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girl is holed up in a local hospital down that way. She got cut up pretty bad by some broken beer bottles left by the side of the motel’s pool. The manager offered to cover their room, but balked at the notion of paying their medical bills, and now the man’s got a hospital tab that’s growing by the minute and no money to pay it. He left his daughter at the hospital with his wife because he didn’t know what else to do. “I got a good case, I know Ido,” he says. “But right now, I’m just trying to get my little girl home.”
    Jay sets his pen across his desk. By now, he’s onto the hustle.
    â€œIf I could just get a little money,” the guy starts. “I’ll pay you back, I swear. Or you can just take it off my bill, soon as we win this.”
    Jay stands and shows him to the door.
    The hooker is the only bright spot on the horizon.
    He tries a couple of phone numbers Ms. Moreland scratched on the back of a gas station receipt, looking for the girlfriend who set up the date between his client and J. T. Cummings, the only person Dana can think of who can corroborate her story. The first number is disconnected. The other is the home of a Mexican woman who sounds to be about eighty. She’s never heard of Dana Moreland. Jay leaves a note on Eddie Mae’s desk: they’ve got to find the witness.
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    He gets home late, after eight o’clock. Bernie is already in bed, snoring.
    She left a plate for him on the stove. Jay takes off his tie and eats in silence at the kitchen table. Afterward, he washes his plate and fork and leaves them in the rack to dry. He tries to clean up some, make himself feel useful around the house, but Bernie has already cleared and washed the pots and pans and wiped down the counter. He cleans out the refrigerator instead, pulling out leftovers from Bernie’s birthday two days ago: barbecued meat, dried and rubbery by now, old potato salad, and beer, a can of which he drinks standing up, holding open the door to the fridge. He burps and reaches for another to kill his lingering headache. He finishes the second beer standing over his stereo,flipping through his LPs, trying to find just the right one. He picks out an Otis record, his favorite, and sets the needle down on track number five.
    I want security, yeah, and I want it at any cost.
    Finally, he sits down with the mail, the bills he’s been avoiding, the kitchen calculator, and his checkbook. He runs the numbers two and three times and comes up short every time. He rearranges the bills, deciding which ones he has to pay now and which ones can wait. What’s left in the register seems hardly enough to eat on, let alone raise a family. He looks around their tiny one-bedroom apartment, cramped as it is with mismatched furniture, law books, and borrowed clothes for the baby, and worries that they’ll never get out of here. Back against the sofa, his financial life spread across the worn carpet, he thinks through his caseload, the open files on his desk, like running lottery numbers in his head, trying to guess which cases to play, where to put his money and time.
    It’s become a game for him, a gamble.
    It didn’t start out this way. One of his first cases out of law school was a police brutality lawsuit against the city. A rookie cop had allegedly roughed up a sixteen-year-old black kid who was nervous and fumbling for his license. The way the boy told it, the cop dragged him from the car, yelled a few epithets, and knocked him to the ground, hard enough that it left bruises and a scar that was still showing by the time they made it to trial. Jay took the case pro bono, going head to head with the city attorney, a white man who had at least a decade of litigation experience over Jay. But Jay had, in so many ways, been preparing for that trial his whole life. His own legal troubles were not so far from his mind. He remembered what it was to sit at a defense table,