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A few months after Charlie Cale’s Plymouth Barracuda explodes at the bottom of the Grand Canyon Canyon, the pending charges against her are vacated, and the Federal warrant is rescinded. Luca gets a classified email with the details, which he skims and then forgets. This happens all the time, and the reasons are always either a procedural technicality or institutional corruption. Understanding either of these would make it harder for Luca to do his job, so he makes a point of letting all the information evaporate from his brain as soon as it lands there.
He’d like to be able to tell her, but he doesn’t know where to find her. If her phone survived the crash, he hopes she’s smart enough to have gotten rid of it by now. But that doesn’t matter. She’ll turn up. She always does.
Months go by. He travels around the United States solving Federal crimes. A few easy successes on top of his already-impressive resumé give him enough pull to form a team he can work with: dependable, detail-oriented, and just good enough at their jobs to keep their close rate high without attracting undue attention.
He moves out of his small, boring apartment in Silver Spring and into a larger but still boring townhouse in Bethesda. He takes an accelerated course in Russian, since Urdu isn’t doing him much good in the Organized Crime division. He calls his parents once a week to tell them everything is fine. His entire personal life consists of attending community theater performances in unfamiliar cities, while he’s out on assignment, and picking up men during intermission. Perfect anonymity: no apps, no paper trail, and most of them live in glass closets. He’s tried having boyfriends a few times, but he can’t handle lying that much to someone he loves.
He hits pay dirt at a performance of Man of La Mancha in Evansville, Indiana, where he skips out on the second act with a guy whose name is almost definitely not Mike. At the nearest Best Western, as “Mike” checks them in, Luca spots Charlie behind the lobby bar, slicing limes. When he makes brief eye contact, Charlie gives him a crooked smile and a shrug. He wants to resist, but she’s too damn charismatic.
There’s no time for pleasantries. “You’re not under arrest,” he tells her. “Your warrant got dropped. You’ve been a free woman for the past six months.”
“Yeah, thanks,” she says. “A friend clued me in.” She winks like Luca is supposed to know what that means.
“Listen, I don’t have time right now, but maybe we can meet up tomorrow,” he says, giving “Mike” a reassuring wave.
“There’s a donut shop a block down the highway. You can meet me there after you stay overnight and don’t cut out early. I hear people like that.”
He rolls his eyes, but she’s already ducking under the bar. She reappears with a mostly full bottle of house Chardonnay. “Hey, want most of a bottle of wine?” she offers. “I poured one glass from it, and now it’s just gonna go bad, you know?”
He accepts, then slips her ten dollars cash so it won’t be misconstrued as a gift. Then, he heads off to have sex, drink cheap wine, and stay the night. He hears people like that.
In the morning, he says goodbye to “Mike,” makes the best of last night’s clothes, and goes to the donut shop. Charlie is already there, nursing a cup of coffee and doodling in the margins of a newspaper. She tilts her head up when she sees him and says, not too loudly, “Hey there, old friend.”
He orders a cup of coffee and a bear claw and slides into the booth across from her when his breakfast is ready. “So you’re a free woman,” he says. “I wish I had more to tell you. Sometimes things just happen. Or don’t happen.”
“True,” she says.
“I found a few of your personal items when we searched the apartment in New York you’d been subletting,” Luca tells her. “I stashed them unlabeled in an evidence locker, in case I ever ran into you.”
“Thanks,” she says. “Most of the important stuff went up in flames, but you know, it’s something.”
“So yeah, let me know if you’re near Langley, and I’ll transfer them over.”
“Right. I still have your card.” She pats her hip pocket, where it surely isn’t.
“And here’s the new one,” he says, sliding a card out of its holder. “I got assigned a new number.”
“Yeah, me too,” she says. “Even with the charges dropped, still better to switch ‘em out every so often, don’t you think?”
He nods. “Especially since –“ He clears his throat. This shouldn’t be so hard to tell her. “The body was never recovered.”
“True. Whose?”
He clears his throat again.
“Fuck.”
“Yeah, that sums it up,” Luca says. “The Bureau has her listed as ‘presumed deceased,’ but that’s –“
“Bullshit,” Charlie finishes.
“I wouldn’t worry too much,” he says, knowing she’ll read the lie. “There’s a good chance she hung up her weapons and retired to an island somewhere.”
“So they took you off the case.”
“Technically, I was never on that case,” Luca says.
“Well, I won’t go looking for her if you won’t.” She waves his card, which already has a coffee stain on the corner. “And if I find her, I have your new number.”
He almost tells her not to, but he can’t bring himself to. He likes playing the hero. He likes when Charlie makes him look like one. So he moves on instead. “What do you think you’ll do now?”
“Now that I’m not on the run from the law?” She laughs dryly. “Same thing I’ve been doing, probably. I’m a drifter. I drift.” She sips her coffee pensively. “Do what I can with what I got, you know? Like you do. Fed with a heart of gold.”
He shrugs. “I do my best.”
“See, that’s what makes you different,” she says. “Most people think they’re good people. It’s everyone else who’s the problem, you know? They’re not a murderer, they just killed that one person. Model citizens otherwise.”
Luca snorts.
“I mean it. Not a lot of people know how much better they could be.”
He crinkles the sticky wax paper from his bear claw. “Maybe that’s why I’m avoiding another promotion.” It’s as close as he can come to taking the compliment.
“Not where I expected this to go, but true.” Charlie leans in.
“Out in the field, I can make judgement calls if I need to,” he explains. “Any higher up than I am, that’s mostly a desk job. From there, I’d have to enforce procedure, and I’d have to defend field agents who hurt people and hide behind procedure. Sometimes I think it’d be worth it for the stability. ‘Someone to hold me too close; someone to know me too well.’ But in the end – in the end, it’s not. Worth it.”
She stares at him, wide-eyed. She has no idea what he’s talking about, and not just because he’s tried and failed to express his feelings through Sondheim lyrics.
“Never mind. Just airing my internal conflict about my life choices, since I don’t have anyone else I can talk to.”
“Gotcha.” She shoots him a pair of finger guns. When he doesn’t say anything else, she asks, “So was he nice? Last night?”
“He was. Kind of divorced and sad. We talked a little more because of the wine. I let him put his number in my phone, to be polite, but if this case is the level of shitshow it’s shaping up to be, I’ll be passing through Southwestern Indiana a lot in the next few months. So I don’t know. Maybe that’s something.”
“Maybe so,” she says. “If that’s what you want.”
“I don’t know what I want anymore,” Luca says.
“True,” Charlie says quickly. She squints and tilts her head to the side. “True-ish, anyway.”
“Listen,” he says, already regretting this. “I know you turned me down when I offered you a job before, but I’m going to give it a shot again.”
“And I’m probably gonna turn you down again, but I’ll listen anyway,” she says. “For friendship’s sake.”
“It wouldn’t be a quirky consultant thing, like on TV. You’re not going to show up in an FBI vest and magically solve the case. I’d just like to be able to call on you once in a while and slip you a few taxpayer dollars in return.”
“Hm,” she says. “Glad I listened.”
Luca nods. “Your abilities – do they still work on video? If someone sent you a clip of a conversation?”
“Yeah,” Charlie says. “Not quite as reliable, but pretty good.”
He sips his coffee, now barely warm, and studies her. “Bullshit.”
“Yeah, you got me, no real difference unless there’s a camera trick or the quality’s really low.”
“Must be hard to watch a movie,” Luca says.
She shrugs. “Not really. There’s different kinds of lying, you know? Some actors, they believe whatever they’re doing in the moment, so even if it’s fiction, everything they say is true for them. Others are lying, but they turn it into a work of art. And then, you know, there’s actors who aren’t very good or are just phoning it in. Which is fun in its own way.”
“I can’t imagine seeing the world that way,” he says.
“Only way I’ve ever seen it.”
They’re both quiet so long that he wonders if there’s anything left to do but shake her hand and say he’ll be in touch. He will be, whether he intends to or not. That’s how the world seems to work.
“You know what’s great about you?” Charlie says. “You always show up just when I think I’m completely alone. Like a fucking guardian angel with a badge.”
He gets a song in his head, and he can’t shake it. Like life is a musical, and this is his number. “No one is alone, believe me.”
“Yeah, kid, you remember that, too.”
“I’ll try,” he says.
“Bullshit.”
“I will!” he says.
“Bullshit.”
“Okay. I won’t try. But I’ll feel bad about it,” he says.
“There it is.” Charlie rises, twirling a vape pen in her fingers. “I gotta run. I’ll see you around.”
Before he can wave goodbye, she’s gone, faded into the Midwest landscape like a mythological creature that exists to impart wisdom and disappear. In the past, that’s disappointed him, but by now he’s learned to appreciate it. At least she’s consistent. And she’ll be back. He’s got her number, written in slanted green crayon on the newspaper she left behind.