He’d found that nothing in his profession was more dangerous than an angry human being saturated with illegal drugs, and the only way to stop them from harming people was to shoot them. But he wasn’t going to mention this to her. That would’ve sounded harsh. He’d actually seen a police officer empty a .45 automatic into a lunatic who’d broken his wife’s arm and thrown one of his kids off a balcony. The man reached the police officer and killed him before he died. It had been a life-changing experience. But he hesitated to relate it to Grace, who seemed out of touch with the realities of the world. She was sheltered and secure in her religion, apparently having seen little violence in the places where she worked.

“Weren’t you exposed to violent people where you worked overseas?” he asked delicately.

“Well, not really. I lived in a small native village far back in the Amazon in South America. The men hunted, the women cooked and made clothing and necessary items and raised their children. The only real violence was when children fought,” she added with a soft laugh.

He began to understand. “Life in America is a little rougher than that, these days,” he said. “We’ve had a drug epidemic and a gang epidemic coexisting, especially here where I work. We’ve had shootings and murders, gang warfare...”

“There should be more churches involved in the community,” she said with a smile. “It all goes back to families and how children are raised. Attitudes can be changed while children are young.”

“That may be,” he conceded. “But we have to deal with the result of bad parenting and peer pressure.”

“I imagine it’s not easy. Mike hated the part of his job that required using firearms. I almost had him convinced to try for a supervisory position, where he wouldn’t have to be involved in actual police work.”

Banks was shocked. He hadn’t realized that Grace was so averse to Mike’s job. In fact, Mike loved being on the streets, interacting with people, helping people. It was what he was best at. Through no fault of his own, he’d walked in on a bank robbery on his day off and been killed outright without getting off a single shot.

“Mike didn’t have his service revolver on at the bank holdup,” Grace recalled. “I’d made him promise that he wouldn’t wear it off duty, although he said it would get him into trouble if he got found out.” She bit her lip, unaware of Banks’s shocked expression. “I suppose that might have been a mistake on my part. But at least he died without a death on his conscience. That was important.”

It was more important that Mike might have lived if he’d had his service revolver on him. He was irritated, despite his feelings for Grace.