Salmon's Lick

It all started with the black book.

Jimmy had been taking his 2PM constitutional - an outdoor break from behind the convenience store counter, punctuated by a cigarette and a frosty can of Red Bull - when he noticed it sitting unattended on the park bench next to his. Basking fully in the glory of his workday’s small slice of time uninterrupted by shifty teenaged boys buying condoms without making eye contact, or by the fourth visit from the local alcoholic in as many hours, he sat down on the bench, flicked his cigarette, and started leafing through the book's pages lazily, expecting to find little of interest but not minding that much either. Boredom, after all, often had cures that were only minutely less boring.

What Jimmy found was of course far from monotony, even if he didn’t take it seriously at first. The book was full of not only scribbled (thankfully legible) writing, but also of newspaper clippings and other miscellaneous sheets of paper, one of which Jimmy later determined - with the help of an old community college buddy who worked at the precinct - to be an actual police report. Altogether, the various writings told the story of the Slider sisters, local legends as they were, and of how (back in the 80s) the twins had dropped out of high school and robbed a bank on the very same day. Even now, however many years later, it was a yarn that Jimmy (as well as any local yokel) had heard spun at least a handful of times - especially in his high school years, that caliber of rebellion was nothing short of a subject of reverence for many - and so he flipped through the notebook’s front matter with confidence, rapidity, and familiarity.

As trafficked as the story was, no one really seemed to know how they had managed to rob the bank to begin with, but it so happens, as many a regional barfly would later recount, that the two sisters got away (hence the local legend status). They were aided, most suspected, by the fact that the sum of money they made off with was rumored to be fairly paltry and far from the Hollywood bank heist standard - some twenty to thirty grand is what most claimed, though who really knows where those figures came from - and especially back in the 80s it was far from likely that the Barney Fifes that patrolled these parts would throw down the spike strips for that. Most people who cared enough to wonder any further - and those folks ranged from casual Dateline viewers to full-on conspiracy nuts - figured that the Slider sisters probably split up and split town. After all, a set of twins was a whole lot more memorable than one high school girl hitching to nowhere, right?

Indeed, Jimmy had heard this song before - that is, until he got to the things like the police report, and the handwritten notes purportedly exchanged between the sisters, and the map with the X on Salmon’s Lick. This was just naming a few of the separate pieces of the puzzle that tumbled out of the black book as he flipped its pages, and both the overall picture and the reasoning behind the elastic band that had held the book's covers together became clearer as each scrap of paper fell into his lap. What began as a mildly amusing diversion for Jimmy, eliciting scoffs with each new piece of “evidence,” became a legitimate curiosity as he ran his eyes over witness accounts, grainy photographs of the sisters with duffels under their arms and caps jammed brow-low over heads of tousled hair, and of course the map.

It wasn’t the kind of map you could buy in Jimmy’s convenience store, oh no - it was the kind of map you drew on a sheet of notebook paper ripped hastily from its metal rings, in this case inscribed with a light blue gel pen truly befitting of a 17 year old thief. It had been somewhat smeared by what Jimmy guessed was rainwater, but the X on Salmon’s Lick was as clear an indication as anyone would require. As for determining what was underneath that X, buried in the soft dirt on a tiny island in the middle of the river that ran to the reservoir down South, all one needed was imagination and a general sense of plot, but if they wanted a better idea than that would give them, they could also read the letters between the sisters, which made it clear that the money they had stolen was there.

And in fact, based on what Jimmy was reading, it was still there. The summary of the letters was that the sisters, thrown wildly into the pressure cooker that a combination of newfound celebrity and the prospect of lives as fugitives would surely create, had had a lifetime’s worth of sisterhood stripped away from them, and, for lack of a better term, had had a falling out. One of the Sliders - Josephine, the one that most suspected was the leader of their all-female Bonnie and Clyde routine - had apparently decided that she wanted to be rid of all of it, money included, and so she had buried it on Salmon’s Lick and given her partner in crime instructions for finding it. The trick of it, though, was that - in an act of self-destructive defiance that could only be born of a teenaged mind - the other Slider, Loretta, had made a similar resolution of not wanting the money that had caused them both so many problems. How the letters had come into the possession of the mysterious notebook owner (the covers, both inside and out, were of course unlabeled) was beyond Jimmy, but it did seem clear that with the crossed wires that the letters described, the money might still be out there.

It was around the time of this revelation that Jimmy, whose break had been over for 20 minutes, glanced up from the notebook and looked around to see if he was being watched. Aside from a homeless man on the next block shakily inserting some quarters into a surely non-functional payphone, the coast was clear, and so Jimmy let out a breath that he hadn’t even known he was holding in. He glanced at his lukewarm and forgotten Red Bull, and then his watch, learning what we already know about his break having long since ended, and carefully squeezed the notebook shut with all of its loose-leaf contents safely trapped inside. After another furtive glance around the block, he lifted up his hoodie, slipped the book into the back of his waistband, and headed back to the convenience store to finish what would ultimately feel like the longest shift he had ever had. The hook was in.

So it was that after weeks of vetting the little black book’s contents beyond that fateful day on the park bench - vetting assisted by the aforementioned community college buddy, and that episode of Dateline (rented on DVD from the municipal library), and of course everyone’s best friend in the world of mystery-solving (the internet) - Jimmy bought a little one-man kayak from a sporting goods store, drove the necessary half hour out of town, and, in the cover of darkness on a Tuesday evening, paddled across the short stretch of water between the mainland and Salmon’s Lick.

Salmon’s Lick was a small patch of scrub barely large enough to be called an island, separating the east and west banks of the river that formed the county’s de facto median. At the time of the Slider heist - at least according to Jimmy’s weeks of research - the river had been low enough that you could easily wade from one bank to the shore of Salmon’s Lick without the water touching your kneecaps, and so often people did just that. Primarily it was randy teenagers who forded the cold currents of the river, doing so in search of a Makeout Point in some of the flattest land the country had on offer, and the Slider sisters, reportedly both being somewhat promiscuous as 17-year olds go, surely knew about its existence for this reason. Presumably, Jimmy thought as he labored across the river, this practice was what gave Salmon’s Lick its name as well. After all, did salmon even have tongues?

The little spade he had brought along - another sporting goods store purchase - worked the dirt with surprising ease, and the sweat that formed a moonlight-reflecting sheen on Jimmy’s brow as he dug was more a function of anticipation than exertion. With each shovelful of loam, Jimmy oscillated between feeling astronomically foolish (as one might when following the lead of an anonymously abandoned notebook) and feeling completely certain that he had finally been provided his meal ticket. Here, on this night, in a twist of fate that either portended the merciful nature of a god Jimmy didn’t believe in or exemplified the random entropy of the universe, he would be given those flighty tools that society constantly demanded of him and of everyone else: the almighty dollars. Twenty thousand wasn’t a king's ransom, sure, but if used wisely, it could go a long way, and Jimmy fancied himself wise beyond his middling years. I’ll use the money to go back to school, he thought. Get a job in middle management or some shit. Insurance, or sales, or something. The definition of pencil pushing, but I’m fine with pushing a pencil if it means I can show up at my next high school reunion with my head held high.

He was thinking about his previous high school reunion and the enormous drag that had been - let's face it, being a 28-year-old convenience store clerk wasn't exactly spacewalking - when the shovel hit the canvas. It was then that Jimmy lost all sense of self, tossing the cheap afterthought of an excavation tool aside and dropping to his knees to scrape the dirt that remained away to reveal the duffel. As his fingers scrabbled for a zipper pull, he noted that it was one of the duffels from those grainy photographs, and his vision blurred with joyful tears as he became as sure as ever that he had found what he came for. Finally finding the zipper, he pulled the top of the duffel open to reveal the money.

Now - anyone who has worked in a bank will know that twenty grand doesn’t look like much, but for reasons that all of Jimmy’s research hadn’t uncovered, the first thing he noticed was that the pile of money was just that: a pile. Pulling out a fistful of bills with shaking hands, Jimmy saw that they were all crumpled ones. He also saw that some of the ones were stained with blood.

A twig snapped just behind him.

That was when he stood slowly, turned around and saw the man. The man who had patiently watched Jimmy crack open his planted Bible in the park. The man who had, behind his homeless disguise, (correctly) diagnosed that the sharp hooks of potential wealth were lodged fully within Jimmy’s proverbial jaw. The man who had stocked up on the necessary supplies and headed straight to Salmon’s Lick to camp and wait for this very moment. In his hand was an ordinary hammer, and by the time Jimmy registered that (and what it could possibly be for), the man was already on him.

As he repeatedly raised and brought down his hammer, the nameless assailant wondered - not for the first time, no doubt - why he always put real money in the duffel. Maybe, he thought, giving his victims - the fish that he had so craftily reeled in - that one moment in which they were convinced that they had truly found the free lunch of free lunches was the cornerstone of his morbid perversion.

He’d get to the bottom of it next time. Right now, he had work to do, and so he did it.