LITMIR.BIZ

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said magnanimously. “I’ll be back in time for the honey-glazed ham and the turkey. The ham’s in the oven; the turkey’s coming in from Cleveland.”

      Decker smiled. “Your mother-in-law?”

      “Who else?”

      “Have fun.”

      “If you get lonely tonight, Deck—”

      “I’ll be up here with the boys, but thanks anyway.”

      Fordebrand nodded.

      “Yeah, you probably don’t go in for Christmas anymore, do you, Rabbi?”

      Decker shrugged.

      “You like playing Daddy, Deck?”

      “They’re good kids.”

      “What’s with you and their mama anyway?”

      “Beats me, Ed.”

      Decker called out to Jake, and jogged over to Sammy and sat down beside him. The younger boy came running and jumped onto Decker’s lap.

      “The police will take it from here, guys, so we can go back to the campsite now. We’d better get going. We still have to pitch the tent—”

      “Peter, I want to go home,” said Sammy.

      Decker blew out air forcefully. “All right. Is that okay with you, Jakey?”

      “Yeah, I’d like to go home, too. I’m sick of peanut butter.”

      Decker put his arms around the boys. “I’m awfully sorry, guys.”

      Sammy leaned his head on the detective’s shoulder. “It wasn’t your fault.”

      “Are you guys a little spooked?”

      “Maybe a little,” Sammy answered.

      “How about you, Jake?”

      Jacob shrugged.

      “It’s a normal feeling to be freaked out. You kids handled this very well.” Decker helped them to their feet. “Let’s go pack up. I hope you guys had a good time before all this happened.”

      “I did,” Sammy said. “I really really did.”

      It was hard to tell whether he was convincing Decker or himself.

      Decker drove them home in the jeep. The boys said nothing as they rode down the winding, one-lane dirt paths with five-hundred-foot drops bouncing along bumpy mountain roads. When the four-wheeler finally exited the mountain highway and hooked onto the freeway on-ramp, Sammy let out a big sigh.

      “Do you ever worry about getting killed?” he asked Decker.

      “I used to when I was a uniformed policeman, but not anymore, Sammy. My work is pretty safe. It’s mostly pushing papers and talking to people.”

      “Were you ever shot?” the older boy continued.

      “No.”

      There was a brief silence.

      “I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, but I don’t want to be a cop.”

      Decker nodded. “It can get pretty gross sometimes.”

      “Know what I want to be?” said Jake.

      “What?” the big man asked.

      “A pilot in the Israeli Air Force.”

      “Not me,” said Sammy. “I don’t want to get killed.”

      “They never get killed,” Jake protested.

      “’Course they get killed, Yonkie. The Arabs are shooting at you. You think they don’t get lucky and get a hit once in a while?”

      “Well, I’m not gonna get killed!” Jake said firmly.

      “Yeah! Right!”

      Silence.

      “I don’t know what I want to do,” Sammy pondered. “I’d like to get smicha, but I don’t want to learn full time like my abba or my uncles did.”

      “Are all your uncles rabbis?” asked Decker.

      “All except one,” answered Sammy. “One of my eema’s brothers lives in Jerusalem. He’s a sofer. That’s kind of interesting I guess.”

      “What’s that?” Decker asked.

      “Uh, you know, the guy who writes the Torah and the mezuzahs,” explained Sammy.

      “A scribe,” Decker said.

      “Yeah, I think that’s what they call them,” said Sammy. “My other uncles, the ones married to my abba’s sisters, used to teach in yeshiva, but now they’re businessmen. They live in New York.”

      “We’ve got tons of family there,” Jake said, excitedly. “We’ve got a bubbe and zayde and two great-grandmothers, and a whole bunch of cousins. We’re not alone at all.”

      Then the little boy licked his lips and frowned. “But sometimes it feels like it.”

      “Especially when you see scary stuff like today?” said Decker.

      “Aw, that doesn’t bother me,” Jake said mustering up bravado. “That was kinda neat … kind of.”

      “Eema’s other brother, the one that’s not a rabbi, sees dead bodies all the time,” Sammy said. “He’s a pathologist and owns cemeteries … Anyway, him and Eema get into fights about that all the time because he’s a kohain—a Jewish priest—and kohains aren’t supposed to to be around corpses.”

      “Your uncle’s not religious?” Decker asked.

      Sammy nodded. “Him and Eema fight about that, too. You can bet that we don’t see much of Uncle Robert.”

      They rode another mile in silence. Decker broke it.

      “Are you interested in medicine, Sammy?” he asked.

      “No way,” Sammy answered. “I don’t like blood.”

      “How about business? Like your New York uncles?”

      “Borrrrring,” said Sammy.

      Decker smiled.

      “Well, you boys have plenty of time to figure out what you want to be. Heck, it’s okay to do a lot of different things in a lifetime. I used to do ranching when I was a kid in Florida. I did construction work in high school. I was a lawyer for a while, and I don’t see myself as being a cop forever. You’ve got loads of time to experiment.”

      Sammy mulled that over for a while.

      “You know what I’d like to be?” he said. “I think I’d like to be a journalist. Maybe write editorials that make people think.”

      The kid was all of eight and a half.

      The grounds of Yeshivas Ohavei Torah were located on twenty acres of brush and woodland in the pocket community of Deep Canyon. It was twenty freeway minutes from the police station and fifteen minutes from Decker’s ranch. The locals of Deep Canyon were working-class whites, and they and the Jews had little to do with each other, but over the past few years there had grown an uneasy, mutual tolerance.

      The locals weren’t the only ones who felt uncomfortable with the Jewish community. The Foothill cops were equally baffled by the enclave, imagining it a slice of old Eastern Europe that had been frozen in a time warp. Actually, the yeshiva embodied aspects of both past and present, but the cops never delved that deeply. They had nicknamed the place Jewtown, which is what Decker had called it before his own personal involvement. Now, at least when Decker was around, they referred to it by its rightful name.

      The lot for the yeshiva had been cut out of the mountainside. Huge boulders had been hauled

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