Notes: The Magnificent Seven is the property of CBS, Trilogy and MGM, and no copyright infringement is intended. The Sentinel and its characters belong to Pet Fly, UPN, and Paramount; ditto about the copyright.

In particular, I've drawn on the events of the M7 episode "Sins of the Past," written by Steve Hattman and directed by Gregg Champion, and on The Sentinel's TSbyBS, written by Bill Froehlich and directed by Danny Bilson.

I use the M7 guys as translated to modern times by Mog. This story is in the same timeline as my "Dunne Deal," which differs from ATF fanon only in that JD is very young (20) and has been hired as Larabee's team's equipment and IT support, meaning he's unarmed and untrained (and inexperienced enough to ask naive questions as the plot requires :-).

For Vonnebear, who generously donated to Hurricane Katrina relief in exchange for this story.

Oh, yeah - I'm going to post in chapters, because that's how the story is organized, even though it's long since done. Flame away if this annoys you. Or go read the whole thing on my website.

A Good Man

by Helen W.

July, 1982

Near Cascade, Washington

I.

The first time Blair ever saw Eli Joe, he was leaning against a fence enclosing a trio of blacktop basketball courts down the street from Blair's new apartment building. The slightly older boy was chewing gum in big, jaw cracking chomps, watching a game of half-court two-on-two. Looking, maybe, too cool to join in, maybe like he was just trying to give off that vibe because nobody was going to ask him. He didn't look like the sort of kid Blair normally made friends with, but it had been almost a week since Blair and Naomi had moved to the neighborhood and he had yet to hit it off with anyone, so he dusted off one of his standard opening lines and asked, as nonchalantly as he could manage, "Want to take on the winners?"

Eli Joe turned out to be a pretty lousy shot, but with his height he was able to rebound pretty well, and Blair was quick and a good ball-handler, so they hadn't done too badly as a team. They lost that first game, but while the original two pairs played again they practiced and even worked out a couple of plays, and when their turn came again they won.

By this time, the sun was sinking below the split-levels on the west side of the park, and the other kids seemed to take this as the signal to head home for the day.

"What about you?" Eli Joe asked him.

"Naomi doesn't believe in curfews," Blair replied.

So they started hanging out together for an hour or more most evenings after the other neighborhood kids headed home. They'd shoot hoops some more, or ride their bikes through the city's string of parks and along its side streets and bike paths. Sometimes they'd do silly, stupid things, little-kid stuff that they wouldn't have done when other kids were out, like lining up bottles and zooming between them, seeing how fast they could go and how close they could cut back and forth. Or they'd experiment with makeshift catapults made from stuff Joe'd pull out of his ever-present knapsack, flinging pebbles across Riverside playground at the swing set. Once, Joe aimed at some pigeons, but Blair told him to stop and Joe looked sort of embarrassed and said that he'd been aiming to miss.

Eli Joe was, Blair guessed, to him what he usually was to the 'good' kids he typically ended up hanging around with. The type of kid you only introduced to your mother if you had to. But nothing really seemed bad-wrong about Eli Joe, and Blair was confident that he could tell; thirteen years of being Naomi Sandburg's son had exposed to him a lot more of life than most kids encountered, he figured. As long as he didn't get in the guy's face, or tempt him with, like, a twenty hanging out of his pocket or something, Blair was confident that he could safely be friends with Eli Joe, at least until school started and he was off into the high school TAG classes Naomi'd signed him up for the minute they'd moved into town.

Blair would later remember those long, hot July days, capped by his evenings with Eli Joe, as some of the best of his childhood.

And then everything went to pieces.

All Eli Joe had wanted to do, Blair repeatedly told the police later, was introduce him to his old friend, Vin Tanner, who lived with a foster family about five miles away. They'd gotten tight, Eli Joe said, when they'd been with the same family a few years prior, before he'd had gone to live with his uncle Ron.

So Blair and Eli Joe had skipped the evening pick-up games and headed out right after Blair was through with dinner. An hour later, they got to the crossroads convenience store where Joe said they were going to hook up with Vin.

"Vin's a great guy, but he's a little nervous when he doesn't know you," Eli Joe said, swinging his knapsack onto his shoulder. "Wait out here a few minutes, while I tell him I've got someone with me. Then come on in."

So that's what Blair did. Counted to two hundred slowly, then walked into the mini-mart and past the coffee machines and magazine racks against the front window until he reached the cold cases. Prepackaged ham sandwiches; they looked pretty good. Then he spotted Eli Joe and another kid, who must have been Vin, standing in the far corner near the door to the restroom, in front of cases of chilled drinks, pulling out a couple of 16 oz. bottles of Pepsi.

Eli Joe turned toward him and made like he was shooting the floor with his right index finger, then pointed to Vin's back; there was an odd-looking bulge beneath the thin fabric of Vin's t-shirt, like there was something tucked into the back of pants. As clear as if he were shouting, Eli Joe mouthed the words, "He's got a gun. Run!"

Blair staid put, though, at first, not knowing whether he should go help Eli Joe, or leave and call the police, or go tell the cashier he was about to get robbed. Vin turned, nodded at him in a friendly sort of way, and started examining a rack of chips. The movement made his t-shirt ride up a little around the bump, and Blair saw something metallic-looking. Then, it was like Blair's brain turned off and his legs took over. He bolted toward the front of the store and out past the checkout counter, so fast the cashier must have thought he was stealing something. "Stop!" he heard the guy shout, but Blair was already picking up his bike.

There was a noise like a cork popping, then Vin flew out the door straight at him. Before Blair knew what was happening, he had grabbed Blair's bike right out of his hands and was in the seat and then pedaling like hell off the asphalt and over the grass and into the road.

Blair started to run after him, but gave up after a few steps. "Come back!" he yelled. "That's my bike!"

A moment later, Eli Joe was at his side. "He shot the cashier!" Eli Joe gasped, his voice high and tight. "Vin shot him! Vin Tanner's a murderer!"

Blair's first impulse was to go after Vin again, knock him off his bike, hold him somehow until the police came, and he run a few feet after him. But already Vin was out of sight, around a curve in the road.

Think! What else could he do?

Airway, breathing, circulation. Yeah. Step one in the first place should have been to see how badly the cashier was hurt.

Leaving Eli Joe, who was hurling curses in the direction Vin had fled, Blair went back into the bright cool of the mini-mart. For some reason, he'd expected it to have turned hot and dark. "Hello?" he called, peering down aisles, delaying looking near the cash register. Finally he took a deep breath and hoisted himself up so that he could lean over the high counter. Fabric. Shit. He considered bolting, but, no, he couldn't do that. The guy might still be alive. How... yeah, duh, the opening to the checkout area was just beyond the candy racks. Blair ran around and through the swinging doors - then stopped. The cashier was crumpled sideways, angled slightly towards where Blair stood, and his head...

It wasn't a head anymore.

When the next customers came in, Blair was still standing there, feeling like there was something he should have been doing but completely unable to figure out what that was.

Blair could answer every question the police asked, except what his phone number was. He could remember their number in Berkeley and even from that gas station in New Mexico when they'd lived completely off the grid for a while, but it was as if everything he'd encountered since June was covered with fog, or mud. Mog or Fud. He could produce his address mostly, though, and that was enough for them to send someone to contact Naomi in person.

Blair half-expected his behavior to tag him as guilty, but it seemed to do the opposite. Nobody seemed to think he was involved in any way; he couldn't tell from the questions whether the police suspected Vin Tanner, or Eli Joe, or maybe both older boys.

Naomi showed up looking almost middle-class, trim and worried in chinos and a light sweater and very little makeup. As far as he could tell, her appearance was what sealed it; Blair was free to go, with nothing but a brief lecture for Naomi on keeping track of him, which Naomi nodded through solemnly.

Leaving the station, he got a brief glance of Eli Joe being led in, hands secured behind his back, huge cops on either side of him. "We caught him heading home, can you believe it?" someone called out to someone else. Well, why shouldn't Joe have headed home? Blair got to go home.

Naomi was very huggy for the next few weeks, but they never really talked about what had happened. Three weeks after the shooting, a new bike appeared in the living room. Blair went for one ride, to show Naomi it worked and that he appreciated it, then never touched it again.

Blair kept waiting for the police to ask him more questions. Months went by, though, before he was depositioned in preparation for Eli Joe's trial. This time much more composed than the night of the shooting, he tried to convince the prosecutors that Eli Joe hadn't been involved in any way. He won all the debates in Civics, even when he was just making stuff up, or playing devil's advocate for the heck of it; why wouldn't anyone believe him when he was telling the truth, when it really mattered? But it seemed that everyone's decision had been made. Nobody believed Eli Joe when he said that he'd fought Vin Tanner for the gun that killed Jesse Kincaid, leaving his prints on the handle and getting residue on his skin.

At the trial, Blair was the defense's only witness. The jury was made up of reasonable-enough-looking people, but it turned out they were narrow-minded bourgeois just like the DA. They rejected the charge of second-degree murder, going for manslaughter, which didn't fit the facts AT ALL - you either meant to blow someone's head off or you didn't - but maybe that was the jury's idiotic way of saying they weren't really sure what had happened.

After the trial, an ADA complimented Blair on his 'comportment'. "You should be a lawyer, kid. Without you as a friend, Joe Vassiconelli would probably be locked up until he's 30, maybe even longer. He'd be headed for the state pen, too, not Juvie."

"Eighteen is old enough," Blair grumbled, feeling peevish. "The real killer is still loose. Doesn't that bother anybody?"

"Vince Tanen is still a suspect in the murder," she said. "I'd bet anything he was the brains of the operation."

Tanen? "Isn't Vin's last name Tanner?"

"No, we know all about Vince Tanen," she replied. "He and Joe were in a foster home together, back in Texas. They moved here to live with that uncle of Vassiconelli's that was sitting in the back the whole trial. Really creepy guy. Apparently some new girlfriend kicked the kids out and they ended up OUR problem." She looked like she'd just spit something disgusting out of her mouth. "Tanen will materialize somewhere soon. Kids like him, if they don't get arrested for B&E or vagrancy or just get picked up for looking too cold, they always do something stupid like go visit their grandmas at Christmas time."

"I'd really like to help put him away," said Blair.

She smiled. "Don't worry, you'll be the star witness."