Scott Turow - Personal injuries

"Well, you know, Judge, I just saw this guy, his kids. But what you did, in chambers. That was brilliant. Really. That was just terrific. That scum-sucker, McManis, he wouldn't have come up with a nickel if you hadn't given him a poke."

"Well, thank you, you know, when I saw that look on your face, I said, So what can I do so this works out like it should? Same as always really, this isn't different from some other case, you talk to the two sides, you tell them to be sensible. That's what I did."

Stan was still making faces-Skolnick's continuing insistence that he hadn't behaved improperly would be a small impediment-but the fact was the judge had annihilated himself. He was already driving back toward the LeSueur, but he detained Robbie in order to finish another joke, this one about a priest and a rabbi who have a collision. After a cautious start, each agrees that he's partly at fault. To cement their amicable resolution, the rabbi offers the father a drink from the sabbath wine which he happens to have in his trunk. The priest takes a long draught, then offers the rabbi the bottle.

"'Right after the police get here,' the rabbi says." Skolnick reddened further as he roared over the punch line, and even in the van there was a current of suppressed laughter. Robbie departed the Lincoln chuckling, but Amari continued to follow Skolnick's car. Given the results of the first recording, Stan had persuaded Judge Winchell to expand her order slightly, allowing the camera to remain activated for an additional ten minutes to see if Skolnick retrieved the envelope from the front seat. The second surveillance van was by now in the Temple parking garage, near the section reserved for judges where Alf had punctured Skolnick's tires five weeks before. We stayed on the street, where, despite Alf's apprehensions, the picture was clear.

Alone, Skolnick used his car phone to call his wife about a set of race cars he was supposed to pick up for his grandson's birthday. Afterwards, as he circled up the ramp, the judge actually began quietly singing "Happy Birthday to You," wagging his large head on the beat. Parked, he turned off the motor, which sent a jolt of static across the picture. The camera would remain on only for another two minutes, as it automatically powered down once the ignition was off to avoid draining the battery. But that figured to be long enough.

For a troubling instant, Skolnick started squeezing out from under the steering wheel without the money. Then he rammed himself in the head. "What a draykopf," he complained about his absentmindedness. He squinted through the windshield and looked up and down the dim structure, then grunted audibly as he twisted around and heaved. The envelope came out like a weed he'd uprooted. He held it aloft, only inches from the camera, then jammed it into an interior pocket of his raincoat. With that, he grabbed the rearview mirror where the lens was secreted and angled it down so he could look himself over. His large features swelled across the screen as he straightened his tie. The pores on his nose were distorted to craterlike dimensions and he ran his tongue over his teeth. The the poor bastard smiled with all his empty-noggined good humor and again began humming to himself, "Happy Birthday to You."

All the UCAS gathered to watch the tape. Evon briefly stole away from the office to join them. It was, as Klecker said, more fun than the movies. Afterwards, Sennett addressed the group. Today's success made Stan seem more determined, more vital. He stood straight in his white shirt under the recessed spots.

This was a great achievement, he said, a relief of a kind and a tribute to the enormous hard work and sacrifice each one of them had made, to the months away from their families, and the strains they'd endured in living undercover. None of them had to worry any longer about saying it was all for nothing. They had put together a case Skolnick could never defend, and another one, on Malatesta, that would soon be at the same point.

But no one should forget these were simply first steps. Men like Skolnick, Sennett said, weren't the deepest problem. They could roll up dozens of Skolnicks, and with luck they would. But the Skolnicks had been born into this system. They went along with no ability to change it. Altering things permanently meant reaching the people who were in command, who willed this to continue as a matter of personal privilege and gratification.

"Tuohey," Sennett said, and let his determined look tick over each of them. "When we get to Tuohey, all of your magnificent efforts will have culminated not just in stats or headlines or stroke letters from D.C., suitable for framing"-there was appreciative laughter-"but a lasting change in the life of this community."

Evon felt high from all of this, the success with Skolnick and Sennett's address, but she found Feaver in a decidedly different mood when they drove home an hour later. The aftermath of these wired showdowns was beginning to assume a pattern. Much as Robbie enjoyed the moment, it demanded an intensity, a state of high alert and toe-dancing nimbleness, which left him depleted and also somewhat depressed as he confronted the results.

"Sometimes I sit up at night and think about all the people I'm fucking over," he said now. "It's starting to be a lot." As the number of solid prosecutions mounted, Feaver often seemed caught between warring impulses of self-congratulation and loathing. She understood in a way. You couldn't hate Skolnick. Even for her, there was no rush at the thought of him in a cell. But she felt no regrets.

"He knows what he's doing," said Evon.

"Do you? I mean, bringing out the worst in people and making them pay the price? You really think that's okay?"

"Necessary," she answered. She didn't think what they were doing was terrible. There were good deeds and bad, like the two different sides of the highway with a stripe in between. And once people crossed over, they could just keep going. That was the sorry lesson of experience.

"I wouldn't mind," Robbie said, as the big car galloped up the ramp onto the highway, "but I know damn well you're gonna scoop up the small fry and never land Brendan." It was a jolt hearing that on the heels of Sennett's halftime speech. But Robbie nodded to cement his opinion. "Never," he said. "And I'm not saying anything about me. We get there, I'll march in a straight line, do like I'm told. Stan's got me by the short ones anyway. But Brendan's way beyond crafty. He'll see your shadow in the dark. My prediction is you guys aren't gonna get close."

"We get em all, Robbie," she said.

"FBI's like the Mounties?"

"You betchum." She meant it, too. Inspired by Sennett, she felt starched by pride. People asked all the time, A nice girl like you, FBI, huh? And the truth was that she was hard put to say where it came from, being an agent, Effin Be I. The end of field hockey was like falling into a hole. Most of her Olympic teammates planned to be coaches. Life for them would remain the field: green Astroturf wet thoroughly before game time, the continual sharp crack of the. ball on the stick, and thinking about how great they were when they were young. For her it was done. Because somehow the illusion that had gone with it had been exposed. She was twenty-four years old. She'd been to the Olympics. And there was still no place in the world where she felt right.

Just to look at options, she'd done the paralegal course at the law school at Iowa while she was finishing the degree requirements for her B.A. In the same kind of mood, she went to a job fair in the field house. Behind a folding table, sitting around with the recruiters from places like RJR Nabisco and American Can, were two guys from the Bureau in gray suits and government-issue glasses, types if they'd ever existed. But it clicked. Her mother's father had been the Sheriff. He was a lifelong deputy who got the top job when his boss died on duty, buried in an avalanche he'd brought down on himself trying to blast loose a cornice that was threatening a road. Valiant. That was the word her grandfather used in mourning his friend. Like the prince, she thought, with his beautiful pageboy that resembled Merrel's. It had become, in the tangle of things inside a little girl's head, improbably large. The Sheriff's star, a heavy gold medallion twice the size of what the deputies wore, looked to her as though all the power and obligation were pinned right there on her grandfather's chest. She was halfway through Quantico when she found out that she wasn't going to get a badge. Hoover never wanted the national police force to look as if they were police. That's why they wore suits instead of uniforms, and carried credentials instead of a shield. But she still longed for a star of her own now and then.