And that meant Shawn C., the guard, would be parked out in the hall, looking through the chicken-wire window the entire time that that homicidal maniac who’d been arrested for cage fighting was in with their girl.

If that motherfucker so much as breathed wrong around her, well . . . suffice it to say that in Billy’s shop, no one was above a little corrective action: All the guards and staff knew about the dark corner in the basement where there were no security cameras and no one could hear an asshole scream when payback turned into a bitch.

Billy leaned back in his chair and shook his head. Nice girl in there, real nice. Course, given what had happened to her brother . . . Hard lives had a way of making for nice, didn’t they.

Grier Childe sat in front of a stainless-steel table on a cold stainless-steel chair that was across from another stainless-steel chair. All of the furniture was bolted to the floor and the only other fixtures were the security camera up in the corner and an overhead lightbulb that had a cage around it. The walls were concrete block that had been painted so many times it was nearly wallpaper smooth, and the air smelled like rotgut floor cleaner, the cologne of the last attorney who’d been in the room, and old cigarettes.

The place couldn’t have been more different from where she usually worked. The Boston offices of Palmer, Lords, Childe, Stinston & Dodd looked like a museum of nineteenth-century furniture and artwork. PLCS&D had no armed guards, no metal detectors, and nothing was screwed into place so it couldn’t be stolen or thrown at somebody.

There the uniforms came from Brooks Brothers and Burberry.

She’d been doing pro bono public defending for about two years, and it had taken her at least twelve months to get in good with the front desk and the staff and the guards. But now it was like old-home week whenever she came here, and she honestly loved the people.

Lot of good folks doing hard jobs in the system.

Opening up the file of her newest client, she reviewed the charges, intake form, and history: Isaac Rothe, age twenty-six, apartment down on Tremont Street. Unemployed. No priors. Arrested along with eight others as part of a bust the night before on an underground gambling and fighting ring. No warrant needed because the fighters were trespassing on private property. According to the police report, her client was in the ring at the time the police infiltrated. Apparently the guy he’d fought was getting treated at Mass General—

It’s nine o’clock on a Saturday morning. . . . Do you know where your life is?

Keeping her head down, Grier squeezed her eyes shut. “Not now, Daniel.”