Disclaimer: These are not my characters and I make no profit from them.

Thanks, Owl and Cheri.

Author's Note: In the epilogue for the third season episode, "Stranglehold", Mark opens up just a bit about his two years in San Quentin—specifically how close he was to cracking on the morning he received a visit from a stranger, Kate Murphy. Which leads us to the question already raised by the pilot episode: where the heck were Mark's dear friends, Flip and his daughter Barbara, during his incarceration?

This follows on after the piece "Epilogophilia—Stranglehold".

Bad Company

by L.M. Lewis

It was as if, having opened that door into the past just briefly, it had now snapped shut. McCormick had set aside his pensive air and consumed his breakfast with a gusto that seemed pretty calculated. He hadn't lingered afterward, either. It seemed as though he intended to start on that memorial topiary project pronto.

He hadn't, of course. The idea had been merely metaphorical—at least Hardcastle hoped so. When next he saw McCormick, about an hour later, the man was steering the mower—the most mindlessly tedious of the many grounds-keeping chores. Hardcastle supposed he should be grateful for a little independent action, but he suspected this was just a new variation on pensive—one that was invisible and therefore unassailable.

As for himself, age and rank had its privileges. He was entitled to sit in the den, pensive as hell, in the guise of catching up on the inevitable paperwork chores that accumulated whenever they were off breaking up a white-slavery ring.

So far it had worked pretty well. McCormick, in avoiding him, had not made it necessary for Hardcastle to do any avoiding of his own. The downside of this, the judge reflected, was that he had more time to dwell on the question that kept bobbing back up to the surface. It was a perfectly reasonable question: why Mark had had no visitors during his stay in San Quentin—at least until Kate Murphy had turned up.

And she a perfect stranger. So where the hell were his friends?

Hardcastle couldn't help it; the friends that had come to mind most readily were the Johnsons, Flip and his daughter Barbara. Mark didn't talk about Flip all that much, but it was evident, from the few remarks he had made, that the man had been important to him. Heck, he never would have had to say a word. His actions two years ago, "repossessing" Flip's car from his murderer, had spoken louder than any words.

And he had done that foolhardy stunt at Barb Johnson's behest.

The judge found himself frowning. He'd taken an instinctive liking to the young lady when he'd first met her back then. He'd also pumped her for information on the drive home from Las Vegas, shortly after they'd busted her father's murderer. She'd been stretched on the thin, taut wire between ebullient and drained that afternoon, and he figured what he'd gotten from her had most likely been the unvarnished truth.

She'd said Mark had been like family—practically a brother to her, when she hadn't been suffering the pangs of her first schoolgirl crush over him. And at least by implication that would have made him something like a son to Flip. He supposed some people threw such notions around with a fair amount of poetic license, but in this case there was the evidence of McCormick's actions to back up Barb's claim.

Risking a third felony charge on a harebrained notion like that . . .

He took in a deep breath and let it out, then glanced over his shoulder, catching a glimpse of the man in question as he executed a turn at the edge of the lawn. It wasn't as though it took much provocation to get McCormick involved in a risky stunt. There'd been a few Mark had pulled on his behalf over the past two years, the judge realized. His frowned deepened.

More than a few.

He brushed that thought aside. It wasn't part of the issue at hand.

The sound of the front door opening startled him from his contemplation. He'd lost track of McCormick and obviously hadn't noticed that the lawn mower had gone silent. Mark was in the hallway, hands on hips staring down into the den.

"You need lemonade?" He'd reached up and swiped at his brow, knocking back some damp hair. "I do," he added without waiting for the opinion of the man who hadn't been out in the sun. He barely waited for Hardcastle's nod before he turned on one foot and headed toward the kitchen.

It was only a minute or two before he was back, a glass in either hand with one of them held up to his own forehead. He set the other down on the desk and snagged a chair with his foot, half-turning it and then dropping into it with the sigh of a man who was glad to sit down.

"Ran out of gas," he said, and it wasn't entirely clear if he meant the mower or himself. Hardcastle had the impression he might not have slept all that well the night before. All the early morning mulling might've started way before dawn. But whatever the reason, he seemed relaxed enough now, which made it all the more aggravating to Hardcastle that his own question was still nagging at him.

The judge tried drowning it with a swig of lemonade. It must not have worked because McCormick gave him a quick appraisal and said, "Whatsa matter—too sour for you?"

"Nah," he drawled.

It might have been closer to a growl. Whatever it was, the younger man looked puzzled and then took a tentative sip from his own glass.

"Tastes okay to me," he said in all innocence and for some reason that was the absolute last straw for Hardcastle.

"It's not the damn lemonade."

This time it had been a genuine growl, verging on a snarl. Mark, of course, didn't look all that perturbed, maybe just a tad surprised, but not even all that much of that.

"Okay, then what the hell is it?" he asked with a mildness that belied the words.

"And it doesn't even seem strange to you," Hardcastle sputtered exasperatedly, as though the man sitting across the desk from him could somehow have been privy to all the thoughts leading up to that annoyed conclusion.

Mark hadn't of course, and the look of bafflement on his face was evident, which meant the judge was committed to some kind of explanation. It occurred to him now—a little belatedly—that there was a certain amount of irony here. After all, was he really in a position to criticize anyone for not visiting a man he'd sentenced to prison?

It was felony auto theft.

It had indeed quacked like a duck, and all the feathers had been in more or less the right place. He shoved that notion aside too, maybe a little roughly. It wasn't the issue.

"All those months," Hardcastle began—calmer now, trying to not interject his own view, to let McCormick see the facts for himself, "up in Quentin, not one person came to visit you?"

There, he'd gotten it out without even naming any names—no direct aspersions cast, though it would be unlikely that McCormick wouldn't come up with the same list of suspects.

He must have, though the effect was not at all what Hardcastle had been expecting. Instead of indignation what he saw on the younger man's face was something that might have passed for embarrassment.

This impression was reinforced by an off-hand and accepting, "Well, of course not."

The nonchalance left Hardcastle with his mouth agape. He closed it, abruptly and after only a split second, and then opened it, only to hear himself getting angry again.

"Whaddaya mean 'of course'? Ya had friends, didn't ya?"

Mark frowned and nodded.

"And that's what friends are for, aren't they?" the judge continued with more vehemence than he'd anticipated, as though his could make up for the absence of any on McCormick's side. "To buck a guy up when the chips are down."

The younger man's frown had flattened out into something a little more grim—though still nothing like anger.

"Maybe," he finally said; it sounded doubtful, "for some people."

"It's bad enough that nobody came," Hardcastle muttered, "but you making up excuses—"

Mark issued a sharp "Huh?" but his confusion must not have lasted very long because that was followed quickly by, "'Excuses'? God, no . . . well, maybe there oughta be for me." He frowned and then added pensively, "If I could think one up."

Hardcastle was thinking the shrinks must have some kind of name for this—it was way beyond The Stockholm Syndrome and into the realm where Alice spent time talking to rabbits. But he didn't get a chance to express that opinion before Mark meandered on.

"It seemed like a good idea at the time," he sighed, indicating that whatever idea he was referring to, it had been anything but good. He glanced up and Hardcastle's look of blank consternation must have finally registered on him.

"You know the drill," he said with a nod that seemed to indicate that the judge might've personally written every one of the rules himself. "Every visitor has to fill out the form—"

"It's not that hard."

"—which the inmate has to request and sign first," Mark continued as though there'd been no interjection. He paused, giving it a moment to sink in, and then he plodded on, as if he wanted to be certain he'd made himself clear. "No requests, no signatures—no visitors."

Hardcastle's brow wrinkled in disbelief. "You were being some kinda masochist or something? Or," he returned with a twinge of satisfaction to his original thesis, "did ya figure if you didn't ask, nobody could say no?"

"No." Mark shook his head sadly. "Neither . . . and it got to be an issue, with Barb at least. She found out the rules—Barb was really good at figuring stuff like that out—and she started nagging me about when I was going to get them to send her a form. I almost broke down and did it, but I never could have let her come up there by herself. A place like that." Mark shuddered slightly. "And that would've meant Flip coming, too."

"So?" Hardcastle said gruffly. "What would've been so bad about that?"

Mark's expression had gone to one of frank disbelief, as though he'd been asked to explain something so fundamentally true that the words for explaining it had been forgotten from disuse.

"You've been there," he finally said.

Hardcastle nodded once.

"And you have to ask," Mark said in some wonderment. "'Course you've never been in there," he added, as though that might explain some of the older man's obstinate unwillingness to understand.

Hardcastle shrugged. "They'd bailed you out before, hadn't they? Back East?"

Mark glanced up sharply. "Who . . .?" And then he answered his own aborted question with a grimace. "Barb—you pumped her for information, huh?"

The absence of an answer from the judge was probably as good as a yes.

"Yeah," Mark admitted, "but just that once, in Georgia. And I hadn't stolen anything that time either," he said irritably. Then he sighed and added, "That might have been part of it, though. I mean, how many times do your friends need to see you in denim with a number above the pocket before they start thinking of you that way?"

Not if they're really your friends. Hardcastle kept that thought silent. It wasn't an argument he thought he could win.

"Anyway," Mark conceded, "it might've been a stupid idea."

"Then why the hell didn't you give in and sign the damn forms?"

The younger man's smile was almost rueful and defied what his stubbornness must have cost him. "What, you think you're the only one entitled to be a donkey, Hardcase?"

So he was back to being glib, which meant the waters beneath had to be getting even murkier. Hardcastle shook his head, figuring he'd get nothing more for his effort.

But maybe there was still a hint of this morning's honesty in the air. There was only a moment's hesitation before Mark plodded on, almost as though he was thinking aloud, explaining something to himself.

"And by the time I knew how deep I was in, it was kind of too late to do anything about it. Those damn forms take time, and I hit a rough patch—got a little box time—"

Hardcastle gave that admission the smallest of acknowledging nods, wary of breaking the flow.

"—and, anyway, if I finally had signed 'em, after all that stalling around, well . . ."

He didn't have to finish that. Hardcastle had already heard the same song, different verse, from Barb's point of view. According to her, Mark's letters from prison had been banal verging on parody. The sudden arrival of a visitor's approval form would have been like a shriek in the night.

"I guess I see why you didn't," Hardcastle grudged.

Mark cocking one eyebrow as if he were startled to encounter even this much understanding. "You do, huh?"

"Well," the judge went on a little more bluffly, "I've been in that kind of spot."

"Uh-uh," Mark shook his head in adamant protest. "No way. And don't tell me your little trips to the pokey count. Nope. You were strictly a short-timer and besides, you were—"

He froze in mid-argument, pulling back from the next word, though there wasn't much doubt as to what it would have been. There was an expression on his face, as though he'd had to swallow it whole and it had been a little spiky.

Innocent.

Not all that amazing an assumption, Hardcastle figured, since he had been, all three times, framed by bad guys looking to get him out of the way. That wasn't the awkward element, since McCormick had never believed for a moment that he'd been guilty on any of those occasions.

So obviously what had made the word stick in the younger man's craw was the inevitable inverse deduction. No innocent man should feel embarrassed by ending up behind bars, therefore . . .

Hardcastle cocked his head and jutted his chin out just a little. He recognized it immediately for what it was: his judicial expression, invoked when he was handing down rulings, intended to give such things substance and weight.

"I think," he began slowly, as though he might have been launching a non sequitur, "that someone can make a bad choice without being a bad person."

Mark said nothing.

Hardcastle frowned and forged on through the denser thicket of legal philosophy. "That's really all the law has to work with, the facts of the case, the actus reus—the act itself. We talk about the mens rea part, but when it comes to a guilty mind, how can we ever be sure?" He grimaced slightly and added, "God knows most people don't feel guilty even when they are.

"Anyway," he sighed, "it's not a perfect system—kinda feels like fixing a watch with a jackhammer sometimes."

This homely metaphor provoked a small smile from McCormick, though when he finally replied, there was still a feeling of hesitance.

"The part about feeling guilty—you'd be surprised. A place like that. Even if a guy is sure—I mean really sure—he can start having some doubts. If not guilty of one thing in particular, then maybe there's some sort of karma involved."

"Karma—hah." Hardcastle shrugged. It wasn't a gesture of disregard, more an indication of the past being the past—irrevocable. It couldn't be changed, only learned from. He thought he ought to say something else but discovered he was all out of philosophy.

And McCormick seemed fresh out of mysticism as well. He looked down at his lemonade, as though he'd forgotten he'd fetched it, and took a long swallow that nearly drained the glass. Then he glanced up, past Hardcastle toward the front window and muttered, "Better get the rest of it finished. They said it might rain."

The judge looked over his shoulder at a mostly sunny sky that wasn't confirming any such predictions, but by the time he'd turned back to say as much to McCormick, the man was up and on his way out into the hallway, lemonade glass abandoned on the edge of the desk. Hardcastle shook his head again, got to his feet as well, but waited until he'd heard the front door close and latch before he collected both glasses and headed toward the kitchen.

All that honesty and it wasn't even lunchtime yet.