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.
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?”
