Free I by Jack Olsen Page A

everybody on my paper route. I even liked the dogs that snapped at me till I got to know them. I gave good service, and I got good tips. Some of my customers would have a cup of hot chocolate waiting when I rode up on my bike. I began to get the idea that people were pretty good at heart—a few, anyway.”
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    In fifth grade Keith began a friendship with a neighborhood boy named Reg Routley. Close personal relationships were still rare in his life, and this one flourished. Every day the boys met after school, fished for salmon and trout, hunted rabbits and squirrels, explored the woods, flirted with girls and enjoyed each other’s company. Then the head of the Jesperson clan announced that they were leaving the country.

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Keith Hunter Jesperson 2

1 Roadblock
    A month after I found out that two innocent people had been sentenced to prison for my murder, my girlfriend Peggy and I headed east with a truckload of lumber for Illinois. As we pushed through an Iowa storm, the heavy wet snow built up on top of our trailer. At the Rock Island check station, the scale master red-lighted me and made me pull around to the parking area. She said we needed to pay eighty-four dollars for overweight and knock off the snow. Otherwise, we couldn’t leave.
    I said, “I’m not gonna pay. It’s your Iowa snow!” In the back of my mind, I’m thinking, Goddamn it, whenever I get in trouble, it’s always a woman.
    She told me to wait right there while she stepped inside the shack to check something. She ran my name in her N.C.I.C. computer and came up with a warrant from Shasta County, California. She placed me under arrest on a charge of sexual assault.
    Peggy yelled that it was a mistake. I gave her a look that told her to shut up. She was pissed, mostly because she knew she would have to deliver the load by herself and con somebody into doing the untarping.
    The scale lady let me clean off the snow so Peggy could drive away. We sat together in the cab for a few minutes and I told her that I might be going down for a long time. I was feeling paranoid and I made the mistake of telling her that while she’d been driving with that other guy in Tennessee, I’d killed a girl in Portland, and they might hold me for that, too. I didn’t tell her who I killed. I explained that I did the killing to get in practice for the ex-husband she’d asked me to execute.
    At first she acted like she didn’t believe my story, but when the truth finally sank in, she flipped, called me every name in the book and then started bawling like a baby. I didn’t know what to say to calm her down. Before they drove me away in a sheriff’s car, I gave Peg all my money. She was still sniffling when she hauled ass with our load of lumber.
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    At two in the morning I was locked into the county jail. Eight hours later I was arraigned on a charge of first-degree sexual assault and informed I would be extradited to California.
    I told the judge that I wouldn’t fight the warrant. I said, “I’m innocent, Your Honor, and I want to go back and prove it. But I want you to drop your eighty-four-dollar ticket. It’s wrong!” I was sensitive about bum raps, I’d taken too many as a kid. The judge voided the ticket.
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    I was put in a holding cell with sixteen other guys. It was my first real experience with jailbirds. I got up to change the TV channel, and a big black dude said, “You can’t do that. You gotta arm-wrestle me for it.”
    I pinned him quick. He says, “I wasn’t ready.”
    â€œAre you ready now?”
    I took him down again. He says, “I slipped.”
    I said, “You slipped, huh? Let’s do it one more time.” I flung him across the table. I stood up and said, “It’s my TV, asshole.” I ruled the roost.
    After a few days in the tank one of the Rock Island detectives told me that California’s felony warrant was too weak