I counted the cinder blocks on the wall across from my bunk one hundred and forty-seven times before anyone told me what I'd been charged with.
My name is Daniel Alvarez. I'm thirty years old, I run a veterinary clinic on Grant Road in Tucson with a woman named Courtney Mills, and until the second of September I had never spent a night anywhere colder than my own bedroom. Then I went to a rally outside City Hall because the council had just approved a contract to tear down the public health clinic on South Sixth and put a private immigration processing building in its place, and by nine that night I was sitting in a holding cell at the Pima County Adult Detention Complex on Silverlake Road with a zip tie still cutting into my wrists.
Forty-seven of us got arrested that evening. I wasn't throwing anything. I wasn't even chanting that loud — I'm a vet, I spend my days talking animals down from panic, I know how to keep my voice low. A sheriff's deputy grabbed my arm anyway, said something about "failure to disperse," and that was it. No paper. No explanation. Just a van and then a cell with eleven other men and a toilet with no door.
Here's the part nobody watching from outside could have known: it wasn't the cell that scared me. It was the silence of not knowing when it would end. My public defender — a kid named Marcus who told me flat out he had sixty-one other cases that week — came by on day three and said the county hadn't even filed the charge yet. Some clerical backlog, he said. Or maybe not a backlog. Maybe somebody wanted me sitting there a while.
My sister Priscilla came to the glass on day four. She looked thinner than I remembered, though it had only been four days. She told me our mother's old power of attorney paperwork — the one we'd set up years back when Mom had her hip surgery — still listed me as able to grant emergency authority to someone else if I couldn't act for myself. She said she'd use it if she had to. I told her not to touch the clinic's accounts without talking to me first.
I should explain about the clinic, because that's the part that almost cost me
