John took a deep breath. It was true that one of John’s state-appointed clients—Hang Nguyen, first-generation Vietnamese-American, seventeen years old and officially tried as an adult in the state of New York—had been indicted on three different counts of solicitation and one egregiously heinous count of sex trafficking that morning. But that was to be expected. Everyone got indicted for everything in Brooklyn. But not everybody got sent to jail in Brooklyn, and that was where John’s job came in. He was a public defender and proud of it.

He considered it a matter of course to sneer at the ADA smirking in his doorway. Though defense attorneys and district attorneys tended to be cut from different cloths, there were plenty of ADAs that John respected, some who he even counted as friends.

Willis wasn’t one of them.

They weren’t enemies by nature, he supposed, but more by endgame. They were born into different worlds and wanted to end up in different worlds too. Crash Willis, with his pocket squares and butter leather shoes, wanted the prestige and notoriety of someday becoming Brooklyn’s DA. He chewed through cases as fast as he could, tough on crime and celebrating every indictment he could smooth-talk out of unsuspecting grand juries.

John just wanted to keep minors out of prison. Willis and John weren’t exactly bosom buddies.

Besides, Willis was one of those assholes who insisted on shortening John’s last name from Modesto-Whitford to just Whitford. John hated that.

In his mind, it was Willis’s way of intentionally reminding John of his father. A small way of insinuating that John’s crusade to defend the innocent rang hollow. At least in Willis’s eyes.

“Well, next comes the fun part,” John said amiably, knowing that Willis had come in here attempting to get a rise out of him. “The fun part” being the hours and hours of underpaid, stress-inducing, nail-biting research, writing, negotiating, coaching, performing and defending of a kid who, in John’s opinion, did not deserve up to thirty-five years behind bars.

“Hey, Crash,” Richie Dear said as he skirted around Willis in the doorway and entered the office he shared with John. “My grandma called—she wants her shoes back.”

John snorted with laughter, pulling his legs back to let Richie pass the eighteen inches he had to go to cram himself at his own desk.

Willis glared at both of them. “Whatever,” he grumbled, turning on his heel and stalking away.

“They don’t call me The Exterminator for nothing,” Richie gloated, leaning across the small room to slam their door closed. “I know how to get rid of pests.”

“Yeah. No one calls you that.”