J.M.J.

Author's note: Thank you for reading! Thank you especially to MargaretA66, ErinJordan, angelicalkiss, max2013, and Candylou for your reviews on the previous chapter! I hope you enjoy this one. God bless!

Chapter VIII

As soon as five o'clock came, Phil practically jumped up from his desk. He hadn't actually been getting much work done for the last couple of hours, but he felt obligated to sit there and act as if he was all the same. Earlier in the day, he had managed to push aside the images of what he had seen at the police morgue, but as he had grown more tired, that was harder and harder to do. He had made up his mind that he was going to do something about it. Exactly what, he wasn't sure, but he did know what the first step was going to be.

He went straight to his supervisor's office and knocked on the door. A voice told him to come in and so he did, closing the door after him.

His supervisor was a woman named Caitlyn who was in her mid-thirties and perpetually had a stressed-out look. She blinked at Phil as he came in and then reached for her coffee cup.

"Are you doing all right?" she asked. She knew, of course, why Phil hadn't come into work the day before. Phil guessed that that had been the topic of a lot of buzz around the office.

"To tell the truth, I'm not sure," Phil admitted. "Like I told you on the phone yesterday, my friendship with Darcy was complicated. I really think I'd like to have a few days to process this."

Caitlyn sucked in her breath. "I'm sure you would. You've been working for us less than a year, and ordinarily you're not eligible to start taking vacation time until you've been here for a year. Now, after what happened to your other friend, we already advanced you quite a bit of time…"

"I'm not asking for more vacation time," Phil hastened to explain. "I'll take it off without pay. I just need some time."

"Well, in that case, all right. I can't say I blame you."

"Thanks."

Phil took in a deep breath as he left the office and headed out to his car. He had bought himself some time to investigate. Now he just needed to figure out how to make the most of it.

HBHBHBHBHB

The sound of nails being pounded echoed inside the Mortons' barn. The regular beat was suddenly interrupted by a duller sound and a shout of pain.

"Careful!" Chet said, standing up so he could see over the side of the sailboat to where Biff had been pounding the nails. "I can't have you knocking holes in my boat before I even get her in the water."

Biff had dropped the hammer and was squeezing his thumb. "Your boat's better off than I am. I hope you've got Worker's Comp."

"I'm not paying you, so Worker's Comp wouldn't cover it anyway," Chet teased with a shrug. "You okay?"

Biff gingerly let go of his thumb and moved it slightly. "I guess I'll live. It's so cold in here, my whole hand is too numb to feel much of anything. I can't believe I'm giving up all my evenings to freeze to death in this barn and work on this boat. Can't we at least get a heater?"

"Not with all this hay in here, unless you want to really heat the place up in a hurry," Chet replied. "Maybe it is a little cold to be working out here."

"Maybe just a little." Biff rotated his thumb. The pain was rapidly subsiding. "Okay. I'm done complaining now. Let's get this thing finished before next summer is over."

He picked the hammer up and went right back to work. He would never admit it—although Chet already suspected it—but this sailboat was one of Chet's hobbies that Biff was almost as excited about as Chet. If he admitted as much, he wouldn't be able to go on teasing Chet about his ever-changing hobbies without having this thrown back at him, so he disguised his interest with plenty of feigned complaining. Any chance of Chet taking the complaining seriously was offset by the fact that Biff kept coming to help.

As Biff got back to work, Chet dallied a little, limply holding his own hammer and a nail. Finally, he said, "Say, Biff?"

"Yeah?" Biff asked.

"About the other day…when we went to talk to Joe…"

Biff grimaced and then kept working without looking up at Chet. "Eh, you don't have to explain that to me. I get it. The way Joe's been treating Iola and you really stinks and the way you treat him stinks and that's between you and him. I don't want to be in the middle of it."

"Can't blame you there. I don't want to be involved either," Chet muttered. He paused and then said more audibly, "That's not exactly what I was going to ask you about. You saw the way Joe completely freaked out on us. He's not okay."

Biff let out a long breath and did stop working this time. "No. No, he's not. That's pretty obvious. But if you're going to ask what we should do about it, don't look at me. I have no idea."

"I'd need to understand what's actually going on with him before I could try to solve any of his problems," Chet pointed out. "I know it started before this, but when things really started going downhill was when you guys went to Ziyou. I need to know: what happened there?"

The memory flashed into Biff's mind like a light being turned on in a pitch-dark room. He felt as if his insides were recoiling at the mere thought of the place. "No. I'm not talking about that."

"Why not? Everyone expects me to understand what's going on and be patient about it and everything, but nobody will tell me anything."

Biff floundered for words for a moment. "I can't tell you. You wouldn't understand. You would have had to be there to understand."

"Well, that's not an option at this point. Maybe I wouldn't understand perfectly, but I would understand better than I do now, which would be something."

"I don't even understand it well enough to explain it," Biff claimed. "I don't think it's such a good thing to talk about, anyway. Just forget it, Chet. Let's get back to work."

Chet watched as Biff went back to try to work. He was so agitated that he was having a hard time focusing on the work. Chet sighed. It didn't look like he was going to get anywhere on this right now.

HBHBHBHBHB

Joe was still rubbing the sleep out of his eyes as he headed into the department store where he worked. Back when he was still working on mysteries, he could go days with minimal sleep and it never bothered him, but getting up at three in the morning for this job was practically murder. If he hadn't needed a paycheck and had been able to find any other job in town, he would have quit this one in a heartbeat. Well, maybe that wasn't entirely true, he admitted to himself as he remembered the fact that he didn't actually have to stay in Bayport. He could have gone somewhere else to look for a job. There had to be someone out there who would be willing to hire him, in spite of his last name. Yet it was that very last name that kept him here. He didn't want to be away from his family right now. He needed them, and maybe, in some ways, they needed him.

He clocked in and went to check with the supervisor about which aisles to stock. The supervisor—a skinny kid named Daryl whom Joe suspected was at least a year younger than himself despite his scraggly attempt at growing a beard—looked disappointed to see him.

"Oh, you're here," he said.

"Aren't I supposed to be?" Joe asked, raising an eyebrow.

Daryl swallowed hard and wouldn't meet his eyes. "Yeah, but…You missed work yesterday."

"I know. I texted you the night before and told you I had a family emergency."

"I never saw any text." Several beads of sweat appeared on Daryl's forehead.

Joe shook his head. He'd had plenty of people tell him lies to his face, but few were this clumsy about it. "You replied to it."

"No, I didn't."

"Yes, you did." Joe reached into his pocket and took out his phone. "I can show you the conversation right here."

"I don't want to see it. You're not supposed to have your phone on you on the job," Daryl declared. He sounded a little relieved to have an actual infraction of company rules to hold against Joe.

Joe put the phone back in his pocket. "I know, but considering I do have an ongoing family emergency and something might come up at any time, I thought it could be an exception. Besides, it's not like everyone else doesn't have their phones with them at all times."

"I don't know about anyone else, but I do know you missed work and you're breaking company rules," Daryl insisted. "You're not leaving me much of a choice." He half-turned to look around for someone else, giving Joe the opportunity to see a telltale bulge in his back pocket.

"If you're putting me on some kind of report or something, you'll want to put yourself on, too. You've got your phone with you, too," Joe said.

Daryl's hand went straight to his pocket, confirming Joe's assessment of what was causing the bulge. He whipped around again. "And now you're arguing with a supervisor. Company policy is clear on how to handle this."

"And what is the company policy?"

"Three strikes and you're out," Daryl averred. "You're fired, Hardy. You'd better leave now."

"Wait, what? You can't just fire me, just like that!"

"I just did. If you don't leave, I'll have to call the police and have them escort you out."

"Uh, I think I'd better talk about this with someone a little higher up the chain of command."

Daryl shook his head obstinately. "I have the authority to fire people who aren't doing the work they've been hired to do. Everyone else will agree with what I did here. You're just continuing to waste everybody's time. Get out of here."

Joe considered arguing, but it wasn't really a strong temptation. Right at the moment, he didn't care enough to come up with an argument. Instead, he asked, "Who were you looking for?"

One of the beads of sweat on Daryl's face turned into a drop that rolled down toward his eyebrow. "What are you talking about?"

"A minute ago, before I pointed out that you were breaking company rules, too. You were looking for somebody, but there aren't any managers on duty this early. You're the highest ranking person here right now, so who were you looking for? Whoever told you to give me the boot?"

"Nobody told me to," Daryl claimed, but he couldn't look at Joe and Joe knew that he was an inexperienced liar.

Oddly enough, this stirred up a feeling of pity in Joe. Someone else was obviously forcing Daryl to do this, and he couldn't be expected to risk whatever consequences had been threatened for Joe's sake. As far as this kid knew, Joe was nothing more than an incompetent failure of a detective who was to blame for someone being killed. Having a morale-destroyer like that around was probably a situation the company had been hoping to resolve even without threats. But that wasn't the kid's fault.

"Okay," Joe said with a shrug. "I'm going. I just hope you don't treat any of your other employees this way."

He trudged back out to his car and sat in the parking lot for a few minutes. Of all days for this to happen…His dad had said that they all needed to act completely normally so that if Black Rose was watching them in any capacity, they wouldn't think anything was up while the plan to get Lisa to safety was played out. Getting fired wasn't exactly an ordinary occurrence. The one bright spot, Joe told himself, was that most likely it was Black Rose who had threatened Daryl into firing him. In that case, him being fired wouldn't raise their suspicions in the least. Joe drove home.

When he reached the house, he went in the back door and hoped he could get upstairs and back into bed without anyone noticing. He had only climbed about three steps when a bright flashlight was shined into his eyes and he heard his father saying, "Who's there?"

"It's just me, Dad." Joe put his hands up to try to shield his eyes from the light.

At the same moment, Fenton recognized his son and turned off the beam. "What are you doing coming home already? You just left."

Joe rubbed his eyes as he tried to relieve them of the pain from the flashlight. "They fired me."

"What? For what?" Fenton asked.

"Officially, for missing a day of work without calling in—even though I did—having my phone on me at work, and arguing with a supervisor." Joe climbed the rest of the way up the stairs. "Unofficially, because I'm practically certain somebody told my supervisor to. I don't know whether it was a bribe or a threat, but from the way he was acting, I'm leaning toward it being a threat."

In the dark, Joe could see his dad shaking his head. "What are they hoping to prove? Oh, well, at least you're out of there. It's not like it was much of a job. I don't know what you're going to do now. You'd have plenty of time to work on the case."

"Dad," Joe protested, "I'll look for Angelo because I owe that much to Tony, but by 'look for him', I mean I'll look through a computer screen. I can't do anything more than that. I wouldn't be any use."

"I think it's about time we talk about this."

Joe groaned inwardly. "Is this really the best time, Dad?"

"No. The best time would have been months ago. But we're both here right now and it's not like either of us is going to get much sleep anyway. And once we put the wheels in motion on this plan with Lisa, who knows what's going to happen? We need to make sure we understand where each other is at before we move forward."

He led the way to his home office on the second floor and they both pulled up chairs. Joe was dreading the conversation that would ensue.

Fenton sat back in one of the comfortable armchairs in the room before he started. "Now, first, Joe, I'd like to say that in many ways, it would be a relief to me if you really did give up detective work permanently. It's dangerous work, and I'd never forgive myself if anything happened to you because of it. Anything more, I should say. At the same time, I think you have a real talent for this kind of work and you could do a lot of good, and it doesn't seem right to abandon it out of fear."

Joe shook his head. "I'm not afraid of getting hurt myself. I've got a lot on my mind, but not that. I'm more worried about getting other people hurt, like Iola and Tony." His voice caught slightly. "And Mom and Frank. I can't protect them, so I don't have any business doing anything that could get them hurt."

"So it all comes back to that," Fenton said. "You're still worried that you might be forced to defend yourself or others using deadly force. Well, you're probably right. As I said, this is dangerous work, and you've already been in that situation."

"And I couldn't do it," Joe said, thinking of how he might have saved Tony's life. He looked down at his lap.

"Is that any easier to live with?" Fenton asked, his voice soft.
Joe thought about it a few moments. "No. No, it's worse." He looked up. "But, Dad, I don't want to kill anyone directly. That's different again."

"No, and I hope you never have to. Anyone who wants to kill another person, whether it's someone in particular or just generally wanting to have the opportunity to kill someone in self-defense, has something wrong with them. But defending yourself—even defending yourself with a gun—doesn't automatically mean that you'd have to kill anyone. You can deter a would-be killer merely by showing that you would be willing to fight back if they push you, not to mention get a suspect to surrender much more easily. Without a weapon of some kind, the only way to get a suspect to surrender might be to try to beat them into submission with your fists, and honestly, threatening them with a gun is much more humane way of capturing them."

In spite of himself, a slight smile played over Joe's lips. "That's true."

"And there's another thing. It's definitely prudent to be armed when there's a chance of someone trying to harm you, but there are a lot of cases where there is less of a chance of that and it wouldn't be necessary to be armed. You've solved plenty of cases without weapons of any kind. Why can't you at least keep working at cases like that?"

"I don't know," Joe admitted. He shrugged helplessly. "I don't know what I want, other than to have some peace and quiet to think about these things."

Fenton let out a small sigh. "All right."