Echo Burning

wife-beater.”
    Walker looked away. “You certainly come straight to the point.”
    “Life’s too short not to.”
    There was silence for a second. Just the dull roar of all the air conditioner motors, rising and falling as they slipped in and out of phase with each other.
    “Actually I’m three things,” Walker said. “I’m a man, I’m a DA, and I’m running for judge.”
    “So?”
    “Al Eugene isn’t a crooked lawyer. Far from it. He’s a good man. He’s a campaigner. And he needs to be. Fact is, structurally, the state of Texas is not big on protecting the rights of the accused. The indigent accused, even worse. You know that, because you had to find a lawyer for Carmen yourself, and that can only be because you were told she wouldn’t get a court appointment for months. And the lawyer you found must have told you she’s still looking at months and months of delay. It’s a bad system, and I’m aware of it, and Al is aware of it. The Constitution guarantees access to counsel, and Al takes that promise very seriously. He makes himself available to anybody who can find his door. He gives them fair representation, whoever they are. Inevitably some of them are bad guys, but don’t forget the Constitution applies to bad guys too. But most of his clients are O.K. Most of them are just poor, is all, black or white or Hispanic.”
    Reacher said nothing.
    “So let me take a guess,” Walker said. “I don’t know where you heard Al called crooked, but a buck gets ten it was from an older white person with money or position.”
    It was Rusty Greer, Reacher thought.
    “Don’t tell me who,” Walker said. “But ten gets a hundred I’m right. A person like that sees a lawyer sticking up for poor people or colored people, and they regard it as a nuisance, or as an unpleasantness, and then as some kind of treachery against their race or their class, and from there on it’s a pretty easy jump to calling it crooked.”
    “O.K.,” Reacher said. “Maybe I’m wrong about Eugene.”
    “I guarantee you’re wrong about him. I guarantee you could go back to the very day he passed the bar exam and not find any crooked behavior, anywhere at all.”
    He placed his fingernail on the photograph, just below Al Eugene’s chin.
    “He’s my friend,” he said. “And I’m happy about that. As a man, and as a DA.”
    “What about Sloop Greer?”
    Walker nodded. “We’ll get to that. But first let me tell you about being a DA.”
    “What’s to tell?”
    “Same kind of stuff. I’m like Al. I believe in the Constitution, and the rule of law, and impartiality, and fairness. I can absolutely guarantee you could turn this office upside down and never find one single case where I’ve been less than fair and impartial. I’ve been tough, sure, and I’ve sent lots of people to prison, and some of them to death row, but I’ve never done anything if I wasn’t absolutely convinced it was right.”
    “Sounds like a stump speech,” Reacher said. “But I’m not registered to vote.”
    “I know,” Walker said. “I checked, finally. That’s why I’m talking like this. If this was politics, it would be too hokey for words. But this is for real. I want to be a judge, because I could do some good. You familiar with how things work in Texas?”
    “Not really.”
    “Judges in Texas are all elected. They have a lot of power. And it’s a weird state. A lot of rich people, but a lot of poor people, too. The poor people need court-appointed lawyers, obviously. But there’s no public defender system in Texas. So the judges choose the poor people’s lawyers for them. They just pick them out, from any old law firm they want. They’re in control of the whole process. They determine the fees, too. It’s patronage, pure and simple. So who is the judge going to appoint? He’s going to appoint somebody who contributed to his election campaign. It’s about cronyism, not fitness or talent. The judge hands out ten thousand dollars of taxpayer money to some favored law firm, the law firm assigns some incompetent lackey who puts in a hundred dollars’ worth of work, the net result being nine thousand nine hundred dollars unearned profit for the law firm and some poor guy in jail for something he maybe didn’t do. Most defense lawyers meet their clients for the first time at the start of the trial, right there in the courtroom. We’ve had drunk lawyers and lawyers who fall asleep at the defense table. They don’t do