Page 14 of So Far Gone

of Kel and his sister on the walls—and into the kitchen, where a glass pot was full of black coffee. He tried three cabinets

before he found a cup. The steam felt nice on his face and he nearly wept, the coffee was so good. When this was done, he

vowed to get rid of that old, stained aluminum pot of his.

Lucy came out of her bedroom in a wool dress and tights, her hair in a ponytail. “Oh, good. You found the coffee. And I see

you met Mr. Kel.” She put her hands on her son’s shoulders.

“I did. He steered me to the coffee. It’s delicious, thank you.”

“Why don’t you get cleaned up. I’m going to get you situated, but then I need to go in to work.”

“Situated?”

“Yeah.” She walked away from the table to get herself a cup of coffee. “I might have found someone who can help you.”

“You did? Who?”

She glanced at her son, then said, “A retired cop. Does some detective work for law firms, finds missing witnesses, deadbeat dads, that kind of thing. I called him and he’s up for it. He’s even had some dealings with the guys you ran into—”

“The Army of the Lord,” Kinnick said, “AOL.”

Kel laughed. “Seriously?”

“They’re apparently the militia wing for this radical church that has some kind of training compound in Idaho,” Lucy said.

“They show up with their guns to Pride parades and shit like that. My friend called them ‘toy soldiers.’?”

“It was no toy I got hit with.” Kinnick put his tongue into his broken cheek. “Do I know this cop? Was he around when I was

at the paper?”

“Maybe.” Lucy took a sip of coffee. Her eyes shifted to Kel and then back. “I... uh... I dated him for a while.”

“No!” Kel stood up. “You called Chuck?” He laughed as he carried his cereal bowl to the sink. “Crazy Ass Chuck! Back in the

show!”

Kinnick looked from Kel to Lucy. “I’m getting help from a guy named Crazy Ass Chuck? You dated a guy named Crazy Ass Chuck?”

Lucy gritted her teeth: not what she wanted to talk about. “Chuck is not crazy . He can get a little... excitable. And he’s got some issues.” She shot a glare at Kel. “But who doesn’t? Chuck’s a good

man. And he was a good cop until they forced him out.”

“Wait. Not Chuck Littlefield?” Kinnick remembered stories from around the time he left Spokane, the jittery, quotable major

crimes detective who got sideways with brass and ended up getting transferred. “You dated Chuck Littlefield?”

Lucy turned the glare from her kid to Kinnick. “You and I are not talking about this!” She went into the kitchen, filled her

coffee cup, then stalked through the dining room. “Be ready in fifteen minutes, Kinnick. And for God’s sake, take a fucking shower! You smell like the business end of a hobo.”

As her bedroom door slammed, Kel’s eyes opened wide. “ Day-amn! You got a morning F-bomb. I thought only I got those.”

Kinnick sniffed his shoulder. “I had a shower yesterday. Have people always been this intense about hygiene, or is this something new?”

“No, I think it’s been around for a while.” Kel sniffed the air. “Hey, you want to borrow a shirt, man?”

***

For a decade, Chuck Littlefield was the man about Major Crimes, a muscly, fidgety homicide detective who also happened to

be every reporter’s best source—the only good quote in an otherwise tight-lipped, tight-assed cop shop. His bosses, however,

viewed him—and not without reason—as a double-dealing ball hog, a leaky ship, a selfish, glory-seeking nonteam player. They

tired of his constant overtime requests and the way details of his cases mysteriously showed up in news stories. And, for

his part, Chuck hated the way his bosses rejected his perfectly reasonable requests for fiber analysis and forensic carbon

dot powder, for any new investigative tool, which they always dismissed as needless and expensive.

When the funding was cut for a cold case homicide unit that Chuck had hoped to start (and ride into retirement), an anonymous

source was quoted in the newspaper, in a story written by the criminal justice reporter Lucy Park, calling the new police

chief “a bureaucrat with a toy badge” who had “all the law enforcement instincts of a fat, old bookkeeper.”

Two weeks later, Chuck was relieved of his Major Crimes duties and shipped off to Property Crimes, the unit where burnout detectives were sent to die, and where he was tasked with serving out the last nine months of his twenty-five-and-change parked at a desk, herding paper.

The problem with this castaway punishment was that Spokane was a property crime town, in the same way that other cities were homicide towns, or gang towns.

Every night, meth and opioid zombies wandered the streets looking for open garages, for backpacks left in cars, for anything that could be lifted, looted, or lightened from its owners’ unwitting hands.

But since no one would ever mistake a filched lawn mower for “a high priority crime” (especially in a city with twenty or

thirty homicides a year), funding for property crimes had remained stagnant for years. That meant just a handful of officers,

two clerks, and one receptionist were assigned to the basement unit, a department so overwhelmed they could do little more

than shuffle paper and occasionally answer the constantly ringing telephone, all while supposedly on the lookout for patterns

that suggested more sophisticated burglary rings. And while property crimes continued to rise each year, even those numbers

couldn’t capture the full scope of the problem, because most thefts went unreported—once citizens learned that filing a police

report was almost as helpful as tossing a coin into a fountain.

And even if it were possible to penetrate the labyrinthian, automated crime-report telephone system, and talk to a human being

(it wasn’t), you wouldn’t find much help there, either. If you were lucky, you’d get a muttering old detective quietly browsing

Arizona condos on his computer while he indulged your sob story. “Uh-huh. And did you register your bike? ( nine-hole executive golf course ) Uh-huh. And do you have the serial number? ( community pool ) Uh-huh. And have you checked the pawn shops? ( Maybe I’ll try Sedona. )”

Chuck spent a few weeks in 2017 in this cord of human deadwood, uh-huhing his way through dull reports, until one day: epiphany! The “fat, old bookkeeper” of a police chief with the “toy badge” had,

like every boss in the world over the last twenty years, gotten his job by selling himself as a champion of “quantitative,

measurable units of policing.”

Stats.

So, one day, Chuck looked up the numbers of his new unit. The SPD Property Crimes division maintained an “active solution/recovery rate” of between 2 and 5 percent. That’s when Crazy Ass Chuck Littlefield devised his cruel and brilliant revenge.

First, he went off his meds. Then, he printed out every report of every property crime that had come in over the last two

weeks, and he drove his pickup truck to each pawn shop in the city, one by one. He examined each bike and television and rototiller

in the shops and compared them to the stolen property reports, and anytime he found a serial number that was the same, or

a photographic match, he confiscated the stolen item and threw it in the back of his truck. He dared the pawn shops to object,

but they could do nothing. They knew the score. They were required by law to have on file a receipt with the seller’s (i.e.,

thief’s) name, address, and photo ID. But everyone knew what kind of flaccid, disinterested cops worked property crimes, and

since they hadn’t been visited by a living badge in a decade, the pawn shop workers had gotten lax about checking the fake

names on the receipts for the stolen shit they purchased every day. The last thing they wanted to do was rat out their suppliers

(i.e., thieves). So, for two months, in the grips of a growing bipolar hypomania, Chuck terrorized both the pawn shops and his fellow Property Crimes detectives, solving a record 9 percent of the property crime cases that came across his desk.

In that time, he also recovered a euphoric sense of purpose that he hadn’t felt since he was a young cop in his first car.

Returning stolen property was almost better than sex. Bicyclists pumped his hand and thanked him like he’d just delivered

their first babies. Contractors got emotional when Chuck pulled up with tool chests taken off their trucks and their job sites.

“I have worked in this city for twenty years,” one backhoe operator said, “and I’ve never so much as gotten a crescent wrench

back.”

“Just doing my job,” Chuck said.

One woman, who had her jewelry box (inlaid with mother-of-pearl) recovered by the handsome detective, with most of the jewels still inside, even tried to seduce him, and while he was tempted, Chuck knew better than to mess with this selfless, transcendent feeling.

“You’re like... some kind of hero,” she said as he John-Wayned away from her house toward his pickup.

Even his lieutenant was impressed. “What in the fuck do you think you’re doing, Littlefield?”

“Just solving crimes, Lieu,” Chuck said. “Isn’t that what I’m supposed to do?” And , he thought, I am shoving these impossible stats up your worthless ass .

“You know we can’t maintain this,” the LT said. “Once you retire, our numbers will drop off a cliff.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Chuck said, “you’ve got some good people here.”

At that, he and the LT both turned to look at the two souls who happened to be at their desks that day: a receptionist playing

Candy Crush on her cell while the office phone rang into oblivion; and red-faced Madman McCallister arguing on the phone with the contractor

who was rebuilding the dock at his cabin at Lake Coeur d’Alene and apparently doing a shit job. ( Uh-huh, and how much for a dock that actually fucking floats? )

Chuck’s last month on the job, he worked eighty-hour, seven-day weeks, returning stolen goods like some kind of inverse Robin