Free Jury Town by Stephen Frey

using four wings for the jurors. We couldn’t take the building out any further without massive construction costs, so the rooms are still just eight feet deep. But now they’re fifteen feet long, which allowed us to put thirteen rooms on each side of each floor and still have plenty of room for showers on each wing. Every juror will have his or her own room along with a sink and a toilet.”
    “So there are a few extra rooms?” Victoria asked, distracted by her worry about climbing a surveillance tower. “Assuming we have two hundred jurors.”
    “Eight extras,” Wolf answered. “Two hundred and eight rooms in total.”
    “What about the fifth wing?” Cameron asked as he and Victoria hustled to keep up with Wolf, who was striding ahead through the maze of tables and chairs. “Is that the workout area?”
    “Yup. Kitchen over there behind that wall of slots to the right,” Wolf said with a wave, “and inmates will order from the menu above the—”
    “Jurors,” Victoria reminded him loudly.
    “Got to fix that habit,” Wolf muttered under his breath. “ Jurors will order from the menu above the slot and have their meal come through the slot on a tray. Breakfast and lunch will be fairly standard, still excellent quality, but dinner will be different each night, and they’ll be apprised of their choices on the screens in the desks of their rooms. Right above Victoria’s daily words of wisdom,” he muttered. “There will be central condiment stations, and everything will be cleaned every night while the jurors are sleeping. We’re doing everything we can to remove the possibility of information passing between jurors and staff, including having rooms and showers cleaned while jurors are out of the living quarters. Again we’ll use random-number generators to figure out who goes where to clean. Candidly, this place will be a lot like Las Vegas in terms of staff observation.”
    “What do you mean?” Cameron asked.
    “People will always be watching people,” Wolf responded. “You know, like box men watching the dealers, floor men watching the box men, pit bosses watching the floor men. You get the idea. We’ll be trying to catch anything being passed from a staff member to a juror on a tray, wrapped in a towel, or stuck inside a medicine vial. We’ll be watching for hand signals as codes, too. And we’ll have eyes in the sky out here watching everything.”
    “But no cameras in the rooms or the showers,” Victoria said firmly.
    Wolf shook his head. “No, but everywhere else.”
    They reached the athletic wing and moved from the hallway into the sprawling workout center.
    “Hey, this is really nice,” Victoria said, gazing at the huge room full of high-tech exercise equipment. “This room was empty last time I was here.”
    “Everything came last week,” Wolf said, pointing to the ceiling. “Upstairs are four basketball hoops and several racquetball courts. There are enough machines in this room for all two hundred jurors to be working out at the same time.”
    “Beautiful.”
    “Let’s check out one of the rooms,” Wolf suggested.
    “No need,” Victoria responded quickly.
    Wolf glanced at her. “Why not?”
    “Just no need.”
    He stared at her for a few moments, then shrugged. “Okay, then let’s climb the surveillance tower.”
    Victoria glanced at Cameron, who was gazing back knowingly. She shrugged. She’d conquered most of the demons she associated with this place—but not all. Not yet.

    Wolf nodded to himself in a supremely satisfied way as he gazed into the afternoon from a hundred feet above the ground, casually leaning against a rusty vertical beam at the edge of the observation deck with one hand as he clutched his white Stetson with the other.
    As if he were looking out over his kingdom, Victoria thought to herself.
    “It’s beautiful up here,” he called over his shoulder.
    From the top of the surveillance tower, they had a panoramic view of the world—which,