Scott Turow - Limitations

“You know, man, sittin’ up there, goin’ like, ‘You guilty, man. You ain’ guilty. Dude, you get twenty-five. But you, hombre, you get paper.” ’ Hector’s cuffed hands circle the air as he passes out these imaginary sentences. “That cool or what?”

“That’s not actually my job anymore,” George says. “But when I did it, I never especially enjoyed that part.” George has never met a judge who didn’t say that sentencing is the hardest thing he or she has to do.

“ Ese,” the kid answers, “is pretty cool.” When George was a State Defender and had conversations like this, he used to give his young clients the same timeworn speech. Forget thug life, stay in school, you can be a lawyer too. It was 1973, and George believed that. He hears occasionally from a couple of the young men he represented who turned their lives around, but nobody’s a lawyer or a judge. These days kids like Hector sneer. At the age of sixteen, he already knows how much of the world is closed to him.

“Hector, I want to know why you and your brother decided to rob me.”

“Man, I don’t know nothin’ ’bout who jacked you, man. But gotta be to see the presidents, no?” Money, he means.

“Maybe we should ask Guillermo,” Grissom says from behind, referring to the little brother.

“Oh, he’s soft, man. You can’t go with nothin’ he gonna tell you. He’s just off the hook, man.”

Nonetheless, Grissom’s made his point. Hector seems to sober.

“That arm broke, man?” He nods at George’s sling.

“Hairline fracture. Hurts.”

“ Y que,” says Hector again. “Gotta do your work, right?”

“If that’s what you call it.” George gives the boy a cold look. “I want to know why you jacked me, Hector. I want the whole story. It’s the only way Guillermo and you catch a break.”

Hector ponders while George keeps a hard eye on him.

“ Y que,” the kid says wearily again and takes a deep breath in defeat. “We got this carnal, man. Fortuna? Had his first appearance and all last week. And that judge, man, he did him real greasy. Twenty bills, man. The bond? And he’s just hemmed in on some little dope thing, man. Twenty bills? What’s up with that, man? So like, Billy and me, man-you know, we was gonna back him up.”

“Help him make bond?”

Hector nods. “We seen you, man? Just sittin’ there? Couple times we seen you. So, you know, we get us the cuetes. But Billy, man, we come up on you, and he’s like, ‘No, vato, no way we can do this hombre, man, he’s like prayin’.’ Were you prayin’ in that car?”

George can’t help smiling briefly.

“But why me, Hector, and not somebody else?”

The boy draws back with a quick, disdaining look.

“Man, that’s a nice g-ride, man, ain’t that? Mucho ferria. ” A lot of change.

George would have been skeptical that a 1994 Lexus, a virtual antique, commands much on the street, but Cobberly said the Mexican gangs prefer to detail and retrofit older cars, regarded as classics. A style born of need is now fashion.

“Nobody pointed me out? Described the car?”

“Man, you was there. We was there. No way I knew you was a judge, man. Nothin’ like that. Only thing I heard is after, when we went to that lame puke who said he was gonna take it off us, and he’s goin’ like, ‘ Malo suerte, man, that ride, it’s been on TV, I ain’ gonna touch it.’ Even he didn’t say ‘Judge,’ man.” Hector shakes his head over his ill fortune.

“What about the guy you got the guns from?” George asks. “You didn’t talk about it with him?”

“Jorge? Can’t tell him nothin’, man. He’d come over and do you himself.” The kid frowns. “Jorge, man, that’s gonna be one vato loco ’bout losin’ them weapons.”

“How about this, Hector? Do you know the name Jaime Colon? El Corazon?”

George has asked the question in his best matter-of-fact tone, but it stops Hector cold. He rears back and delivers a narrow, disbelieving look.

“Corazon?”

“You know who he is?”

“ Ese. You thin’ I don’t know Corazon? Seen him plenty, man.”

The judge takes care to show nothing.

“Where have you seen him?”

Hector looks to the distance to fix the time.

“Tuesday night, man, ain’t it? My ma, man, she don’t never miss them damn telenovelas. She loves that guy, man. ‘Mira, mira, El Corazon.’ She’s straight loca about him.”

On the way out of the room, Gina grabs George.

“Did you believe him?”

“More or less.”

“I want three for him. And two for the little brother. The guns weren’t loaded.”

“That’s too light.”

“Come on, Judge. First adult offense.”

He remembers how he felt facing that pistol. His instinct is to say six, but that’s what the Warnovits defendants got for raping Mindy DeBoyer.

“Gina, my arm’s in a sling. And both those boys have chairs with their names on them in juvie court. Five and three sounds right to me. That’s what I’ll tell the P.A.”

Marina, who came speeding back from her conference after the arrests, missed the interrogation. She’s just entering from the receiving area as George and Abel are headed to the door. Grissom comes over, and together the three of them describe what’s transpired. Marina asks several questions before they leave.

“What do you think?” George asks her as they depart the station. She appears somewhat listless, without her usual brio. Then again, given events in the garage and her travel schedule, she missed a night’s sleep.

“I don’t think anybody in his right mind gives up Corazon-six, sixteen, or sixty.”

George tries not to react, but compared with Marina, Ahab barely gave a second thought to that fish.

“Not that it matters anymore,” she adds.

“Why doesn’t it matter?”

“I got a call from the FBI, Judge, while we were driving back. Remember I told you they were going to run forensic software on your hard drive? When I shipped Koll’s letter over, it sort of reminded them. They only picked up one thing, but it’s pretty interesting. The very first e-mail you got, Judge? They figured out what computer it came from.”

“And?”

Weary, Marina nonetheless manages to find his eye.

“It was yours. The one in your chambers.”

George stands on the sidewalk outside Area 2 with Marina and Abel, trying to gather himself. It’s shift change, and the black-and-whites are double-parked in the small lot behind the station while uniformed officers, usually in pairs, stroll in and out in the declining light of a mild late-spring evening. Across the street, in a ragged park, a few flowering trees remain in bloom on a lawn that is littered and unmowed. George’s arm is bothering him. He needs more ibuprofen.

“My computer?” he asks. “The first message came from my computer?”

“Yes, sir,” Marina answers. “They finally got around to running the forensic software and reconstructing your hard drive, so they could see everything that had been on it. I mean, it’s an obvious thought that a message returned to your computer came from there. But since the rest of the e-mails went through the open relay, the Bureau techies pretty much crossed that off. They only ran the forensic software to double-check on your copy of the message Koll received, to see if there was something about it they hadn’t noticed, but as long as they were doing it, the techs poked around to look at the very first e-mail-the one you thought you’d deleted? — and when they reconstructed the message, it was like, ‘Whoa!’ It was from your IP address, through the courthouse server. That seemed pretty weird because there was no copy in your Sent file. They figured it was a super-sophisticated spoof, and then one of them suggested reconstructing the Sent file too, and there it was. It’d been deleted.”