Read Online Con Law by Mark Gimenez - Free Book Online Page A

the fiftieth floor.’
    ‘I’m going to write wills.’
    ‘Why? That’s boring.’
    She shrugged. ‘Not a lot of danger in estate planning.’
    ‘You ever meet an heir cut out of his daddy’s will?’
    They came tolaw school without a clue what it meant to be a lawyer. It wasn’t sitting in a fancy office poring over discovery for eight hours and billing ten. Being a lawyer was about helping people in need. Real people, not rich people. Book was determined to teach his interns that the law wasn’t found in the casebooks but out here in the world beyond the classroom. They came to him as law students; they would leave as lawyers.
    ‘Professor, can I ask you a question?’
    He chewed the jerky and nodded.
    ‘Why are you doing this? You read that letter then jump onto this motorcycle and ride to the middle of a desert? And drag me along? Why? Why do you care so much about Nathan Jones?’
    ‘He was my student four years ago.’
    ‘How many students have you taught? A few thousand? What makes him so special?’
    ‘He was also my intern.’
    ‘For how long?’
    ‘One month.’
    ‘You knew him for one month four years ago, and now you’re dropping everything to help him?’
    Book stared at the distant ridgeline and thought of Nathan Jones.
    ‘He saved my life.’
    She frowned. ‘
How?
’
    ‘Long story. And we’ve still got a long ride.’
    She regarded him for a long moment while she finished off the granola bar. Then she said, ‘Next time, get the kind with the chocolate coating.’
    Book donned the doo-rag and sunglasses then swung a leg over the Harley.
    ‘You ready?’
    ‘No.’
    But she buckedherself up then strapped on the goggles, pulled on the helmet, and climbed on behind him. He started the engine, shifted into gear, and accelerated past roadside signs that read ‘Burn Ban in Effect’ and ‘Water 4 Sale’ and onto the long black ribbon of asphalt disappearing into the distant horizon.
    One hundred thirty years before, Hanna Maria Strobridge saw the same distant horizon from her seat inside her husband’s private railroad car. His name was James Harvey Strobridge, and he built railroad lines for the Galveston, Harrisburg, and San Antonio Railroad. He had built the very line they rode on that day. Hanna had ridden in that private car from California to Texas; she had even been at Promontory Point in the Utah Territory for the driving of the golden spike in 1869 when the first transcontinental railroad was completed. At the time, James was the foreman for Central Pacific Railroad, which built the track eastward from California. After a moment, Hanna dropped her eyes from the horizon to her book, Feodora Dostoyevsky’s latest,
The Brothers Karamazov
. She fancied Russian novels and striped skirts.
    Two hours later, the train stopped at a water depot bordered by three mountain ranges. Hanna had no idea where they were because the depot had no name. Her husband, as superintendent of railroad construction, possessed the sole and absolute authority to name every water depot and other unnamed locale within the railroad’s right-of-way. But he had no imagination for naming persons or places, so he had delegated his authority to his wife.
    ‘Well, Hanna, what are you gonna name this little no-count place?’
    She pondered a moment and thought of the servant in her book named Martha Ignatyevna. Of course, ‘Martha’ was the English translation; in Russian, her name was—
    ‘Marfa.’
    And so it was.
    ‘And that’s howMarfa got its name,’ Book said.
    From the back seat: ‘Fascinating.’
    Sitting four hundred miles due west of Austin, two hundred miles southeast of El Paso, sixty miles north of the Rio Grande, and a mile above sea level, the high desert land colloquially known as
el despoblado
—‘the unpopulated’—and geologically as the Marfa Plateau is generally unfit for human occupancy. It’s not bad for cattle, if it rains. If it doesn’t, it’s not so hospitable to them either.