Free Because the Rain by Daniel Buckman

two-bedroom apartments with an attic and half basement.
    He then tried telling Murphy about the cop he’d seen beating a man in the headlights of a Range Rover, but Murphy was too high from getting seven hundred thousand dollars after having bought the place for thirty-five. I was cutting through an alley, Goetzler told him. This cop was hitting a hairsprayed suit, holding his balled collar and giving him jabs.
    Murphy was too nature-dreamy to listen.
    “The guy must have mouthed the cop,” Goetzler said, “but the cop had the honor to smack him in front of the world. You could tell the guy had never been hit. But he’ll never learn that the law is not money.”
    Murphy talked right over Goetzler.
    “I’m trying to understand how the young couple who bought this bungalow for seven hundred thousand could move in with five percent down,” he said. “The salary he must have.”
    “You were a public defender. This guy is a lawyer.”
    “He’s thirty-five and she doesn’t work.”
    “It wasn’t like this when you bought here,” Goetzler said. “These are different people than the people you know.”
    “I know people.”
    “The people a public defender knows.”
    “You’re not going to make me bitter, Donny. You haven’t won yet.”
    “I’m just telling you.”
    “No. You’re wanting flesh and you don’t know how to get your pound. Just buy the cabin next to mine and we’ll think about other things.”
    “And eat overcooked steaks in Wisconsin supper clubs?”
    “Let’s just sweat, Donny.”
    Goetzler would tell Murphy that the cop was tired of keeping the world fair for men who believed themselves absolutely correct. He serviced them, they humiliated him, and the cop was done with this two-stroke food chain. Aware of the possible price, the fallout from hitting a civilian, this cop took his pound of flesh anyway. But Murphy wouldn’t care enough to listen. He’d retired from the public defender’s office, the years of hopeless first-degree murder defenses, and only planned to see game wardens toting old .38s until his last sunrise. They sat quietly until Murphy told Goetzler he’d be back next summer and that he’d call him. They parted and agreed to sweat in June. Murphy would stall the cabin owner for a couple months so Goetzler could think about buying.
    Later, in the locker room, Goetzler dressed. He used number 346 because it was close to the security mirror and he could watch men’s hands in the bubbled glass. Always keep watch of their hands, Kerm told him when he became a flatfoot. The one thing you know for sure is that you don’t know what will happen next.
    After he got booted from the force, he sat in a windowless room for twenty-five years and ran focus groups of plumbing contractors, the fat sons of the guys who started the businesses, and reported on why they got all their safety boots from Weber Industrial Supply, but not their wrenches. He thought if he watched their hands that he might appear as a hunter among men who have never hunted. But it was always hard to get the guys to sit down, after they ate the free focus group pizza and had a few Heinekens. Goetzler would have to ask them five or six times.
    After he tied his shoes, he looked up to meet eyes with Mike Rosen, the lawyer who almost forced him into group therapy. Rosen sat on a stool and talked into his cell phone while he threw towels on the floor. Melanoma scars flecked his back.
    “I paid them extra money to use new paintbrushes,” Rosen said into the phone. “The fucking contractor assured me. I have it in writing.”
    He squinted hard at Goetzler, but Goetzler never rang a bell.
    “How do I know?” Rosen said. “Because the brush hairs are dried in my fucking trim. They come off old brushes like that.”
    Life sure got you, Goetzler thought.
    Mike Rosen left the ACLU in 1974 to take dope cases and cash retainers. The draft was over and his adolescence was never interrupted by Vietnam. He bought the first