“Who was that you were listening to?” I asked him.

“Um, that was Three Six Mafia.”

“Dirty south?”

“That’s right.”

Over the years, I had become knowledgeable in the subtle distinctions, regional and otherwise, in rap and hip-hop. Across the board, most of my clients listened to it, many of them developing their life strategies from it.

I reached over and picked up the shoebox full of cassette tapes from the Boyleston case and chose one at random. I noted the tape number and the time in the little logbook I kept in the shoebox. I handed the tape over the seat to Earl and he slid it into the dashboard stereo. I didn’t have to tell him to play it at a volume so low that it would amount to little more than background noise. Earl had been with me for three months. He knew what to do.

Roger Boyleston was one of my few court-appointed clients. He was facing a variety of federal drug-trafficking charges. DEA wiretaps on Boyleston’s phones had led to his arrest and the seizure of six kilos of cocaine that he had planned to distribute through a network of dealers. There were numerous tapes-more than fifty hours of recorded phone conversations. Boyleston talked to many people about what was coming and when to expect it. The case was a slam dunk for the government. Boyleston was going to go away for a long time and there was almost nothing I could do but negotiate a deal, trading Boyleston’s cooperation for a lower sentence. That didn’t matter, though. What mattered to me were the tapes. I took the case because of the tapes. The federal government would pay me to listen to the tapes in preparation for defending my client. That meant I would get a minimum of fifty billable hours out of Boyleston and the government before it was all settled. So I made sure the tapes were in heavy rotation whenever I was riding in the Lincoln. I wanted to make sure that if I ever had to put my hand on the book and swear to tell the truth, I could say in good conscience that I played every one of those tapes I billed Uncle Sugar for.