Scott Turow - Personal injuries

With that, Brendan allowed the chromed legs of his chair to ring as he pushed away from the table. The meeting was over. Tuohey sat erect and proud. He knew he'd handled himself with customary deftness, tiptoeing down the chalk lines with the delicacy of Nijinsky. From his feet, with Milacki and Kosic beside him, Brendan laid his dry hand on Robbie's coat collar and delivered one more perfect line.

"I don't feel concerned, Robbie. Not a bit. You're the kind of fellow who can stay the course in hard times." Tuohey reaffirmed that supposed compliment with a solid nod and turned, his two retainers on his heels. Across from me, Sennett began groaning again as soon as Tuohey started moving away. Stan ran his hands over his hair. He rarely allowed emotions to affect his grooming.

"Ugh! What a wienie performance! He should have gone for it. He had him."

I started to defend my client, but McManis uncharacteristically interrupted. Jim had given his usual dry eye to Stan's outburst. He allowed his tousled head a single shake.

"Stan, I don't think he was ever close. These guys are in no-man's-land. They know about Evon, but they're not sure about Robbie. They don't want to cut him loose and give him a reason to turn on them, but they're gonna be way careful."

The van had left the curb. Another undercover agent, Tex Clevenger, a lean six-footer in his late twenties who posed as McManis's messenger, was at the wheel today so Joe could run his crews from the street. Tex asked if there were instructions for Amari, but Stan, still dying a thousand deaths, ignored him.

"There's a way," he told Jim. He raised a fist, the knuckles white. "There is a way."

They did not come for her. not that Evon expected it. She never felt in danger. Shirley and she drove to the office each morning with a cordon of surveillance cars whipping past them. Within a week, both of them knew all the OGVs, official government vehicles, or CARs, as human beings put it. While Evon was at work, a local agent was sitting in the dark in her apartment, using a flashlight to read magazines. Nothing happened.

McManis finally let her have a gun. There was no point in sitting there unarmed while she was waiting for the bogeyman. The only weapon he could get her on short notice was one of the S amp;W 10 millimeters that nobody in his right mind really wanted. Typical D.C., good idea gone wrong. After the death of three agents in a shootout in Miami, the thinking types wanted eleven-inch penetration, lighter ammo, fast expansion. Smith amp; Wesson made the gun to spec, but the thing was the size of a cannon-she'd need a beach bag, not a purse, to hide it-and the handle was bad. At home she had an S amp;W 5904, high-capacity double-action semiautomatic, 9 mm. That was a weapon.

At McManis's urging, she'd spent the Memorial Day weekend following the break-in in Des Moines. She'd wanted to go to Denver to see her sister, but Merrel and Roy and the kids were at their new condo in Vail, flyfishing, and given the difficulty of booking flights over the holiday weekend, Evon would not have gotten there for much more than twenty-four hours. Instead, she turned the key on the life of DeDe Kurzweil. The house she rented was dark and had a close, unpleasant odor. The mice, she suspected, had had a field day, but the smell was more like what you'd expect in the home of an elderly person locked up with a dog. She made some calls and went to a barbecue with Sal Harney, another agent, who'd used her car while she was gone. Before he drove her home, she made him open up the safe at the resident agency office and she removed her 5904. Sunday, after church, she went to a civilian range and shot for an hour. The proprietor and a couple of his greasy-looking flunkies were watching by the time she was done. She kept the pistol in her purse now, storing it at McManis's when she ran over to the Temple with various filings she was doing for Mort.

Matronly, good-humored, Shirley slept on the sofa. At night, she talked to Evon about her kids and drank a little too much. Shirley wore a white terry-cloth robe that wrapped around her tight as the dressing on a wound, with long hairy fibers dancing down from each sleeve. She had three children, two married; the last, a girl, a junior in college, was thinking about the Secret Service.

Robbie was seldom in the office now. The excuse imagined only a month before, that Rainey's decline would require his full attention, had, like some ill-omened wish, come true. Alf felt there was no way to ensure secure conversations over the phone equipment in Feaver's home, and so twice a day, in the guise of transporting work from the office, Evon appeared there to ferry messages back and forth from McManis. Robbie's capacities for buoyant denial seemed to have failed him entirely in the wake of his mother's death. Often when Evon arrived, she was startled to see that he had not bothered to shave. He explained himself succinctly one morning. "No matter how much you tell yourself you know what's coming," he said, "you don't."

Once a day, Evon went upstairs to greet Rainey. She was weakening quickly. The routine functions of life commanded all her energies. After a meal, she would sleep for at least an hour. Toileting, dressing, massage were exhausting and, as a result, she seldom had the energy to maintain her focus through much of a conversation, except with Robbie. The cuirass, which looked a great deal like a bowl-style vacuum cleaner, was fixed over her chest to aid her breathing in, but it tethered her to the bed. The equipment hissed away with an unnerving sound like a child sucking too hard through a straw. Worse, the doctor had said that Lorraine's carbon dioxide levels made it likely that within the next two weeks she would have to decide on ventilation. The alternative was descent into ALS's final phase, a slow, desperate suffocation. Robbie was sparing with the details, but his demeanor suggested he was losing in his effort to persuade Rainey to go on.

On Tuesday, June 8, I chaired the annual fund-raising luncheon of the Kindle County Bar Foundation, an organization I'd started during my term as Bar President. At moments, I wondered if I'd just wanted to leave a small monument to myself-so much of what is supposed to be charity has always been the refuge of ego. On the board, was often wearied by the frequently politicized squabbles ever which of many underfunded legal projects should be stinted. Yet I signed on every year. Doing less good than you'd want doesn't mean you're doing no good at all. For the event, judges and public officials were 'comped,' as they say in the fund-raising trade, and seated, one for each table, with paying guests, so we could peddle elbowrubbing and access in the name of charity. By this and other shameless devices, we had managed to gather nearly five hundred people in the enormous Grand Ballroom of the Hotel Gresham. The room was an antique, a Gilded Age leftover. Its gilt-ribbed pilasters and wedding-cake ceiling leafed in gold almost mocked the poverty of the people intended to benefit from the event, who were brought to mind only in the obligatory mid-meal video.

Our keynote address this year came from Supreme Court Justice Manuel Escobedo, who was funny for five minutes before he sank like a weary traveler into the valley of his prepared text. Like most former courtroom lawyers, he was reluctant to leave the podium once he had returned there, and it was nearly 2 p.m. by the time the justice had fmished. A dark-suited phalanx, eager to pound the phones and the word processors to pay for lunch, rushed between the majestic marble columns at the back of the ballroom even before the applause had died. Elsewhere, in smaller circles, some of the routine grip and grin that had gone on before the meal was briefly resumed, lawyers passing quick shots and greetings amid the gilt-armed fauteuils turned at all angles by the hasty departures.