"A lawyer, huh?" Meche asked, raising an eyebrow. Her amusement was probably just as evident as Phoenix's interest, but hopefully he'd take her teasing in stride. "I wouldn't have pegged you for the lawyering type, if I'm honest. Shouldn't you have fangs or something like that?" Granted, she didn't know a whole lot of lawyers; Manny's stories about that snake in Rubacava were the closest she'd come lately. But lawyers certainly didn't have a very good reputation in any case. They really needed better PR.

She actually repeated "For a living?" out loud--it was too good a private joke to pass up. "He's done a little bit of everything, actually. You should get him to tell you the stories whenever they let him out," she said quickly, keeping her face straight. "He started off mopping floors in an automat once, and he ended up taking it over and turning the place into a nightclub less than a year later. Another time he shipped out to sea for a year and came back as the captain. He's that kind of guy." She'd heard the stories many times, but retelling them brought back some of their weight. Manny really had had a remarkable afterlife. She could only wonder how many jobs he'd worked his way through when he was alive. If they ever got out of here, he could probably be president.

"When I met him, though, he was a travel agent," she concluded.