Joe Victim: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

  “I know that. I meant, you know, the family dynamic was normal. Dad would go to work and mom would stay at home and I would go to school. The only thing that changed was we all got older.”

  “How’d you feel about him killing himself?”

  I shake my head. This isn’t a subject I really want to talk about. “Are you serious? How do you think I felt?”

  “Are you checking for answers, Joe?”

  “No. Of course not. I was angry. Upset. Confused. I mean, the guy was my dad. He was always supposed to be there. He was meant to protect me. And he just, you know, just thought fuck it and ended things. It was pretty selfish.”

  “Did you get any counseling at the time?”

  “Why would I get counseling?”

  “Did your father leave a note?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know why he did it?”

  “Not really,” I say, but that’s not entirely true. I have this dream sometimes, which, sometimes, I think might actually be a memory rather than a dream. It was the Uncle Billy factor. I came home to find Dad and Uncle Billy in the shower together nine years ago. I don’t know if my father would have killed himself if I’d given him the time to really think about it. I think he would have. Better that than living with mom’s anger. His suicide was less a suicide and more of his only son nudging him a little closer to heaven. I think that’s where he wanted to go since I heard him saying oh God, oh God over and over before I opened the bathroom door. It was the less painful solution for everybody involved. And not painful for me at all. Of course, that might just be a dream. . . .

  “You sure? You look like you’re remembering something.”

  “I’m just remembering my dad. I miss him. I always miss him.”

  “Some professionals would call what your father did a trigger.”

  “What?”

  “A trigger. It means an act that forces you to behave differently. A triggering event.”

  “Oh. I understand,” I say, not so sure I do. I didn’t shoot him. I tied him up and stuffed him into his car and put a hose running from the exhaust and through a gap in the window. At least that’s what Dream Joe does sometimes.

  “I want to talk more about your childhood.”

  “Because you think there are more triggers?”

  “Possibly. Your story about the kitten—”

  “John,” I interrupt.

  “John,” she says. “Your story about John makes me think there are going to be other triggers. Tell me, Joe, do you like women?”

  “Joe likes everybody,” I say.

  She looks at me for a few seconds, saying nothing, and I’m sure she’s about to tell me off for referring to myself in the third person. I used to do that when I was a janitor and it worked well. Here, I’m not so sure.

  “What’s your earliest traumatic memory?” she asks.

  “I don’t have any.”

  “Something to do with women,” she says. “Your mother, possibly. Or an aunt. A neighbor. Tell me something.”

  “Why? Because that’s what the psychiatric textbooks say?” I say, a little too quickly, but I say it that way to stop my mind from traveling back to when I was a teenager.

  “Yes, Joe. That’s why. I know what I need to hear from you, and I get the strong impression you also know what you need to say. I’m going to give you sixty seconds to tell me something that happened to you when you were young. Trust me, I’ll know if you’re making it up. But something happened and I want to know what.”

  “There’s nothing,” I say, leaning back. I start drumming my fingers on the table.

  “Then we’re done here,” she says, and she starts to put the tape recorder back into her bag.

  “Fine,” I tell her.

  She finishes packing up. “I won’t be back,” she says.

  “Whatever,” I tell her.

  She makes it to the door. Then she turns back. “I know it’s hard, Joe, but if you want me to help you, you have to tell me.”

  “There’s nothing.”

  “There’s obviously something.”

  “Nope. Nothing,” I tell her.

  She knocks on the door. The guard opens it up. She doesn’t look back. She takes one step, then another step, and then I call out to her. “Wait,” I tell her.

  She turns back. “What for?”

  “Just wait.” I close my eyes and tilt my head back and rub my hand over my face for a second, then put my hand in my lap and look at her. The guard looks more pissed off this time than the last time when Ali moves back to her chair. He closes the door again.

  “It happened when I was sixteen,” I say, and I start to tell her my story.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Raphael wakes up feeling like a new man. He feels ten years younger. No, twenty. Hell, he feels like he is twenty, even if his muscles do ache like he’s fifty-five. Which he is. He rubs at his shoulders as he climbs out of bed. He opens the curtains. He went to sleep in rain, but he’s waking in sun. It still looks cold out there, but it’s blue skies and no wind and that makes what they have to do this morning so much better. He showers and stares at himself in the mirror for a minute afterward, wondering what he always wonders these days—which is what happened to his body, his face, to the years that have gone by. He thinks about Stella, Stella who is broken on the inside, Stella who is going to help fix him.

  He has time for a good breakfast. These days he doesn’t tend to eat much. It’s pretty obvious when he has his shirt off. Having no appetite combined with being too lazy is the reason. And work—not that he’s really working much these days. But today he’s going to make the effort. Today he’s celebrating. He makes waffles. Mixes up the batter and pours it into the waffle maker, one after the other, more time-consuming than he thought it’d be, but waffles always catch you like that. He eats them with maple syrup and strips of bacon. He drinks a cup of coffee and a glass of orange juice. God he feels good. For the first time in over a year he doesn’t feel numb inside, doesn’t feel hollow. For the first time in over a year the anger is stomping around his body looking for an outlet. He even had a name for the anger back then. The Red Rage. The Red Rage would keep him awake at night, trying to figure out a way to get revenge for his daughter, only he never could. He didn’t know who had killed her. He wasn’t a cop. He couldn’t figure it out. And then Joe was caught and the Red Rage had to deal with the fact there would be no revenge here because Joe was in jail, so the Red Rage went into hibernation.

  Raphael never thought he’d see it again.

  He reverses out of the garage. The morning isn’t quite as cold as he thought it was going to be when looking out his bedroom window. The plan he has with Stella relies on good weather, and the forecast suggests that’s what’s on the menu. The roads are dry, but the lawns and gardens are still wet. It’s forty-five degrees and might climb another one or two, but not much more. Traffic is thin. Raphael has the radio on. It’s talk radio. Raphael is obsessed by it. Has been for the last few months. He keeps thinking he ought to make a call. Others are. They’re sharing their opinion about the death penalty, those who are calling all having an extreme position on it.

  His position is extreme too.

  He drives to the same coffee shop he went to last night with Stella. It’s an independent store that goes by the name Dregs, and has old movie posters stuck across every spare inch of wall, even one of the windows is blotted out by movie cards. He doesn’t go in this time. Instead Stella is waiting in her car in the parking lot out back that services a dozen stores, including a few hairdressers and a novelty sex shop. He pulls over next to her and pops the trunk. He helps her load the stuff from her car into his car. She isn’t wearing the pregnancy suit.

  Then they’re driving together. Talkback radio still on. People still ringing in.

  “I honestly don’t know what people are thinking,” Raphael says to her. “How can anybody be against it? How can anybody look at a monster like Joe Middleton, and say he has rig
hts? People are getting confused. They see putting criminals down as murder, but it’s not murder. How can it be, when the people being executed aren’t human?”

  “I agree,” she says, and of course she agrees—they wouldn’t be doing this if they didn’t see eye to eye on all of this.

  They get stuck behind a truck on the motorway, a lorry two trailers long and full of sheep, the ones on the edges staring between the wooden slats of the walls out at the scenery racing by, not knowing their lives are flashing in front of their eyes just as quickly as the view, not knowing that trucks full of sheep tend to head to places where they take the live out of livestock. That would be murder too, according to the people against the death penalty.

  But not Stella.

  She was a good find. Eager. Angry. Capable. And, truth be told, a little scary. And since he’s admitting things to himself—quite the stunner. Last night he was hollow inside—the trial coming up, his protest starting on Monday. But what was that, really? He and others like him hanging outside the courthouse in the cold, holding up signs, and none of it was going to bring his daughter back. He was doing it because it was something to do—they were motions to go through, motions that were putting off what he really wanted to do to himself while he lounged around inside his house wearing his pajamas for entire days at a time, stains forming on the sleeves where he’d spill tomato sauce or whiskey on them. Last night Stella came into his life. He bought the coffees and she shared the plan. It was a great plan. Good coffees, but a great plan.

  The sheep truck turns off. The motorway carries on. For all the conversation they made last night, this morning it’s different. He’s ready to explode with excitement, but he’s too afraid of saying the wrong thing, too afraid that Stella won’t turn out to be as capable as he first thought. At the same time he doesn’t want to disappoint her.

  This is going to happen, he keeps telling himself. It’s going to happen and Joe is going to die, and Raphael is going to be the one to pull the trigger. It won’t bring Angela back, but it sure as hell beats protesting. It will bring peace to his life. Perhaps a destiny too. There are others who need his help. Others from the group. This feels like it could really be the beginning of something.

  Of course he has to be careful not to get ahead of himself.

  “We’re nearly there,” he tells her.

  “When was the last time you were out here?” she asks.

  Out here is thirty minutes north of the city.

  “A long time,” he says, only it wasn’t a long time ago, it was last year. “My parents used to own a getaway nearby,” he tells her, “but it burned down years ago. I used to bring my wife and Angela out here for picnics during the summers, but not in a long time now. Not in almost twenty years.”

  He takes a side road from the motorway, through farm country for another five minutes, and then another turnoff—this time onto a shingle road that after two hundred yards becomes compacted dirt as the scenery changes from open fields to forest. The road is bumpy, but the four-wheel drive manages it easily enough. He goes slow. There aren’t many twists and turns, but the back wheels occasionally skid off large tree roots as they round the few corners there are. It’s almost untouched New Zealand scenery. It’s why people come here, film movies here, farm sheep, and raise children. Snowy mountains in the near distance, clear rivers, massive trees.

  He pulls into a clearing. It’s just like he told her. Nobody around for miles.

  “It’s scenic,” Stella says.

  “Easy to fall in love with,” he says.

  They climb out of the car. The air is completely still. And quiet. The only thing Raphael can hear is the engine pinging from the SUV, and Stella moving about. No birds, no signs of life—they could be the last two people in the world. He walks around to the back of the SUV and pulls out the gun case. Stella starts messing around with a rucksack, reorganizing the order of things inside it before throwing it over her shoulder. His wife used to do the same thing with her handbag. Their feet sink a little into the dirt as they move beyond the car, through the trees, and toward another clearing, toward where the getaway used to be until one day somebody thought it would be fun to set fire to it.

  “I can’t believe I’ve never fired a gun,” he says, and he really can’t believe it. What kind of guy gets to fifty-five years old without ever having fired one? “It’s always something I wanted to do,” he says, and he wishes he hadn’t said it. All he’s doing is confirming he might not be the right guy for this. And nothing could be further from the truth. Just ask the Red Rage.

  Stella doesn’t answer him. He knows she’s fired one. It’s one of the reasons she’s come to him. She told him she’s a terrible shot. She told him that if he is a terrible shot too, then this mission is over. Only she didn’t call it a mission. He wonders if the police would call it a movement.

  She opens the rucksack and starts taking out some tin cans. They’re all empty. Baby-food tins, spaghetti tins, soup tins. She starts lining them up a few feet from each other. She leaves some in full view, others slightly hidden behind roots, others she pins in between branches at different heights. After a few minutes they have a shooting gallery and some very ugly tree decorations.

  They move thirty yards into the clearing. They’re now two hundred yards from the car with a belt of trees between them, trees that will stop any stray bullets from hitting the SUV. Another hundred yards away are the foundations of the cabin, but they’re covered in long grass, as if the scorched earth made the ground more fertile. “This is a good distance,” she says.

  Raphael drops to his knees. Immediately moisture seeps out of the ground and into his pants. He rests the case on the ground and pops the lid. It’s the first time he’s seen the gun and he whistles quietly at it. It just happens instinctively—maybe the same way people whistle at nice-looking women or sports cars. There’s no instruction booklet. “Wow,” he says. And then again, “Wow. I hope you know how it goes together?”

  “I was given a lesson,” she says.

  “From the gun store?” he asks, and he’s fishing for information, and it’s obvious he’s fishing for information, and obvious he’s not going to get it.

  “Exactly,” she says.

  He picks up the barrel. It’s black and solid and feels dangerous and is a little lighter than he thought it would have been. He puts it back into the case. He’s itching to try slotting things together, but instead he waits. It’s her show—and he doesn’t want to risk breaking something. That’d be a real mood killer. It takes her a few minutes, the pieces snapping together with firm clicking sounds. He stands up to watch her doing it; kneeling down over the case was hurting his back a little. She pulls a box of ammunition out from her rucksack and loads it into the magazine. It takes twenty bullets, and there are twenty-four in the case. He can tell from the way she goes about it that she wasn’t kidding when she said she’s not good with guns.

  “How many boxes?” he asks.

  “Three,” she says. “We can practice with them all. We just need to keep two rounds, plus our special round.” She reaches back into the rucksack. “Here,” she says, and she hands him a set of earmuffs. Then she starts looking back through the bag.

  “Lost something?” he asks.

  “No,” she says. “I know they’re . . . Oh, wait, I took them out back at the car.”

  “Took what out?”

  “My earmuffs.”

  “I’ll get them,” Raphael says.

  “It’s okay,” she says, “I’ll go. Here, set this up,” she says, and hands him a blanket from the rucksack before walking off in the direction of the car, taking the rucksack with her.

  He spreads the blanket out. It’s big enough for two people to lie on without feet or hands overlapping onto the grass. It’s thick too, but it’ll only be a matter of time before it starts soaking up the rain from the damp ground, especially once they lie on it. It reminds him of when he used to picnic here. Janice, his wife, and Angela, his little
girl. Janice still lives in the city and Raphael talks with her, but not often—there is too much sadness there, it was a downward spiral neither of them could break. Best to focus on the good times. Like coming out here with a picnic blanket and a fishing rod. They’d hit the river half a mile away, but in all the years never did they catch a single fish, which was a relief, really, because he wouldn’t have known what to do with it. Of course those were summer days. He has never been here in the winter.

  Stella comes back. She’s carrying her earmuffs. His are orange and hers are blue, but other than that they look identical. She holds them up and gives him an apologetic smile before putting them on. He smiles back, then puts his on too. The sounds both he and Stella are making are dulled dramatically. She lies down and takes hold of the gun. He stands a little behind her, watching the curves of her body, watching the gun, watching the targets up ahead. She stabilizes her elbows into the ground. She shrugs her shoulders around a little, twists her head back and forth, and finds a comfortable position. This time yesterday he was watching morning TV and eating toast that he’d been too lazy to put butter on. He’d been hanging out in his underwear with the heaters on full so he wouldn’t have to get dressed. He’d been wondering what the hell to do that day before the counseling session, and had ended up continuing to do what he’d started doing that morning.

  Stella reaches up and brushes her hair back over her ears to keep it away from the scope. She adjusts herself one more time, then reaches for the trigger. Her finger settles on it. Raphael holds his breath.

  The gun kicks up as the bullet explodes from the barrel. It sounds like a thunderclap. It’s so loud for a moment he thinks the earmuffs are there just to hold the blood that’s going to run from his ears. Only there is no blood. There would be, he’s sure of it, if it weren’t for the muffs. He can’t tell which tin she was aiming at because none of them have moved.

  “Wow,” Raphael says, the word sounding like it’s coming from deep underground.

  She lines up the tin again. Takes her time. He watches her breathe in. Breathe out. He can’t wait to have a turn. He can feel his heart racing. She pulls the trigger. The same explosion. This time he sees a divot appear in the ground about a foot from a tin. She wasn’t kidding about being a bad shot.