Free The Rainmaker by John Grisham

I had the promise of a good job with a nice check. Now I’ve got people I haven’t met pulling in favors and trying to locate the tiniest scrap of employment.
    “Thanks,” I say, biting my lip and staring at my fingers.
    He glances at his watch. “Gotta run. You wanna study for the bar in the morning?”
    “Sure.”
    “I’ll call you.” He pats me on the shoulder and disappears.
    AT EXACTLY ten minutes before five, I walk up the stairs to the main floor and leave the library. I’m not looking for cops now, not afraid to face Sara Plankmore, not even worried about more process servers. And I’m virtually unafraid of unpleasant confrontations with various of my fellow students. They’re all gone. It’s Friday, and the law school is deserted.
    The Placement Office is on the main floor, near the front of the building, where the administrating occurs. I glance at the bulletin board in the hallway, but I keep walking. It’s normally filled with dozens of notices of potential job openings—big firms, medium firms, sole practitioners, private companies, government agencies. A quick look tells me what I already know. There is not a single notice on the board. There is no job market at this time of the year.
    Madeline Skinner has run Placement here for decades. She’s rumored to be retiring, but another rumor says that she threatens it every year to squeeze something out of the dean. She’s sixty and looks seventy, a skinny woman with short gray hair, layers of wrinkles around the eyes and a continuous cigarette in the tray on her desk. Four packs a day is the rumor, which is kind of funny because this is now an official nonsmoking facility but no one has mustered the courage to tell Madeline. She has enormous clout because she brings in the folks who offer the jobs. If there were no jobs, there would be no law school.
    And she’s very good at what she does. She knows the right people at the right firms. She’s found jobs for manyof the very people who are now recruiting for their firms, and she’s brutal. If a Memphis State grad is in charge of recruiting for a big firm, and the big firm gets long on Ivy Leaguers and short on our people, then Madeline has been known to call the president of the university and lodge an unofficial complaint. The president has been known to visit the big firms downtown, have lunch with the partners and remedy the imbalance. Madeline knows every job opening in Memphis, and she knows precisely who fills each position.
    But her job’s getting tougher. Too many people with law degrees. And this is not the Ivy League.
    She’s standing by the watercooler, watching the door, as if she’s waiting for me. “Hello, Rudy,” she says in a gravelly voice. She is alone, everyone else is gone. She has a cup of water in one hand and a skinny cigarette in the other.
    “Hi,” I say with a smile as if I’m the happiest guy in the world.
    She points with the cup to her office door. “Let’s talk in here.”
    “Sure,” I say as I follow her inside. She closes the door and nods at a chair. I sit where I’m told, and she perches herself on the edge of her chair across the desk.
    “Rough day, huh,” she says, as if she knows everything that’s happened in the last twenty-four hours.
    “I’ve had better.”
    “I talked to Loyd Beck this morning,” she says slowly. I was hoping he was dead.
    “And what did he say?” I ask, trying to be arrogant.
    “Well, I heard about the merger last night, and I was concerned about you. You’re the only grad we placed with Brodnax and Speer, so I was quite anxious to see what happened to you.”
    “And?”
    “That merger happened fast, golden opportunity, etc.”
    “That’s the same spill I got.”
    “Then I asked him when they first notified you about the merger, and he gave me some double-talk about how this partner or that partner had tried to call you a couple of times but the phone was disconnected.”
    “It was disconnected for four