80 Years Old ~ Reward at Hand?

At Age 80, Sarah Seeks Her Reward?

Today was Sarah’s birthday. At eighty, she had outlived the prosecutors and jurors one and all. Even Uncle Freddie passed on just last year. During the past ten years or so of her sentence, she had taken to acting just a bit batty, as expected of one her age. She knew that none of the watchers was aware of her secret, how she had hacked into the prison system with a simple worm while they thought she was merely typing inmate numbers, dates and job hours into the payroll database.

Her innate curiosity and boredom led her to other government payroll programs, from which she had been siphoning funds for nearly the entire 50 years of her sentence, using them to electronically pay the property taxes and maintenance on her apartment building.

She had taken the rap for Freddie, both of them thinking at the time that no jury would convict a sweet mousy girl from the prairies of multiple murders and grand theft, but they were wrong. Sarah considered telling the truth, but realized both of them would be jailed at the least, and she couldn’t keep an eye on Freddie if he were in the men’s prison facility nearly as well as she could track him on the outside. She figured he would eventually be eliminated in one of his witless schemes, but he lived to a natural old age of 125, waiting for her release, never knowing that he literally slept on the bounty of their crime.

Sarah bade her watchers good-bye and left the confines of the prison behind her. She flagged down the first cab and approached the complex that housed the means to living the remainder of her years in supreme comfort. Now, if she could only find the key, and recall the address?

© 2006 manga_kate

for daily flash fiction challenge ~ word count ~ 300