1 Motor City Shakedown Read Online Free PDF

to interpret as a slight. Older lawyers weren’t above pointing out someone’s inexperience in order to score points in an argument, or to establish pecking order.
    She was opening her mouth to say something when the door to the room swung open and three men crowded in. A gray-haired man in doctor’s scrubs was in the lead, followed by Big Cop.
    Behind them both was a stern, hard-faced man who shouldered his way past the other two and up to the bed where Vernon Pullins’ silent mass lie. Darren watched him, and immediately decided he was a cop. The man was lean and compact, and moved with an athlete’s self-assured grace. More than that, it was his stare. He had the focused, bleak stare that cops get after seeing enough horrible things.
    When the man stared down at Vernon, there was no sympathy within those eyes. If anything, Darren noted, he looked at the comatose giant with unveiled anger-- an agitated and barely restrained hostility. Darren had the alarming notion that if the man had been alone in the room with Vernon Pullins he’d have marched up to the bed and immediately begun strangling Vernon to death.
    The doctor cleared his throat.
    “You really can’t be in here,” he said.
    “I’m that man’s lawyer,” Darren answered absently, still watching the man hovering over the bed.
    “I understand. But he’s in my care, and there is no expectation that he’ll be awake any time soon. He can’t have visitors. Not until I’ve cleared it.”
    Darren nodded vaguely and said to the man at the bedside “Who are you, exactly?”
    The man mumbled something.
    “What’s that?”
    He turned and fixed his furious glare on Darren.
    “I said fuck you,” Allen Phelps hissed. “That’s who I am. Who are you?”
                 
     
    *
     
    Issabella watched the rumpled, unshaven lawyer beside her subtly transform. Darren rounded on the stranger with the spooky voice and the cold eyes. He grew a wide and playful smile, and Issabella didn’t know what to think. He seemed to have grown an inch, when all she wanted to do now was shrink down until she was invisible.
    She didn’t know why she was still in the room, really. It was as if the entire morning was a dream that she could now look back on with clear eyes. She saw herself rushing to the hospital with the intention of convincing Vernon Pullins to let her take his case. She saw herself making rationalizations about blatantly breaching the code of attorney conduct that forbade such solicitations. What had she been thinking?
    All she could come up with now, as she was surrounded by men who didn’t want her in the room at all, was that she had let desperation overrule her good sense. Her mother’s needling, the stack of depositions that never grew thinner no matter how furiously she ran through them, the ominous phallic tower that loomed over her crummy little office—all of it had conspired to push her into a wildly harebrained scheme to somehow solve all her problems by chasing a sensational headline.
    She took a step bac kwards, intending to simply slip quietly out of the room and back to her life.
    “Who am I?” she heard Darren say. “I’m that man’s lawyer. I’m also the guy who’s starting to guess maybe you’re one of the cops who put him in that hospital bed. Is that what this is?”
    The last question he shot at the doctor, who blanched and looked like he wanted to be as far away from the brewing confrontation as Issabella.
    “You let a cop involved in the case against my client come in here?” Darren snapped. “Is that what’s going on? No lawyers allowed, but all the cops on the case can just wander on in?”
    “What? No,” the doctor stammered. “I don’t know this man. I’m only here to tell you…that is, all of you, everybody, needs to leave. Please. Right now. Nobody can be here until I’ve cleared him for visitation.”
    Issabella, without realizing it, had stopped her surreptitious exit of the room to watch