Unprotected by Kristin Lee Johnson

“You can’t avoid me.”
    She shook her head in protest and was going to say that wasn’t what she meant, but he was right, so she didn’t say anything. Thankfully, her heart wasn’t thudding anymore.
    “Okay, so we’re working together, “Amanda said, trying to sound businesslike. “What do I need to know about these cases?” She opened Marlys’s file first.
    “Well for starters, it would be good if you actually attended the court hearings.”
    She looked up at his nasty smirk. “Jacob, if we’re going to work together, you’re going to need to find a way not to take jabs at me,” she said more defensively than she intended.
    “Amanda, am I supposed to ignore the fact that you ran out of the building this morning? I have to represent you on these cases. I have to know you’re going to stick around.” He said it with enough force that she knew he was referring to more than that morning.
    “I wasn’t feeling well this morning,” she said quietly.
    “You have a history of bolting, Amanda,” he said equally quietly. “I need to know if there’s anything that I did, or anything I shouldn’t do.”
    Again, this was about more than this morning.
    “This is my job,” she said finally. “I’m not going to mess it up.”
    Jake looked like he was going to say something more, thought better of it, and let the subject drop. He nodded.
    “So, what’s the deal with this Thomas case?” he asked taking a deep breath and opening the file.
    “Well I wish Leah was here. She did all the interviews, but the gist of it is that Matthew, the thirteen-year-old son of Charles Thomas, was seen at the emergency room for a dislocated shoulder and compound fracture of his right arm. The ER doctor wrote in his letter that he suspected child abuse, both because of the nature of the injury, and because the kid and the mom couldn’t explain what happened consistently. A few days later the kid told a friend in detail that his dad hurt him, but he just shut down during his interview so we don’t have a direct statement from him. ” Amanda paged through her file until she found the initial report. “It’s obvious that the doctor didn’t know who he was reporting, and he hadn’t made too many child protection reports before.” She looked up at Jake. “At least that’s what Max said. He couldn’t believe the doctor made the conclusions that he did about the injury being ‘highly likely’ to have resulted from child abuse.”
    “I saw that, “Jake said. “That doctor is a lawsuit waiting to happen, whether he’s right or not.”
    “That’s the really sad part,” Amanda said. “Everyone is just freaking out about this because of who the family is, and it makes it really hard to focus on the fact that this kid was beaten up pretty badly.”
    “Makes it a lot easier to be out-of-towners,” Jake said. “I really don’t care who he is. But that lawyer is the one who’s gonna make it hard on me. I’ve barely been doing this two years,” Jake said. “He’s already trying to intimidate the hell out of me, and referred to his experience about eight times in the three minutes he spoke.”
    “How did he manage to make his experience relevant?”
    “In my thirty-four years of trial experience I have never seen such an egregiously overzealous response to an obvious accident.” Jake snorted. “Well, in my twenty-two months of trial experience I have never seen an attorney more impressed with his own shit.”
    “What did the judge think of his shit?”
    “Oh, that was even better,” Jake said. “Chuck and the judge had to catch up on old times, ‘off the record’ of course. Then the judge looks at me, and I swear he would have scolded me if he could have, and says, ‘how can we dispose of this matter today?’”
    “He did NOT!” Amanda said, loud enough for the paralegals in the office to turn around.
    Jake waved them off over Amanda’s shoulder. “Amanda, you need to find a way not to sound quite so