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

man with a bad leg scale a ten-foot cement fence topped with barbed wire, in less than a minute, and get away clean, people wanted to know.

As it turned out, however, it wasn’t in less than a minute.  The yard guard had been on his cell phone, having a heated conversation with his new wife about his ex-girlfriend, with his back to the prisoner for at least ten minutes.

“He’d never tried anything before,” the guard complained.  “He was out there an hour every day, and all he’d ever done was volunteer to wash the wall down.  Said he needed the exercise.”

“What’s your preference?” Joe asked Lily.  “That they find him, or that they don’t?”

“I think I’m going to hold my cards close on that for now,” Lily said.  “Meanwhile, I guess, it’s still our case.”

. . .

It took Jason several hours to reach the mountains he knew so well, and then a few more to climb his way up to the specific spot, in the shadow of two peaks, that he had dreamed about seeing again for so long.

He had been forced to take a rather roundabout route, in and out of myriad rivers and streams, to make sure he would leave no scent behind for search dogs to pick up and track.

His leg hurt so much it that was all he could do to keep himself from screaming at the top of his lungs.  But when he finally entered the small clearing he had been heading for, and saw the spring-fed mountain pool close to the small cave he remembered so well, he knew that all the pain had been worth it.

His first task was to build a fire that no white man would ever see.  His second was to fashion a crude spear from a piece of dead tree limb, honing the tip of the branch on a big rock until it was sharp enough.  Then he took aim at a small fish in the pool, quite pleased with himself when he needed only three tries to snag it.  He plucked some of the edible mountain plants, made a nest for his fish, rested it carefully over his fire, and cooked the first decent food he would eat in months.

All around him, the sky was glowing as the last rays of sunshine dipped below the mountaintops, and he leaned against the big rock and watched as the world went from day to dark, and first one and then another and then another blink of star peeked through the pale blue, dark blue, and finally black sky.  He was sure there were at least a trillion of them out there, and they were so bright and so close that he knew he could just reach up and touch one of them if he wanted to.

After a while, he gathered up a load of leaves and made a bed on the floor of the cave.  But, try as he could, he just couldn’t get himself to sleep.  It was the exhilaration of being free, of course.  Although exhausted from his journey, he dragged himself back out of the cave, sat down against the rock, and watched the stars dancing across the sky all night.

. . .

At nine o’clock on Monday morning, Grace Pelletier called her court to order, issued a bench warrant for Jason Lightfoot, and then declared that the trial was on hold.

“I apologize to the members of the jury, but we’re going to be taking a little break in the proceedings,” she said, wondering if it was going to be possible to keep the defendant’s escape from jail a secret from them, and knowing, just from the looks on their faces, that it was not going to be possible -- that they already knew.  “Should this delay exceed two weeks, I will declare a mistrial.”

She then called the attorneys into chambers.  “All right, what the hell is going on here?” she demanded, glowering at Lily.

“I’m afraid I don’t know anything more about this than you do, Your Honor,” the attorney assured her, embarrassed nonetheless.  “I found out about it after the fact -- just like everyone else.”

“No hint?  No clue?  Nothing in his behavior to indicate he might do something like this?”

“Nothing,” Lily insisted.  “On the contrary, he seemed to be dealing with the trial quite well.”

“Mr. Morgan?” the judge inquired.

“We’re not looking for sanctions, Your Honor,” John Henry said.  “We don’t believe there was any collusion involved.”

“Good, then we’re agreed.”  She turned back to Lily.  “Should your client contact you, however, Miss Burns -- ”

“Yes, Your Honor,” Lily said before the judge could finish her sentence.  “I will urge him to surrender himself, and I will notify the court immediately.”

. . .

“Damn it!” Lily exploded as soon as she was back in the safe confines of the Broad Street Victorian.  “We hadn’t even put on a single witness yet, and I was beginning to think maybe we wouldn’t have to, our case was going so well.”  It was only a slight exaggeration.

“I agree,” Megan said sympathetically.  “You’d already gotten that crime scene analyst to pretty much admit that his whole theory about kneeling and standing and an execution-style shooting didn’t make much sense.”

“All we needed was some confirmation on the drug angle,” Lily added, “and I just know we could have found at least one member of that jury to think reasonable doubt.   Urrrgh, Jason!”

“You can’t really blame him, though,” Dancer said softly.  “He didn’t understand very much of what was going on.  I was watching him, and I could tell.  I think all he knew was that, if he didn’t get to breathe in some fresh mountain air pretty soon, he was going to up and die.  I know that’s how I would have felt.”

“Do you think that’s where he went?” Lily asked him with a faint smile.  “Into the mountains?”

“If I were him, that’s where I’d be,” the bodyguard said.

“But you know as well as I do that’s the first place they’re going to