A Reasonable Doubt by Susan Sloan (free novels .txt) 📕

He tried not to think about the trial.  He had nothing in the world to do except think, but he didn’t want to think about the trial.  He just couldn’t help it.  As hard as he wanted to push his mind in other directions, it kept coming back to that big, dark, smelly room where the rest of his life was being decided by a bunch of people who didn’t even know him.  He wondered how it was possible that these people who didn’t know the first thing about him could hold his life in their hands, and he wanted to jump up and shout at them that they had no right.  But of course he didn’t.

He appreciated what the lady lawyer was trying to do -- make a case for self-defense, or maybe it was something to do with him being drunk -- but he didn’t see as it was really doing him any good.

Every day, he watched the jurors.  They never looked at him.  They didn’t want to know him, or anything about him.  They wanted someone to pay for what happened to the cop, and he was all they had.  So they wanted him to pay.  He could tell.  Even though they were listening to what the lady lawyer said, he could see it in their eyes, in their body language.  A cop was dead.  That was what reached out and touched them, and made them feel vulnerable -- not some poor homeless excuse for a man.  They didn’t care about mitigating circumstances -- whatever that was.  They didn’t care about him.

And what if the lawyer did convince them that it wasn’t his fault he killed the cop?  What difference would it make?  They would still make him pay for it.  And, truth be told, it would be a relief.  Jason wasn’t anxious to die, but there was no way he could live, caged up like this, much longer.

If he hadn’t known that before, he certainly knew it now.  In just the past eight months, his skin had developed a grayish tinge from lack of sunlight, and he had lost close to thirty pounds -- thirty pounds he didn’t have to spare.  The clothes the lady lawyer bought for him to wear to court were two sizes smaller than he used to wear.  His orange jumpsuit hung on him.

It was the food, of course -- greasy, overcooked, inedible stuff that turned his stomach sour, and more often than not was left untouched.  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a decent cup of coffee.  He longed for one of his uncle’s ham steaks.  And, despite all the good that Greg Parker may have done for him, he ached for a shot of rum.

But more than anything, he yearned for the sweet smell of the mountains, the gentle touch of a highland breeze, the peaceful sound of a wandering stream or a bird chirping, and the indescribable feel of high-ground dirt beneath his bare feet.

. . .

The call came at 11:30 on Sunday morning.

“Sorry to have to bother you at home, Counselor, but we have a problem,” the warden at the Jackson County Jail declared without preamble.  “Your client broke out of here about an hour ago.”

Lily was dumbfounded.  “What happened?”

“Well, he was having his hour out in the yard, just like always, and because we’ve never had a problem with him, the guard turned his back for just a minute or two,” the warden told her.  “He was over the fence and gone before anyone could do anything about it.”  Jailbreaks at the county jail were almost unheard of and, as a result, the barbed wire that topped the cement fence surrounding the facility, while meticulously maintained, had never been electrified.  “I’ve notified the Port Hancock police, of course, and the county sheriff, and the state patrol. I wouldn’t have thought he could get over the wall with that bum leg of his, but you just never know about these Indians -- here one minute, gone the next.  And real quick and efficient about it, too.”

The facility backed onto the foothills that led directly into the mountains where, Lily knew, there was an ample supply of fresh water and food, and endless places where a knowledgeable person could hide.  The reservation where Jason Lightfoot had been born and raised was well within hiking distance.

“I’ll be happy to do whatever I can to help,” she told the warden.  “But I don’t hold out much hope of anyone finding him up there.”

“Maybe not, Ma’am,” the warden said, “but we sure as hell got to try.”

True to his word, state patrol helicopters were soon buzzing Port Hancock on their way up to the mountains, police units from all over the county hit the foothills and fanned out in all directions, and canine teams were brought in to try to track the Indian’s route from the jail.

“What the hell happened?” Joe exclaimed when Lily called him.

“I guess he didn’t want to die, after all,” she said.  “Maybe the further we got into trial, the more inevitable it looked to him.”

“And here I thought you were doing such a damn good job of defending him.”

Lily sighed over the phone.  “I guess he must not have thought it was good enough.”

Word spread quickly around town.

“He must have had help,” someone suggested.

“An inside job, maybe,” someone else said.

“Or an outside one.”

People congregated outside after church.  A cold-blooded killer had broken out of jail and was on the loose.  “How can we protect our families?” they asked their priests and their pastors.

Worried women met at the supermarket.  “If he could kill a policeman, he could kill anyone, couldn’t he?”

Men gathered at the auto supply shop.  “Sure would like to know how he got away so clean,” they said, perhaps a bit wistfully.

It was the lead story on the evening news, the main topic of conversation on talk radio, and the headline in morning newspapers all across the state.  How could a