1979

He waited silently in the shadows for the guard to pass him by, and when he did, he made his move.

He jumped up, and ran across the hall, stuck his lock pick in the door, and jimmied it open silently. He slipped inside, and looked around.

There was the window, and the desk, the painting, the plant, and the two chairs, exactly as he had mapped it out the day before. He stepped quickly and confidently over to the painting, and pulled on the left side of it. For a second, it didn't budge, and he thought, with a mild kind of panic that he had hit a snag, and that he was going to be caught.

No, you idiot! Pull on the RIGHT side. The voice spoke in his head sounding amazingly like his father, who was always quick to point out his shortcomings. He hated his father. Luckily, that bastard had been in the ground since 1964, and he had been the one who had buried him. It was a pity he hadn't gotten to kill him, though.

That would have been very satisfying indeed. His father had always been the kind of man who believed firmly that if you spared the rod, you spoiled the child. So, his father had never sapred the rod, even when there was no occasion to use it, he would, just to remind his children that it was still there, and could be used.

Jackson, for that was the man's name, had been on the receiving end of that rod many many times. Perhaps more then any of the other children, and as such, had grown to resent it more then any of the others. Burying his father had been one of the more satisfying things he had done.

Stealing from arrogant, self righteous, ego-centric pigs had been another. That was why he was lurking around this office, popping open a painting (on the right side, not the left, you dork), and then slowly turning the wheel, listening for the tumblers to click.

He heard it click, and then opened the safe.

Score! There was easily over two thousand dollars in this safe. He grinned to himself.

Brett Collins, whose office he was currently working on, was head of a somewhat large chain of seafood restaurants, and he had grown quite a big head, boasting that soon he would be expanding nationwide, and hedge out Red Lobster, and Long John Silvers.

If there was one thing that Jackson hated, it was braggarts. Like the day back when he was in high school. Nineteen fifty-six this had been, and one of the older kids, a year old then Jackson himself, was bragging about how tough he was. No one could beat him up. He was King of the School.

These decrees went flying at lunch, for everyone to hear, and know. From his seat in the back of the lunchroom, he had said quietly,

"You're king of nothing but your own mind. Now sit down, and put your arms down before what few friends you have, desert you."

The kid, Jackson didn't even remember his name, turned his head, and looked with wide, disbelieving eyes at him. Who was this young rogue, underminding his authority?

He stepped over to him. "What's your name, asshole?" He had asked.

Jackson took a bite of his sandwich, studiously ignoring the bully, seeing something interesting back behind the kid, something the kid didn't see.

"Hey! I asked you a question, jerkoff! What's your name?"

Jackson had stood up, and simply tossed his sandwich bag over the kids head, and into the garbage can. Then, he had turned his back, and walked away.

The kid, not wanting to let anyone who wouned his pride to live, followed after. Jackson slowed down, so that what he had seen out of the corner of his eye would still be able to see their little skirmish. There was very little chance of their not being noticed. All activity in the lunchroom had ceased.

He stopped then, and turned, looking right at the kid.

"My name, is not important. If you were truly the king, you would know my name, but since your only king in your own mind, you don't know. Just know that I will be the instrument of your downfall."

He thought for a moment how corny and unreal his voice and words sounded in his own ears, but he had always had a flair for the dramatic, and the look that came to the kids face had been worth it.

The kid stepped forward, and grabbed Jackson by the front of his shirt. He shook him once, violently. "Take it back, asshole!" He yelled.

Jackson looked him in the eye, but was secretly looking at what he had seen earlier. Yes, it was still going to work. He was confident of it.

"I'm sorry," he said, kepping his voice low, "that I didn't stand up to yuou earlier, and I'm sorry I let your ego grow so big it hedged out any semblance of intelligence you might have once possessed."

That did it, and Jackson smiled at the look in the kid's eyes.

The kid threw Jackson down, and then punched him in the face. "Instrument of my downfall, huh? I'll show you, you little shithead!" He yelled.

He punched Jackson again, and Jackson allowed himself to fall. The kid jumped on top of him, and began punching him again.

Any minute now, any minute, just wait for, and don't fight back, Jackson thought to himself.

Then it happened. The teacher Jackson had seen earlier had come forward and laid a restraining hand on the kid's shoulder. He drew him up, and then pushed him back against the wall.

He looked at the kid right in the eyes. "What the hell do you think you're doing? Fighting?"

The kid had no reply, it was just beginning to dawn on him what had happened.

"Well, we'll just see what the principal has to say about all this."

As the kid was dragged off to the principal's office, he caught one last look at Jackson.

I told you. Jackson mouthed at him. The bright light of understanding went on in the kids eyes, and then he was gone out the door. That kid had been expelled, Jackson remembered with a grin, as he reached a hand in and began to take out the money, bit by bit.

Now, for the really fun part. He wasn't a Robin Hood type of thief, robbing fromt eh rich and giving to the poor, nor was he the normal kind of thief, robing from the rich and giving to himself. He just liked to cause worry, and anxiety, and the like, humbling the egotistical bastards of the world.

He took the money, and banded it altogether, then reached under his shirt, and pulled out the small tray he had hidden there. This was a specially made tray. It had a frame around it that would comfortably hold money in, and not let it fall out. Over the sections that had been folded over to hodl the money in, was glued four magnets. Powerful ones, which would make it hard to pull it off any metal object it might be stuck against. And he was going to be sticking it against a metal object.

He reached into his pocket, and pulled out three other bars, each with their own magnet stuck on it, and looked them over. They were the same length and height as the side of the tray, and that was good.

He slipped the money, all two thousand dollars of it, plus one extra piece of paper that he had scrawled a message on (always making sure to use his recessive hand to write it so his handwriting wouldnt' be analyzed), into the tray, and then slid the tray back into the safe, attaching it to the underside of one of the shelves on the side of the safe. He then took each of the bars, and attached them to the same place on each of the other three shelves. He then stepped back and looked at it. From the outside, it looked like Four thick shelves. Nothing out of place.

He grinned to himself, and closed the safe, slowly, quietly, and then the painting, just as quietly. He stepped back to the door, and looked out. The guard was nowhere to be seen. If Jackson's obseervations had been correct, he wouldn't be back up this way for another five minutes. More then enough time to get out of here, and into the clear.

He stepped out, and quietly closed the door. A ways of down the hall, he could hear the guard whistling to himself.

He felt and heard the door close, and then stepped toward the door o the stairs through which he had come.

There was a loud click, and a beeping sound from behind him. What the hell was that? He turned back, and saw the lock on the door re-engage itself, and making quite a racket as it did.

Shit! he thought to himself. This is not good. He felt for the reassuring bulge of his gun under his shirt, and took a claming breath when he felt it.

He heard the whistling suddenly stop, and could almost see the guard turning, and began to come back his way.

He looked up and down the hallway. Whereto hide, where to hide? Not in the stairwell. He would be seen for sure there. But maybe he could use it to his advantage. He had maybe a minute before the guard was in this particular area, so he rushed to the stairwell door and cracked it open.

He ran back, and waited, just behind a bend in the hallway, hoping he was concealed enough.

He saw the guard come around the corner, and pause, looking over the hallway, and the door. He opened it slowly, and looked inside. He seemed to be listening, and not hearing anything.

He closed the door, and then turned a key in the lock.

Shit and shinola! Jackson thought again. He locked the damn door! Now what was he going to do?

Improvise of course. He had been in tougher spots.

The guard was coming closer, and Jackson had to make a split second decision. Run away, or run toward him. He chose the former.

he darted around the corner, and just barely registered the guard raising his gun before panic, and impulse took over. Jackson raised his own gun and fired. The guard cried out and fell back. Jackson ran on, not bothering to admire the dead body.

God, he had killed a man. He was a murderer! How had it happened? Why had he chosen to do that? What had possessed him? A murderer! they would catch him for sure! He would die, and that was that. He didn't want to die.

He found another stairwell door, and entered it. as he made his way down, he found himself doing something he hadn't done since before his father died, fifteen years ago.

Praying.

Hey God? It's me, Jackson, but I spose You know that. Umm, I know I haven't been in touch with you alot, and I know I've done alot of stuff that You probably thought was not really good, but if You're really as merciful as everyone seems to say You are, please just let me get out of this mess, and away from here. I didn't mean to kill that guard, You know that. It was an honest mistake, and I'm sorry, I really really am.

In fact, if you let me out of this mess, I'll go turn myself into the police. I swear it! Please God, jsut trust me, and see if I don't. In fact, I'll even make you a deal. If I don't do it, then You can go ahead and arrange it so I get busted. I know you can do that. Either way, I get caught. You win, right? Deal? I hope so...

Then, he was out the door, and moving through the foyer, timing his darting movements so that there was no camera trained on him when he did. Exactly as he planned.

He got out the door, with no mishaps, and down the street, walking calmly, and slowly, just another guy out for a walk. At 4 am in the morning. He crossed the street, and walked a couple blocks down. He got to his car, and climbed inside. There was no one following him. No sound of sirens. Nothing.

He had made it. he had escaped.

Time to 'fess up, then. A voice in his head whispered. It was the voice of his old best friend Joey "J.J." Johnson. J.J. had always been the one to give him the best advice. JJ always knew what to do.

Time to 'fess up, indeed. He had said he was going to do that wasn't he? Jackson started his car up, and drove off down the street. No way. He had gotten off scotfree. He was in the clear. Out of the black and into the blue. No way was he going to screw all that up now.

He drove off down the street, and when he reached the interstate, he kept going. He got across the state line before he stopped, and rested. He would start over here. He would be fine here. No one knew him, and everything would be fine.

He would return back to this town in about twenty years or so, just to kick around some, but in the meantime, he had other humiliations to plot, and that would take a good deal of his time.

Jackson did not get away as scotfree as he had hoped he would. The guard he had shot was not dead, as he had suspected. Jackson had winged him a good one, and laid him out, but it was only a bullet through the arm. Nothing fatal. The guard had pulled off his belt, and tied it around his arm, cutting off the blood flow. He replayed the last few seconds of the encounter in his mind, and held the image of Jackson's face in his mind as long as he could, so he wouldn't forget.

He forced himself up, lightheaded and dizzy, and got to a phone. He managed to phone the police, who showed promptly at the offices, and questioned him. they got a good description of Jackson, and a police sketch artist drew an amazing rendition of him. The guard said it looked like him.

The picture got into the paper, and a reward was offered for tips leading to his apprehension.

Though the paper was a popular one, and many people got it, no one saw Jackson. He was well out of the state by then, and would be for the next twenty years. Eventually, the case went unsolved, and was shoved back into the unsolved files, and left to wallow.

1999

It was a foggy, overcast, grey, and bleak day in September, a very rare thing indeed, when Jack Jamieson came in for his shift at the bar. the bar wasn't a pleasant place to work, but hey it was work.

Sometimes you got some weird unsavory characters in here, but that's the kind of thing you would exepct in a place that looked the way this one did on the outside.

From the outside, you would think that the place was dark and damp inside. The door was rotted and warped, and the roof was missing shingles, and there was a huge hole near the left side of the roof.

You would take one look at it the building, and think that at the first sign of rain, anyone inside would open their umbrellas, bad luck or not. It looked that bad.

The windows were fogged and soaped over, and if you didn't know better, you would think the place had been abandoned long ago.

Not the case however. If you managed to summon enough courage to step inside the place, you got a totally different picture. From the inside, the place was comfy, cozy, warmly lit. Looking up, you would see solid ceiling where the hole in the roof was. Long ago, the insulation had been beefed up to the point where any rain falling through the hole was absobred, and not noticed below.

The windows were soaped, but the light coming through was a pleasant subdued light. The windows were translucent, but only from the inside. From the outside, you couldn't see anything except a bunch of soap.

Still, a bunch of weird people came in here sometimes. There was the occasional drug dealer, and junkie, making their (literally) under the table deals. Jack noticed them all the time, but he never did anything about them.

There was the Man in Black. That was how Jack referred to him. He was a regular who came in, always dressed in black, and never talked to anyone, and no one ever talked to him. He always ordered coffee, black, of course, and never bothered to give Jack his name, or anything else for thatmatter, though Jack had tried numerous times to get anything out of him.

He hadn't seen the man in black in for a while. He had been gone for almost two weeks now, after he had left with that one guy, what was his name? Christopher something or other. Back in August that was. He had been gone since.

The thought crossed his mind that that was right aroudn the same time of that really nasty car wreck over on Highway 92. Could the Man in Black been one of the fatalities in that car crash? He somehow didn't think so, since both of the men killed, Jonathon Jackson, and Ben Thomas-Moore, had family, and ID on them. Jack didn't think the Man in Black had either.

He began to wipe down the bar, and get it set up for the afternoon and evening rush. He hated weekends. those were always the worst. He hated seeing the more discouraging members of his gender moving in on women, using pickup lines ranging from corny (you're daddy must be a terrorist, cause you're the bomb!) to clever (If I told you you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?) to bad (Why don't you sit on my lap and we'll talk about the first thing that pops up...) to downright horrible (Excuse me, my face is leaving in a few minutes. Will you be on it?).

He sighed and prepared himself for the dredges of the male sex to clamber into his place.

His work day proceeded as usual, though maybe a little less busy, due to the weather. It had started to rain, and that always discouraged people from coming in.

He looked out the window, at one of the trees that was shaking in the breeze. Hmmmm, he thought, I should get that looked at. It's gone fall over one of these days, and right onto someone's car, and then where will that put me?

He was right. It would fall, and soon, but not on anyone's car, for as he was watching, it tumbled over, and crashed right through the window.

"Awwwww shit!" he cursed and moved over to the window. He examined it, and then called another of the bartenders over.

"Watch the bar while I go out and fix this, okay?"

He stepped outside into the rain, and wrestled the tree out of the hole in his window.

He threw the branch down on the ground, and ran back inside. He looked at the hole from inside.

"Hey Paul! We got anything to patch this hole with?"

"ust a sec, lemme go look." Paul disappeared into the back of the bar for a minute, and then came back out with a stack of old yellowed newspapers in his hands. "We got these old Newspapers here," he said. "These work?"

"Yeah, they'll be fine. Go get me some nails or something."

Paul ran and fetched a hammer and some nails.

Jack began to nail the papers into place, stacking them up to form as much as a barrier against the wet and the cold as he could.

He finished fifteen minutes later with one of the papers that dated all the way back to 1979. He didn't pay much attention to it, or he would have seen a picture on in that would alert him later on.

When he was done, a makeshift blind was up, and it was working rather well. Just in time for the five o'clock rush, too, it seems.

As the people began to come in and belly up, he greeted some of them by name.

He talked with them for a while, and then spied a new face down ont eh far end of the bar.

He stepped over to him and, being a friendly fellow, held his hand out. "Jack Jamieson, bartender. And you are...?"

The man looked up at him. "You can call me Jackson. I used to live here, in this town. Had to leave though. Some stuff didn't agree with me."

"Oh, well, I'm sorry to hear that. What went wrong?"

"Not much. The usual. People getting in my way, some stress getting out of hand. The usual." He gave a sardonic grin.

"Ahh, yeah. So what made you come back?"

"Well, just mainly thinking things have quieted down. it's been twenty years since I went away, so I guess it all has. Things get forgotten in twenty years, don't they?"

"Some things, yeah." Jack wiped the bar surreptitiously. "Well, I hope you decide to stay. My bar is open until 1 am every night, if you ever need to stop in. I'm here for the last shift, and I hope to see you again."

"Thanks," Jackson said. "I'll be sure to stop in again."

Jack turned away, and nearly ran into Trudy, one of the waitresses. She stared at him, and then spoke low and quietly. "Jack, we need to talk."

"About what?"

She made a "come on" gesture, and stepped back into the kitchen. He followed her.

"Alrght, what's up?"

"What's up? That guy you were talking to! How can you not see it?"

"See what?"

"Didn't you put those newspapers up in the window?"

"Yeah..."

"Well, I think you should go take another look at them. Especially at the one that has the headline about the shot security guard."

He looked at her for a moment, and saw she was serious, so he stepped outside, and went aroudn to the window, pretending to examine the papers for leaks, or peelings. He was really examining the headlines. Then he saw the picture. It was a sketch that a police artist had drawn, and it looked exactly the man that Jack had been talking to.

God, he thought, have I been talking to an attempted murderer?

The thought chilled him, and he went back to the kitchen. He picked up the phone, and dialed the operator.

"Operator."

"Yes, hi, can you connect me with the police please?"

"Yes sir, just a moment please."

There was a moment of silence, and then, "Sergeant Dennevy speaking."

"Ahhh, hello Sergeant, I have a question."

"What can I help you with?"

"Well, in your files, do you have a case circa 1979 that involved a robbery, and a shot security guard?"

"Hmmm. Not sure. Let me go check."

There was another long pause.

"Yeah, here it is. Security guard got shot, and the man described w3as never found. After running through data banks, the man was discovered to be Jackson Conner, arrested once for robery, but nothing was ever proved conclusively, so he was released. Why? What's this about?"

"I have your man, sir."

"You do?"

"Yes sir. Here at my bar. It's called Jack's, and It's located on Bell's Ferry, just before Highway 92."

"How do you know it's him?"

Jack told him the story of the discovery he had made.

"Hmmmm. Alright. Thanks for the information. We'll look into the matter." There was a click as Dennevy broke the connection.

Jack went back outside, but Jackson had left.

Jackson came in twice more, once with a friend, once with two friends, and then he didn't come in again. Jack wondered what happened to him, all the way up until one day, when he opened the paper and say a headline proclaiming a twenty year mystery solved.

Jackson Conner, a native of Woodstock Georgia, was arrested tried and convicted of a twenty year old crime, involving robbery, and a shooting. The article went on to say that Jackosn had hid out in another state for the last two decades, and then come back, cause he thought there was no way no one would have remembered.

The article made no mention of Jack's name, nor his bar, nor how Jackson had been caught. It did however, highly laud the actions of the Woodstock Police Depatment in General, and Sergeant- no, sorry, he had been promoted to Lieutenant- Dennevy in particular.

Jack never did see a penny of the reward promised in the paper, though he did clip out that article, and frame it, and hang it above his bar.

The irony was never wasted on him.