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He decided at the last moment to go. A Halloween party given every year by the senior partner in the law firm where he had recently been hired. Hired to settle small time bankruptcy cases. Saw ten to fifteen clients a day. Clients, that was an over-used tern if there ever was one in his line of work. They weren't clients as far as he was concerned. They were working stiffs and waitresses, students and salesmen, all getting themselves way in over their credit card heads.

It paid well, the perks were good with vacations awarded for meeting certain quotas, but it just wasn't what he, Jake Wilson, 27, had in mind when he had first set out to be a lawyer.

"You know there comes a time when you have to make a decision, a wiser-than-your-years decision about your limitations and where you fit in the overall scheme of things. We can't all be trial lawyers, Jake. Otherwise there would be a world of other legal problems all gone unsolved. Know what I'm saying?"

Of course Jake knew what he was saying: Jake wasn't smart enough. Jake wasn't intuitive enough. Jake didn't have that killer instinct, that internal drive, that all-consuming desire to be a trial lawyer. And what hurt the most, what really went straight to the marrow was he was right and Jake knew it. Knew it well before it had to be said, but deep down inside in that part of oneself that steadfastly believes anything is possible, and clung on to that truly ludicrous pipe dream like a cockroach trying to escape being washed down the drain.

So he had given up trying to be a trial lawyer, knowing that uphill climb he'd encounter would be like trying to climb El Capitan with kite string and paper clips.

They would try, it would be their job, their duty, their obligation to use whatever it took to dissuade - and that was putting it nicely - Jake from ever becoming a trial lawyer. And if by chance he survived that onslaught, that full-frontal verbal barrage of criticisms and put-downs and negatives and setbacks they would, in their own humble way, admit they were wrong about him. That diamond in the rough he would be known as from then on; a poster child for perseverance and hard work. But Jake was at least smart enough to know he was not that diamond in the rough. He would not be the Aladdin of the legal world.

So he concentrated on small claims court, a Pandora's box of legal snafus, the kind of snafus that could land the right kind of lawyer - the kind that couldn't cut the trial mustard - a lucrative, if not satisfying, living. Small claims court was the level Dante had intended for lawyers once they died and went, unquestionably, to hell. At least that was the common knowledge at Pitt law school when Jake was attending and probably would be for centuries to come.

But even before he graduated, even before Jake took the bar exam, he had been offered a job at Grimm, Berkowicz and Abernathy in the small claims/bankruptcy division.

"How can you not go to this Halloween party?" Brian asked.

Brian Reed, another lawyer, among many lawyers, sharks, all swimming in this vast sea of Grimm, Berkowicz and Abernathy. Brian Reed, a roommate and Pittsburgh product who had told his father, a GB