Scott Turow - Limitations

Scream, he tells himself. He has previewed this situation a thousand times through his career, looking up from a transcript or a police report and coldly assessing the victim’s options. If they are going to kill him but are reluctant to do it here, then screaming is the best choice. The boy with the automatic at George’s throat will be put to a decision. To run. Or shoot. Running would give him the best chance to get away. But George senses that he has exhausted the kid’s patience. He tried to escape once. Respect, the credo of the street, is likely to be the foremost issue. And there’s another problem. The judge is not really sure he can summon the voice for anything better than a meek croak.

George has always known you can be so frightened it hurts. His right forearm is throbbing, and his temple is tender, but there’s also pain throughout his body. His muscles have spasmed below his armpits for some reason. And he’s damp inside his shirt.

The boy has hunched down beside the Lexus while keeping the handgun against the base of the judge’s skull. An engine fires several rows over, and a car pulls away. As it rolls off, George feels a wave of despair. It was a mistake, he decides. He should have shouted.

“Give it up, man,” the kid says again.

George shakes his head.

“Yo, puto. Get your fuckin’ ass out here, man, or it’s comin’ right through this damn window.” The boy reaches in and takes hold of George’s necktie. He gives it a sharp jerk, smashing the judge’s cheek against the door frame, but he does not wait to see if George has changed his mind about cooperating. The kid does exactly as promised, using the tie as a leash and pulling George out the open driver’s window. Instinctively, George grabs for the seat belt hanging inside the door, but it pays out as the boy drags George’s entire upper body into the outer air. He is left gasping, with both hands at his collar. In whatever hissing voice he can muster, he has said ‘Okay’ a dozen times before the boy finally eases his grip.

The kid slowly backs off from the door and watches George emerge. The other boy bounds to this side of the car now, waiting at its rear. George was right. He too has a gun.

Standing, George feels his legs wobbling. He is afraid he’s going to topple, and he begs himself not to fall over, not so much out of pride as a sense that it will only enhance the danger.

“Wallet,” the kid says. He takes George’s watch too, and his class ring from college, then makes George turn out every pocket in his suit and surrender the contents. After that, the two boys motion George away from his car. He backs off about ten feet, still rubbing his forearm. He has no idea what is happening and wonders if they are going to shoot him here after all, but that makes no sense. If they were going to do that, it would have happened by now.

Instead, the first boy slides through the opened car door into the driver’s seat and triggers the engine. He nods to his companion, who has been holding his black gun, probably a. 32, on the judge in the interval.

Please, God, not the trunk, George thinks then. They are going to force him into the car. Not the trunk. And with that, he realizes he’s going to stand his ground. They can choke him here, or pistolwhip him, but he’s not going to submit. He’ll scream if he has to. The end, whatever it will be, is going to take place on this spot.

His soul has compressed around that decision when he hears the second boy scampering away. He flees around the Lexus and into the passenger’s seat, and the kid driving throws the car into reverse. George realizes too late that he had a brief chance to run. Having backed the sedan out, the boy looks through the open window at George, who stands no more than two or three feet from him. The judge is not surprised at all when the silver gun reappears.

Shoot and drive, he thinks. That’s the plan. Kill him and escape. He had it wrong. All wrong.

“ Puto,” the boy says, “you ask Jesus tonight, man, why it wasn’t shovel time for you. I should have lit you up, man, pulling that lame stuff. Ought to make you kiss this cuete,” he says, showing him the automatic.

It takes George a second to absorb these words, and even longer to comprehend the implications. And then he sees: They are not going to kill him. They never meant to kill him. This is a robbery, not a murder. They are here to jack him and his car.

For whatever reason, the boy is still staring, as if he expects George to explain, or even offer a word of thanks. And somehow he agrees.

“I thought you were someone else,” he tells the boy. They are both astonished by that-George that he has spoken and the kid by what the older man has said. The kid’s dark, quick eyes move around in bewilderment.

“Man,” he declares, and with that stomps on the accelerator. The Lexus, George’s private refuge, flies around a turn and out of sight.

He looks for something to sit on, but the closest thing is one of the concrete pillars, and he leans against it, waiting for the feeling to come back into his body. For a moment, he does nothing but breathe, each inhalation a supreme experience. In relief, he is weakening. His legs are overcooked, and slowly he lets his weight go and sags with his back against the pillar down to the filthy, oil-stained floor. He tries to review the entire incident, but there is only one lasting impression. He was wrong. Everything he thought was wrong. He has always believed he understood crime, the causes, the preparation, and the aftermath. But it turns out that, in thirty years, he has apparently learned nothing of any real use. Or accuracy. He misapprehended everything, resisted unnecessarily, and by so doing brought himself into the only mortal peril he actually faced.

Slowly his spirit seems to be creeping back into his body from the site nearby where it had been watching, preparing for his demise. Every physical possession is gone. He handed over not only his wallet but his house keys, even his reading glasses and his loose change. He does not have Patrice’s cell phone but can’t recall giving that to the boy and wonders if he may have left it in his chambers.

He never really understood, he thinks. He never fully comprehended. That in the end, or at the start, a human being is only this: a single humiliated fiber that wants desperately to live. He considers the messages he has been receiving and the foolhardy bravery he has tried to display. All pointless. At the moment of consequence, nothing matters but staying alive.

Patrice could have told him that. It was what she must have experienced when the doctor prodded beneath her larynx and said he didn’t care for what he felt. And so George Mason sits there on the gritty floor, thinking with regret and admiration about his wife.

Getting back into the courthouse seems to take forever. He bangs on the glass of the front door with his one good hand for at least five minutes, and when the night security officer, another useless member of Marina’s khaki tribe, finally ambles to the window, he winds his head like something on a spring.

“Court’s closed,” the khaki officer mouths before turning his back. He probably takes George for a lawyer who missed the filing deadline on an appellate brief he hopes to slip through the mail slot of the clerk’s office.

“I’m a judge!” George keeps screaming. “I’ve been assaulted.” Eventually, Joanna Dozier, a deputy P.A. who is working late, recognizes him, and the police, at last, are summoned.

Awaiting the cops, George goes up to his chambers. He removes an ice tray from the freezer compartment in the tiny refrigerator in the corner and applies it to his shirtsleeve. The pain in his forearm is drilling, too deep and distinct, he suspects, for a mere bruise.