Read Southern Men: Ballad of a Texas Rose for Free Online

completely deserted as Clara drove out towards the Texxon plant. She knew it was unwise to go alone, sure, but there wasn’t anybody else in the world she could have asked to go with her anyway.
    Clara was a lawyer, having moved south from New York almost a year ago to elope with her new man. The relationship hadn’t worked out so she moved on down to San Antonio and set up a practice. And then the biggest case of her life came along.
    It all started in a little town called Prudence in the mid nineteen seventies, where a man named Ace Cooper and the oil empire his family had ruled over for almost a century started a campaign of surreptitious waste dumping on the outskirts of the town. The effects of the pollution on the townspeople were massive, so much so that they would spend the next forty years fighting for justice.
    And that was where Clara came in. When she read in the paper that the community of Prudence were running out of money to spend on their case she stepped forward and offered her services for free. She believed in the cause and hell, the publicity would serve as a bonus for the amount of leg work she had to put in anyway. It was exciting.
    But after taking an early lead, the case had slowed down in recent months, bogged under by Cooper’s crack team of lawyers and their campaign of underhanded delays and misdirections . Suddenly Clara was realizing why the case had taken so long to progress in the first place. Ace had the means to just keep on throwing money at the table while his legal team pulled every trick in the book to stall the case for as long as it took for his opponents to run out of money. That was his game and that was exactly what he’d been doing, for over thirty years now.
    Clara wasn’t in it for the money – something Ace would never understand – but that didn’t mean she’d be able to go on indefinitely pleading the case. She needed to make money some way and if she was doing this one for free then she wouldn’t have as much time to do the work that actually paid. And she needed to eat.
    But then a breakthrough came. Or at least she believed it would be a breakthrough, because right now she didn’t know for sure just yet.
    That night when she’d returned to her office after eating in the diner down the street she’d found a small note wedged in the doorway.
    “ Miss Silverman ,” it read, “ Texxon Refinery, Mann Road, tonight at midnight. There’s an opening in the fence by the south exit. Come alone. I have information for you that will ensure you win this case .”
    That was it. There was no signature.
    After reading the note, still standing in the doorway of her office, Clara looked at the pile of paperwork stacked up on her desk that she’d intended for the rest of the night’s consideration. She looked back at the note in her hand. She checked her watch – it was half past eleven pm. Five minutes later she was in her car.
    As she hurtled through the darkness of the desert at night, she reflected again that it wasn’t necessarily the safest thing in the world to be going alone to the meet, without any idea whatsoever about who had actually summoned her there in the first place. But there was nobody she could have called (at least not without a lot of awkwardness involved), even just to let somebody know where she would be for the night in case she didn’t come back.
    So if the whole thing was a set-up? Well then she’d just have to deal with that when the time came.
    Up ahead she saw the huge compound that housed the San Antonio Texxon oil refinery, beyond the tall black fence the factory buildings stretched out across the whole valley ahead. It was almost like a small town of its own. She cruised on, the road now running parallel to the fence, as she made her way towards the south entrance.
    She passed the road leading up to the gates and continued driving for another couple of minutes before pulling into the side of the road and turning off the lights. She killed