When Lecker’s limousine arrived at Lou’s house, it was already surrounded by cops and firefighters. Most of the cops were private police—not the ones on Lou’s private detail, or the ones on retainer to the gated community where the house was, but the company that had been retained by the breakaway municipality that the wealthy people of the wider neighborhood had formed to protect themselves in the aftermath of the uprising. The backyard mercenaries could not keep the taxman away, but they could keep the refugees and thieves at bay.

They could not prevent a father from welcoming his daughter home, though, no matter what she had done. Or what friends she brought home with her. Or what she had in her luggage.

Donny looked at the house. It was even huger than he had imagined, more compound than house, in the style of an all-American suburban home of your childhood memory that has been crossed with a Spanish castle and then injected with some growth hormone and wrapped in precious stone harvested from faraway mountains. The polished front wall was forbidding, but when the lights of the patrol cars hit the tall thin window over the front door you could get a glimpse at the cavernous hall inside, and even make out the colors of some big contemporary painting on the wall where the lords of yore would have hung a tapestry.

“What are their demands?” asked Lecker, speaking to the officer in charge.

The cop read off the list. It was about what Donny expected. Lawyers, guns, and money, not in that order. Transfer of all of the trust funds, release of prisoners whose convictions for crimes in the uprising had been outside the Compact, amnesty for the kids inside who had taken Lou hostage.

Lecker and the cops were debating how to respond when the first bomb went off, and the top floor erupted in flames. You could hear the gasp of the air around the building being suddenly consumed by the heat, and the gasp of the grizzled old brain busters who thought they had seen it all. It took a moment before the firefighters mobilized, and the officer in charge told Lecker it was time to move in.

“Let me try,” said Donny, not really asking. But they let him do it. Walk right up to the front door, ring the doorbell, and walk right in.

Have you heard the one about the lawyer in hell? said the fireman.

58

That Friday, Harrison v. AMR was the first thing on the docket in Judge Larriva’s court.

Karen Keller had just the one junior associate with her, and she could have handled it alone. Her clients stayed home.