In Plain Sight

HE PLACED THE locker key in a plastic basket and showed the two guards at the metal detector the can of Copenhagen.

“She said it was okay,” he said, gesturing to the waiting room.

“She did, huh?” a guard wearing horn-rimmed glasses said, taking the can and opening it. Unlike the woman, the guard stuck his bare finger into it and swirled it around.

“What are you looking for?” he asked. “You’re getting your germs in it.”

The guard looked up, not sympathetic. “People try to smuggle things in here all the time,” he said. “How do we know you didn’t mix something in here?”

He felt his neck get hot. “But she said it was okay. It’s a gift.”

“Nope,” the guard said. “Leave it here. You can get it on your way out.” The guard replaced the top, and wiped his finger on his uniform pants.

Go wash your hands . . . Don’t put your finger in your mouth, he wanted to warn. But all he said was, “Oh, come on . . .”

The guard shook his head no. It was final.

“For Christ sake,” he said. His plan was already going a little awry. But he had a backup.

“Keep Him out of it,” the guard said. “Do you want to go inside or not?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then leave it here and go get in the van.”

He nodded, figured he’d better shut up. As he went down the hallway where another guard was waiting at an open door, he heard a metal clunk as the tobacco was tossed inside a metal waste can. He let out a breath and walked ahead. A van was outside.

He settled into the first seat behind the driver. He was the only visitor in the van. The driver climbed in after him, turned on the motor, shut the door, and did a slow U-turn. He looked outside the window at the bare, rocky hills. There were wisps of clouds in a high blue sky and nothing, absolutely nothing, else. Except some antelope, up there on the hillside. Hiding in plain sight.

IT WAS A mile from the Administration Building to the prison. The driver said, “First time?”

“Yep.”

“You want to know what you’re looking at?”

He really didn’t care, but to be friendly, he said, “Sure.”

“That’s the ITU,” the driver said, nodding in the direction of a boxy gray building behind a fence topped with razor wire. “Intensive Treatment Unit. Ultra-rehab. That’s where the drug addicts get sent when they arrive. Or if an inmate needs extensive psychological treatment.”

“That’s probably a lot of them, I’d guess,” he said.

“You’re right about that.

“This is a state-of-the-art prison,” the driver continued, saying it in a way that suggested he had repeated it a hundred times, like a tour guide at a theme park. “It’s a city unto itself. Everything is on premises, cooking, laundry, hospital, everything. It would continue to function if the rest of the world didn’t, at least for a while. We have six hundred and eighty inmates in A, B, C, and E buildings, or pods. The inmates are segregated based on their crimes and their behavior, and you can tell their status by the shirts they wear. Yellow means newbie, or rookie. Blue shirts and red shirts are general population. Orange means watch out, that man is in trouble or he’s dangerous. White means death row.

“The whole place is watched twenty-four/seven by two hundred cameras that are everywhere. I mean it, everywhere. There are also motion sensors everywhere, and I mean everywhere. No one moves in this place that somebody isn’t watching him.

“That includes visitors,” the driver said, looking at him in his mirror to make sure he had heard him.

“It’s slow today for visitors. Summer weekends, we get more than a hundred people. The average day is fifty. Are you meeting your inmate in the contact or noncontact area?”

He wasn’t sure. “Noncontact, I think.”

“Who is it?”

He told him.

The driver nodded. “Yeah. Noncontact. He’s in for murder, right?”

He said yes. Multiple homicide. Death row. He’d be wearing white.

“He doesn’t get many visitors,” the driver said, leaving it at that.

HE STOOD IN another waiting area. He wished the driver hadn’t told him about the cameras, even though he should have known. If he’d felt exposed standing in a parking lot, he really felt exposed here. He’d been told the conversation he was about to have wouldn’t be recorded. But how could he be sure of that? He’d have to keep his comments obscure, the way he had in his letters to the inmate. Get things across without actually saying them.