The Lincoln Lawyer: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

is that with the shares you earned in the company you really made more.”
    “Right.”
    One of Roulet’s cellmates came up to the bars next to him. The other white man. He had an agitated manner, his hands in constant
     motion, moving from hips to pockets to each other in desperate grasps.
    “Hey, man, I need a lawyer, too. You got a card?”
    “Not for you, pal. They’ll have a lawyer out there for you.”
    I looked back at Roulet and waited a moment for the hype to move away. He didn’t. I looked back at him.
    “Look, this is private. Could you leave us alone?”
    The hype made some kind of motion with his hands and shuffled back to the corner he had come from. I looked back at Roulet.
    “What about charitable organizations?” I asked.
    “What do you mean?” Roulet responded.
    “Are you involved in any charities? Do you give to any charities?”
    “Yeah, the company does. We give to Make a Wish and a runaway shelter in Hollywood. I think it’s called My Friend’s Place
     or something like that.”
    “Okay, good.”
    “Are you going to get me out?”
    “I’m going to try. You’ve got some heavy charges on you—I checked before coming back here—and I have a feeling the DA is going
     to request no bail, but this is good stuff. I can work with it.”
    I indicated my notes.
    “No bail?” he said in a loud, panicked voice.
    The others in the cell looked in his direction because what he had said was their collective nightmare. No bail.
    “Calm down,” I said. “I said that is what she is going to go for. I didn’t say she would get it. When was the last time you
     were arrested?”
    I always threw that in out of the blue so I could watch their eyes and see if there was going to be a surprise thrown at me
     in court.
    “Never. I’ve never been arrested. This whole thing is—”
    “I know, I know, but we don’t want to talk about that here, remember?”
    He nodded. I looked at my watch. Court was about to start and I still needed to talk to Maggie McFierce.
    “I’m going to go now,” I said. “I’ll see you out there in a few minutes and we’ll see about getting you out of here. When
     we are out there, don’t say anything until you check with me. If the judge asks you how you are doing, you check with me.
     Okay?”
    “Well, don’t I say ‘not guilty’ to the charges?”
    “No, they’re not going to even ask you that. Today all they do is read you the charges, talk about bail and set a date for
     an arraignment. That’s when we say ‘not guilty.’ So today you say nothing. No outbursts, nothing. Got that?”
    He nodded and frowned.
    “Are you going to be all right, Louis?”
    He nodded glumly.
    “Just so you know,” I said. “I charge twenty-five hundred dollars for a first appearance and bail hearing like this. Is that
     going to be a problem?”
    He shook his head no. I liked that he wasn’t talking. Most of my clients talk way too much. Usually they talk themselves right
     into prison.
    “Good. We can talk about the rest of it after you are out of here and we can get together in private.”
    I closed my leather folder, hoping he had noticed it and was impressed, then stood up.
    “One last thing,” I said. “Why’d you pick me? There’s a lot of lawyers out there, why me?”
    It was a question that didn’t matter to our relationship but I wanted to test Valenzuela’s veracity.
    Roulet shrugged.
    “I don’t know,” he said. “I remembered your name from something I read in the paper.”
    “What did you read about me?”
    “It was a story about a case where the evidence got thrown out against some guy. I think it was drugs or something. You won
     the case because they had no evidence after that.”
    “The Hendricks case?”
    It was the only one I could think of that had made the papers in recent months. Hendricks was another Road Saint client and
     the sheriff’s department had put a GPS bug on his Harley to track his deliveries. Doing that on public roads was