“So, qué pasa? What’s shaking?” he wanted to know. “A detention hearing?”

I started to explain, but he spotted a couple of his clients waiting for him on the other side of the room before I got to the part about Monica Fullbright. I thought he might get a laugh out of it. The sheer ridiculousness of it. The fallen ideals of law students. You start out thinking you’ll save the world, and you end up trying to get papers for someone’s maid.

“Check B-18 for detainees,” he said as he hurried away. “Give me a call if you need anything. Anything at all.” His smile hooked up into a happy leer as he disappeared into the crowd.

B-18. But for that hot tip, there’s no telling how long it might have taken me to find room B-18, which was located outside the building, back by the rear parking lot and down an unmarked flight of stairs. A piece of white paper was stuck to the door, but it had come loose on one side and the wind blew it about so that reading the handwriting on it was nearly impossible. Parked outside was a small fleet of unmarked green vans. The same puke-green the cops use on their undercover Ford Fairlanes. A black man in a green uniform stood watch just inside the doorway of B-18. It was very clear this was a holding tank.

Compared to the first floor, the room was strangely empty and quiet. Most of the room was separated from the short hallway by iron bars and steel mesh. There was a desk inside this cage. A door to one side of the desk led to what I guessed was a cell. Several black vinyl chairs like the ones in my office were the only other furniture. This made it somewhat easier to understand what Monica Fullbright had been worried about. No matter how many times I’ve been to Sybil Brand Institute for Women, to County, to the custody tanks in the courthouse, every time I hear those sally port doors close behind me, I think of all the things I’ve done wrong and I’m afraid I’m not going to get out again.

Behind the desk sat an INS officer with enormous breasts barely buttoned into a green shirt. Three gold necklaces with crosses and hearts fell across her chest, a gold heart hitting the plastic name tag above her left nipple.

“Give me the blue form,” she growled without looking up from the paperback romance she was reading. Its lurid cover was all throbbing ruffles and Gothic castles. These books are written by divorced men using noms de plume with exotic geographic references such as Margaret Deauville and Helen Saxony.