Page 25 of So Far Gone

“You got exiled... up?” he asked.

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

“The Gilligan of journalism,” he said.

It wasshewho askedhimout, 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 criticizedthe 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 playingMagic: The Gatheringon-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 hewantedwas what he’dhad: low-key, profane, petty, pretty, perfect-fitLucy Park. He even started to wonder if maybe he hadn’t beenin lovewith 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 missedhim,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 thoseArmy of the Lorddouchebags, 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 BabyBjörned 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. Helpingthis 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 sexylittle buddy, and returning as her ever-loveableFuckhead. 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 the Nike Cross-Trainers he wore under his chinos and sports coat, giving her his warmest noncrazy smile, and saying to her friend with the black eye and the broken cheek, in the Glass Animals concert T-shirt: “Dude! Let’s do this!”

***

They sat in stiff wooden chairs at a long table in a cavernous coffee shop, Lucy Park and Chuck Littlefield on one side, Kinnick on the other, as he explained what had happened from the moment Leah and Asher showed up on his porch the day before. The big ex-cop had a small pocket notebook open on the table, though he hardly wrote anything down at first. He spoke quickly, in a clipped way that made Kinnick think of a typewriter.

“Uh-huh,” Chuck said. “Right. Then what?” Every few seconds, he’d say this, “Uh-huh, right, then what?” as if Kinnick were unaware of the concept of chronology and might suddenly tell some part of the story from the 1940s, or two weeks in the future.

“Uh-huh, right, then what?”

Kinnick repeated what Asher had said, that “maybe Dad killed Mom.”

“Smart kid,” Chuck said.

“What? You think so?” Kinnick felt suddenly sick. He hadn’t really thought Shane was capable of something like that. He’d been trying tonotthink of that possibility.

“No, I mean, that’s probablynotwhat happened. He just sounds like a smart kid.”

When Kinnick got to the part of the story that took place at the abbey parking lot, the two AOL goons taking his grandkids and one of them hitting him with a blackjack, Chuck reached across the table and took Kinnick’s chin between his thumb and forefinger, turning his head to both sides. “They broke your zygomatic arch. I can see the dent, even with the swelling.”

This was the third thing Chuck wrote in his little notebook, after “Chess Club” and “Smart Kid.” “Blackjack. Zygom. arch. Broken.”

Kinnick wondered how he could have managed to spend the last seven years reading almost a thousand books and still somehow be the only person in the world tonotknow the scientific name for a cheekbone. He tried not to be intimidated by the retired cop, who was younger and more muscled, with fast-blinking eyes, salt-and-pepper hair and beard, and, evidently, a deep knowledge of facial bone structure.

“So. Can you help him out?” Lucy asked.

“Sure,” said Chuck Littlefield. “Sure. It won’t be easy. But there are some steps we can take. First, this guy, Shawn?”

“Shane.”

“Shane, right.” Finally, he wrote the name Shane in his notebook. “Since this Shane is the boy’s biological father, and has adopted the girl, your daughter will be the only one with legal standing to stop these paintball yahoos from marrying off your granddaughter. So, first step, find—what’s you daughter’s name again?”

“Bethany. She might have gone back to Oregon.”

“Right.” He wrote in his notebook:Betheny: Oregon?“We’ll find her, but in the meantime I’ll have one of the lawyers I work with draw up some kind of writ—and since these shit-sticks can barely read, the writ can say anything as long as we get acountyofficial to stamp it—that’s the only authority these guys recognize—then we go in strong, present our paper, grab your grandkids, and go find Brittany—”

“Bethany—”

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