“Oh?” Joanna asked. “How are you being paid for maintaining our facility, Mr. Blair?”
She knew exactly how much Anchor Air Conditioning was being paid on a monthly basis as an ongoing maintenance retainer. When the board had come up with that brilliant idea, she had argued against it—argued and lost.
“Monthly,” Alex Blair returned.
“Right. Because the board of supervisors wanted to have a regular budgetary item they could count on rather than having occasional spikes, right?”
“Yes,” Blair replied. “I believe that’s correct.”
“And how long have you had the contract?”
“Six months or so,” Blair said.
“Seven,” Joanna corrected. “I have it right here. It started in December of last year.”
“Well, seven then,” Blair admitted grudgingly.
“And how much time have you put in at our facility?”
Blair paused again. Through the phone Joanna could hear him shuffling papers. “That would have been two months ago, when we came out to fire up the AC units and get them ready for summer.”
“Seven months,” Joanna said. “And your people have been here exactly once. As I said before, Mr. Blair, you’d better have someone here working on our equipment by five o’clock today. Otherwise, I’m calling in a pinch-hitter repair company and reporting you to the board of supervisors as well.”
She punched the speakerphone button, ending the call, cutting Alex Blair off in mid-excuse.
“Do you think these clowns will actually show up, Sheriff Brady?” Tom Hadlock asked.
“They’d better,” she said. “But if I were you, I’d call Sammy 77
Cotton and give him a heads-up. Tell him if Anchor Air Conditioning isn’t here by five, I want his crew here by five after.”
“What if Sammy does the job and Anchor doesn’t pay him for it?”
“Anchor will pay, all right,” Joanna said grimly. “I’ll see to it. Now tell me, what do we do in the meantime? I don’t want to lose anyone—guards or prisoners—due to heat prostration.”
“We can let the prisoners out in the yard, I suppose,” Tom Hadlock said dubiously.
“It’s cooler outside in the shade than it is in here, but I hate to have that many people outside all at once. If there was any trouble …”
“Call Chief Deputy Montoya,” Joanna said. “Have him come over. I need him to give me a hand.”
Frank Montoya arrived at the jail a few minutes later. “What’s up, Sheriff Brady?”
he asked.
“What can we do about the prisoners?” Joanna asked. “We’ve got to let them cool off.
Can we let them outside?”
Frank thought about it for a minute. “If everyone is loose in the yard at once, we should probably bring in some of the patrol deputies to back up the detention officers just in case there’s trouble.”
Joanna nodded. “Good idea.”
‘I’ll get on the horn and see how long it’ll take to get them here.”
Joanna nodded and turned to Hadlock. “Before we let them into the yard, I want water out there—water and ice—plenty of it. Plenty of paper cups, too. Got it?”
“Right,” the jail commander said. “I’ll notify the kitchen right away. Anything else?”
“Yes. How do I make a jailwide announcement?”
78
Tom Hadlock motioned to an old-fashioned-looking microphone that stood on the credenza behind his desk. “Help yourself,” Tom said. “Hold down that button and talk into the mike.”
“What next?” Frank asked.
“I’m going to make an announcement over the jail intercom,” Joanna told him. “And, for the sake of our non- English speakers, you’re going to translate.
“This is Sheriff Brady speaking,” Joanna said. “As you have no doubt noticed, our air-conditioning units have gone out and won’t be repaired until much later this afternoon. We have a choice here. You can spend the afternoon sweltering in your cells, or we can do something about it.”
She passed Frank the microphone and then waited for him to translate before she continued.
“At this point it’s probably cooler outside than it is inside. We’re willing to let people outside, but only if we can have some assurances that there won’t be any difficulty.”
Again she waited while Frank translated. “Once we have additional personnel in place, we’ll be moving you out into the rec yards where we plan to have ice, water, and towels. We’ll let you out. We’ll do it in an orderly, careful fashion, but let me warn you—if there’s any trouble, and I mean at the first sign of trouble—heat or no heat, you go back inside under full lockdown.”
By the time Tom Hadlock returned to his office, Frank had finished translating the last segment of Joanna’s announcement. “The kitchen will have the water and ice out there within the next fifteen minutes,” Hadlock
