Daylight Saving Crime
A short story
It was 6:00 a.m., but neither Stu nor Jasper could fall asleep despite having been up all night.
“You awake in there?” Jasper asked.
“Unfortunately,” said Stu.
“Whatcha in for?”
Stu remained lying down in his cot with his back to Jasper’s cell. After a prolonged sigh, he said, “It was supposed to be the perfect crime: rob a bank on daylight savings night. I had it all planned out. At 1:59 a.m., the clocks jump back to one o’clock, so technically, that previous hour did not exist.”
“Holy shoot.” Jasper sat up excitedly and looked through the bars to the adjacent jail cell. “It’s like that movie, The Purge. You can get away with doing anything during that hour!”
“That was the plan,” Stu said. “If you rob the bank during the first one o’clock hour, you can’t be caught. If the police ask where you were when the bank was robbed at 1:30, I’d say I couldn’t have robbed that bank because I was home at 1:30. It’s the perfect alibi.”
“What about the surveillance cameras in the bank?” Jasper asked. “Wouldn’t they have you on tape?”
“How could the video cameras have two 1AM hours on file?” Stu said. “It’s like the Y2K bug. Computers are too logical; they don’t know how to handle a paradox like that. To prevent crashing the whole system when the clocks turn back, the computer would have to record over the previous hour’s footage. Meaning anything that happened during that hour—like someone robbing the vault—would disappear.”
“Whoo.” Jasper stood, impressed, and walked to the cell bars separating them. “You’re one of those computer geniuses like Steve Jobs, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know about that.”
“So what happened?” Jasper asked, eagerly. “How’d it all go down?”
“I broke into the bank at 1:15, as planned,” Stu said. “The alarm went off, but I knew I had fifteen minutes until the cops arrived. So I worked fast. I used explosives to get into the vault, grabbed the cash, and I was out by 1:30, in my car, and home by 1:45. Then, at 1:59, the clocks shifted back to 1:00 a.m. So by 1:15—the time of the robbery—I was in bed, fast asleep.”
“Hot damn!” Jasper slapped the cell bars with glee. “You’re like Steve Jobs meets Jesse James. How much you make out with?”
“About 70-grand.”
Jasper whistled. “You are a genius.”
“Obviously not,” Stu said, still lying in his cot, “or else I wouldn’t be here now, would I?”
“Shit, that’s right… So what happened then?”
“The cops came to my house around 3:30 a.m. and asked where I was between 1:15 and 1:30,” Stu said. “I told them I was here: at home, in bed, asleep. Because I was. And I even had surveillance cameras in my house to prove it.”
“Ha,” Jasper snickered. “You showed them coppers. The perfect crime.”
“Except they still arrested me,” said Stu.
“How?”
“They said they caught it all on tape.”
“But… Y2K…” Jasper looked confused. “There can’t be two 1AM’s on a computer. That’s a paradox.”
“Guess not.” Stu sighed.
“Hey, I forget,” Jasper said. “Whatever happened with that Y2K bug back in 2000?”
Stu sat up in his cot to think about it. “I forget, too. But the world didn’t end.” He looked over at Jasper. “So what are you in for?”
“Me?” Jasper scoffed. “I shot some son of a bitch cheating on my wife.”
“Oh…” Stu studied Jasper to see if he was joking—apparently not. “Is he…dead?”
“Nah, I missed,” Jasper said. “Just shot up his bar a bit.”
“What happened?” Stu asked, now intrigued.
“Well, my wife works as a waitress at the place, but she was supposed to be home by 1:30,” Jasper said. “At 2AM, she still wasn’t home, so I called her cell, but she didn’t answer. I drove by the bar, saw her car outside, and that son of a bitch bartender’s car, too—they were both inside. The bar was closed, which could only mean that they were fooling around. So I grabbed my shotgun and headed inside. What do I find? The two of them behind the bar together, just as I suspected. So I aimed to shoot that bastard dead.” Jasper raised his arms to mime holding a shotgun. “Bang! But I missed—couldn’t see straight, on account of the two six-packs I drank earlier that night. Then, while I’m preparing to fire again, the bouncer tackles me from behind, takes my gun, and holds me down until the cops showed up.”
“Wow.” Stu stared in shock. “You’re more Jesse James than me.”
“Eh, the son of a bitch is lucky I was too drunk to shoot straight,” Jasper said. “Normally I’m a deadeye.”
“So your wife was actually cheating on you, then?”
“Well, what else would they be doing there alone over an hour past closing time?”
“But they weren’t alone. The bouncer was there, too.”
“Shit, you’re right,” Jasper said. “It’s worse than I thought: a damned threesome!” He spat with disgust.
“Or…”
“What?”
“Did you happen to roll your clocks back last night?” asked Stu.
“Huh?” Jasper looked confused. “Whatcha talking about?”
“For daylight saving time.”
“That was last night?”
“Yeah,” Stu said. “I just told you about the bank robbery…”
“I didn’t realize that was this last night,” said Jasper.
“Are you sure they weren’t just cleaning up the bar after closing?”
“Come to think of it, my wife did have a mop in her hands.”
“So what you thought was 2AM, was really only just past one,” Stu said.
Jasper rubbed his head. “So she wasn’t late at all…” He stumbled around the cell then sat on his cot. “Goddamn daylight saving time fucked me!”
“Goddamn daylight saving time…”
"Daylight Saving Crime" was originally published in Story Addict, a collection of 27 short stories, available in ebook or paperback on Amazon.