Read Mickey Haller 4 - The Fifth Witness for Free Online Page A

This might have been the highest amount so far, but I doubted it would be the last time I was asked.
    “I can’t do that, Lisa. Number one, I don’t have that kind of money, and number two, it’s a conflict of interest for an attorney to provide bail for his own client. So I can’t help you there. What I think you need to do is get used to the idea that you are going to be incarcerated at least through your trial. The bail is set at two million and that means you would need at least two hundred thousand just to get a bond. It’s a lot of money, Lisa, and if you had it, I’d want half of it to pay for the defense. So either way you’d still be in jail.”
    I smiled but she didn’t see any humor in what I was telling her.
    “When you put up a bond like that, do you get it back after the trial?” she asked.
    “No, that goes to the bail bondsman to cover his risk because he’d be the one on the hook for the whole two million if you were to flee.”
    Lisa looked incensed.
    “I’m not going to flee! I am going to stay right here and fight this thing. I just want to be with my son. He needs his mother.”
    “Lisa, I was not referring to you specifically. I was just telling you how bail and bonds work. Anyway, the deputy behind you has been very patient. You need to go with him and I need to get back to work on your defense. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
    I nodded to the deputy and he moved in to take Lisa back to the courthouse lockup. As they went through the steel door off the side of the custody pen Lisa looked back at me with scared eyes. There was no way she could know what lay ahead, that this was only the start of what would be the most harrowing ordeal of her life.
    Andrea Freeman had stopped to talk with a fellow prosecutor and that allowed me to catch up with her as she was leaving the courtroom.
    “Do you want to grab a cup of coffee and talk?” I asked as I came up beside her.
    “Don’t you need to talk to your people?”
    “My people?”
    “All the people with cameras. They’ll be lined up outside the door.”
    “I’d rather talk to you and we could even discuss media guidelines if you would like.”
    “I think I can spare a few minutes. You want to go down to the basement or come back with me to the office for some DA coffee?”
    “Let’s hit the basement. I’d be looking over my shoulder too much in your office.”
    “Your ex-wife?”
    “Her and others, though my ex and I are in a good phase right now.”
    “Glad to hear it.”
    “You know Maggie?”
    There were at least eighty deputy DAs working out of Van Nuys.
    “In passing.”
    We left the courtroom and stood side by side in front of the assembled media to announce that we would not be commenting on the case at this early stage. As we headed to the elevators at least six reporters, most of them from out of town, shoved business cards into my hand—New York Times, CNN, Dateline, Salon, and the holy grail of them all, 60 Minutes. In less than twenty-four hours I had gone from scrounging $250-a-month foreclosure cases in South L.A. to being lead defense attorney on a case that threatened to be the signature story of this financial epoch.
    And I liked it.
    “They’re gone,” Freeman said once we were on the elevator. “You can wipe the shit-eating grin off your face.”
    I looked at her and really smiled.
    “That obvious, huh?”
    “Oh, yeah. All I can say is, enjoy it while you can.”
    That was a not-so-subtle reminder of what I was facing with this case. Freeman was an up-and-comer in the DA’s office and some said she would someday run for the top job herself. The conventional wisdom was to attribute her rise and rep in the prosecutor’s office to her skin color and to internal politics. To suggest she got the good cases because she was a minority who was the protégée of another minority. But I knew this was a deadly mistake. Andrea Freeman was damn good at what she did and I had the winless record against her to prove it.