Cheaters

            The black robed judge slammed the gavel on the desk. "Mr. Samuels, you are hereby found guilty of willful tax evasion and are now sentenced to five years in prison." He stood up and left the room.

            Mr. Jay Samuels shifted in his orange jumpsuit, and his dull-silvered handcuffs jingled.

            His lawyer said to him as he packed his briefcase with the papers scattered on the shellacked desk,"Well, I tried, but you didn't give me much to work with. I can try to press your case or get your sentence shortened, but that also depends on you…" but Mr. Samuels was not listening. The door and his cuffs attracted most of his attention.

            The door, a dark walnut affair with scalloped reliefs and a few bullet holes left obvious in the wood, lay thirty feet before him, fifteen paces if unimpeded.

            One officer grabbed his arm and swatted away assistance. "I've got him." The man, burly and sweating in the hot courtroom, herded him down the aisle. "Ready?" he whispered in Mr. Samuels's ear, after he had blocked the slighter man from the view of the rest of the courtroom with his large figure.

            Mr. Samuels nodded.

            "One. Two. Three--"

            Mr. Samuels shook off the officer and stripped the dummy handkerchiefs from his wrists as he ran through the double doors. Once outside the courtroom, he pushed his way through his town's dated courthouse, knocking over a clerk with papers stacked high to his chin and shoving past a woman pulling her resistant child down the hall that led to the welfare office.

            "Sorry," he mumbled.

            The police were disorganized and took a couple moments to give chase, but he soon heard their heavy footsteps behind them and his officer friend yell for him to stop. He ran faster and when he reached the registration offices, he stumbled into the front glass doors and flung them open. The sun beat down onto his reflective orange jumpsuit and magnified the heat onto his neck and made him sweat.

            "Mr. Samuels! Stop where you are! Put your hands above your head and get to the ground!" a woman's voice called from behind him, but he did not look back. The report of a bullet echoed in the parking lot, and shrapnel from exploded asphalt shivered into his calf, but he continued running.

            Near the parking lot exit, his officer friend had a car unlocked and waiting for his escape. The bribe for the man had been steep, but well worth it. Mr. Samuel had no intention of losing five years of his life in a concrete hell, and the only time to escape was before the security lockdown had him tucked away.

            He looked for the sheen of the blue sedan and caught sight of it to his left. He plunged with as little limp as possible for the door and lifted the handle. It unlatched and he fell onto the seat. With a grunt, he eased his left leg inside, then slammed and locked the door.

            Mr. Jay Samuels grabbed at the key to turn it, but it was missing. He reached into the panel above the pedals, but realized he did not know how to hot-wire this new model. Behind him, another shot rang out and the rear tire deflated. He groaned. The woman officer sidled into the space between his car and the next with her gun held ready for another shot. Her hair was pulled back, her chest flat, and she looked like a bully; anticipating her words, he rested his head on the steering wheel, put his hands behind his head, and wondered how the hell he had gotten there.

*****

            Shhhhh, Jay said to her with his eyes as he leaned over her desk to look at her test paper. He winked.

            Why, you dirty swine! Ilean said back with hers, but let him copy her answers anyway. In sixth grade, cheating was less a taboo and more a statement against the system and teacher, or the straight fix of an adrenaline rush to the less precocious minds.

            If Ilean had not let him cheat off of her paper, he would have read over Anne's, which would not have done him any good since his own guesses would have served him much better. Ilean was the top of her class, and that Jay thought her answers were good enough to steal flattered her. She let him have them all.

            His own answers, if he had bothered, would not have been too different from her own, and everyone knew that. Jay was clever enough to not copy every answer she had, and so neither he nor she could ever get in trouble unless the teacher herself caught them. Often when he deviated, it was to correct the answer that she had gotten wrong, but he never showed her his own paper, explaining that they would have been caught if she copied from his. That made sense enough at the time, though twenty years later she was smacking herself in the head for her naïveté.

            Jay weaseled his way into the teachers' hearts and they never thought him rotten, since his big brown eyes feigned innocence when they blinked up at the exhausted teachers with a compliment attached. He was careful to never let his grades be stellar, always just under Ilean's to avoid suspicion. He did not cheat for the grades, but for the idea of it: for the rush that at any moment he could be caught, sent to the principle, thrashed at home with the oaken paddle his father had sanded to hardness before the man left Jays' mother; his stepfather beat him with it now.

            In college, Jay received a merit scholarship because of teacher recommendations and his grades -- the records of which he had inflated when hacked into his high school's computers. He began as a math major until he realized how easy it was to copy a classmate's ciphers or steal the answer for a problem from the internet, so he changed to a  business degree, where he at least could use his deceptive impulse for profit.            

            "Ilean,"he asked the ashy blonde on his arm, the same, bright Ilean that had followed him from elementary school because he could filch her the drugs she discovered in senior year, "Ilean, can you stand outside Dr. Llameros's office? I need you to warn me when he is coming."

            "Why? There isn't a test, is there?"

            "No, no. He does have something I want in his files, though."

            "Paper or computer?"

            "On his computer, of course. I would have a hell of a time trying to find something papery. You know how disorganized he is." The image of the aging and bloated doctor entering their classroom with a pop quiz spread into three separate folders played in Jay's memory. His prank had allowed every student a few minutes to study.

            "Why don't you just hack it from your station? It's so much easier."

            Jay grinned. "Easier, schmeasier. That's no fun.The station's getting cluttered anyway. You spilled nail polish all over the keyboards, remember?"

            Ilean pouted. "I thought it was a very nice station."

            "Yeah, yeah. And red midnight nail polish really brings out the black in the keyboard." He motioned to the door, "Hello, here he is!" Dr. Llameros exited his office, distracted and mumbling to himself about luncheons and bibs and waistcoats. "Now's our chance."

            "What do you want me to do?" Ilean asked, as Jay crossed the hall and dropped to a knee to fiddle with the archaic doorknob with his lock-pick set.

            The lock made an audible if quiet click. "Just text me if he comes back, and act dumb," he said. As he swung the door behind him, he added. "It's what you're good at."

            Ilean stared at the wooden door with the opaque glass and the lettering "Dr. Llameros, Ph. D. Department of Business" in gold leaf. A mathematics teacher, the one the campus knew as being cranky with all those who were not her favorites, toddled by her with a rolling black suitcase that held all her textbooks. She nodded at Ilean and smiled, and then rolled on. Ilean gulped and tittered a message to Jay to hurry up. Behind the doctor's door, she heard his text alert beep and him mutter a "dammit."

            Jay whipped the door open and reappeared, closing it without a sound. He walked to Ilean's side and pulled out his phone. "Dammit, Ilean. I told you to text me if he was coming, not because you were scared. I won't have another chance for hours now, and my class with him is before then." He would have preferred his friends stand guard, but after he had told them in confidence that he got headaches if he did not trip the system somehow when his brain told him to, no matter the risks, they discontinued their associations with him.

            "I'm not letting you help me anymore, if this is how you behave in a low-stress venture."

            "I don't cheat, remember? Now, what did you get? Can I use any of it?"

            He unfolded the stack of papers he held in his hand and inspected them. "Nah. I just had time to get the key for the pre-post test they survey us with."

            "The pre-post test? Really? And I'm the dummy? Jay, they don't even grade us for that!"

            "I know. I already got the important ones with the computer station. Important is boring; this was for fun. I'm going to go memorize this now, so skeedadle."

            Jay whisked off, and Ilean was left standing there staring after him, confounded.

*****

            Mr. Jay Samuels sat in the oven-like sedan, his hands on his head and his forehead resting on the rim of the steering wheel. He heard the car door click open and a rough female voice say, "Out of the car."

            He examined her now that she had his attention. She would have been beautiful with her even, dark features and intense eyes, if she had not been aiming a gun at his vitals. Mr. Samuels nodded and pushed out of the car, his hands still on his head and his movements protracted and steady. He walked in front of her at the speed she set, though with a pronounced limp.

            Only just arriving from the courthouse, the herd of slower-going policemen rushed to apprehend him. She spoke again, and he could see her shadow on the asphalt shaking its head. "What made you think you could actually get away?"

            He shrugged. "I don't know. I just thought I'd try."

            "But you didn't think it would work?"

            He smirked. "No, I didn't. But it was a nice last hurrah . . . ."

            She brought out a thick pair of handcuffs from her belt. She secured him and slid her pinky into the space between his wrist and the metal and cinched the metal tighter until there was no slack. "I wouldn't try now." She laughed,  "I think you just added a few more years on."

            "You think that's funny?"

            "You're not my problem, so yes."

            He nodded, but as she looked up when another officer addressed her, he slid his fingers into the toolbox of her belt, found her cuff key, and hid it like a magician between his fingers; she never knew it was missing.