Thriller: I Am Sal - A Mystifying Crime Thriller (Thriller, Crime Thriller, Murder Mystery Book 1)

by Abraham Falls

  This clinched it, however. I would definitely have to tell Gunner what was going on, but I trusted him. There was no doubt in my mind that he would keep my secret, and he might even be able to give me advice on how best to use this help I was being given.

  We passed the afternoon by talking and playing cards with some of the other guys. It turned out I had an amazing knack for playing spades, the most popular card game in the jail. Gunner and I won almost every game we played, and the ones we didn’t win could be chalked up to bad luck in the deal.

  Dinner came, and I half expected to find yet another note, but there wasn’t one. I still had not read the one that came with my lunch, and it was driving me crazy. The first one had said that my secret friend had found a way to get me out, and I wanted to know just how he or she planned to do that. Hopefully, the note in my pocket would give me more information.

  Even after dinner, we still couldn’t go and lock ourselves in our cell. It was still considered daytime, and while it was okay to be in the cell, it was not okay to close the door. With the door standing open, anyone walking by could hear everything we said, so I forced myself to be patient through two movies and another card game.

  Finally, the time came, and Gunner and I said good night to our friends and headed up the stairs. We went into our cell and closed the door, then sat on Gunner’s bunk and waited until everything got quiet. Right after lock down, one of the jailers always walked through the cell block and counted us, looking through the window into each cell to be sure we were all where we were supposed to be. I kept quiet about the note until we saw the jailer leave the cell block.

  Gunner didn’t say a word, but just looked at me. I held up a finger to indicate that I wanted him to have a bit more patience, then pulled out the latest note and opened it.

  I have arranged a way for you to escape, the note said. It has to be tomorrow night. I will send you the details with your lunch tomorrow. Once you are out, I can give you the proof that will clear your name, and then you will surrender. You’ll have all the proof you need that shows you did not kill anyone. Do not tell anyone about this. Flush this note as soon as possible.

  I looked at Gunner, who was staring at me as I read the note. I decided to tell him about the first one, then let him read the latest.

  “Something’s going on,” I said. “I got a note in my lunch tray yesterday, and it said it was from someone who knows I’m innocent and is trying to help me. The problem is, they said there’s no way to prove it while I’m still locked up. The note said that I’d be getting more information, and not to tell anyone, but…” I looked at Gunner, and he smiled, “I trust you. Then I got this one today.”

  I handed it to him and he read it quickly. I saw his eyes go over it a second time, and then he looked up at me.

  “I hope you ain’t gonna go along with this shit,” he said. “You escape from jail, that’s another whole charge all by itself. You get five years for that, easy.”

  “But if this person can give me the proof that I didn’t kill anyone,” I protested, “then what choice do I have? I need that proof.”

  “You really believe this shit? I think somebody setting yo ass up. This probably from one of the deputies, they want you to get shot and killed trying to escape. They out for revenge about Crazy Kyle, and this the way they want to do it.”

  I looked at his face, and saw that he was serious. “Gunner, I have to try. Even if it turns out to be a trap, the way things are going, I could be looking at a death sentence. Nothing else I’ve tried has done me any good, and unless I get some kind of proof that will really stick, I’m pretty well doomed. This could be it. The difference between life and death.”

  The true enormity of the situation really hit us.

  “Man, turn on your brain,” Gunner said. “This got to be a set up, they trying to get you to escape so they can blow your ass away.”

  “If that’s all they wanted, they’ve had a bunch of chances. Each time they took me out to see a doctor, it would’ve been easy to say I was trying to escape and just killed me.”

  “Unless one of them deputies what was with you wouldn’t go along with it,” he said. “They ain’t gon’ do it if they’s a witness who might talk.”

  I thought about what he said, and had to admit he could be right. It was possible that he had hit the nail on the head, that the only reason I was still alive was because one of those deputies had a conscience, or was afraid they’d get caught.

  Still, I wasn’t convinced. The idea that a person might know me, as in actually know me, and possibly offer insights into my past and who I was, was almost too great to pass up.

  “Gunner, I appreciate what you’re saying, and you might be right. The thing is, I feel like this is a chance I need to take. What if this person knows things about my past? Or is able to somehow help me remember? Not to mention the case is pretty much over as it stands right now. If I don’t come up with some kind of evidence that I’m telling the truth, my life is over. When you consider the fact that I’m only a few days old, at least as far as I know, that’s pretty disturbing. I’m not ready to give up, and I’m certainly not ready to die.”

  Gunner sat there and just stared at me for several seconds, then his face softened. “Okay, I get that,” he said, “I really do. But just—don’t just go for this without thinking it through. This says you get another note tomorrow, let’s just wait and see what it says. Then we talk it over, and if it look good, then you can do it if you think it be worth trying. Okay?”

  I smiled at him. “Okay, that works.” I took the note back from him and flushed it down the toilet. “Besides, that’s all I’ve been doing, thinking this over. I’ve been trying to figure out just what kind of plan this person might come up with, and how it could possibly help me if I escape from jail. It’s like I’m trapped in a movie, and trying to figure out the script as I go along.”

  Gunner nodded. “Yeah, I can see that,” he said. “And I know you desperate, you just trying to find a way to get through this. That ain’t always easy, and I got to wonder about sneaky people who promise to help, especially when you don’t even know who they are.”

  “I think that’s the worst part,” I said. “Whoever this person is, it must be someone who knew me. Sure, I want his help in getting out of this mess, but even more than that, I just want to sit down and ask questions about me. Just who is this guy called Sal, and what kind of person was he? What kind of life have I led, and do I want to go back to it? Maybe I should try to make a change, now, while I’m starting all over anyway. I’ve got like a million questions running through my mind, and I don’t know which one to start with.”

  Gunner grinned. “I’d be knowing which one to start with,” he said. “It be, ‘Hey, Bro, let me hold some money for a little while.’ I be thinking, whoever this is, he probably want something in return. People don’t stick they neck out like this unless there be something in it for them. From everything you done said, it sounds like you got some money stashed away someplace, so they know you good for it. I’d be hittin’ ‘em up for some money, so I can get on up outta here.”

  I laughed, and after a moment, Gunner joined in. “The only trouble with that is, I have to stick around here in order to solve the problem. There’s no point in leaving, not yet, anyway.”

  We joked around about it for a bit, but I was excited about the prospect of getting the next note. That should be the one that told me what my next move would be, so it was also the one that would have to be the final determinant on whether I decided to follow the instructions or not.

  If I went along with my secret ally’s plan, then it was quite possible that I would soon be adding “jailbreak” to the list of crimes I had been accused of. That didn’t worry me all that much, though, since they can only hang you once, and being dead would probably put an end to what little worries there might be.

  On the other hand, if my unknown friend genuinely had some sort of evidence that could help me prove my innocence,
then I couldn’t afford to pass up the chance to get my hands on it. I knew that, despite all the risks, I was going to follow the instructions in the note that I was waiting for. Even if it turned out to be a trap, even if I were shot dead during the escape attempt, at least I wouldn’t be spending years and years locked up on death row, just waiting to die.

  No, my mind was made up. Whatever, whoever, this character was, I was going to do what he said.

  Chapter 25

  INTERLUDE FOUR

  Someone was stalking me.

  I didn’t know who it was, and nothing I’d seen was giving me any kind of clue, but I knew that someone was actually stalking me. I could tell, and not just because of that itchy feeling on the back of my neck. That’s the residue of our wild ancestors, the seventh sense that lets us know when someone is watching us, even when we can’t see them. Some people think of it as the sixth sense, as part of the mythical telepathic ability that has become so prevalent in science fiction movies, lately, but I disagree. I think it’s related more closely to the sense of touch, that we actually feel the pressure of someone’s vision upon us, and that’s what causes the tingling, the itch.

  Does that actually make sense? Who knows? In my own research, I’d come to the conclusion that there were many different kinds of senses that we had yet to discover. Perhaps, one day, I’ll be known as the discoverer of this particular sense. We’ll call it the sense of presence.

  The sense of presence allows us to do more than just know when someone is looking our direction, however. If you’ve ever walked into a room, and known without any evidence that someone else had been there, that would be your sense of presence. You have felt the presence of another person, despite the fact that there is no one visible to you, or otherwise detectable by your five senses, at the moment. The presence can be current, meaning it’s someone who’s observing you at that very moment, or it can be past presence, the sense that someone has been where you now are, someone who had a reason to be paying attention to you.

  In my case, I was sensing both at different times. I would feel that I was being watched at times, and then it would fade away. I would go on about my day, letting that sensation slip away, only to have it return full force when I would go out for something and then return home. As soon as I walked into the house, I could tell that someone had been there, that there had been another presence in the house while I was gone.

  Whenever I felt I was being watched, I looked around, trying to find some sign of the observer. Who could it be that was watching me? I wondered about this, constantly, trying to rack my brain for any clue as to who might be that concerned about what I was doing. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t come up with a potential suspect for my paranoid delusion, and so I fell back on the old standby of those who suffer such feelings:

  Just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

  And that’s how I felt. No matter how crazy I might think I was becoming, the fact remained that I was absolutely certain that someone was following me, watching me, slipping into my house while I was away. It wasn’t just a feeling, it was a certainty, and I was more determined than ever to figure out who was behind it.

  I tried to think of who might have some idea of what I was up to, but even though this is going to sound incredibly egotistical, there were less than a double handful of people in the world who could possibly follow my reasoning and research and come to the same conclusions that I had. The chance that any one of them had stumbled across me, found out what I was up to without even discussing it with me, and then decided to try to steal my work—well, it was probably more likely that I would be the sole survivor of the collision between two planets, and would go on to rebuild both worlds. Yeah, okay, that sounds pretty science-fictiony, but let’s face it: the point is to stress just how unlikely that possibility would be, so it works.

  So, if it wasn’t one of the few people who could actually understand my work on the technical levels, who else could it have been? I knew that I had sensed that presence not only in my house, but down in the basement, where all my work took place. There were many little signs that someone had been there, including the fact that certain items weren’t quite the way I’d left them. Some of them had been moved, slightly; others had been picked up and carried across the room, as if whoever was doing it was daring me to notice.

  Sometimes, it was as subtle as noticing that some dust had been brushed away from a particular label, as if to make it easier to read. I saw this on the AFM, the atomic force microscope that allowed me to work with the nanorobots I’d created. All of the buttons and keys on the device had been dusty, because I hadn’t used it in some time. Imagine my surprise when I noticed that some of them had apparently been depressed, removing the dust from those particular items.

  There was nothing in the AFM to see, so I began to suspect that my stalker was not on my intellectual level. Anyone even close to my level of intelligence would have already discerned that I was beyond the point where the AFM was necessary. No, whoever was going through my house when I was gone was a person who didn’t know what I was up to, didn’t understand the type of work I was doing. With that being the case, I was at a loss to figure out why they were bothering with me at all.

  Of course, robbery would be a likely motive. I’m sure I had probably spent enough money around town for people to get the idea that I was certainly not broke. I had to consider the possibility that someone had decided I would make an easy target, an easy mark for a quick score. Sadly, I had to come to the conclusion that they were probably right. I was almost certainly about to be robbed, and I didn’t have the slightest idea how to protect myself from it.

  Okay, that wasn’t entirely true. Certainly, there was one thing I could do, which would be to go to the police, and I began to think about doing just that. Unfortunately, Selkirk was one of those small towns that doesn’t even have its own police department. Instead, we relied on the Stevens County Sheriff’s Department out of Clement, which was a good thirty miles away. I didn’t feel like driving all the way over there, and I could just imagine how I would sound to whatever poor soul answered the phone if I called.

  “Hi there, my name is John and I’m convinced someone is stalking me, even though I’ve never seen them and don’t have any proof whatsoever that anyone gives the slightest fig about me. It’s just that occasionally I see a little dust go missing, and the back of my neck tingles a lot, so that should be plenty of proof that I’m not the loony tune I sound like, don’t you think?”

  Yeah. That would work well.

  So far, I hadn’t seen anything that caused me any real worry. Nothing was missing, none of my equipment had been tampered with, and the most damaging evidence of an intruder seemed to be that someone wanted to peek through a super microscope. Granted, that microscope had cost me over a hundred thousand dollars, but it hadn’t been stolen or damaged, so we were probably looking at the academic version of joyriding, as if someone had simply taken my car for a ride without damaging it.

  On the other hand, since I was certain that someone was getting into my house, that meant there was always the possibility that they were intending to cause me personal harm somewhere down the line. Just because they hadn’t killed me yet didn’t mean they wouldn’t, right?

  When that silly little line went through my thoughts, it suddenly hit me that I might not be dealing with an academic of my stature, but perhaps someone who was less intelligent but far more dangerous. What if someone had decided that the work I was doing presented a conflict to their own, or somehow would cause problems that would impact them or their work negatively? Would it not be possible that such a person might decide that eliminating me was a necessity?

  I could be dealing with a hit man, a hired killer. If there was one thing I was sure of, it was that I, personally, was no match for anyone like that. I suddenly wished I had taken some of the martial arts classes I had passed up when I was younger, or that I had thrown off my pa
cifist ways sometime back and allowed myself to buy a gun.

  The whole thing was making my head hurt, so I finally decided it was time for a break. I locked up the house as tight as I could, got into my car and headed for the bar.

  My old friend the bartender was delighted to see me, probably because he knew that my presence was going to put several hundred extra dollars into his pocket before the night was over. I didn’t begrudge him the money he made off of me, because the stress and pressure I left on his peanut-shell-strewn floor was worth every penny I spent there. It wasn’t that I needed the alcohol itself, it was more that I needed the chance to just let my brain dump all of its excess thoughts and ideas out, along with the usual trash of painful memories and unfulfilled regrets.

  We all have those, and we all have to let go of them from time to time. Most people manage it while they’re sleeping, perhaps in dreams, or by venting their pain into creativity like music or poetry. My creativity extends into things that are more scientific and industrial in nature, so I don’t get the relief from them that other people do.

  Instead, it’s necessary for me to pour some sort of strong solvent into my bloodstream, then let it slosh around inside that closed container I call my skull so that it can clean all that refuse out of my brain. It’s a little like the way you clean out a mason jar, by putting some soapy water and it, clamping the lid on tight and then shaking it like crazy. I do the same thing with my brain, substituting significant quantities of alcohol for the detergent. The shaking is easy, because after about the third or fourth drink, just trying to walk to the bathroom results in bouncing off of several walls, applying plenty of vibration.

  “How’s it going, Buddy?” The bartender asked that same question every time I walked in. I smiled and waved.

  “Well, I’m here, so it must not be going all that good, right?” My usual response got the same laugh it got every other time I said it, but as I moved toward my favorite table, the one in the corner all by itself, he smiled back and held up my usual glass of whiskey sour. I could see that he was already taking it toward my table, so I just went ahead and sat down.