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FIVE MINUTES TO THREE IN THE AFTERNOON EXACTLY SIXTY-ONE hours before it happened The lawyer drove in and parked in the eround, so he spent ain the foot well until his overshoes were secure Then he got out and turned his collar up and walked to the visitors’ entrance There was a bitter wind out of the north It was thick with fat lazy flakes There was a storm sixty miles away The radio had been full of it

The lawyer got in through the door and stamped the snow off his feet There was no line It was not a regular visiting day There was nothing ahead of him except an empty room and an euards standing around doing nothing He nodded to theh he didn’t know them But he considered himself on their side, and they on his Prison was a binary world Either you were locked up, or you weren’t They weren’t He wasn’t

Yet

He took a grey plastic bin off the top of a teetering stack and folded his overcoat into it He took off his suit jacket and folded it and laid it on top of the overcoat It was hot in the prison Cheaper to burn a little extra oil than to give the inmates two sets of clothes, one for the summer and one for the winter He could hear their noise ahead of him, the clatter of metal and concrete and the randorued corridors and many closed doors

He emptied his trouser pockets of keys, and wallet, and cell phone, and coins, and nested those clean warrey plastic bin Didn’t carry it to the X-ray belt Instead he hefted it across the room to a smallin a wall He waited there and a woave hie for it

He braced himself in front of the lanced ahead, expectantly, as if waiting for an invitation Learned behaviour, frouards let him stand there for a minute, a small, nervous man in his shirtsleeves, empty-handed No briefcase No notebook Not even a pen He was not there to advise He was there to be advised Not to talk, but to listen, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to put what he heard anywhere near a piece of paper

The guards beckoned hiuard wanded him and the second patted hih doors designed never to be open unless the last and the next were closed, and around tight corners designed to slow a running lass ith watchful faces behind

The lobby had been institutional, with linoleureen paint on the walls and fluorescent tubes on the ceiling And the lobby had been connected to the outside, with gusts of cold air blowing in when the door was opened, and salt stains and puddles of snowmelt on the floor The prison proper was different It had no connection to the outside No sky, no weather No attereasy where sleeves and shoulders had touched it, still pale and dusty where they hadn’t Underfoot was grippy grey paint, like the floor of an auto enthusiast’s garage The lawyer’s overshoes squeaked on it

There were four interview rooms Each was a less concrete cube divided exactly in half by a wall-to-wall desk-height counter with safety glass above Caged lights burned on the ceiling above the counter The counter was cast frorain of the forlass was thick and slightly green and was divided into three overlapping panes, to give two sideways listening slots The centre pane had a cut-out slot at the bottom, for documents Like a bank Each half of the room had its own chair, and its own door Perfectly symmetrical The lawyers entered one way, and the inmates entered the other Later they left the same way they had come, each to a different destination

The guard opened the door from the corridor and stepped a yard into the room for a visual check that all was as it should be Then he stood aside and let the lawyer enter The lawyer stepped in and waited until the guard closed the door behind him and left hiht minutes late He had driven slowly because of the weather Norarded it as a failure to be late for an appointment Unprofessional, and disrespectful But prison visits were different Ti to prisoners

Another eight lass A different guard stepped in and checked and then stepped back out and a prisoner shuffled in The lawyer’s client He hite, and enorht, marbled with fat, and coe jumpsuit He had wrist and waist and ankle chains that looked as delicate as jewellery His eyes were dull and his face was docile and vacant, but his ling to retain complex information

The door in the wall behind the glass closed

The prisoner sat down

The lawyer hitched his chair close to the counter

The prisoner did the same

Symmetrical

The lawyer said, ‘I’m sorry I’m late’

The prisoner didn’t answer

The lawyer asked, ‘How are you?’

The prisoner didn’t answer The laent quiet The air in the roo, reciting, working his way through lists and instructions and sentences and paragraphs he had committed to memory From time to time the lawyer said, ‘Slon a bit,’ and on each occasion the guy paused and waited and then started up again at the head of the previous sentence with no change in his pace and no alteration to his singsong delivery It was as if he had no other way of co

The lawyer had what he considered to be a pretty good memory, especially for detail, likea lot of attention, because to concentrate on the process of re distracted hi But even so some small corner of his mind had counted fourteen separate criminal proposals before the prisoner finally finished up and sat back

The lawyer said nothing

The prisoner said, ‘Got all that?’

The lawyer nodded and the prisoner lapsed into a bovine stillness Or equine, like a donkey in a field, infinitely patient Ti to prisoners Especially this one The lawyer pushed his chair back and stood up His door was unlocked He stepped out to the corridor

Five minutes to four in the afternoon

Sixty hours to go

The lawyer found the sa lot two ain and his stuff was back in his pockets, all reassuringly weighty and present and nor harder by then and the air was colder and the ilder It was going dark, fast and early The lawyer sat for aand his wipers pushing berlass Then he took off, a wide slow turn with his tyres squeaking against the fresh fall and his headlight beah the white swirl He headed for the exit, the wire gates, the wait, the trunk check, and then the long straight road that led through town to the highway

Fourteen criminal proposals Fourteen actual crimes, if he relayed the proposals and they were acted upon, which they surely would be Or fifteen crimes, because he hiht crimes, if a prosecutor chose to call each separate issue a separate conspiracy, which a prosecutor lory Twenty-eight separate paths to shanominy and disbarment, and trial and conviction and imprisonment Life imprisonment, almost

certainly, given the nature of one of the fourteen proposals, and then only after a successful plea bargain A failed plea bargain was too awful to contemplate

The lawyer ed into the slow lane All around hi snow in the late afternoon Nothis way, some of them faster and sooing the other way, across the divider He drove one-handed and jacked up off the seat and took out his cell phone Weighed it in his hand He had three choices One, do nothing Two, call the number he had been told to call Three, call the number he really should call, which in the circumstances was 911, with hasty back-ups to the local PD and the Highway Patrol and the county sheriffs and the Bar Association, and then a lawyer of his own

He chose the second option, like he kneould Choice nuet him nowhere, except a little later, when they caet him dead, slowly and eventually, after what he was sure would be hours or even days of hideous agony He was a small nervous man No kind of a hero

He dialled the number he had been told to dial