The stacks of dollars on the ground confirmed everyone’s suspicion: Craig had indeed embezzled $1.6 million in public funds. Betsy grabbed a handful of cash and held it out to Jimmy—her intention was obvious: she hoped Jimmy would let them off the hook and keep this secret. Jimmy was torn inside. He had once been a rogue, capable of cooking up all sorts of schemes to swindle money. But now he had turned over a new leaf; he wanted to prove to Chuck that he could become a qualified lawyer, and taking this money would go against that. Yet the money was incredibly tempting for cash-strapped Jimmy—with it, he could advertise his small law firm and boost its visibility. Choosing between taking the money to grow his career or upholding the moral bottom line of a lawyer became the biggest dilemma before him.
After racking his brain, Jimmy finally came up with a "perfect" plan. He would treat this money as a retainer fee for being a consulting lawyer. As Craig’s lawyer, Jimmy wouldn’t be obligated to report the over $1 million on the ground. As for the disappearance, he could claim that Craig had taken his family camping, and in a fit of caprice, trashed the house before leaving—an impulsive act that didn’t violate a single U.S. law. With this explanation, Jimmy felt much more at ease. However, Craig and Betsy still couldn’t accept him as their consulting lawyer. After all, Jimmy had only defended guilty people before, and Craig didn’t want to arouse others’ suspicion.
Sometimes, one doesn’t need to stick too rigidly to principles—and Jimmy was exactly that kind of person. With 30,000inhand,hearrivedattheparkinglotentranceinagoodmoodandtooktheinitiativetogreetMike,theattendantinthebooth.MikehadplayedapartinfindingtheKettelmans,andmaybetomorrow’snewspaperheadlineswouldcoverthestory.Ofcourse,thereportwouldnevermentionthe1 million. But Mike still wore his usual unsmiling expression. Jimmy, feeling snubbed, had no choice but to drive in and head to the police station to handle the procedures for Nacho’s release.
Nacho had no intention of letting Jimmy off the hook so easily. Any sensible person would realize that someone had warned the Kettelmans about the danger, which was why they had gone camping at this timing—and that warning had led to Nacho’s arrest. Nacho wanted Jimmy to pay for this, but Jimmy refused to back down. When it came down to it, the root cause of the trouble was Nacho’s own carelessness. He had used his own van to stake out the Kettelmans’ house, gotten his license plate noted by a neighbor, and failed to clean up the bloodstains in the van in time. It was Nacho himself who had provided the police with a host of clues. In fact, someone warning the Kettelmans had been a blessing in disguise—if Nacho had succeeded in his plan, he would still have been caught by the police and sentenced to decades in prison. No one knew if Nacho had taken Jimmy’s scolding to heart; all Jimmy knew was that he didn’t see Nacho again for a long time after that.
With Craig’s case wrapped up, Jimmy had startup funds and began to promote his law firm. First, he splurged on a new outfit: a suit made of the finest fabric, a silk shirt, and even pearl buttons instead of plastic ones. This outfit was a direct copy of the signature style of his arch-rival, Howard Hamlin. Then, wearing this new getup, Jimmy created a huge advertisement—using the remaining money to rent a billboard at the highway interchange that Howard passed every day on his commute. The design of the billboard was an exact copy of the ads for Hamlin & McGill (HHM), even the logo was identical—except the "HHM" initials were replaced with "JMM," the abbreviation of Jimmy’s name.
When Howard saw the giant billboard on his way to work, he was furious. His first thought was that Jimmy was playing a cheap trick to confuse clients. Soon after, Howard sent a cease-and-desist order via Kim, demanding that Jimmy take down the billboard. Despite Kim’s good relationship with Jimmy, Jimmy still refused to comply. This led to Jimmy and Howard taking the dispute to court, where the judge issued an order requiring the billboard to be taken down within 48 hours.
After leaving the judge’s office, Jimmy made several calls to media outlets, hoping they would expose the "bullying of small businesses by big corporations," but few responded. In the end, Jimmy decided to pay out of his own pocket to hire a student film crew from the state university to shoot a short video. On the day the court-mandated demolition was scheduled, Jimmy set up cameras under the billboard, chose an angle that would frame both himself and the giant billboard in the same shot, and began delivering a passionate speech. Mid-speech, a shout of alarm suddenly came from above. A worker who had been dismantling the billboard had slipped and fallen, and was now hanging in mid-air from his safety rope, unable to move up or down. Seeing this, Jimmy climbed frantically up the 30-meter-tall billboard, lay on the guardrail, and pulled the worker to safety—accomplishing a stunning "feat." Afterward, Jimmy even secretly gave the worker a high-five to celebrate the smooth execution of his plan.
Putting up the billboard had only limited promotional reach; taking it down had always been Jimmy’s real goal. The short video of Jimmy rescuing the worker was uploaded online and even made the headlines of major media outlets—equivalent to nationwide publicity, and far more popular with the public. Jimmy became an overnight sensation, and many people called to inquire about his legal services. But he knew his trick could fool others, not his brother Chuck. Early the next morning, he brought food to Chuck’s house and, incidentally, hid the newspaper at the door, lying that he hadn’t seen any.
But Chuck wasn’t stupid. He knew his brother well—Jimmy usually brought food at night, so changing the time for no reason must mean he had an agenda. After Jimmy left, Chuck pulled back the curtain and saw that all his neighbors had newspapers at their doors. The thought that Jimmy must be hiding something made Chuck uneasy; he was terrified that his brother had slipped back into his old ways of cheating and deceiving. Unable to contain his worry, he wrapped himself in a space blanket made of metal film, opened his front door for the first time in over a year, and rushed outside—into the direct sunlight, a place he believed was filled with electromagnetic radiation. He stumbled to his neighbor’s door, grabbed the newspaper off the ground, left $5, and hurried back inside, slamming the door shut. Chuck collapsed onto the sofa, gasping for breath, and immediately opened the newspaper. His brother Jimmy’s photo was prominently displayed on the front page, but all Chuck could see in it was a full page of lies and scheming.