“I won’t ask if you want one. Disgusting habit, I know. But I started smoking when I was a teenager, there wasn’t much else to do in the town I came from. And I started smoking again in prison, same issue,” he says. “Haven’t been able to kick it since. When my wife was still with us, I’d try. Got those nicotine patches. Have you seen those? They help if you have the discipline, but I don’t pretend to anymore. Not since I lost my wife… What’s the point? Charlie gives me grief about it, but there isn’t much he can do. I figure I’m an old man. Something else will get me first.”

He puts the cigarette to his mouth, silver lighter in hand.

“I’d like to tell you a little story, if you’ll indulge me,” he says. “Have you heard of Harris Gray?”

“I don’t think so,” I say.

He lights up, takes a long inhale.

“No, of course not. Why would you have? He introduced me to my former employers,” he says. “He was twenty-one when I first met him and very low on the totem pole. If he had been any more senior, the gentlemen at the head of the organization would have called in one of their in-house lawyers to help him out and I wouldn’t be sitting across from you now. But he wasn’t. And so I was called in to defend him by the city of Austin. Random assignment sent to the public defender’s office on a night I was working late. Harris was caught with some OxyContin. Not a ton, but enough. He was charged with intent to distribute. Which, needless to say, was his intent.” He takes another drag. “My point is, I did my job, maybe a little too well. Usually Harris gets locked up for a period of time, thirty-six months, maybe seventy-two in front of the wrong judge. But I got him off.”

“How did you do that?” I ask.

“The way you do anything well,” he says. “I paid attention. And the prosecutor didn’t expect that. He was sloppy. He didn’t disclose some of the exculpatory evidence, so I got the case dismissed. And Harris went free. After that, his employers asked to meet me. They were impressed. They wanted to tell me so. And they wanted me to do it again for other members of their organization who found themselves in trouble.”

I don’t know what he expects me to say, but he looks at me, perhaps just to make sure I’m listening.