As he stepped through the courtroom doors that Friday morning at 9:27 a.m., Donny found the Honorable Laura O. Larriva already seated at her bench, and every other player at their place. When she saw Donny, the judge broke away from her off-the-record sidebar with defense counsel, and then pulled back the sleeve of her black robe to look at her own Rolex, a gesture whose real purpose was as clear as the big government clock on the wall.

“You know being a lawyer isn’t like being a musician, Mr. Kimoe,” said the judge, addressing him with the formality the courtroom and its transcript required, even though they had known each other on a collegial if not chummy first-name basis for more than a decade. “Keeping them waiting does not make them want to hear from you more.”

“I should have had the good sense to scalp my tickets while there was still demand,” said Karen Keller, the lead lawyer for the private prison company Donny was suing, who was sitting at the opposite table with her pinstriped entourage from Polson & Chevalier. Donny felt a tremor of anxiety wondering what Karen and the judge, who knew each other even better, had been talking about off the record while they waited for him.

The judge laughed. “And now you have me trying to remember if I have ever heard Donny Kimoe sing.”

“I did once,” said Karen. “Three years ago, when they had the bad idea to host karaoke night at the state bar convention.”

The self-disgust that came on as the scene cued up in Donny’s head was driven not so much by the cringeworthy memory of his wasted performance as the reminder that he spent so much time fraternizing with the enemy during his years fighting the regime.

“What did he sing?” said the judge.

“‘Ebb Tide,’ if you must know,” said Donny, embracing the fool. That was the role the system liked him to play—sometimes to his advantage. “A prescient and underappreciated evocation of amorous melancholy in a drowning world.”

“That was just the warm-up,” said Karen. “Before he got all punk rock. And then degenerated into political rants like some mic-hogging Oscar winner. Best performance as a burned-out lawyer who can’t win a case and blames the system.”

Judge Larriva and Karen both chuckled. They had probably been joking about him before he got there. They had worked together at P&C before the judge went on the bench, and now Karen and her partners were the judge’s most reliable campaign contributors. The only good thing about that setup was you knew the only bribes Judge Larriva took were legal ones.

Donny shrugged. “There may be a few videos still out there in circulation if you really want to see it, Your Honor. And I’m pretty sure there’s one from the same night, of Ms. Keller and Bridget Kelly channeling the Red River Girls, big-hair wigs and all.”