for a small-town lawyer living in a rented house and driving a car with almost 200,000 miles on the odometer , the scene was surreal : he , jake , poking through cardboard boxes in a dusty , semi-lit storage room in a prefabricated office building at a backwoods sawmill in rural mississippi , and casually looking at sums of money that greatly exceeded the combined lifetime earnings of every lawyer now working in ford county .