The Paranoid Thief Read Online Free Page A

public records, Randolph’s
appointed hour for the public hearing arrived.
    With the arrival of grim-faced court
deputies, Randolph’s restraints activated to a touch of a button, bringing his
arms and legs together. Once he was settled on a robotic transport, the group
of them, including two city guards as redundancy measure, saw him to the
elevator platform. This decadent precaution had been established long before
the restraints and robotic transport were incorporated to make certain no
prisoners disappeared before the elevator could lift the defendant up into the
courtroom.
    Thus, without incident, Randolph was
brought up into a glass enclosure, designed specifically so only the selected
lawyer could hear the defendant’s boisterous complaints. A procedure put in
place to protect the sensitive ears of judge and witnesses alike, should an
unruly defendant decide to molest those gathered with objectionable profanity.
    Once the elevator came to a halt, Randolph
looked around the small oak-panel room which included ten witnesses on a pew, a
middle aged bailiff, an ambitious looking judge, an old prosecutor, and
Randolph’s all-too-young, snot-nosed-just-out-of-night-school lawyer. It appears Mr. Hilden is taking no chances,
calling in a favor to make my incarceration a certainty. Randolph looked
skyward, with the knowledge he’d been royally screwed. The question now of course is how screwed? And with that thought,
his so-called trial started.
    The kid outside his inverted containment
dome sat down and somehow managed to open his briefcase with trembling fingers. Possibly because this is his first
courtroom appearance, Randolph surmised.
    “Let the video recorders show all court
personal and witnesses are present,” the bailiff called out. “Case number
37645AD, the city of Willing in the great state of Luashess , for the people. Mr. Prosecutor?” He finished
without emotion before he backed away so a fat, balding, older man could
activate his monitor which displayed on a liquid screen all charges attached to
Randolph’s case file.
    The prosecutor, who bore the weight of
over-indulgent eating habits, stood as customary so all could see the anger instilled
in his fat face for the atrocities the defendant committed. “As you can all
see,” he began in a boisterous voice, “the charges against this unrepentant
criminal are substantial. The defendant is accused with fifteen minor and seven
major criminal acts which alone would render a life sentence. But those all
pale before the willful murder and lack of consciousness for the lives of the
whole Henderson family, including their pregnant daughter, five live-in
servants, and the rape and murder of a chanced-upon jogger in the city’s
recreational park only an hour or more after setting up a bomb in the
Henderson’s three story mansion, causing it to collapse and kill all within.”
The prosecutor then stroked his black tie with chubby fingers and a cold smirk
on his lips as the room of people reacted to his brutal inflection of words on
the charges against Randolph. This reasonable reaction of outrage also included
Randolph’s own disbelief of the charges.
    “The Henderson family wasn’t even home!”
Randolph screamed to the room but the glass enclosure carried his voice only to
his lawyer’s ear piece, which still lay in its cradle next to the kid’s
briefcase. “They were over...aw damn-it-all.” Randolph exclaimed, as the true
folly of his mistake sank in. They were
over at Mr. Hilden’s home, per his invitation. Of all the stupidities I could
have ever done. There was never any package to retrieve! Randolph sagged
against the restraints. That was why Mr.
Stanton was so smug. The whole thing was a set-up to get my DNA on the grounds
and link me to the bomb, thereby killing off the family and leaving me the sole
fall guy! But what he couldn’t at first understand was the jogger—why did
they kill an innocent bystander? Then it hit him; the bomb had to