“Either charge him or release him. You know the rules.”

I drum my nails on the wood of the desk, sticky cracks in the varnish grabbing at my fingerprints. In some places, I am more careful where I leave a record of my presence. When face-to-face with a custody sergeant of the LAPD, surveilled by AI-enabled divining tools provided by competing concerns, and acting as an agent of the court, there is little point.

In the back, the detectives come to the inevitable conclusion.

Release.

My client shambles out of holding half an hour later, 25 minutes of my wait on wipe-clean blue seats a carefully calculated insult from his captors. He stinks of drunk-tank epiphanies, fear flop-sweat and his own filth. The left side of his face is slack, loose as an ill-fitting suit. Thick, milky drool runs out of a curl of his lip and falls onto his shirt.

“He’s all yours, counsellor.”

He can’t sign his name. I press his thumb carefully into ink and make his mark for him. Then I coax him past the Auntie Annie’s kiosk that projects an alluring smell of cinnamon and sugar into the lobby, and down the stairs at the front of the precinct to where the Shelby is idling.

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I was prepared. Big Citrus has sheathed the back seat in the sort of plastic sheeting beloved by painters of industrial buildings and house decorators. I have to work in this car. I don’t need the stink to linger.

Big Citrus unfolds his phone and sliver of WLFI2$ lands in my crypto wallet.

“How fast should I drive boss?”

“I wouldn’t advise breaking the law.”

The payment and advice make at least the next two miles covered by attorney–client privilege, per the Rao court’s most recent ruling. Big Cit presses the pedal to the metal, the car’s steel shaking like a horse getting swarmed by fire ants. It was not a comfortable ride, but it was American made and so old it predated spyware. We run the first red light, then hit the speed limit for the boulevard and keep accelerating. Overhead a drone marks our progress and sends us a court summons for speeding.

“You should pay that,” I advise.

This counts as legal advice, pulling the gauzy veil of the Sixth Amendment back over our journey.

His massive thumb triggers the function in his phone, which pays the fine by API. It will be added to my forthcoming invoice as a tax-deductible pass-through cost from my chauffeur’s LLP to mine.

We swing wide around the carcass of a fire-truck, its frame rusted where it isn’t charred. It has been there since the last round of riots, precious metals picked clean by magpie junkies, the remainder rotting where it died. My passenger sways, a rope of spittle swinging out to slap against the back of the driver’s seat. It stains where it touches.

Our destination is a decaying strip mall. A vape shop, massage parlour and barbershop cling to life, commercial barnacles on the sunken ship of twenty-first-century capitalism. One of the units has a dark kitchen in it, although if the local rats win their war against the coyotes who descend from the hills at sunset, their next victim will be the minimal level of food hygiene that remains.

We pull up in front of the chapel and the big man comes round to help me guide the client through its door. The words of Mark, 16:18, beckon us in with a neon cheerfulness that doesn’t fit the surface onto which they’re daubed.

The Armenian is waiting. He is stooped, and grey, and as dangerous as a copperhead with a hangover. One of his ears has the bulbous cauliflowering of a brawler, to go with the swollen knuckles that keep his thick rings in place. Mistaking him for an old man because of the white in his beard, or for a soft man because of his store-bought tailoring, would be a terrible mistake.

“My courier. And my lawyer.”