Escape Artist

Six counts, the arrest report said, six counts of theft, fraud and eventually murder. Six counts of a sixty is all it should take me to tell you this story. 
      We drove up to that prison entirely sure of what we were going to find there, Jamie Saint. We'd be forewarned that Jamie was a sadistic psychopath, a keen manipulator and a tricky escape artist. No one warned us that Jamie was a woman. I placed her at about twenty-five, tall, brunette, beautiful. A life devoid of cosmetics suited her, as did the color orange. 
'Look after this one' the officer growled at us as he walked her to our transport vehicle. He placed her in the back of the van and shut the doors showily, I heard Jamie sigh. 
  We began the journey, six hours, mostly straight road and desert. We were scheduled to stop somewhere just outside Oregon for rest room use and nourishment. This was the time I was most weary of. It was always like that though, being a prisoner transport unit driver had it's dangers and they mostly manifested in this half hour pit stop. Aside from the possibility of being strangled through the seating divide that is, but that almost never happened. Me and Horner drove in relative silence, after months of doing this weekly we'd almost run out of things to say. He instead turned on the radio and let the gentle lament  of the Turnpike Troubadours seep out of the dodgy speakers. I thought I heard Saint tapping her foot along to the melancholy beat but I couldn't be sure. Her humming to James Taylor was undeniable however. I felt her presence to be a calming and likable one, despite what i'd been cautioned. By the time we reached Oregon I didn't have a single apprehensive bone in my body about the woman in the back of the van, the woman who'd sang along to Bonnie Tyler, the woman who'd stabbed a man to death. 
  When we drove into the service station Horner told me he was starving. This of course meant that he'd be getting food and I wouldn't, as one of us had to stay in the van with the detainee. Normally I would have argued, but I didn't mind being alone with Jamie Saint. The thought didn't terrify me at least, how it usually did. Horner exited the vehicle once we'd pulled in at the front of the customary IHOP, a chain I was repulsed by after one too many sticky toffee waffles. After he left the silence was crushing, I felt awkwardly charged - like the air before a tropical storm. 
'Hey freckles, can we get some air?' a raspy voice spoke from behind me. In my heightened state the sound breaking through the lull startled me. I assumed she meant me because of my paradoxically boyish freckles, and I was the only other person present. 
'Ugh.. yeah, sure.' I stuttered and began to clamber out of the seat. I took my gun with me. I opened up the double doors at the back of the van and she winced as they swung open. The day was torrid and bright and the dark windowless space behind our caddy was fairly dim so i'm sure the sun blinded her. She adjusted and shuffled forward, chains binding her feet. 'Sorry, we can't take those off' I blushed. 
'I'm not asking you to.' she smiled. I couldn't understand how someone so delicate could be such a monster. She was akin to a wounded bird of prey, fallen from something so mighty and tainted with the mark of her past. I could see past it, but I could understand how others weren't so open minded. We walked, or shuffled in her case, over to a picnic bench just next to where the van was parked. The sun bathed us in a glorious and intrusive warmth, she tilted her head back - absorbing it. 
'I'm going to miss this' her voice was an adult lullaby, soft and hard in one sweeping tone. She opened an eye to squint at me. 'Go on, ask.' I stared back at her in embarrassment. 'I know what you're thinking and it's okay, just ask.' I lent forward, excitement on my lips.
'I just want to know what happened, why it happened.' She sighed again and once more tipped her head to bathe in the glow of the summer heat. 
    'It happened because of love. It's ridiculous to say it was with love that I killed him, because it wasn't, it was rage and hate and revenge but there was passion alright.' She looked me in the eyes from the corners of hers, possibly to gauge my reaction, and then she continued. 'I was enamored, completely consumed by the existence of another person. My first love, my first passion. Her entity engulfed my mind and I became something other than myself, I became a component in a mechanism, I became a 'we'. The more time I spent with her the more utterly and irreversibly in love I fell. I craved her, every hour of every day. She became a physical necessity like food, water - air. She was the most uniquely brilliant person I'd ever met and I couldn't understand how i'd ever managed to be without her, or who I was before I met her.' I flinched at the word 'her', confused by it, but nothing surprising stayed that way for long that day, after a while it just became evident fact. 'Then she fell ill.' She breathed a long jagged breath and picked up an empty water bottle that was lying on the bench. It was difficult to maneuver through her handcuffs, but she did it gracefully. 
    'They'll never understand, the judicial system, I know that now. Five sessions in court, seventeen statements and they still can't see that I did it for her. She was the north pole to my south, my one absolute attraction. She was the center of my universe and she was dying. It felt like everything I'd ever known to be reality was melting around me and I had no way to stop it. Like my world was liquidizing and falling through a crack beneath my feet. I tried to clutch it, to hold on to my stability, but the liquid just dripped through. Even though I could feel it, even though I could touch it - I couldn't catch it.' She picked at the label of the water bottle, ripping it slowly with her fingernail.
    'And then, one day, someone told me there was a way. A way to freeze her, to solidify her. It was like for one magnificant moment everything was perfect again, I could breathe again. I clutched at her, grabbed every part of her I could in those hours of hope. Savored every kiss, letting the taste tingle my desperate lips for hours after we disconnected. I watched her chest, watched the rise and fall of life, knowing for certain that it would stay there. But then, they told me the cost.' She ripped the label off entirely in one swift moment, screwed it up into an angry ball and then discarded it like it was nothing. 'I was a student and I had nothing more than a pile of debt. I had no family, no one to help me and neither did she. We had each other and that was all. So of course I did what I could, of course I stole to pay for the operation. I did whatever I could to stabilize my shaken world. To keep the plates spinning. But it didn't matter, they all crashed around me in the end. I went home, do you know what that feels like freckles, huh? They told me the operation was a success so after twenty-nine hours of sitting in that waiting room for a verdict, to know whether the heart mine belonged to was still viable - I went home. When I arrived the next day they told me she'd died in her sleep. "Peacefully" they said "didn't feel a thing.", apparently her heart had just stopped beating. But what about my heart? Why was that still going? Why, when my entire world had disappeared was I still standing? What was I even standing on?' She turned her back to me for a moment and when she turned again to face me she was holding a slightly disheveled cigarette between two of her long fingers, I didn't question where she got it - I was too absorbed. I reached towards her extending a lighter and she stared into my eyes as she inhaled. It mesmerized me. 
   'They say,' She continued, her eyes still burning through mine. I dropped my hand and she exhaled. 'That when a magnet is shattered, each tiny piece, each surviving fragment, forms another two poles. I was so broken, but I still yearned for her, I still magnetized towards her but she was no where on this mortal earth for me to find. So I got trapped. Trapped in delusions of her and how we were together, trapped in a place in my mind where she still existed and this world became all that I could think about. Everything else became irrelevant because, in some form, I had her. Then when after I stopped eating, I became physically ill myself and I had to be healed. After I was nourished my mind started to work again and I could see that she was gone, I could see that I was alone. And I was traumatized. I became obsessed, consumed by the inexorable thirst for revenge. That's when I looked him up, the surgeon.' There was a soft burning to the depths of her irises, they held in them the hatred she'd felt, I did not find regret beside it. 'I could not stop myself, I was engrossed by the idea of equivalent exchange, he'd stolen her life - so now his belonged to me. My magnetism was redirected, it honed onto him. I haunted him, I tracked him down and I stabbed him straight through the heart - because I felt that was only fair, because that's what his shoddy work, his shaky hand, his inattentive nature - had done to me. I watched the life drain from him and I thought of her, how I had never got the chance to be there, that I'd never seen that flawless light leave her. So I held him, his blood drenching my body, and I wept. I fell apart completely, screaming into his hairline - demanding her. She never came. But the police did, and they took me away. That was the first time I escaped, just slipped out the handcuffs, six weeks longer to freely wander the state, lost and damaged. It made sense to keep stealing, I had nothing to lose anymore. It felt like I was being punished by the Gods, all I wanted was to be alone, to find the time to end my own life so that my soul could once again be entwined with hers. But every time I came close I was detained. I just want that freedom freckles, to leave this earth on my own terms, not rot in a jail merely dreaming of her.' I stared at Jamie, this injured beauty. This tragic eagle. I reached into my pocket for the small metal key, the key to her death - her salvation. I unlocked her ankle and wrist binds. I then handed her my gun. 
'There.' I said. 'Be with her.' The smile that spread over Jamie's face melted my heart, the joy at being able to be reunited with her soul mate. She put her finger to the trigger, inverted the snout and reached the gun in front of her. 
'Thank you.' She breathed, then she flipped, pointed the snout at me - and fired. It didn't confuse me for long though, the pain - nothing did that day.