Scott Turow - Limitations

Patrice’s cell phone is on his desk. Since Marina returned it to him on Friday, he has forgotten it more than once, clearly loath at some level to give #1 another chance to scare him. But he uses it to call a twenty-four-hour locksmith. Still recovering in the garage, George was hatcheted by a new fear. He had surrendered his house keys, and his address is on the driver’s license in the wallet he handed over. When the khaki radioed the police, George asked, first thing, that they send a squad to watch his house.

He phones Patrice next to tell her the locksmith is on the way.

“I got carjacked and lost the keys.”

“Oh my God, George. Are you all right?”

“I’m okay. It’s my own fault. I’ve been warned a dozen times about hanging around in the parking garage. I saw those kids lurking, and I was trying to be a tough guy-” He stops, recognizing that he’s about to reveal much of what he has been holding back. Instead, he asks Patrice to take a look out the front window. The black-andwhite is at the curb.

“But how are you?” she asks again when she’s come back to the phone.

“Fine, fine. Shaken, naturally. I got a little frisky. I need to get an X-ray of my arm. Right now I’m waiting for the cops.”

“An X-ray? I’m coming down there,” she says.

The last thing she needs is more time at a hospital. And her return to work is certain to have worn her out. But the locksmith is reason enough that she shouldn’t leave the house, and she finally accepts that.

“Between the police and the ER, I’ll be hours,” he says. He promises to wake her when he gets in.

Abel is peering in by the time he’s off the phone.

“Jeez-o-Pete, Judge.” He was paged at home and came running in green Bermuda shorts that reveal a pair of pink toothpick legs. It’s a wonder of nature they can support his bulk.

“It’s all on me, Abel. I should have listened to you.”

Abel insists on seeing the judge’s arm. For whatever reason, George has not actually looked, and he knows he’s in trouble when the arm proves to be too swollen for him simply to roll up his sleeve. Instead, he has to unbutton his shirt. An alarming dome of sore-looking red-and-blue flesh has risen halfway between his wrist and elbow. Abel whistles at the sight.

“Judge, let’s get you over to the hospital. The boys from Area Two can just as well take the report there.”

In the ER at Masonic, George waits in a little curtained area for more than an hour before they get him to X-ray. The judge took the precaution of bringing some work, but his right arm hurts when he attempts to write, and his editing is confined to juvenile scratches in the margin whose meaning he hopes he will remember tomorrow.

“Hairline fracture,” the ER doc says when he finally breezes in with the film. He gives George a blue canvas sling and Vicodin for the nights. Otherwise, the judge should be able to get by with an ibuprofen. “See an orthopedist in three days,” the doc says when he sweeps back the curtain.

Out in the waiting room, Abel has inserted himself into one of the wooden armchairs. He’s passing the time beside a man whom he introduces as a detective from Area 2. His name is Phil Cobberly, a heavy guy with tousled brown hair and a ruddy, alcoholic complexion. George shakes backhanded, using his left.

“You know, Judge, you and I did some business before,” says Cobberly. “You had me on the stand in that Domingo case years ago. Remember? General Manager of one of these giant furniture outfits, jiggering the inventory and sending merchandise out the back door? Guy was making a bill and a half, and stealing anyway. I thought we had this character on the express to the slam. Six coppers on the surveillance?”

George recalls now. Cobberly testified at the preliminary hearing and, relying on the joint report the officers had filed, identified the position of every member of the major theft unit as they observed the crime. When George subpoenaed personnel records from McGrath Hall, it turned out that two of those officers had been on leave that night. It was sloppiness, not perjury, but with proof that the police had been willing to swear to more than they actually remembered, the P.A. pled the case for probation while the coppers seethed.

“’Course these little hair balls that done you,” Cobberly says, “they won’t have that kinda lawyer, right? Your clients paid the freight. These mutts’ll stay put.” Cobberly smiles and scratches his face. For him there’s divine justice in seeing a guy who made good money freeing bad guys now on the receiving end of crime. George gave up trying to explain things to cops like this a long time ago.

Abel intervenes. “Judge is probably tired, Philly.”

Having vented, Cobberly is amiable enough taking the report.

“What about the tats?” he asks eventually.

George says the only tattoo he saw was the five-pointed star of the Almighty Latin Nation on the boy’s right hand.

“If he’s courted in to Latinos Reyes,” Cobberly says, speaking of the set that Corazon probably still heads, “then he should have had a crown right above that, same size.”

“Maybe that’s what he was looking for with this bit,” Abel says, “kid that age. Blood for life,” he adds. George thought the same thing himself when he believed he was going to get killed, but Abel’s interpretation strikes him as a stretch given how things turned out. The gang initiations usually require violence-shooting, stabbing, stomping rivals-not stealing a Lexus.

“To me, it was a straight carjack, guys,” George says. “Whatever I thought at first.”

Neither Cobberly nor Abel are fully convinced, nor is Marina, who comes rushing in just as George and Abel are ready to depart. She too is in shorts, and a placket shirt, both designer items. Off the job, she looks quite stylish. She was on her way downstate for a morning conference when she received the page. By now, George is drained and sick of the hospital-the misery on wheels, the hubbub and brightness-but because Marina has driven 110 miles in two hours to get back, he’s obliged to replay the whole incident, and they sit down together again in the waiting room outside the ER.

“I don’t buy it as a coincidence, Judge. Look at the pattern. Corazon just keeps ramping it up one notch each time. Getting closer and closer. You say these kids have been watching you for close to a week, right? Like they were waiting for you?”

“I’d say they were waiting for anybody with a car key. I’m just the guy who got bingo, because I’m always stupid enough to sit around there. If Corazon meant to put me down, he’d never have had a clearer shot.”

“He’s got his own timetable, Judge. He sent those kids to do just what they did-jack you and scare all of us silly in the process.”

George understands her theory. Corazon wants everybody-the cops, the prosecutors, and the judge most of all-to know the kill is coming. When it does, every soul who had a hand in putting Corazon away will reside in terror, seeing that the Inca of Los Latinos Reyes takes vengeance with impunity- and a smile, because the state itself will provide Corazon with a complete defense, given all its ironclad guarantees about the total isolation of prisoners in the supermax.

Call it denial, but George still thinks this is police hype. Latinos Reyes are a street gang, not Mossad, and Corazon’s hallmark is brutality, not calculating patience. But George isn’t going to duke it out with Marina again.

When he stands to leave, she says, “It’s 24/7 now, Judge. There’ll be cops covering you whenever you leave the courthouse, and my people will have you there. No back talk.”

He thinks it over. For the time being, this incident will serve as his explanation to Patrice.