Germ

"Stephen," she said slowly, thinking about what she wanted to say. "A couple times Allen started to say something about why you left medicine and became a pastor. You stopped him. Can you tell me now? I'm just curious." She reached out and laid her hand on his.

He stared at it, expressionless.

"I killed a man," he said. "I murdered him."

Her hand jumped slightly. She hoped he didn't notice.

He shifted his gaze to the window. "Back then—this was a few months before completing my MD—I was pretty cocky. Respected, wealthy family. No problem getting dates. Had a residency lined up at Boston's Massachusetts General. 'Course, med school is vicious. On the rare evening I didn't have night courses and wasn't studying or doing volunteer work at the local clinic, I hit the bars. Hard. Most of us did. We'd try to get two months of high tension out of our systems in one night."

He paused, shifted in the seat.

"We were in a sports bar, Malone's. Celtics and Bucks on all the TVs. We'd gotten pretty rowdy, a few of us."

He turned to Julia and leaned closer.

"Some guy at the bar told us to shut up. Jeff—a friend of mine— he got into a yelling match with him. The guy came over, all in-your-face, and dumped a plate of potato skins in Jeff's lap. Jeff was a wiry little guy, feisty like a Chihuahua. He just about jumped over the table to get at him. I put my arm out and stopped him. So the guy who'd come over starts saying, 'This your babysitter, that it? Doesn't want Jeffy to get hurt.' Stuff like that."

Stephen was looking past Julia, completely there, back in that bar.

"Jeff picks up a saltshaker and beans the guy right in the forehead.

Now they're both trying to get over the table. I had to stand up to hold them back. The guy sees me rising up and thinks I'm coming at him. He gives me a shove. And of course I shove him back, which puts him on his butt, sliding across the floor. He's up in a heartbeat, ready to dive at me. He stops and sizes me up. I got a hundred pounds and eight inches on him. He reaches round his back and pulls out a knife, starts carving little circles in the air, you know? I'm like, 'Whoa, buddy,' but now I'm really ticked off. I mean, the guy pulls a knife? He kind of lunges, and I haul off and plant my fist right in the side of his head."

He stopped, thinking. His face seemed to have slackened, like a candle just starting to feel the effects of its own burning wick.

"He went down and never got up. Ever. My punch fractured his skull and ruptured a middle meningeal artery. They arrested me for manslaughter, then eventually determined I'd acted in self-defense."

"Sounds right to me," Julia said.

He shook his head. "I was never in danger. That lunge was a half-hearted attempt to save face. It didn't come close. I saw it in his eyes. He was scared. He wasn't going to take us on, with or without a knife."

She patted his hand. "Law enforcement has what's called the twenty-one-foot rule. It says that a suspect with an edged weapon is a deadly threat within twenty-one feet. It takes one and a half seconds for a person to close that distance, about the same time a quick-thinking cop can draw and fire his weapon. And our society's infatuation with firearms has dulled us to the dangers of knives, which can kill with one puncture, one slash. In the situation you were in, any cop worth his spit would have shot that guy. Including me."

He studied her face, said nothing.

"He was freaking out, angry, probably had a few drinks. There's no way you have could have been sure he wouldn't have attacked you. He didn't even know, most likely."

She saw in his face that Stephen had long ago made up his mind: he'd killed an innocent man.

She said, "So that shocked you into dropping out of college, finding God?"

"The guy—his name was Wayne Reitz. Only twenty-two. His father came to see me. He was a pastor of a big church. He wept for his son; then he told me to get on with my life, not to let what happened crush me." He found her eyes. "Not to let it crush me. Well, I did feel crushed that I could do such a thing with my bare hands. A soon-to-be healer, practitioner of the Hippocratic oath to do no harm. There was this pressing weight on my chest."

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

"CliffsNotes version: I went to Pastor Reitz's church. I wanted to know if he really meant his kind words. How could he not hate me? He explained God's will and forgiveness. It took a long time, but I started to breathe again. I did some work around the church, went to seminary . . . didn't become a physician."

In his eyes she saw the pain, still there like the ghost sensations amputees experience. There was also compassion and caring. It all added up to a reluctance to do physical harm.

"As a pastor, as a compassionate man," she said, "you believe in fighting evil, right?"

He nodded.