Normally, he would have billing records to help him. But Slider’s case was on a contingent fee, meaning he didn’t need to generate a bill, at least not at this stage of the case. So all he had were his chicken scratches.

He looked at the case file, to find the documents the client had had to sign.

Putting all that together, he realized the last time he had met with Slider was almost a year earlier, when they were in the initial stages of drafting their pleadings in this case they called Harrison II. Donny dug through the file and found his handwritten notes from that meeting. They were high-level, because he hadn’t needed much information from Slider, but looking at those and the documents Slider had signed helped him remember quite well the discussion they had had.

Slider refused to meet Donny at his office, which was a pain in the ass. Getting around Houston had been bad enough under martial law. Now, even though the checkpoints were gone, the damage from heavy weather and sometimes heavier fighting meant so many streets were closed and sections of town blocked off that most trips took twice as long as they used to, if not longer. Luckily Donny had managed to get himself loaned a pretty nice bicycle from one of his clients, a courier for the underground who had been locked up for information smuggling and was free now but trying to get his record expunged. Donny hadn’t ridden it much, but he did that day, when he decoded Slider’s message and saw where he wanted to meet. He never would have thought riding a bicycle would be the fastest way to get around Houston, or that doing so wearing a suit would improve his mood. He wished he had the time and the knees to take his old skateboard.

Slider had never been willing to come to a law office, unless it was the only path to liberty. So instead, Donny always said why don’t I come to your place. It was only after they had been working together awhile that Donny realized Slider didn’t have a place. He just couch-surfed. Stayed with people in his network. A habit he had developed when he was a wanted man. Sometimes he stayed outside, something he had done as an intermittently homeless kid after his parents were arrested and disappeared, and before he got connected with the Front.

The directions took Donny to a little bungalow just south of downtown, in a spot near a paved stretch of bayou. Donny knew that area because he had fished it after the floods a few times, and seen you could ride it like a Veloway when the water was down. And that day there was just a trickle, though that didn’t stop the overflying geese from following its path north.