Joel said, "I didn't expect to see you drinking your lunch."

Fred set down his beer and replied, "It's not like I have a job to rush back to, is it? I was expecting Nora, not you. We're just meeting here. We’re going to a restaurant with decent food, not the lousy burgers they serve here."

"She told me where to find you. She has to skip lunch because Mrs. Blackstone is suddenly interested in a plea bargain.""

Fred pointed in back of the bar and said, "This place does have a phone. You could have skipped the trip."

"I wanted to see for myself how you were doing."

"I’d doing just dandy," Fred said in such a sarcastic tone that it gave the opposite meaning.

Fred continued before Joel could comment on that, "Mrs. Blackstone is considering a plea deal, huh? Do you think the dearly departed Mr. Blackstone had been beating her?"

Joel shrugged and said, "From the testimony so far, I can't tell. There were never any domestic disturbance calls to their mansion, but the place is isolated."

The bartender came over, "What'll it be, buddy?"

Joel said, "A glass of water."

"Order something you have to pay for or leave. That's the rules."

Joel replied, "A cup of coffee."

"This look like a coffee shop, buddy? We don’t have any."

Joel said, "A Coke, then."

The bartender frowned with disapproval, but got it.

Joel remarked, "Despite what happened to you, I didn't expect crying in your beer."

Fred said, "When you got what I did declared a justified shooting. I thought I'd won. Yet, here I sit unemployed! I don’t feel pain in my ribs anymore, but Sharon told me she's going to be in a cast for another six months. That's a long time!"

Joel responded, "Chances are good she’ll make a full recovery. It’ll just take a while."

Fred said, "I’m glad of that. I’m also glad that her reputation wasn’t sullied like mine was. For the first time anybody can remember, Shyster Shuster wins...and it has to be against me."

Joel countered, "He didn’t really win. It was an out-of-court settlement."

Fred protested, "That settlement makes me look guilty!"

"It is a settlement without any admission of blame," Joel said.

"Everybody assumes that means guilty people are buying their way out of trouble! Everywhere I go I’m treated like a criminal now. There was no city policy forbidding an officer from having vision in only one eye, so why should I get blamed for that?"

"There was such a policy for the state police, even if not for this city. In all the years this city has existed, it simply never came up here before."

Fred bitterly said, "Now, there's a fresh new rule, signed by the mayor. The same mayor who used me in the press conference after I got mostly favorable press after my admission in front of the church. His popularity soared after that. He fired me in a campaign to get only physically perfect cops on the force. His popularity went up again. Better be careful, Joel. He might go after you next for needing glasses or just being short."

Joel suggested, "You could still take a desk job."

Fred said, "The only desk jobs with the Port City Police Department are well below my salary level. Financially, I'm better off to just take the disability pay. Nora thinks I should sue under A.D.A. for my old job back."

"What's that?"

Fred replied, "Americans with Disabilities Act. The city would have to prove I couldn't still do the job with one eye. Did you read what Mr. Shuster had in his negligence claim? That if I had both eyes, I would have been able to just slightly wound Eric to stop him. The way I did it is in the departmental guidelines! If I'd done what Shyster Shuster suggested, Eric might have gotten off more shots at Sharon. Maybe Eric could have nailed her in the head like I once was rather than just her leg!"

Joel remarked, "Most civilians don't understand that, and they'd be the ones in a jury. Besides, Mr. Shuster had another part of his negligence claim. It was that you might have seen Eric's gun earlier if you had both eyes."

Fred said, "Eric had an untucked flannel shirt over the gun, which was located in the small of his back. Even when I had two eyes, it didn't make me Superman with X-ray vision."

Joel sighed, then said, " Can you convince me beyond any shadow of doubt that there might not have been a lump that you didn’t see but somebody with depth perception would?"

"The way the shirt was, I am certain I wouldn't have noticed the gun even if I had two eyes. I know what I saw, but I don't know how I can prove it to you beyond all doubt," Fred admitted.

Joel nodded slowly, then said, "That's my point. In front of a jury, Mr. Shuster might exploit that tiny doubt and win. The city can afford a hundred thousand dollars for a settlement. That had to be balanced against the risk of losing ten million dollars. That'd sink the city budget!"

"I had expected you to stick up for me," Fred complained, then swallowed the rest of his beer, then signaled for another one.

Joel said, "If you really feel that way, take Nora's advice. Use the A.D.A. and fight your termination. I think the city can justify not allowing police officers in the field with vision in only one eye. That it was allowed for you for a year was an oversight, now corrected."

"Doesn’t seem right to me. Say, any change in the results from the coroner about Eric?"

Joel answered, "I’ve got the final autopsy report rather than just the preliminary. More tests were done for drugs in Eric’s body. All confirmed he was clean. I talked to several of Eric’s teachers and fellow students. Everyone said that he was an active campaigner against drugs."

"I have trouble believing that."

"So did I initially, especially since his girlfriend Beth is a heavy drug user, and so is his buddy Ray. Many of Ray’s teachers called him Pipe, which I found weird."

"Did the teachers and fellow students know about Ray’s and Beth’s drug use? I mean before your raid, as everybody in the city knows now."

"Beth’s parents still claim she never willingly touched drugs. Everybody else I talked says the drug use was well known. Also, that Eric had made Beth and Ray his special projects. His mission was to convince them to quit."

Fred declared, "Not only didn’t he succeed, he was playing with fire that could destroy him. And perhaps it did."

Joel said, "You would know far better than I."

Fred drank half his new beer, then demanded, "What do you mean?"

"In 1974, we were part of a raid of a drug house near campus. You knew the guy in charge of that house."

"Stephen."

Joel sipped his soft drink, then asked, "You told me once that proving Stephen was stealing to the others in the house when you were still in college led you on the path to becoming a police officer. How’d you prove it?"

Fred explained, "I left out a wallet as bait, although I did lock the door. I suspected Stephen had keys to every room. I had a normal camera that had a mechanical timer activated by a lever. I had a string attached to the top of the door and to the lever. I left a radio playing to cover the ticking noise of the mechanical timer, which was pretty loud. Crude stuff compared to the videocameras and electronics of today, but it worked. It produced anmistakable shot of him taking the wallet. I also dusted for prints with baby powder, lifting his. I still think I did a decent job."

"A photograph and fingerprints would have convinced me," Joel said.

Fred said, "When I presented that at a house meeting, only Carrie believed me. I was depressed and confused by that back then. In hindsight, I think it was because the others were getting drugs from Stephen. They didn’t want to anger their supplier, even if I had just proved he was stealing from them. I didn’t have a clue back then how powerful an influence drugs could be."

"Was there time between when you guessed Stephen was stealing and when you proved it?"

"Maybe a month."

"Why didn’t you get out immediately?"

"These were my friends, Joel! If I could just prove what was really going on, I knew I could save them."

Joel said, "The house was filled with drugs and people when we raided it two years later. You failed."

Fred sipped beer, then said, "I didn’t fail. I convinced Carrie what was going on. She and I left together."

"You convinced one person out of how many?"

"About a dozen," Fred replied. "Getting her out made it worth it. That convinced me to become a police officer. I can’t save everybody, but there are those few exceptional people who do listen and act."

Joel said, "You succeeded, Eric failed. He told other students that if he couldn’t win Beth’s heart and save her from drugs, his life wasn’t worth living. Not even with all his great achievements in school and sports."

"Your comparison stinks. Carrie only smoked pot and cigarettes; Beth is a heroin addict. My parents were rock-solid, hard-working, law-abiding people. Eric’s father is a convicted thief and murderer, and his mother a convicted shoplifter. My crime...if you can call it that...was smoking some joints. When I was in college, it’d be harder to find people who didn’t than did. Eric’s crime was shoplifting. The same crime his mother loved. I don’t see where shoplifting fits with saving his sweetheart from drug addiction, but something Freudian about Eric toward his mother and father might work better as an explanation."

"There is that."

Fred was on a roll and said, "Eric was supposed to be a genius with great grades, but he wasn’t clever enough to show up at the shoplifting trial to get his wrist slapped. That made his situation far worse."

"He might have had an unrealistic idea of how harsh his punishment would be."

"A smart person could get some idea with a little research. It’s also not rocket science to realize that if he missed his trial, the justice system would not simply forget about him."

Joel suggested, "Being caught shoplifting violated being the smart, hard-working, anti-crime, anti-drug kid everybody described him as being. Maybe it wasn’t intelligence, but emotion that kept him away. He was only seventeen."

"Eric without any decent reason other than being a stupid, insane teenager shot me and shot Sharon. I shot him in defense. End of story. Why play psychologist and sociologist guessing games? He’s dead, so can’t be saved. Or have you taken over Eric’s holy crusade of saving Beth and Ray from their own drug-induced self-destruction?"

"I’m not too hopeful about saving somebody who is taking heroin or even PCP. Watching those two is like watching two trains heading for a wreck and being unable to stop it. Beth’s parents make it worse. They claim the track marks on her arms are just bug bites."

Fred said, "Denial is a powerful emotion."

"Is denial powerful enough to miss a court date for shoplifting?"

"Touche’. Best part of your spiel so far. If you think Beth and Ray are pretty much lost causes, my shooting Eric was ruled justified so is a closed case, the settlement closes the book with Shyster Shuster, and Eric himself is beyond all help, why are you still worried about why Eric did it?"

Joel said, "Because thinking about it gave me more insight then I ever had before on why you became a police officer. You’re the one I’m worried about, and trying to understand."

Fred finished off his beer rather than replying to that.

Joel asked with some concern, "Are you driving?"

"I'm not that stupid. I walked. I live less than a mile away. I’m not walking back until the rain stops."

A portable radio Joel carried made a noise. He talked into it, then hurriedly left, not having the luxury to wait for the rain to cease. Fred watched Joel leaving, and deeply missed not being part of that action anymore.

The rain stopped an hour later, but time had gone many, many hours beyond that before Fred headed home. Temperatures had fallen below freezing that evening. Fred concentrated on avoiding slippery ice puddles. He remembered that he'd found going down stairs difficult after he'd first lost his eye, but he'd rapidly adapted to that. That had been like seeing the world as too flat. This was different. Now he felt like he was some distance away, telling his body what to do, which only imperfectly responded. Very hazardous when combined with the ice.

He reached his house. He didn't look forward to going in because it was such a lonely place since Carrie had died. He wondered if Nora was done talking with Mrs. Blackstone yet. He looked up from the frozen puddles hoping that her blue sports car would be in his driveway. It was not. However, he noticed two dark human forms sitting on his front steps. He felt a surge of panic. He saw one of them make a hasty movement in a pocket. He instinctively reached under his arm, under his jacket, but nothing was there. He remembered he'd not put his gun on. He had planned on doing some drinking, so didn’t bring it.

A male voice said, "Calm down! We just want to talk, Fred."

The voice stressed the informality of that first name, like Fred was his good buddy.

A snide female voice put in, "Are you going to gun us down like you did my boyfriend?"

Fred sniffed and immediately understood the hasty movement had been hiding something rather than bringing it out.

Fred remarked, "Sitting in the dark on my front steps is not a safe thing to do. I was a cop for twenty-seven years, even though I'm not one anymore. There are many people who'd love to ambush and kill me. I think of that first."

The female giggled and noted, "Your voice is slurred! You're drunk!"

Fred replied, "And you're stoned! I'm a fifty-year-old adult, so I'm allowed to drink. I can smell what you've been smoking. It's not tobacco. Who've we got here, Ray Newman and Beth Droughton?"

"Correct," Ray said.

Fred asked, "What're you two doing out of jail and the hospital?"

Beth said, "My parents hired Mr. Shuster. They suggested he also talk to Pipe's Mom. He did, and she hired him too. He arranged for us both to be out on bail."

Ray said, "We saw on TV that you’d been fired."

Fred started again, "Ray, I heard about the deal that was offered to you. If you go through rehab, the prosecutor will drop the charges related to interfering with a crime scene plus not contest treating you as a juvenile. There'd still be the drug charges, but records of those would be sealed when you reached the age of eighteen."

Ray "Pipe" Newman bragged, "That was before Mr. Shuster explained some legal things to Mom. We don't need that deal, and I don't need rehab. He really helped us. We're going to sue the police department. Mr. Shuster thinks we'll get even more money than Mrs. Lewis! We need the money, even if Beth's rich parents don't."

Fred said, "Hold on, why don't you need rehab?"

Ray stated, "On TV, you said that you smoked pot and stopped easily. No rehab, no hospital, no nothing! Just stopped without any problem. If you can do it, so can I. I just don't want to stop yet. It's too much fun! Hey, Cowboy said that he could score me some OxyContin. I'm going to take that next, since you proved it's not addictive."

Fred cried, "Oh, God!"

Beth asked suspiciously, "You didn't lie on TV, did you?"

"No, I didn't lie," Fred said. "A section of my skull had been shattered, then surgically repaired. The slug didn't just take my eye and leave everything else intact. That no brain damage was detected is a miracle for which I thank God every day! Taking OxyContin wasn't fun, Ray. It just brought the pain down so I could handle it. Taking a drug that potent just for kicks is stupid! Don't even consider it!"

Ray said skeptically, "I guess I can just stick to smoking drugs. That’s safe, at least."

Fred said, "I never smoked PCP-laced pot. I also never smoked the high-THC-content pot of today. If you were able to try pot from back then, you'd be amazed how weak it is."

Ray said slowly, "Then what worked for you might not apply to me?"

Fred threw down his hands in exasperation and declared, "Exactly! Ray, whether the prosecutor offers you a deal or not, why don't you march right back to the hospital and get into rehab?"

Beth said reassuringly, "Fred's just trying to scare you into accepting punishment for what he thinks is a sin. Cards says that's just what cops do. Besides, Fred thinks it's all right to be drunk himself, but not for us to be stoned."

"Beth's right," Ray said, smiling at her reassurance.

"Rehab is not punishment, but treatment," Fred said, thinking in his own mind that he didn't really have a good counter argument about his drinking.

Beth said, "Mr. Shuster was so much nicer to us than any of the cops. He got us out of that terrible hospital."

"What's terrible about it? For a city this size, it's one of the best in the country," Fred claimed.

Beth said with a giggle, "They didn't let us have our recreational drugs, that's what. The only drugs they let us have aren’t any fun."

Ray remarked, "I like Mr. Shuster. He helped us get out of the hospital and stay out of jail."

Fred said, "You're only out on bail. Your parents had to put out a big chunk of money for that. Beth, I know your parents can afford it, but I don't know how Ray's mother did."

Ray remarked, "Mr. Shuster got my bail lowered because my mother doesn't have much money. The judge was cooperative."

Fred said, "Be that as it may, your trial hasn't happened yet. Being out now doesn't mean you won't end up in prison."

Ray said, "Mr. Shuster said that he's going to fix that, plus we'd make a ton of money suing the city. He likes us! Fred, why don't you like us?"