Unbreakable (City Lights, #2)(13)

“Okay, so how about us?”

Inexplicably, my heart tripped a little over that word as it came out of his mouth. “Us…?”

He gestured to indicate our fellow hostages. “We’re in your jury pool.”

“Oh, right,” I said, mentally kicking myself. Damn, Gardener, get a grip.

“Just to pass the time. How about Roy?”

“Are you sure I’m not interrupting your conversation with Miss Patel?” That came out much more bitchy than I’d intended. Possessive. I struggled to come up with a recovery but Cory didn’t seem to have noticed.

He glanced at Frankie on the other side of the door and said in an undertone, “She’s on the phone with the cops.”

“Right now? How…?” Then I remembered Amita had been talking with her Bluetooth device. “She’s been on the line with them since the beginning?”

He nodded.

“What if Frankie finds it? He’ll go ballistic.”

“Maybe. But if they take her cell phone too far out of range, it’ll go dark anyway. So far, she’s been able to give the police a bunch of information on our hosts. Pretty damn smart.”

“Yeah,” I muttered. “Very.”

“Hey.” Cory nudged me gently with his elbow and said quietly, “So let’s hear it. Mr. Roy Morgenstern is in your jury pool. Do you keep him or ditch him?”

“I, uh, well, it depends,” I said, refocusing my attention. “If I were suing a corporation for some wrongdoing, especially if the company could stand to pay huge damages, I’d dismiss him first. Before he even sat down.”

“When would you keep him?”

“If I represented the corporation. In that instance, I’d pray they make him foreman.”

Cory’s smile slipped. “Do you often take cases like that? Big corporations against a little guy?”

I shifted against the wall. “I take the cases I believe I can win.”

“What if the winning side isn’t the right side?”

“There isn’t right or wrong, except in the eyes of the law.”

“Yeah, but come on. There’s a gray area…”

“There’s no gray area,” I said, trying to keep my tone neutral. “You can’t let emotion get in the way, or sympathy. You have to put all that aside and look at the letter of the law. Period.”

“Okay, but what if the little guy is right—morally speaking—but his case is weak. You know? Where the deck was stacked against him. David and Goliath, that sort of thing.”

“Yes, I’ve seen that,” I said slowly. Munro vs. Hutchinson, I thought, although in this case David was a family-owned hardware chain and Goliath an odious little man who barely cleared five-foot-four.

“What I’m asking,” Cory said, “is who do you fight for?”

I stiffened. Don’t let him rattle you. He has no idea how hard you work or how complicated it all is. Yet the details of my Munro case scratched around my mind like nettles. “I told you I fight for the person who hires me. If I agree to take their case, that means I think they have a good one.”

“No matter what?”

I crossed my arms over my chest. “It’s a lot more complicated than what you see on TV or in the movies.”

Cory nodded, mulling this over. “Okay, so what about me?” he asked finally.

“You mean in a David vs. Goliath case?”

“Yeah.”

I looked up at him and suddenly I felt a bit lost. His eyes were like dark pools, which held a gentleness that was incongruous with his rugged appearance. The talent that served me so well in the courtroom locked in on Cory Bishop, and I saw kindness, honor. A man who rarely complained and who didn’t stand for bullshit. A man who meant what he said when he gave his word. A man who would risk his own safety to help others, but who would rather eat glass than ask for help for himself.

At the time, I had no way of knowing how much of what my courtroom intuition told me was true, but I wasn’t considered a prodigy for nothing. Beneath Cory’s broad chest was the proverbial heart of gold, beating a steady, solid pulse of goodness and integrity. I would have staked my career on it.

“I’d dismiss you immediately.”

He absorbed this, seemed to be absorbing me in much the same way I had been taking him in, and then he laughed lightly to break the strange tension.

“Oh, ouch. Kick me to the curb.”

I smiled faintly. “They don’t call me the Shark Lady for nothing.”

“Who calls you that?”

“It’s a reputation I have, down at Superior Court.”

He frowned as if he didn’t like the sound of it. “And that’s a good thing?”

I used to think so. Until this moment. I gave myself a shake, vowing to stop letting this man unravel my thoughts and feelings with just a word. A look.

“My father was a great litigator,” I said. “The best. They called him the Great White and now I’m following in his footsteps. Or I hope to, anyway.”

“He must be proud of you,” Cory said, a strange melancholy flashing over his face then gone again. “But you don’t look like a shark to me.”

I could find no response to that, and silence fell between us. Cory looked lost in his own thoughts for a bit before saying, “It’s pretty expensive to hire a lawyer, right?”