legal web such as the one that had brought her mother down, forcing her to sell the small house that was all she had after her husband, a driver for the transit authority, had been killed in a freak bus accident. She’d been forced to sell because the relatives of the people who had died in that accident had sued not only the transit authority, but the family of the man they felt was responsible for the accident.
She was going to be late, Sarajane thought, annoyed at the minutes that had somehow managed to disappear. Grabbing her purse, she hurried out the door, heading to the parking garage where she kept her car. It seemed ironic to her that, after having grown up hating all lawyers, she found herself voluntarily working for them. Someday, when she had the time, she was going to have her head examined.
Someday. But not today.
Chapter Two
You win some, you lose some.
The old adage echoed in Jordan’s head as he made his way down the streets of a section of Portland he rarely, if ever, passed through.
The problem was, he didn’t like losing. Ever. Granted, it wasn’t something he was accustomed to doing, certainly not in the courtroom. And not in the bedroom, either.
But he’d kept his cool and said, “Perhaps another time,” when he’d broken the news to Gina over the phone after he’d left Jenny and Eric’s house yesterday. Gina Rivers, the model whose face graced a hundred magazine covers and whose body was considered near-perfect by every breathing male between the ages of ten and a hundred, was the woman who was to meet him in Hawaii. The woman he had intended to take his now-aborted vacation with. When he’d called her about the change in plans, she’d made a few sympathetic noises about how charitable he was being to his little sister, then coolly told him not to be concerned about ruining her plans.
Apparently she’d had someone waiting in the wings all along. There was a prince from one of those tiny principalities no one outside of Jeopardy paid much attention to who’d been after her to rendezvous with him for quite some time now. Since he was available at a moment’s notice, she saw no reason not to have him “fill in” as she’d put it.
Obviously all men were merely interchangeable bodies to her. Jordan didn’t particularly like being replaced so effortlessly. Granted there was no huge romance in the offing with this woman, no future, really, but he had anticipated sharing a good time with the supermodel for the space of three weeks.
For just a second, as he continued driving, the shallowness of his social life stared him in the face. He admitted, in the privacy of his mind, that he was just the slightest bit weary of beautiful, vapid women. Yes, a good many of them were experts at setting the sheets on fire, but once they were in a vertical position, there was not much to go on. Certainly not much in common with him. He found himself a little envious of Eric. Jenny was pretty and she had a soul, not the easiest combination to come across.
Still, he did enjoy himself, and he had been looking forward to this vacation, to shedding the responsibilities that he took very seriously and to just having a little mindless fun and relaxation for twenty-one days.
“You really do owe me big-time, Jen,” he murmured under his breath as he craned his neck to make out the faded addresses that graced the fronts of less than half the stores and buildings he passed.
It was hard to imagine, the way the streets were now, that this area had ever been new. The buildings looked as if they had been standing, enduring the less-than-clement Portland weather, for the last century or so.
Here and there Jordan saw half-hearted attempts at renovations, seemingly doomed before they were begun. Cheap paint was slapped onto surfaces to make them look newer than they were and to hide the multitude of flaws.
Oh well, he wasn’t here for the view or a tour, he was here for Jenny.
Jenny, the pure of heart, he thought with a smile.
He supposed his sister was right when she insisted that this was their duty. Growing up, they had both always had so much, had never wanted for anything. The best education, the best of everything, really. It only seemed right to try to pay some of it back.
This, Jordan decided, would fill his pro bono quota for the next year.
Maybe longer, he amended, slowing his car down even more as he realized that he was looking at the storefront office where he’d agreed to spend the next three weeks, shepherding the lost and the confused through the maze known as their legal system.
The sign in the window, which Jenny told him had once displayed the wares of an independent clothing store, brightly proclaimed: Advocate Aid, Inc., in bold black letters on gleaming white poster board. It only made the surrounding area appear that much more dingy and forlorn.
To Jenny’s credit—at least, he assumed as much—the display window was dust-free and clean, unlike the displays belonging to the businesses on either side of the legal aid office. To the right, ironically enough, he thought, was a pawn shop. The window was crammed with all sorts of things that had once been precious to someone, and that were now being sold in an effort to keep body and soul together. From the amount of dust that had accumulated, Jordan guessed that the items had last seen anything remotely close to a good cleaning somewhere during the Eisenhower era.
To the left of the office was a smaller store front which displayed an anemic blue light. The fixture was fashioned to proclaim that a seer of the future was domiciled just beyond the threshold. For a nominal fee, the secrets of the future could be shared.
Jordan paused, his sports car idling. He shook his head in disbelief. His sister had graduated near the top of her class. She could have had an office next to his at Morrison and Treherne.
“What the hell are you doing here, Jenny?” he wondered out loud.
And what was he doing here? he wondered silently. For that matter, where the hell was he going to park his car? More to the point, was it going to be there when it came time for him to leave? Cars like his were targets in seedy neighborhoods like this. A good team could strip it in no time flat.
Maybe he should have rented an inexpensive car for the next three weeks. Too late now, he thought with a sigh.
A sign indicating that there was parking behind the row of stores had him circling the block, looking for an opening. He missed it the first time around. When he discovered it on his second pass, he found his driving skills challenged. The alleyway that led to the lot was narrow, even for his sports car. He held his breath the entire time.
When he finally reached the lot, Jordan saw that there were several cars already there. Or maybe they’d just been abandoned, he amended, seeing the condition of the vehicle closest to him. It had at least twenty years on it and the years had not been kind.
Getting out, holding a container of cappuccino in one hand, Jordan engaged the security alarm in his car with his other, wondering if the gesture was a futile one. He had a feeling that anyone here probably knew how to disarm such an alarm in a matter of seconds, silencing it before it had a chance to go off.
Here goes nothing, Jordan thought, walking back out onto the street.
He passed a man rolling back the rusted iron security gates that protected the pawn shop from any break-ins. Short, squat, with arms that looked as if bench-pressing an elephant would have presented no hardship to him, the man wore his hair cropped so close to his head it appeared to be almost shaved.
Pausing
