Courtroom 302 Read Free Page B

hand of the prisoner he’s numbering, rushes into the bullpen, and sticks his nose menacingly in the balding man’s ruddy face: “Ex cuse me—why am I about to beat the piss outta you?” The prisoner averts his eyes and says nothing more. Thomas returns to the hallway.
    The sergeant is never surprised when the pain-in-the-ass is a white guy. White prisoners tend to be either too dumb or too smart to do jail well, Thomas says. The white guys, like the kiddie criminals, seem compelled tobroadcast that they know their rights, he says. Female prisoners aggravate Thomas even more. White, black, or Hispanic, the women wail about everything, he says, often in grating voices. Give me fifty male prisoners instead of five females any day, he likes to say.
    After he’s numbered the men, Thomas skims through their arrest reports to see if he needs to keep a special eye on anyone. Out of curiosity, too. Tonight it’s mostly the standard crowd of accused drug offenders. The only arrest report catching his attention is the one for Chester G., a twenty-eight-year-old white man charged with aggravated battery against police officers. Chester G. walked into a northwest-side station yelling obscenities, the report says, then struck one officer in the arm and another in the face.
    Kevin O’Hara, a cherub-faced deputy, reads the report on Chester over Thomas’s shoulder. When Bullneck appears in the hallway, O’Hara excitedly informs him, “This guy walked into the Twenty-fifth District swinging at cops.”
    “Which one?” Bullneck asks.
    O’Hara peers into bullpen two and makes an intelligent guess. “The guy with the bandage around his head, whaddya think?”
    Chester, olive-skinned and broad-shouldered, is sitting on the floor in bullpen two. Below the wide bandage that covers his forehead, and beneath his bushy eyebrows, one eye is blackened and swollen shut. His lips are swollen as well, and his gray turtleneck is blood-spattered. O’Hara studies Chester’s battered face from the hallway and chuckles. “I fought the law, and the law won.”
    Bullneck searches the paperwork for Chester’s rap sheet, but apparently this is the twenty-eight-year-old’s first arrest. Bullneck considers himself an expert on human nature, at least on the nature of the humans brought into this basement. He wonders aloud what would prompt a guy who’s stayed out of trouble this long to walk into a police station swinging. “I think Chester’s got something wrong with him,” he tells O’Hara. “I think there’s some psych meds that Chester forgot to take. Well, let’s just ask him.” He calls Chester out to the hallway.
    “So you were swinging at cops,” Bullneck says.
    “I would never do it. I never did it,” Chester says.
    You been seeing a doctor? Bullneck asks. Uh-huh, Chester says. Taking any medicine? Nuh-unh, Chester says with a shake of his head; nothing besides the Haldol, the Ritalin, and the Cogentin. Bullneck and O’Hara exchange looks. Hearing any voices? Bullneck asks. “Not all the time,” Chester says. Hear any voices in the police station last night? Chester nods.
    “Well, you’re gonna have to stay calm tonight,” Bullneck says. “You hear any voices, tell us.”
    “Yeah, don’t swing at us, just tell us,” O’Hara adds.
    Chester nods and returns to his spot on the floor in bullpen two.
    The bus for the kiddie criminals finally arrives, and they’re escorted out of the basement. Blackjack and Harley, apparently as fond of the youths as Thomas is, snarl and snap as they walk by.
    Thomas moves some of his prisoners into the vacated bullpen, easing the crowding in bullpens one and two. A glassy-eyed young black man walking from one lockup to the next has forgotten the First Commandment; his hands are in the pockets of his windbreaker. Thomas positively reinforces him, slamming an open palm into the man’s chest. “Where the fuck ’re your hands s’posed to go?” The man grunts from the blow, his hands