Scott Turow - Personal injuries

Both cars stopped a quarter block away while she paid the taxi driver. She told Robbie as soon as she was in the Mercedes. He didn't seem to buy it, but she'd described the cars and he recognized them himself in his rearview within a few minutes of leaving the subdivision.

"Should I ditch them?" he asked.

"Let McManis decide. I'll call him." Her cell phone wasn't really secure, but there was no choice. There was no answer on the emergency number.

Robbie's car phone rang a minute later. McManis didn't even say good morning.

"They're ours," he said. "We've been covering you since last night. Just in case." Before he hung up, Jim told Evon he wanted to see her once she got in.

She came straight up from the garage. Jim greeted her from behind his desk and asked her to close the door. He drained the last from a Starbucks cup and took a long time to look her over. He was well groomed, but there were little gray swells from sleeplessness beneath his eyes.

He'd prepared a speech. The assumption from the start, he said, was that they were dealing with rough company. Undercover agents who'd been unmasked had had some heaping bad times, McManis said. Shot. Some UCAs had been tortured to find out what they knew. His tone remained unruffled, but he did not spare details graphic enough that for a moment it was almost as bad as if he'd laid those corpses on his desk. As McManis figured it, he said, she was entitled to get out now.

"I'm a big girl," she answered.

"You have to think about it. Don't just sing from the hymnal."

She had thought about it. Much of the night.

"It's starting to get exciting," she said.

"We might be able to do it without you." That was ridiculous. They both knew that. If she cut and ran now, she might as well wire Walter Western Union to tell him Carmody was right. She tried to be level and unflappable, like McManis, as she shook her head.

At ten, we met. Jim stood up in his white shirt and addressed the assemblage-Sennett, Robbie, me, and the remaining UCAs. D.C. had punted. The decision whether to go on had to be made on the ground, where the operatives themselves had the best vantage to judge how close they were to blown. Evon was willing to go forward, he said. But he urged everyone to take a second to reconsider. Around the table, no one moved. It wasn't clear to me whether Stan would have offered Robbie the same chance to opt out, but Feaver and I had talked already, and he was convinced that, for the moment, Evon was the only one in serious peril.

Stan received the community resolve with a taut buttonedup smile and took over. To reinforce the team, he had decided to share news previously sequestered in the realm of need-to-know. Everyone had realized that Amari and his surveillance squad had tailed the targets after the drops. Both Walter and Skolnick, it developed, had visited with Kosic within a few hours after Robbie passed them money. And the surveillance hadn't terminated there. Amari and his watchers had been dutifully following Rollo when he bought a newspaper, or blood sausage at the market, or visited a currency exchange. As he approached the register, an agent would sidle close enough to catch a look at the bills Kosic was using to pay. Then, as soon as he was gone, another agent would make a purchase with something larger. The idea was to get Rollo's bill back as change in the hope it would prove to be part of the prerecorded money Robbie had delivered. And it had worked. They'd hit the bull's-eye three times now, picking up two bills Robbie had passed to Skolnick, from one of which D.C. had even lifted Rollo's prints. This morning at Paddywacks, the notorious hang of county pols, where Rollo, as always, had paid for Brendan's breakfast, Amari had recovered a fifty that Robbie had given Walter yesterday at 5 p.m. Stan was prepared to ask the Chief Judge to approve a bug it Kosic's office the next time money changed hands.

"The game is changing," Stan said. "We're in the second half. After yesterday, we have to figure the clock is running. But, folks"-Stan's dark eyes were bright as a grackle's-"we're literally, literally, right outside Brendan Tuohey's door."

Since Sherm Crowthers treated all souls on earth as likely enemies, he refused to employ the usual courthouse bagman. Instead, according to Robbie, Sherm did business through his half sister, Judith McQueevey, the proprietor of a successful soul food restaurant in the North End. Judith had begun with a simple storefront and had expanded over the years. Although only the hardiest of white folk ventured into the neighborhood after dark, it was not unusual at lunch for all colors to gather there, drawn by the legendary fried chicken, or the Southern-style ribs, simmered until the meat parted from the bone.

Robbie and Evon had arrived at noontime one day in late April. After their meal, Robbie approached Judith at the register. In paying the check, he handed over an envelope intended for her brother in gratitude for the fine settlement supposedly achieved after Crowthers manhandled McManis in the sexual harassment case of Olivia King.

Like me, Stan had known Sherman for years, although he had a far dimmer opinion of him, as a result of tangling with him as an opponent. But with that advantage, Sennett had figured a way to trap Crowthers. Ordinarily, the envelope Feaver offered would have been almost an inch thick, containing a hundred $100 bills. Employing the familiar gambit, Sennett decided Robbie should short Crowthers, figuring in this case Sherman would confront Feaver rather than abide being dissed.

`I gotta talk to him,' Robbie had whispered to Judith amid the restaurant's luncheon clamor. The air was heavy with frying smells and the piquancy of greens. `There's something he doesn't understand.'

Judith, who was far too shrewd not to know what was occurring, steadfastly refused to acknowledge anything. She was a big person, taller than Robbie in her high heels, and clearly a fan of her own cooking. At noontime, she wore a snug spangled evening gown, profuse purple eye shadow, and a heavy Ghanaian necklace, apparently solid gold. When Robbie handed over the envelope, Judith, adroit in these matters, pouched out a heavy vermilion lip as she hefted the package. There was only $2,000 there.

`Mmm-mmm,'she said to herself.

`That's why I have to see him,' Robbie whispered.

`I wouldn't know a thing about that,' Judith said, a wellpracticed line. Her dangling earrings, little African gods, and her long straightened hair rambled about as she shook her head.

`Please,' Robbie answered. Usually he paid Judith two hundred dollars for lunch, declining the change as her tip. But today he peeled five hundreds off the roll in his pocket. Judith, a woman of prosperity, looked at the money through one eye. Her usual animation drained, and she cheated a glance at Evon, who stood a safe distance away, while she'd overheard their exchange on the infrared. The kitchen was just to the rear, and around them rattled the voices of waitresses, in their pink uniforms, demanding their orders from the chefs in a characteristic tone of weary disappointment in the performance of men. One thing Judith had learned in this life was that money was money, you couldn't have too much, and she finally picked up the hundreds and crushed them in her fist. She waved Robbie on his way, even as he begged her for reassurance that she'd speak to her brother.

Whatever she'd told Sherman, however, did not work. Crowthers made no effort to contact Robbie. Instead, the next time Feaver appeared before Crowthers, in the first week in May, coming in with McManis on the case that had been transferred to Sherman's calendar from Gillian Sullivan's, the judge had scalded Robbie with a furious look. Without explanation, he granted McManis's standard motion to dismiss the suit.