine.”
“I am,” Wade said, then gestured to Charlotte. “Officer Greene, this is Sam Appleby, retired watch commander at McEveety station, where I started out.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Charlotte said.
Appleby shook her hand.
When Wade worked with Appleby, he was all muscle and sinew, without an ounce of body fat. But he’d put on weight over the years, and now it was all yielding to gravity. Everything on Appleby seemed to be sagging toward his feet. Maybe that was why Appleby sat right back down again.
“I had no idea you were back on your old beat,” Wade said. “What happened to the dream of spending your days fishing at Deer Lake?”
“It’s a vacation when you do it two weeks a year. It’s a new kind of hell when it’s your life.”
Apparently, Appleby had forgotten that Wade grew up on a lake.
“This is better?” Wade asked.
“At least now I enjoy fishing again,” Appleby said. “How’d they get away with busting you down to uniform?”
“Technically, it’s a lateral move.”
“You could have walked,” Appleby said, then waved his hand in front of him, as if dissipating smoke. “Never mind, I forgot who I’m talking to. So what brings you here, Tom?”
Wade handed Appleby a picture of Glory Littleton.
“Ah hell,” Appleby said. “She was such a sweet girl. I heard she’d been killed. What happened?”