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“I don’t understand,” Payne said.

“The cops have a little recruiting booth set up there,” Matt said, “presumably to catch the going-to-work crowd. So I saw it, and figured what the hell, it wouldn’t hurt to get some real information. Five minutes later, I was upstairs in City Hall, taking the examination.”

“That quickly?”

“I was a live one,” Matt said. “Anyway, there are several requirements to get in the police department. From what I saw, aside from not having a police record, the most important is having resided within the city limits for a year. I passed that with flying colors, since I gave the Deke house as my address for my new driver’s license, and that was more than a year ago. Next came the examination itself, with which I had some difficulty, since I had to answer serious posers like how many eggs would I have if I divided a dozen eggs by six. But I got through that, too. At eleven, I’m supposed to be in the Municipal Services Building, across from City Hall, for a physical, and, I think, some kind of an interview with a shrink.”

“That’s all there is to it?”

“Well, they took my fingerprints, and are going to check me out with the FBI, and there’s some kind of background investigation they’ll conduct here, but for all practical purposes, yes, that’s it.”

“I wonder how your mother is going to react to this?”

“I don’t know,” Matt said.

“She lost a husband who was a policeman,” Brewster Payne said. “That’s going to be on her mind.”

Matt grunted.

“I want to do it, Dad, at least to try it.”

“You’ve considered, of course, that you might not like it? I don’t know what they do with rookie policemen, of course, but I would suspect it’s like anything else, that you start out doing the unpleasant things.”

“I didn’t really want to go in the marines, Dad,” Matt said. “Not until after they told me they didn’t want me, anyway. It was just something you did, like go to college. But I really want to be a cop.”

Brewster Payne cocked his head thoughtfully and made a grunting noise.

“Well, I don’t like it, and I won’t be a hypocrite and say I do,” Brewster Payne said.

“I didn’t think you would,” Matt said. “I sort of hoped you would understand.”

“The terms are not mutually exclusive,” Payne said. “I do understand, and I don’t like it. Would you like to hear what I really think?”

“Please.”

“I think that you will become a police officer, and because this is your nature, you will do the very best you can. And I think in ... say a year . . . that you will conclude you don’t really want to spend the rest of your life that way. If that happens, and you do decide to go to law school, or do something entirely different—”

“Then it wouldn’t be wasted, is that what you mean?” Matt interrupted.

“I was about to say the year would be very valuable to you,” Brewster Payne said. “Now that I think about it, far more valuable than a year in Europe, which was a carrot I was considering dangling in front of your nose to talk you out of this.”

“That’s a very tempting carrot,” Matt said.

“The offer remains open,” Payne said. “But to tell you the truth, I would be disappointed in you if you took it. It remains open because of your mother.”

“Yeah,” Matt said, exhaling.

“And also for my benefit,” Brewster Payne said. “When your brothers and sister come to me, and they will, crying ‘Dad, how could you let him do that?’ I will be able to respond that I did my best to talk you out of it, even including a bribe of a year in Europe.”

“I hadn’t even thought about them,” Matt said.

“I suggest you had better. You can count, I’m sure, on your sister trying to reason with you, and when that fails, screaming and breaking things.”

Matt chuckled.

“I will advance the proposition, which I happen to believe, that what you’re doing is both understandable, and with a little bit of luck, might turn out to be a very profitable thing for you to do.”

“Thank you,” Matt said.