Джонатан Келлерман: Crime Scene

“In two miles,” the phone said, “the exit is on the right.”

“How’re you feeling?” Amy asked.

I shrugged. “Fine,” I said. “Little nervous.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“That would be the healthy thing to do, wouldn’t it.”

“Only if you want to,” she said.

“I don’t really.”

“Then don’t.”

A green sign loomed.

The phone said, “In one mile—”

Amy muted it.

The last stretch before the exit consisted of citrus groves — row after row of round-topped trees, studded with underripe fruit. It was easy to pretend we were headed someplace fun. A day of U-pick, followed by lunch, a nap, a blanket in the shade.

Then we crossed over a dry riverbed and the terrain sank and withered, becoming a terrible blankness, baked and sterile, only the sandy margins of the road and drooping power lines separating us from oblivion.

It was a vision of hell.

I reached for Amy, and she took my hand.

The prison campus revealed itself in stages. Barbed wire, protecting nothing but empty acreage; bleached green transformer boxes and orange traffic delineators and a duo of blinking amber lights that warned of the upcoming intersection. Low-slung cement structures: a sister facility: state hospital for mentally ill and sexually violent offenders.

The left turn lane stretched for hundreds of yards, as if to allow you time to change your mind.

I put on my signal.

The run-up to the guard booth was long, too, trimmed with agave and rocks.

Amy squeezed my hand. “You do know how to woo a lady.”

I said, “Wait’ll you see what I got lined up for our third date.”

The guard checked my driver’s license, raised the barrier arm. “Ahead on your right.”

I lifted my foot off the brake.

The visitors’ lot was already crowded, slack-faced folks trudging between the cars, like the breakup of some awful tailgate. They knew enough to get here early.

I killed the engine. In an instant, suffocating heat slammed through the windshield.

I turned to Amy. “Ready?”

Easier to ask her than myself.

We got out and she took my hand and we joined the back of a discontented line, shuffling toward the door, out of the sun and into a scratched, boomy concrete room. Clearing the metal detector required that she let go of me, but she was waiting for me, hand out, when I came through, and she held on to me as I approached the booth, the impassive face behind Plexiglas.

I felt her walking close beside me, and I felt her fingers tighten on mine as I formed the words:

Clay Edison, here to see my brother.