NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH
Chapter One
At the tail end of a dog of a morning, Dismas Hardy
was beginning to fear that he would also be spending
the whole stiflingly dull afternoon in municipal
court on the second floor of the Hall of Justice in San
Francisco.
He was waiting-interminably since nine a.m.-for his
client to be admitted into the courtroom. This would not
have been his first choice for how to celebrate his forty-eighth
birthday.
Now again the clerk called out someone not his client-this
time a young man who looked as though he'd been
drinking since he'd turned twenty-one and possibly two or
three years before that. Maybe he was still drunk-certainly
he looked wasted.
The judge was Peter Li, a former assistant district attorney
with whom Hardy was reasonably friendly. The prosecuting
attorney was Randy Huang, who sat at his table
inside the bar rail as the defendant went shuffling past. The
public defender was a ten-year veteran named Donna
Wong.
Judge Li's longtime clerk, another Asian named Manny
See, read the charge against the young man as he stood,
swaying, eyes opening and clo ... read full excerpt from: Nothing but the Truth ebook
