A lot of the men laughed at that, and I even chuckled, myself. “Nah,” I said, “if I’m Batman, then where is my girlfriend? You don’t look like Catwoman to me.” That got another round of laughter.
When the movie ended, we watched the local news program, and I finally saw the story they were telling about me. The reporter said the police were baffled about me, because none of the neighbors around the house could tell them who I was, all of them saying that I kept to myself and rarely even spoke. Even the local stores were unaware of my name, because the credit card I used to make purchases of groceries and such was a corporate card from LJM, Inc. Even my signature didn’t give a clue, since it appeared to be just an S with a long line trailing after it.
To make matters worse, the bank that had issued the credit card had done so at the direction of the company that owned LJM. They had no idea who it had been sent to, and only knew that the account was kept funded by transfers from Kuala Lumpur. Whoever I was, I apparently had access to an awful lot of money, but no one had any clue what the source of that money might be.
The FBI had gotten hold of the credit card number, and with the bank’s assistance, they had determined that I had made many, many purchases through the Internet, all of which were done only under the name of LJM. Even the post office, UPS and FedEx only knew that they were delivering packages to LJM, Inc. at the address of the house.
The reporter went on to describe the case against me, repeating the story that Deputy Johnson had gone to the house to speak to me, though no one seemed to know what it was he’d wanted to talk to me about. The sheriff claimed that someone had called in a complaint that there was shouting coming from the house, and that he had found me crouching over the body of the deputy when he arrived, with the house already on fire.
The Sheriff’s face suddenly appeared on the screen. “At this point,” he said to the camera, “all we know is that the suspect claims to not know who he is, other than his name. There’s virtually no room for doubt that he murdered Deputy Johnson, and we have every intention of seeing him prosecuted for that murder.”
The reporter said that I was to be arraigned on a charge of first-degree murder sometime in the next couple of days, and that more details would be presented as they became available.
The inmates in the day room suddenly broke out in applause, and I was startled. I looked around, then turned my eyes back to Gunner.
“I done told you, man,” he said. “Everybody called that fucker ‘Crazy Kyle.’ He was probably the most sadistic bastard who ever wore a badge. If he arrested somebody, he almost always had to take them to the hospital before they got to jail, because they be beat half to death. Probably half these sons of bitches been on the receiving end, so if you killed him, you they hero!”
I just shook my head, unable to understand the mindset that would make a hero of someone who murdered a law enforcement officer. Even if he was the kind to beat people up whenever he got the chance, he was still a cop.
When it came time to go back to our cell, Gunner and I sat up and talked for quite a while after the lights went out. He had some snack cakes, oatmeal cream pies, and offered me one as we chatted.
“It just seems crazy to me,” I said, “but all those guys are happy that deputy is dead. Was he really that bad?”
“Shit, yeah,” he replied. “There’s a lot of cops who get rough with you when they arrest you, and nowadays, some of them even get in trouble over it. Crazy Kyle, he got sued like probably a hundred times, and they been lots of times when people got video of him going nuts on guys, but every case get thrown out. Hell, he probably killed ten or fifteen people, some of them with his bare hands, but every time they just say it was justified.”
I sat there and thought about it for a moment. “All they say is that he came to talk to me about something,” I said. “I wonder if he tried to get rough with me, if maybe I did kill him, but in self-defense?”
“That definitely be my guess,” Gunner said. “Maybe he didn’t like what you said, and was going to arrest you. If he tried to beat you the way he beat other guys, the way you fight, you probably tore his ass up. You said he was bleeding out his neck?”
I nodded. “Yeah, it sort of looked like the whole side of his throat was cut. I mean, there was blood everywhere, all over him, all over the carpet. When I found him, I think he would have been really close to bleeding to death, already, because when I tried to stop the bleeding, there wasn’t a whole lot of pressure behind it.”
Gunner sat there and looked at me for a moment. “How long was it after you woke up in that basement before you found this guy?”
My eyes went suddenly wide. “Probably five or six minutes,” I said. “But that doesn’t make sense. I saw him; his jugular vein had been cut badly. He should have lost consciousness within no more than thirty or forty seconds after that, and bled to death in only a minute or so.”
Gunner was nodding. “That’s kinda what I was thinking. You know, in movies and stuff, some guy get his throat slit, he drops dead in a split second, but I’ve seen people get their throats torn open in car wrecks and stuff, and it takes a little more time than that. But they bleed out faster than five minutes. It happen fast.”
I stared at him. “You realize what this means, don’t you?”
He smiled at me, the kind of smile a man uses when he suddenly finds himself on the winning side. “Yeah,” he said. “Means you didn’t kill Crazy Kyle Johnson.”
Chapter 12
That next morning, when it was time for breakfast, I was caught off guard when everyone stood back away from the door and indicated that I should go first. Gunner walked up behind me, and told me that it was intended to be a sign of respect. Because I had shown that I was not afraid, and had even won such an unfair fight, everyone else was going to treat me like something special. As my cellmate, Gunner could come along for the ride and enjoy the benefits with me. I thought that was fitting, since he had been disrespected and forced to the end of the line the day before.
We went to a table and sat down, and I thought it was kind of comical that everyone else avoided trying to sit near us. Our table was in a corner of the room, and the tables immediately surrounding it were left empty as everyone started filling up the ones in the opposite corner, first. Gunner and I were alone, with enough privacy to be able to talk.
“So, what, are they afraid of me now?” I asked.
“Yeah, pretty much,” Gunner said. “Course, if you asked them, they say ain’t no way they’d be scared of you, you just a puny white boy. They can’t be admitting to being scared, or they lose respect from the rest of the assholes in here. Respect, when you’re in prison, is everything. If you get it, you might get treated okay, people do what you say. If you don’t get it, then anybody can just walk on you if they want to. Right now, you got their respect. Believe me, you don’t want to lose it.”
I nodded. “I can see that,” I said. “Do me a favor, will you? Keep an eye on me, and if you see me doing something that could cause a problem, let me know.”
“You know I will,” he said with a grin. “Got to take care of you, won’t nobody mess with me as long as you’re around.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it; Gunner was almost twice my size, or at least it seemed that way with all of his muscles. The thought that he was concerned with keeping me safe so that I could protect him was just comical.
“Okay, that’s just funny,” I said. “Seems like it ought to be the other way around.”
Gunner shrugged his shoulders. “Can’t say I disagree with you,” he said, “but after watching you mop the floor with those bastards, I’d have to say I want to stay on your good side. You sure you don’t remember any special training, like maybe for the special forces or something?”
“Nothing. I sit here, I rack my brain, but there’s just no memory. Nothing.” I shook my head. “You want to know the weirdest part of it? I know lots of things, I mean, like I know who the president is, I know a lot about
history, I know a lot about science and all kinds of stuff, but I can’t remember learning any of it. I got no memories of school, no memory of any kind of training, no memory of a family or friends or—hell, for all I know, I might be married and have a dozen kids.”
“You don’t have a wedding ring mark on your finger,” Gunner said, pointing at my left hand. “Of course, not all men wear a wedding ring, but at least it gives you an idea.”
I grinned at him. “Yeah, I noticed that, myself. The trouble is, since I don’t even know who I am, I can’t imagine what kind of life I might’ve led. I mean, if I killed that deputy, then for all I know I might be a serial killer, or maybe a hit man. Maybe that’s how I make my living, by killing people.”
“Nope,” Gunner said. “Anybody who was a natural killer, anybody who killed people other than by accident, would not have been careful to only bruise those sons of bitches yesterday. Some of them would’ve died, especially with how fast everything happened. I’ll be honest, and I can’t imagine how you managed not to kill any of them.”
I looked at him, and it dawned on me that he was absolutely right. Things had happened so fast that I didn’t have a chance to really think about any of it until it was over. So, if killing was natural to me, or something I was used to, then I probably would’ve killed one or more of the men who had jumped me.
“I’d say you have a point, but I’m just not sure what it is. Yeah, it is kind of surprising that nobody got killed yesterday. Especially because, as I’m sitting here thinking about it, I know at least six different ways to kill with my bare hands. Why on earth would I even know that? Why would I ever need to know how to do such a thing?”
Gunner just looked at me. “Dude,” he said, “special forces, I’m sayin’. I got a cousin, he was a Navy SEAL. He was like that, knew how to handle several attackers at once, and it’s like you said, he could kill a guy with his bare hands. You don’t remember nothin’ about bein’ in the service?”
I shook my head again. “I don’t remember anything, not a single damn thing. I know what amnesia is, but it’s hard for me to believe it could be so complete.” I looked at him. “One of the strangest parts of this, like I said, is that I know a lot of things. For instance, I know that most cases of amnesia are caused by what’s known as a fugue state, which is when somebody gets overstressed or confused and goes into a form of dissociative personality disorder. They may simply forget who they are, or they may develop a whole new identity and claim it as their own. Most such cases don’t last very long, and being confronted with proof of who they are is usually enough to start the process of recovering the memories.”
“You think that might be what happened to you?” Gunner asked me.
I shrugged. “No idea. It’s possible, but there are other kinds of amnesia. You can get amnesia from a concussion or blow to the head, or any kind of brain injury. There’s retrograde amnesia, which is what seems to be what I’m experiencing. In retrograde amnesia, you can’t remember memories from the past, but there’s also something known as anterograde amnesia, which means you can’t make new memories.”
“Shit, man, that would suck. You meet a new girl and can’t remember who she is five minutes later?”
“Yeah, that wouldn’t be good.” I couldn’t help it, I grinned. “Anyway, what I’m trying to get at is this: Why is it I can remember all these little details that I must have learned over the years, but I can’t remember learning them? I can’t remember a single situation where I might have read about any of these things, or heard about them on television or anything, so how can I know them at all?”
“You askin’ the wrong man,” Gunner said. “Me, I’m just a working stiff, got caught up in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
I looked at him, and realized that we’d been so focused on me, and my predicament, that I knew next to nothing about my cellie. Heck, who am I kidding? He was my only friend. At least, it seemed that way.
“All we do is talk about me. What’s your story, Gunner? How did you end up in here?”
He shrugged his shoulders, and looked a little ashamed. “Cousin of mine came by my house one night, said he needed a ride to go pick up some money somebody owed him. I said okay, and drove him into town, here. But when we got to where he wanted to go, it wasn’t somebody who owed him money. He told me to wait in the car while he went in this house to pick up the money, but next thing I know, there’s people yellin’ and screamin’ like idiots, and some woman started goin’ nuts. So I jumped out the car and ran inside. My cousin, he got a gun and was pointing it at this guy, and the guy’s sayin’ he ain’t got no more money, and all of a sudden some other guy comes running in the back door and my cousin’s gun went off. The new guy fell down, and everyone was screamin’, and we could hear po-po comin’. So my cousin threw the gun down and ran out the door.” He stopped and rubbed his face for a moment; I could tell that reliving this story wasn’t easy for him. He continued. “The gun went up under a chair, and I knew it had his fingerprints on it, so I dove down on the floor and reached up under there for it. Took me a minute to find it, but I did, so I grabbed it. The guy who got shot wasn’t hit bad, just in his arm, so I took off out of there and ran right into a cop who was comin’ at me. He told me to drop the gun, so I did, and then two more cops hit me and took me down. My cousin, I guess he thought something happened to me in there; took the car and was gone.”
I looked at him. “But you didn’t really do anything wrong,” I said. “Didn’t they get your cousin?”
Gunner shook his head again. “Nope,” he said. “Turned out this guy in the house was just somebody my cousin heard about who had a lot of money, so he wanted to rob the guy. I guess the man didn’t have as much money at home as he thought, so that’s why things went bad. The guy who got shot, he was just a neighbor who heard all the screaming, but none of them knew my cousin. Cops told me if I give up whoever was with me, they go easy on me, but where I come from, you don’t snitch. I kept my mouth shut. They know I didn’t shoot the man, but they caught me with the gun, so I’m the one doing the time.”
We had both finished eating by this time, so we took our trays over to the dishwashers’ window and passed them through it, then went back to the table. Gunner had some coffee that he had bought from the commissary, and offered me some. I took it and thanked him.
“Anyway,” Gunner said, “the judge gave me three years. My cousin, he keeps me in money so I can get stuff like coffee and all, but it still sucks I gotta be here. I got a wife and little girl out there, and they need me, but they all know I did what I had to do.”
I shrugged. “Just doesn’t seem right to me, that you’re in here and he’s still free. I mean, it’s your life, I’m not trying to judge you; it just doesn’t seem right, to me.”
Gunner grinned at me. “Yeah,” he said, “white folks don’t never get it.”
Chapter 13
At that moment, I heard my name called over the loudspeaker. “Inmate Sal Jones,” the voice said, “report to the cell block door.”
I got up and went to the door, and it buzzed to let me through. As soon as it was closed behind me, the outer door opened and two of the jailers were waiting for me. One of them was the one who had shoved me into the wall the day before, but the other did the talking.
“The judge ordered you a lawyer,” he said. “She’s come to see you.”
Each of them took hold of one of my arms, and they walked me down the hallway to the interview room where I had met the sheriff and Agent Decker. They opened the door and let me go inside, where I found a very pretty young woman waiting at the table. I took the chair they indicated, and then she stood and extended her hand for me to shake.
“Mr. Jones,” she said, “I’m Stephanie Cooper. I’ve been appointed to represent you.”
I shook her hand, and was surprised at how firm her grip was. This was a woman who wasn’t a bit afraid of me, although that probably had a lot to do with the fact that she knew there were ja
ilers just outside the door. “I’m delighted to meet you,” I said.
She sat down again, and I saw that she had a folder lying open on the table in front of her. There wasn’t a lot of paper in it, so I knew that she had probably already read everything about my case. “I’ve been reading through your file,” she said, confirming what I had suspected, “and I wanted to meet you and try to get a sense of what it is I’m dealing with, here. They’ve got you scheduled for arraignment tomorrow morning, and I like to be prepared.”
“Okay,” I said. “How can I help?”
She smiled. “Well, I’ve already read your statement, as well as the psychologist’s report. She seems to think you’re telling the truth about not remembering what happened, and she’s recommended that you be examined by a doctor. The FBI also wants you to have a psychiatric exam, so those will probably be scheduled over the next day or so.” She leaned forward and tilted her head to the right as she looked into my eyes. “Look me straight in the eye, and tell me you’re not lying.”
I couldn’t help it, I grinned, but I met her eyes with no problem. “I can tell you that I’m telling the absolute truth about not remembering anything prior to waking up in the basement the other night.”
Stephanie sat there and looked into my eyes for a long moment, then began nodding. “The shrink is right—I think you’re being honest with me. That doesn’t mean you’re telling the actual truth, though; it just means you believe what you’re saying.”
“I’ve been hearing that a lot,” I said, in a half-joking manner, “I do, but that means something else. If I’m telling the truth about waking up in that basement, which I am, then I couldn’t possibly have been the one to kill Deputy Johnson. His jugular vein had been cut, which means he would have bled out in less than a minute. It took me at least five or six minutes to get out of the basement and get clothes on before I found him, and he was not only still alive, he was still at least partially conscious. He saw me, and tried to speak to me but couldn’t. It was only after that that he slipped into unconsciousness, and died only a few seconds later. Whoever slashed his neck had to have done it no more than thirty or forty seconds before I tripped over him in that living room.”
Thriller: I Am Sal - A Mystifying Crime Thriller (Thriller, Crime Thriller, Murder Mystery Book 1) Page 6