CHAPTER 9
“Hey, it’s not like it’s the end of the world, old buddy-roo,” Ellis Burke said into his cell phone as he inched along in the heavy traffic on the interstate. “Trust me, this is just a minor setback. We’ll still get everything we want from those bastards at the insurance company. You remember everything I told you, right? You don’t ever step outside the house without that collar around your neck? You stupid asshole!…No, no, not you, Mitch. I’m talkin’ to this guy in front of me who won’t get off his brakes…Yeah, you just do like I say, and payday’s a-comin’…Hey, who’s the lawyer here, you or me? I’ve handled hundreds of these cases. Thousands! Those insurance sons o’ bitches’ll cave. You’ll see…Okay. No, that’s all right, no need to apologize. Of course you worry about it. You’re out of work. Your family’s future depends on this settlement.”
So did the next payment on Burke’s Caddy, but he didn’t say anything about that to the client. It was always best to keep it all about them, and never remind them that he stood to collect a big chunk of change from this case, too. He needed the money as much as Mitch Sherman did; otherwise, he was gonna have to choose between the car payment and the child support payment. Couldn’t make ’em both this month.
But he was confident that the insurance company’s lawyers would give in once they’d strutted around and acted like hard-asses for a while. They had to make it look like they were worth that big retainer the insurance company paid them. Ellis Burke didn’t know why, instead of paying off legions of high-priced attorneys, insurance companies didn’t just deal fairly with the folks who filed claims against them. Hell, they had all the money in the world to start with. It was only fair that they spread some of it around.
“All right, Mitch, all right, I’m glad you called. I’ll be in touch…Nah, at this point, we can’t really expect any movement until next week. It’s Thanksgiving in a couple of days. People are already thinking about turkey and football and Christmas shopping, instead of lawsuits. Gimme a call on, like, Wednesday if you haven’t heard anything from me, okay? Okay-doke. Bye-bye.”
Burke closed the phone, slid it into his shirt pocket, and thought, Asshole.
He told himself he shouldn’t be that way. It wasn’t Mitch’s fault that he’d been born and raised in a state full of gun-nut, execution-loving assholes…and assholes who didn’t know how to drive at that.
“Can’t you just go on and get out of the friggin’ way!” Burke shouted at the drivers clogging the highway in front of him. Traffic hadn’t come to a dead stop, but it was really creeping along. Burke wished he was back in New York, where people had the good sense to use public transportation. You’d think with all the ugly, empty space in Texas, the highways wouldn’t be so damned crowded.
That was because too many “damn Yankees” had moved down here, to hear the local yokels tell it. He got fed up with them getting mad whenever somebody with some common sense—namely him or somebody else from an actual civilized state—tried to explain that you couldn’t keep doing things the same way just because that was the way Cousin Zeke and Uncle Jed had done them for the last hundred and fifty years. Frickin’ Wild West lunatics with their gun racks and their racist Confederate Rebel Nazi bumper stickers and their love affair with the death penalty. What was he doing down here in this Lone Star Insane Asylum anyway?
Fighting for justice, that’s what.
He couldn’t let himself forget that. His was the voice of blue-state reason and sanity, crying out in the red-state wilderness.
When his wife had said that she wanted to move back home, back to Texas, at first he’d said forget it, that he wouldn’t be caught dead in such a backward place. But since she was pregnant, she wanted to be closer to her mama—and that was the way she had phrased it, too, closer to her mama—and Burke supposed he could understand that. So he’d agreed, figuring that as smart as he was, he could run rings around those cracker lawyers down South.
What he hadn’t reckoned with was the good ol’ boy network that ran from the very bottom to the very top of the Texas legal system. The bastards shut him out because he wasn’t one of them. He couldn’t get the important cases, the cases where he might be able to make an actual difference and do some good for the common man.
No, he was reduced to taking on personal-injury lawsuits on a contingency basis, and not even the big-money tier of those. He supplemented what he made there with DUI and drug-possession and hot-check defenses, which pretty much assured that he was stuck dealing with world-class bubbas and bubbettes. He told himself that he was doing some good by getting fair settlements for people who deserved them…
But it was a far cry from saving the world as he’d set out to do, wasn’t it?
Since the traffic wasn’t moving, he glanced at himself in the rearview mirror. When had his face gotten so broad and red and beefy? When had those lines appeared around his eyes? What the hell was that gray doing in hair that was supposed to be thick and black? He’d been in Texas less than ten years, and already that handsome young liberal firebrand who had come out of law school in New York was gone.
He never should have listened to Rebecca. He should have insisted that they stay right where they were. If they had, he would have gone into politics by now. He’d be a congressman, or maybe even a senator. He’d be in Washington, where he could really accomplish something, instead of creeping along a crowded interstate north of Fort Worth, just another ambulance-chasing shyster.
And the thing that really sucked about it was that Rebecca was gone. She’d gotten tired of him and left, taking their daughter with her. Burke had had no shot at getting custody, not with the affairs he’d had and the drunken-driving charge—even though he’d been able to get it dismissed—and all the other crap Rebecca had threatened to dredge up if she had to. He went along with what she wanted, so that Vicky wouldn’t have to be dragged into a nasty court fight.
And if he wanted to be honest about it, he wouldn’t have had a whole lot of ammunition to use against Rebecca anyway. She was a smart woman…just not smart enough to realize that she shouldn’t have married some handsome young crusading attorney when she went off to New York to study art.
Burke took both hands off the steering wheel since the car wasn’t moving anyway, spread his fingers, and said, “Where the hell did all these people come from anyway?”
When he and his wife and daughter had moved north of Fort Worth, this area wasn’t even the suburbs. It was country. So much country that the quiet at night creeped Burke out. But DFW Airport was close, and the cities of Fort Worth and Dallas weren’t much farther away. They called it a megalopolis now, stretching for almost a hundred miles from east to west, and still growing.
In recent years that growth had exploded northward, taking in Denton, a picturesque little university town. Alliance Airport, a sprawling complex that was an airfreight hub for the entire region, had gobbled up thousands of acres of what had once been farm and ranch land. A NASCAR track was built not far away. Housing and shopping, hotels and restaurants had soon followed.
Just in the time that Ellis Burke had lived here, the country had disappeared, replaced by mile after mile of the worst urban sprawl. The air pollution and traffic were so bad that people were already starting to call the area Little L.A.—but it didn’t have any of L.A.’s benefits because it was populated by a horde of mouth-breathing rednecks.
Burke did his best not to let them corrupt him with their racist attitudes and rampant consumerism. He still read the New York Times instead of any of the local rags, and he donated money to the local PBS station every time they had a pledge drive. He listened to NPR. He wished he could drive a more fuel-efficient car, maybe a hybrid, but he’d found that he needed the Caddy for his image. People down here didn’t take a lawyer seriously unless he drove a Cadillac or a Lincoln. But he tried to fight back with bumper stickers that savaged the previous administration and boosted the current one. He’d