Read Online An Invisible Client by Victor Methos - Free Book Online

him go. I pulled up a chair and sat down next to him, staring up at the television.
    “I like your name. Noah Byron. It’s cool.”
    I grinned. “Byron’s not my given name. I changed it as soon as I turned eighteen.”
    “Why?”
    I considered how to phrase my answer. “My dad wasn’t as nice as your dad. So I didn’t want to carry his name. The second I turned eighteen, I went to court and changed it.”
    “Why did you choose Byron?”
    “After a poet, Lord Byron. One of my favorites.” I smiled at the memory. “I don’t think I’ve read poetry for twenty years.”
    He thought for a while. “I like it even more since you chose it. It’s like you picked your own name. Like you picked who you are.”
    “Yeah, I guess I did.”
    He swallowed and reached for a cup of water on the table next to him. I handed it to him.
    “Thanks.” He drank, then held the cup in his fingers. “My mama said there’s a lotta money that we might get if you win your case. I don’t care about the money. I just want enough so my mama doesn’t have to work anymore. She works at a factory in West Valley for a bad man. She quit so she could be with me, but she’ll have to go back. He makes her cry sometimes, but she says she didn’t go to college and can’t get another job. That’s why she says I have to go to college, so I don’t have to work for bad men.” He took another sip, as though the effort of speaking had dehydrated him. “Can you do that? Can you make it so my mama doesn’t have to go back to him?”
    I stared at him. “Yeah. Maybe.”
    He smiled widely. “I knew you were a good man. That’s what my mama said about you. That you were a good man God sent here to help us.”
    I almost chuckled. He completely believed that. Instead, I stood up and looked at the jersey on the wall.
    “I never got on the Jumbotron,” he said.
    “Oh, yeah?”
    “Yeah. I really wanted to make silly faces.”
    “Well, maybe when you get out of here with all your money, you can take your mama there and both be on the Jumbotron.”
    He smiled. “You really think so?”
    “I promise you, buddy, you’ll get there.”
    His entire mood lifted and the smile on his face seemed contagious. “I’ll see ya, Joel.”
    “Noah?” he said as I was walking out.
    “Yeah?”
    “If you wanted to come over tomorrow, we’re gonna have ice cream. My mama’s bringing me ice cream from Farr West. It’s the best ice cream. Will you come?”
    I nodded. “Sure. I’ll come.”

11
    The next day, around noon, I was researching cyanide and its effects on the human body when my phone buzzed. I told Jessica to take a message, whoever it was, but she said it was an attorney I knew named Jeppson. I always took Jepp’s calls.
    “Noah, it’s Jepp. How are ya?”
    “Good, man. What’re you up to?”
    “Oh, just finishing up an arbitration. I just wanted to talk to you really quick about something. Bob Walcott called me.”
    I stopped looking at the computer and leaned back in the chair. “What’d he want?”
    “He said you’re considering something really stupid and asked if I wouldn’t talk some sense into you.”
    Jepp was an old law school professor of mine, and he’d been one of the first people to refer clients to Byron, Val & Keller. His word was gold with me. I wondered how Bob would know something like that.
    “He said that? Those exact words?”
    “More or less.”
    “Why would he care? His firm makes thirty times what we make. He has nothing to be scared of from me.”
    “Well, he’s taking this one kinda personal. He says if you bring a suit and lose, he’s going to petition the Bar for sanctions. Maybe even a suspension for bringing a frivolous suit.”
    “That asshole! I haven’t even filed the suit yet, and he’s threatening to suspend me?”
    “He’s got a lotta connections up there, Noah. If he says an attorney should go before a disciplinary council, they’ll probably give it to him.”
    Sometimes, probably just