End of Watch

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All right. Here goes. Mary says I should write, that writing will keep me honest, so here I am. She said, don't think, just write. Ten minutes a day. I’ve got my timer set. Nine minutes and twenty-one seconds left.

Christ, where to start? WWJD? What would Julie (Andrews) do? Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start.

Let's start with Mary since this is her brilliant idea.

I bitch, but she's a gem. Knocked on my door at six thirty the morning after I tried to eat my gun. Took one look at me and said, "Kid, you look like you've been eating rat poison and sleeping under rocks."

Which was exactly how I felt. I liked her right away. No bullshit. She's from Brooklyn. Left her husband with two little boys and ran to California, just like I did. Minus husband and kids, of course.

She was a terrible drunk. Now she looks like somebody's sweet old granny but evidently she did everything short of murder before she sobered up. She's a retired dispatch operator from the sheriffs department. I can tell her things I couldn't tell a civilian—from the baby drowned in a bucket last week, to fucking up with Gail, all the drinking on the job. The blackouts. Eating my gun. No secrets. That's the deal. Got to tell your sponsor everything. She just nods and keeps knitting. She's fucking shockproof. She's kept me sober this far—sixty-one days—so I may as well keep doing what she tells me. Beats a bullet for dinner.

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