Page 15 of So Far Gone

Hood. The pawn shops had tightened up again, and so Chuck struggled to make his target—double digits—but in his last two weeks

he hit an astounding 13 percent solution rate, a number so impressive and utterly unbreakable that even some of his lazier, more cynical colleagues were

impressed, two of them giving him a standing ovation when he packed his things to leave on his final day (the other two people

in the office gave him the finger).

“You’re like the Joe DiMaggio of assholes,” his lieutenant said. “And when our numbers fall back to earth, I’m dead.”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” Chuck said, thinking, No one deserves it more .

But then retirement came, and along with it, the severe depression that always followed a good mania.

But this felt like more than just a dark mood.

The only life that Chuck Littlefield had ever known.

.. was over. For a while he thought he might be over, too—just forty-seven years old and already put out to pasture.

He put on weight. Started drinking heavily.

One night, he stood on the Monroe Street Bridge, looking over Spokane Falls as it roared and tumbled into the river canyon,

and thought, Why not? But he didn’t jump, and eventually, he found his way back to his mood stabilizers, and vowed to enjoy retirement, the way

other cops seemed to. He bought new skis and hit all six mountains within two hours of Spokane. He played on a softball team,

and spent his days at the local tribal casinos, where he lost so much money playing poker that he had to get a job. He got

hired as an investigator for a law firm, tracking down philandering husbands and wives, interviewing people who were suing

their contractors, suing their employers, suing their doctors, spouses, siblings, parents, anyone. It was like being in Property

Crimes again, the endless, dull parade of people who wanted to take someone to court.

One day Chuck was in the grocery store, when he saw, in the greeting card and magazine aisle, behind a Covid-19 mask, the

former police reporter Lucy Park, who had written the story that effectively ended his career. Something about that mask highlighted

her lovely eyes. He could still visualize what she had in her cart that day: Frosted Flakes, red wine, romaine lettuce, coffee,

and a Vanity Fair magazine. She asked how he was doing. (“Never better,” he lied. “Me, too,” she lied back.) She apologized for writing the

story in which he criticized the new police chief, but Chuck waved this off. It had been the best thing that had happened

to him, he explained, getting exiled to Property Crimes. He’d rediscovered his purpose as a cop. She, too, had been exiled,

she said, moved off her old reporter beat into a desk job, eventually becoming assistant metro editor.

“You got exiled... up?” he asked.

“Exactly. Like being named first mate on a doomed ship.”

“The Gilligan of journalism,” he said.

It was she who asked him out, and he nearly knocked over her cart saying yes. He liked her tight dancer’s body (“What are you talking about? I was

never a dancer.”) and her sexy black eyes. (“They’re dark brown, asshole.”) And he liked the way she smiled at him when he

told his old cop stories, as if he were someone special, a man of courage and decency. (“I was actually thinking, ‘What a

dick you are.’?”) Most of all, it was that very stubborn argumentative quality—Lucy was a true contrarian—that won him over.

He was an optimist, she was a pessimist; he was a Republican, she was a Democrat; he needed fresh air, she went around closing

windows; they agreed on so little and yet, somehow, it worked, every argument like a slow dance, electric and filled with

promise. They dated for two years, in the manner of divorced people their age, with neither of them pushing for more, just

quietly taking refuge in the feeling of having an attractive adult across the table at the restaurant, someone to take a walk

with, to share bad news with, to sleep next to. They fit well together, Lucy coiled into his chest, Chuck curled up over her

like a protective shell, whispering sweet gallows humor into her ear. (“Want to go watch a murder show? Want to watch some

poor wife get strangled by the new curtains?”) They shared the love language of two people raised in a cop shop.

He called her “Gilligan.” She called him “Fuckhead.”

But Fuckhead could be agitated and moody, up-and-down, especially when he skipped his meds.

He sometimes said shitty things about her job, or her family, and he didn’t always call or text when he said he would.

He bought things on impulse, a motorcycle, a fishing boat, another fishing boat, a third fishing boat, a hundred used lawn chairs that he intended to reweave and sell.

Gilligan could be moody, too—down, mostly, endlessly disagreeable, bitching about her job and her dying profession.

She sometimes said shitty things, too, and yelled at him for not calling or texting when he said he would.

Being an editor seemed to put her in a terrible mood, but whenever Chuck criticized the newspaper or suggested she leave it, she went on this insane defense of journalism that made it sound like she was single-handedly saving blind orphans from being eaten by cannibals every day.

Then there was her kid, hapless Kelvin, who, when he wasn’t wasting his time playing Magic: The Gathering on-line, was wasting himself, cycling through cheaper and cheaper drugs on his way to becoming a street Freddy. Chuck tired

of hearing about this messed-up kid, who took up way too much of their conversation time, and way too much of Lucy’s energy.

And when Chuck offered his reasonable, tough-love advice (“You should toss him out. Be more like me—such a bad parent your

kids don’t bother you with their bullshit.”) Lucy called him “cold and uncaring,” and one day, when Chuck happened to suggest

that Kel was “a lost cause,” Gilligan decided suddenly—just as it had been her idea for them to date—that she was “over your

cruel fucking ass.”

Fine by him. After two years, Chuck was tired, too, of Lucy’s constant negativity, mostly. He suspected there was probably

a platoon of hot, hungry, less-complicated women out there for him. So, for a year, he swiped right, slept around, and slipped

in and out of various short-term flings. These offered little enjoyment, though, and he found himself devising escape routes

on third, second, even first dates. He even made his way back to the jewelry-box woman and slept with her, wishing immediately

afterward (or technically, during ) that he hadn’t, that he could have remained an implacable, selfless hero in her eyes, instead of what he actually was: an

old, tired, half-horny, twice-divorced cop with bad knees, three estranged kids, and emotional dysregulation and bipolar issues,

a guy who didn’t really want to hear about your job as a pharmaceutical rep, or how your daughter’s new boyfriend was a loser,

or how your ex-husband had poisoned the family against you, or, really, anything that came out of your dull, pretty mouth.

So, after two weeks, he ghosted the jewelry-box pharma rep— How’s that for a hero?

—and realized something rather surprising.

What he wanted was what he’d had : low-key, profane, petty, pretty, perfect-fit Lucy Park.

He even started to wonder if maybe he hadn’t been in love with her.

He stared at old photos of the two of them on his phone (her eyes really were brown). He pulled up her number just

to look at it, and a few times, he drove past the crappy duplex where she lived with her messed-up kid. He even found himself

parking outside the newspaper office once, on the off chance he might see her and casually ask how she was doing. But Chuck

had been given no indication that she missed him , and he had worked way too many domestic murder cases to go in for a full-on stalking.

Still, he began having elaborate daydreams that involved bumping into her, offhandedly asking if she wanted to get dinner

sometime, or, in his more melodramatic moods, rescuing her from thieves, or from international terrorists.

So, to have her just call out of the blue this way and ask for his help—for a former colleague whose grandchildren had been

forcibly taken from him—was almost too good to be true. A sign that things were turning around for him, that maybe there was

a future with Lucy after all. The very idea filled him with hope. And adrenaline. Especially after she explained that her

friend had run afoul of those Army of the Lord douchebags, the fanatics who were always skulking around Pride parades and MLK Day marches in Spokane and Coeur d’Alene,

and who, during the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests, had shown up for unsolicited security-guard duty at shopping

malls and downtown stores, in their Don’t-Tread-on-Me-I-got-a-small-dick pickup trucks and their Kevlar vests over their black

T-shirts, their semiautomatic rifles BabyBjorned to their fat guts like the shithead soldier/cop-wannabes they were (even

though none of them had the stones to go and join the actual military, or the brains to pass a simple law enforcement test).

But he was getting ahead of himself. Messing with these buffoons would be fun, a charge to the old battery, practically like police work again, but the real point was getting to see Lucy once more.

Helping this old friend of hers (he wondered: boyfriend?

) and reminding her that dating a retired cop had its benefits.

Being of use again. Maybe even winning back his Gilligan,

his sexy little buddy , and returning as her ever-loveable Fuckhead . Chuck got so excited at the prospect, he could barely sit still—he could barely sit still most days anyway—and when Lucy’s

car pulled up at the Rocket Bakery downtown, Chuck Littlefield leaped up and met them at the door, bouncing on the balls of