Scott Turow - Personal injuries

She felt the heat past her shoulders. All her life she'd been at the mercy of her temper. By the time she was two or three, she was regularly told she had a sore look on her face. You are scowling, young woman. Girls were not supposed to let their faces grow condensed and stormdarkened. But she did.

"Then I guess I just have to kick your butt to get you to behave," she told him.

"Yeah, right." He had a good, long laugh, the kind that would get him clocked in a barroom.

"You're going to make me prove it, right? I've taken down men twice your size. When I worked the fugitive squad in Boston, I grabbed a guy six foot six and three fifty, and I had him on the ground and cuffed when the locals got there."

"You didn't hear me the first time. Why are you always telling me how well you're hung?"

She felt herself recoil. Then she told him to stand up. She widened her stance to face him.

"I'll wrestle you, baby," he said. "Strip down to our skivvies? Little scented oil? We'll have a gas." Mocking, he beckoned her with both hands toward the desk behind which he remained perched.

"Stand up, Feaver. I mean it. This is gonna happen. Or is Mr. Man scared of a woman who's five foot four?" She closed the distance between them to a few feet and kicked off her shoes on the dark red rug.

He closed his eyes to calculate. He exhaled. Finally he stood. He removed the suit jacket he'd just put on, then hunched over and extended his arms in a grappler's pose, the watch and i.d. glittering on his hairy arms.

"Okay," he said. "Come at me, tough guy."

She had hit the rug and rolled up on one hand, hooking her legs around his right knee before he did much more than turn. For a moment, as she finished the leg whip and saw him drop heavily, she was frightened, certain his head would catch the green glazed edge of the desktop. Lord God, was she crazy? Would she ever be able to explain this? But he landed solidly on his chest. She could hear the breath come out of him with a sound a little like a leaking tire. His face rested on the corner of the plastic floor mat that sat under his desk chair. She asked if he was all right. Instead, without reply, he stood, first getting to one knee. He brushed off his shirt. There was a smudge now under the pocket that brought the white-on-white diamonds into relief, and he scratched at it for a second. From the deliberate way he moved she took it he was in pain.

When he finally spoke, he said, "Two falls out of three." He came around the desk and pulled two chairs out of the way. He lifted the coffee table and put it on the sofa, then he stood on the blood-colored rug, his arms again held wide.

"Now we have some room," he said. "You're quick. I give you that. But I'm ready now. Come on."

"Look, I was making a point. I'm not trying to hurt you. I just don't want to be sitting here for six months getting your chick act. I want you to take me seriously. And what we're doing seriously."

"Scared?" he asked.

She looked away with irritation, and while her head was still wound in the other direction, she dove at his midsection. Even as she lunged, she knew it wasn't going to work. They'd both seen the same movies and he was ready for the sucker move. He stepped aside, grabbing her arm to avoid her, then catching her around the waist. He hoisted her off the ground, his arms locked uncomfortably close to her breasts. He was several inches taller than she was, and much stronger, more solid, than she had imagined. She rammed an elbow into one arm, and swung one foot behind his knee. In response, he dropped her suddenly to the rug and sat down on her before she could scramble away, resting his full weight on her behind. When she started to flail, he grabbed her arm and applied a half nelson.

"Okay?" he asked. "Can we cool now?"

Suddenly, Evon felt him let go, even before she heard the voice.

"Oh shit," said Eileen Ruben from the threshold. The office manager had a rattling, smoke-devastated voice and a bad blond dye job on the sad remnants of what years ago would have been called a beehive hairdo. A plastic cigarette, which had been dangling from her mouth all week as she went through yet another effort to quit, hung gummed to her lipstick as she gaped.

"We're wrestling," Robbie told her.

"What else?" asked Eileen, and with that closed the door. He had stood up by now and was suddenly back to himself, greatly amused.

"See? It worked out. Everything for the best. We're right on plan. Monday, Eileen will be out there telling everybody how I've already got you on the rug."

He was correct about that. Right on plan. But she felt no temptation to smile. She never recovered quickly from this kind of fury.

"Now, the guy thing," he said, "would be to go out and have a cocktail, bury the hatchet. Can you handle that?"

"I don't drink." She stood up and adjusted her skirt. Her panty hose had done a virtual 360 on her waist and she headed for the ladies' to correct that. Over her shoulder, she told him, "I'm Mormon." SHE WAS NOT A MORMON. Her father had been raised in the Church and she might have been, too, if her mother had kept her word to her in-laws. But you go along in life, her mother said, and figure what's right for you. By the time Evon's oldest sister, Merrel, had been born, her mother'd turned her back on all of it. She held no doubt by then, apparently, whom Evon's father would choose.

They were from near Kaskia, Colorado, a little Rocky Mountain town that, in effect, had been seized from slumber during Evon's lifetime, awakened by the arrival of resorts and malls and multiplexes. But in her childhood, people had dwelled in the Kaskia Valley with a sense of privacy. In her family there were seven children. She was fifth. Right around the place where you'd expect kids to begin getting lost. And she was lost, she supposed. That teeming house where nine people lived, ten after Maw-Maw, her mother's mom, came to stay, swirled about her like a storm. Her parents always existed foremost in the reports of her sisters about what they'd want or expect. Don't put your elbows on the table, Ma doesn't like it when you put your elbows on the table. A kind of secondhand childhood as she thought of it, in which she too often felt isolated and unknown, and somehow inept.

She was an odd duck, she knew that. She didn't smile at the right times, she said yes when she was supposed to say no, she always realized too late when somebody was trying to be funny. She had a rear end on her that no matter how in shape she was did not seem to sit right on her frame. She'd never been at ease with folks outside her family and was forever embarrassing herself. People called her tough or callous, but the truth was she'd just never had the feel for nuance or mood. Someone asked a question, she answered plainly. She had no idea what else to do. And as people recoiled, she always thought the same thing. No one knew her. She didn't match. What was inside her was not what people saw.

In that mood, the mood of a lifetime, she had returned to her apartment. She'd hurt her shoulder somehow, thrashing around with that fool. Reconsidering the scene, she wanted to laugh, but a dark thread of shame laced through her heart. The agent was supposed to run the c.i., but Feaver seemed unmanageable. Or was she the one who was somehow out of control?

Her apartment was not bad, a one-bedroom with rented motel furniture. Jim had referred to the deep-cover team from D.C. that had set her up as `the Movers.' It had sounded mysterious, until they arrived with a truck and uniforms from one of the national van lines. Every item she'd packed had been vetted. Anything that could trace back to who she'd been in Des Moines the previous week-every appliance with a serial number, all the prescription drugs for her allergies-had been replaced. Evon Miller was like a doll that came with brand-new accessories.