“Oh, come on, Bennie.” Paul gestured at Alex. “What’s he doing here, anyway? Is he even allowed?”
“Arraignments used to be held in courtrooms, so it’s technically public proceeding. Now, follow me.” Bennie turned away and led them to the prison as an uneasy group. Mercury vapor lamps cast hazy pools of light along the road.
Julia felt worse as she got closer. She shuddered to think how Courtney would be feeling right now, expecting them but knowing that they couldn’t visit her. It would make everything harder for her than it already was.
Bennie turned to them as they walked along. “Any of you ever visited a prison?”
“No,” Julia and Paul answered together.
“I spent a night in lock-up.” Alex smiled crookedly. “You stage enough protests, sooner or later they try to make something stick.”
Bennie smiled, then caught Julia’s eye. “I know this place looks intimidating but it’s only minimum security. Nobody’s here longer than two years, and it houses about nine hundred men and fifty women. There’s also temporary holds and inmates awaiting hearings or trial, like Courtney.”
Julia gathered her thoughts. “Will we get to see Courtney?”
“Only onscreen, on closed-circuit television.”
“Will she be able to see us?”
“No, only me.”
They continued down the road, reached a large circular driveway, and passed a black prison bus with grates covering the windows. They reached the entrance, which had metal doors of pitted green paint under a flat roof, and entered the prison. There was a large, windowed entrance hall with a dirty black mat in front of double doors of smudged glass.
They entered to find themselves in a waiting room, large and harshly bright, with fifty or so black bucket seats in fixed rows. The walls were dingy white cinderblock, and the tile floors a grimy gray. A glass divider painted with smiling cats and dogs walled off a play area for children. A floor of polished concrete shone dully, and the air felt hot and dry.
Bennie led them to a counter with a bulletproof screen behind which sat an older C.O. in a black uniform. They produced their IDs with a minimum of conversation, then a female C.O. appeared, showed them a small locker for their IDs and keys, then ushered them through a metal detector and a sally port that contained three sets of locked and barred doors.
Julia felt her stomach twist as they got farther inside the prison. The halls were empty and silent except for faint echoes of voices. The air felt hotter and smelled worse. The foursome was funneled together through a cattle chute to another locked door, which the C.O. unlocked, pulled open, and slammed behind them with aclang, then locked with a large, crude key.
Julia swallowed hard. She sensed they were passing the point of no return. The C.O. led them into a long hallway that seemed to run thelength of the prison, evidently one of the sides of the H. The hall was wide and dim, lined with grimy, scuffed cinderblock walls.
They passed a glass-enclosed room on the right, with a sign on the glass door that readSECURITY CENTER. It was dark inside the room, and two C.O.s sat before a wall of closed-circuit screens glowing gray. One of the C.O.s looked over as they passed, then rose and opened the door, poking his head out. He was beefy and Black, and he smiled at Alex.
“Dudek the Dude! As I live and breathe!”
Alex grinned, and they slapped hands. “Hey, Curtis.”
“What brings you here?”
“The usual oppression by the state.”
Curtis chuckled. “Never change, bro.”
“Never. Give my best to Denise.”
“The hell I will!” Curtis shot back, laughing.
Paul rolled his eyes but said nothing. There were a few meeting rooms on the left, and Julia could see inside the rooms because the top half of the wall was glass and the lower was cinderblock.
“This way.” The female C.O. unlocked the door to the middle meeting room, and they entered. It was a small rectangle containing three black bucket chairs in front of a table of audiovisual equipment and a medium-size monitor, its screen dark. The air in the room was hotter than the hallway, bringing up the odor of institutional disinfectant.
“Thank you,” Bennie said for all of them, then the C.O. closed the door and locked them in.
“We’re locked in?” Julia grimaced, sitting down.
“Yes, for security.” Bennie took the seat in front of the monitor.
“Bennie, now what happens?” Paul took the last chair, which forced Alex to stand, but if it bothered him, he didn’t let it show.