Run: Day 14

Word Count: 84,019

Summary of Events:

Ty woke up before DaNiel — which wasn't common — and elected to take advantage of his free time to switch out the Idaho plates he'd stolen for some Oregon ones, as well as turning in a bunch of empty drink containers he'd picked up on the side of the road the day before at a bottle depot he'd seen in town, among other things. Out on the I-84 again, DaNiel mulled over things in his head, fearing that instead of being rewarded for getting the device to Seattle he might get rearrested, and he might even be accused of telling Ty to do all the stealing . . .

Excerpt of the Day:

There was, however, one card in his hand that could do something, as it were, and that was Ty himself.

Although they’d been travelling together for several days — DaNiel had lost count — he and Ty hadn’t become friends; he wasn’t even altogether sure anyone could’ve mistaken them as friends.

Ty didn’t consider himself a kleptomaniac and the animosity between them was not the sort of thing that would go away quickly; so if Ty were to be brought to testify in hopes that he’d tell everyone DaNiel had been the mastermind it wasn’t likely the prosecution was going to get what they were looking for.

After all, Ty was of the belief that stealing things helped him to survive, and DaNiel could see Ty proclaiming that to the court as much as anyone. He would, in a way, nail his own coffin shut by proclaiming that he did what it took to survive despite the opposition from DaNiel.

Indeed, if DaNiel was rearrested and tried for having escaped prison and such, he would almost want to advice his legal team to get Ty to testify for them, as that way DaNiel would be proven to have not been behind the stealing and whatnot, but had been outright opposed to it, which would fly in the face of the persona the prosecution had tried to apply to him last time.

It would be proven not by people testifying that DaNiel was a great guy — as he’d had a whole bunch of character witnesses do in his last trial — but by one person testifying that DaNiel was a jerk who kept accusing him of being a kleptomaniac when he was just fighting to survive that he wasn’t the cold-blooded, conniving, evil person he’d been spun to be.

Not, though, that DaNiel was keen on being rearrested, not only because there was the potential that his sentence could be upgraded, as it were, to a death penalty that would actually be carried out, but because of the fact that he would be back in jail for a crime he hadn’t committed.

He had undertaken this trip with hope that the Army would appreciate the return of their item — and the fact that he’d gone through all the effort to deliver it to the place he was certain it would be safe at — to the extent that they would dedicate all the resources they could offer him to see his name cleared of the foul smear that had been placed upon it by the people in Virginia who were convinced he was guilty purely because he offered no alibi, not because any of the other evidence DaNiel would’ve thought much weightier pointed to him.

DaNiel took a deep breath and let it out to force himself to release the tension he’d felt building and to, in a way, blow the thoughts of those past things out of his mind. He needed to be focused on the present, and on winding his way through all of these mountains to get to Seattle.