“Chet bracken is here to see me?” I ask in disbelief.

Stuffed on a big lunch, I come awake and sit upright in my chair and stare at my telephone as if I expect it to pop up a picture of Blackwell County’s one true whiz bang hotshot criminal attorney, Chester Theodore Bracken, an ugly, short man with jug ears the size of satellite dishes and a paunch he doesn’t bother to hide.

Bracken is the guy you call if you shoot Mother Teresa in a room full of nuns as she is being blessed by the Pope. Oddly enough. Bracken has showed up in my life unannounced once before. He had just picked up a client in the Hart Anderson murder case and rumbled through my office at the Public Defender’s that day like a flash flood, intimidating me with his reputation and overbearing manner. It doesn’t seem to have made much difference that I’m in private practice now. Why doesn’t he just use the telephone like everybody else?

“He’s not Jesus Christ, for God’s sake!” barks Julia, our floor secretary and receptionist, her tone up to her usual snotty standards.

“Are you gonna see him, or do you want me to say you’re too busy crapping in your pants?”

If Julia weren’t right so often, she’d still be intolerable. As a relative of the owner of the building, she dresses and talks as she pleases. Today the magenta sweater covering her breast implants is so tight her nipples look like rivets that have popped out of their holes from metal fatigue. At some perverse level, the lawyers on our floor like Julia and have grown attached to her, as one would a dog with a nasty growl. She can be a bitch, but she’s our bitch. I look down at the blank legal pad in front of me. I had set aside this morning to work on a brief to the Arkansas Supreme Court, but what the hell, it’s a loser anyway-a cocaine deal with the search being the main issue. If the money is right, the temptation is overwhelming to bag the client before he can slither out the door down to someone else’s office.