The 5th Horseman - James Patterson [11]
“So are you going out with him?” Cindy asked, sending us into new rounds of laughter.
Yuki shook her head. “You mean, if he asks me? You mean, if my mom grabs his cell phone and dials my number for him?”
We were having so much fun the band had to dial up the music a notch to be heard over our good time. Twenty minutes later, Yuki left the table before the coffee and chocolate mud pie, saying she wanted to see Keiko again before visiting hours were over.
Despite her rapid-fire talk, and our good-time chatter, there were worry lines between Yuki’s beautiful brown eyes when she told us all good night.
Chapter 16
MAUREEN O’MARA FELT HER PULSE beating in her temples. Was that possible? Well, that’s how pumped she was. She pulled open one of the massive steel-and-glass doors to the Civic Center Courthouse and entered the cool gray interior.
Goddamn.
Today was the day. She owned this place.
She handed her briefcase to the security guard, who put it on the X-ray machine and checked it as she cleared the metal detectors. He nodded good morning and returned her seven-hundred-dollar “lucky” Louis Vuitton case with a smile.
“Best a’ luck today, Miss O’Mara.”
“Thanks, Kevin.”
O’Mara showed the guard her crossed fingers; then she cut through the milling crowd in the lobby and headed toward the elevator bank.
She was thinking as she walked—about how her stuffy, know-it-all partners had told her that she was insane to take on the huge, well-defended hospital, to try to weave twenty individual claims into one gigantic malpractice case.
But she couldn’t have turned it down. This one was too good.
The first patients had found her—then she’d seen the pattern. The momentum had built rapidly, then snowballed, and soon she’d become the go-to lawyer for patients with serious grievances against Municipal.
Putting this case together had been like corralling wild horses while standing on the seat of a motorbike and juggling bowling balls. But she’d done it.
Over the last fourteen months, she’d slogged through the discovery process, the endless depositions, lined up her seventy-six witnesses—medical experts, past and present employees of the hospital, and her clients, the families of the twenty deceased who were all finally in accord.
She had a personal reason for her total, unwavering commitment, but no one needed to know why this case was a labor of love.
She definitely felt her clients’ pain—that was reason enough.
Now she had to convince a jury of their peers.
If she could do that, the hospital would feel the pain, too, in the only way it could—by kicking out a gigantic payout, the many, many millions her clients richly deserved.
Chapter 17
MAUREEN O’MARA MADE A RUSH for one of the courthouse elevators, stepping in then starting as a man in a charcoal-gray suit joined her just as the doors were closing.
Lawrence Kramer gave her a brilliant smile, leaned forward, and pressed number four.
“Morning, Counselor,” he said. “How are ya doing so far today?”
“Never better,” she chirped. “And you?”
“Perfecto. I had about three pounds of raw meat with my eggs this morning,” Kramer said. “Breakfast of Champions.”
“Sounds kind of bad for your heart,” Maureen said, giving the hospital’s lead attorney a sidelong look. “You do have a heart, don’t you, Larry?”
The big man threw his head back and laughed as the elevator lurched upward toward the courtroom.
God, he has a lot of teeth, and they’ve been whitened.
“Sure I do. I’m going to get my cardio workout in court, Maureen. Thanks to you.”
At forty-two, Lawrence Kramer was a gifted defense attorney—smart, good-looking, and in his prime. All that and he was rapidly gaining national media presence as well.
O’Mara had seen him interviewed a few times on Chris Matthews’ Hardball about one of his clients, a football star accused of rape. Kramer had held his own against Matthews’ verbal machine-gun attack. It hadn’t surprised Maureen, though.