Joe Victim: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

  Glen pinches my nose shut, and it helps, a little, and any help at this stage is a relief.

  The sandwich touches my lips. I feel the lettuce dangling from the edge of it on my chin. I feel the bread—it’s stale and firm and feels like it’s been lightly toasted, but it hasn’t been. Then that bread is on my tongue and scraping the roof of my mouth, and so far it’s okay, it’s okay because bread is all I can taste. The bread starts to get wet. Adam pushes more of it into my mouth, then Glen lets go of my cheeks and pushes my jaw upward and my teeth bite through the sandwich.

  My taste buds all head for the hills at the same time as flavors burst into my mouth, they run in the same direction, which pulls my tongue into the back of my throat and causes me to gag. Even with my nose pinched closed I can smell the sandwich again. Something in the back of my throat starts clicking and still the sandwich is being pushed deeper. I can’t breathe now. It’s chew or suffocate. They’re the two choices I have.

  So I chew.

  I picture my mom and her meat loaf and I try to imagine that’s what I’m eating, but my imagination simply isn’t good enough. What floods my mouth is dirty and foul and makes me wish I’d been quicker a year ago when I tried to shoot myself. I twist my head from side to side, but Glen keeps his hand pressed firmly on it, and as if to prove a point he punches me again in the stomach, only this time lightly.

  I figure the best thing to do is chew the minimum amount of times and then swallow. So I do that, chewing even less than the required minimum, and when I try to swallow what happens is a giant wad of whatever the hell I’m eating gets lodged in my throat. I start to choke.

  “You’re not getting off that easy,” Glen says, and he spins me around, digs his hands beneath my chest, and pulls upward. The ball of sandwich comes up and hits the wall. He spins me back around again. “Smaller bites are the key, Middleton,” he says, and then we repeat the steps—the punching, the nose squeezing, the flooding of flavors—only this time I chew for longer and my second bite goes down, and then there’s a third. I keep my tongue pressed down and I chew as best as I can without trying to taste anything, but it doesn’t work. I look at the sandwich. Three bites gone.

  Bite. Chew. Adam laughs.

  Swallow. Repeat. Glen laughs.

  The humiliation’s worse than anything I’ve ever felt. Glen pulls out a camera and takes a photo. Then he films me taking a bite. If I can survive having my testicle crushed, I can survive this. It takes ten minutes and then the sandwich is gone. I keep expecting them to make me eat the bit I coughed up, but they don’t. I can feel my face burning, the scar running up to my eye feels tight. My other eye is watering. My bad eye doesn’t, something to do with a damaged tear duct.

  “See, that wasn’t so bad now, was it,” Adam says, and lets me go.

  I drop to my knees. I start to retch. I can taste bile in the back of my throat, but none of the sandwich wants to come back up, which is probably a good thing because these guys would make me eat it again.

  It takes them a few minutes to calm themselves down. Glen has laughed so hard he’s broken into a sweat. It takes me the same amount of time to know I can walk again without vomiting all over myself. They lead me back to my cell. They try to hurry me along, but I maintain a slow speed. They keep laughing at me, and when they leave me in my cell I can hear them laughing back along the corridor.

  I look up at the door waiting for Caleb Cole to come in. If he does, there is nothing I can do. So with that in mind, there’s no reason not to turn my back on the door and try to make things a little better. I hold my head under the tab in the basin and pour water into my mouth and rinse it out a dozen times. Then I swallow mouthful after mouthful until I can no longer bear it, and when my stomach seems to turn upside down, I crouch over the toilet. In a rush of surging water from my stomach parts of the sandwich finally appear, but nowhere near as many as I would have liked. It’s turning into a bad day, and I know there are still plenty of ways it can get a whole lot worse.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Raphael should have trusted his initial gut instinct last night. It told him there was more to Stella than she presented, but he saw what he wanted to see. The lies were good. So good he imagined anybody would fall for them. And the change in looks. Boy, she could almost fool anybody. She fooled him. Even when Schroder gave him the photograph, he didn’t pick it. Not at first. Not until he took a good look and then he started seeing. She looked different. Different makeup, different hairstyle—hell, a completely different hair color. Plus she’s put on weight, not much, but a little around the neck and face.

  He connected the dots.

  Stella wasn’t Stella. She wasn’t a rape victim who’d lost her baby.

  She was Melissa.

  The realization was almost like a blow to the stomach. He felt his breath catch and it took all of his composure to stay calm, to not let on that he knew the woman in the picture. He stood there staring at it while his mind was racing. What he felt was a sense of betrayal. What he should have felt was a need to tell Schroder she was in his house—and yes, that was a consideration—but not what he settled on. Telling Schroder would be the first step in the process of he himself going to jail—after all, he did kill two lawyers.

  Of course Schroder sensed something. How could he not? But he recovered from the pause—he told the ex-policeman that he recognized her from the news, and Schroder bought it. No reason not to. Will Melissa buy it too?

  What he can’t figure out is why she wants Joe dead. The trial must have something to do with it. That’s what the timing suggests. She wants Joe dead, and he’s okay with that. He wants Joe dead too. So their desires fall in line quite nicely.

  Where things don’t line up are their views on people who take innocent lives. Melissa has been doing a lot of that lately. Other cops. Security guards. Paramedics. People in uniform. The media even labeled her the Uniform Killer for a while there, though that name doesn’t seem to have stuck much. The police uniform he has, it looks authentic because it is—it’s come from somebody she’s killed.

  He knows the irony. He’s a smart guy. Smart enough to know that he’s a killer working with another killer to kill another killer. It’s not complicated.

  Law Abiding Raphael knows he should go to the police. Red Rage Raphael thinks he should just shoot both Joe and Melissa and let the chips fall where they may. Sensible Raphael knows he can’t go to the police because Melissa saw the articles pinned to the wall in his daughter’s bedroom. She made the connection. If he goes to the police then he’ll be thrown in jail alongside her. Then Joe will get his trial. He’ll have his chance to plead his insanity defense, and then you just never know what will happen. He’ll be found guilty, has to be, but that doesn’t sit well with Raphael. So Sensible Raphael agrees with the Red Rage. There are more than enough bullets to go around. The plan allows for that. In fact, the very nature of the plan allows for it perfectly. And if he gets caught because he’s taken that extra shot? Then so what. So. What.

  So he covered with Schroder while these thoughts went through his mind, and then he covered with Melissa too while those same thoughts were there. If she suspected he knew who she was, she would kill him. He didn’t know how. He wasn’t arrogant enough to think that just because he was bigger and perhaps stronger that that gave him an advantage. There was a reason she had killed so many people. It was foolish to underestimate her.

  But she didn’t suspect. Had no reason to, not when he spoke about his anger toward Joe, and what Joe had done to him, his daughter, and to Stella. He spoke of his excitement to be the one to take Joe’s life. They spoke about the plan. They went over and over the plan. It wasn’t a simple plan. Not really. But he has a great way to streamline it.

  Melissa rang him this morning. The next part of the plan was happening today. She said she would be by this afternoon to pick him up. Sometime around three thirty.

  “It’s important we’re not late,” she had told him.

 
And now it’s three thirty and he’s waiting by the door, and he only has to wait another minute before her car pulls up. He heads out and climbs in. She’s still got black hair, but he wonders if it’s a wig or if she’s dyed it. He tosses the bag with the police uniform into the backseat.

  “Then we’re doing this,” he says. “We’re really going to shoot Joe.”

  “Gun’s in the back,” she says, and puts the car into gear and starts driving.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  I end up lying down, hoping for my stomach to settle, which it doesn’t seem to want to do. The sandwich has set about some motions that I don’t know how to stop. There are cramps and there are sharp pains and there are occasional moments where the two combine, other rarer moments where there is no pain at all. I give up looking at the door every time I hear somebody coming near me. If Caleb Cole came in with his makeshift knife he’d be doing me a favor.

  Eventually a set of footsteps slow down. They enter the cell. I’m too busy feeling sorry for myself to look up. It’s more than one set of feet. Eight feet, four guards, one underlying current of anger. None of the guards are Adam or Greg. My hands are cuffed in front of me. There are ankle cuffs with a length of chain about a yard long between my feet. A length of chain runs up from that chain and connects to the handcuffs. It’s the kind of thing Harry Houdini would wear to a fetish party.

  I struggle to keep up with the guards, and when I do slow down too much I get pushed in the back. At the front of the prison is a police detective I haven’t seen before. A woman. She’s signing forms and talking to the warden. The woman is perhaps a couple of years older than me. Beautiful hair. Beautiful features. Great curves all wrapped up in some pretty sleek packaging. She glances up at me and barely gives me a second’s worth of attention before carrying on her conversation with the warden. The warden is in his mid-fifties and is wearing the kind of suit telling the world there’s just no point in mugging him.

  Both the warden and the woman come over to me. I’ve got my stomach muscles clenched and my ass clenched because my organs are performing some weird kind of ballet, they’re dancing around so fast they’re turning into fluid.

  “If you put one foot out of line,” the warden says, “these people will shoot you.”

  “Which is the wrong one?” I ask him.

  He doesn’t answer.

  “My name is Detective Kent,” Detective So Hot I’d Rather Abduct You Than Kill You says, and my oh my, what fun we could have together. “And what the warden said here is absolutely one hundred percent correct,” she says, and I could get lost listening to her voice, looking into her eyes, cutting her open. Even the warden seems to be mentally trading his wife in for her.

  “Joe will behave,” I tell her.

  “Good,” she says. “Because the general consensus is that Joe has something planned.”

  “Joe don’t have a plan.”

  “Good. Because if anything happens, Joe’s going to find himself with a bullet in the back of his head,” she says.

  “Joe just wants to do the right thing.” Everybody is giving me the same kind of look they’d give a stand-up comedian misreading his audience. “Where is Detective Carl?” I ask.

  “Detective Schroder won’t be joining us,” she says.

  “I miss Carl,” I tell her.

  “I’m sure he misses you too,” she says. “Now let’s get this show on the road.”

  I’m escorted to the door. Outside are three heavily armed officers. The afternoon is chilly. Mostly gray skies, but some patches of blue in the distance. No sun. The day is cool, but my skin is feeling hot and my stomach is riddled with what feels like large worms on the loose. I’m led to the back of a white van. There is nothing special looking about it. The back doors are opened and I’m told to climb inside. There’s a metal eyelet that’s been welded into the floor. I step up and my legs buckle under me and somebody has to catch me.

  “Stop fucking around,” somebody says.

  I suck in a deep breath and hold it. I can feel the world slipping a little.

  “He’s going to hurl,” somebody says. “Get back!”

  Everybody gets back. I drop to my knees heavily enough that I’ll have bruises on both of them this time tomorrow. I open my mouth, but nothing happens. Sweat is dripping off my face. I widen my eyes and my mouth then exhale heavily. My stomach is struggling to hold on. The sandwich is threatening to fire out in all directions.

  “Are you up for this?” Kent asks.

  I nod. I appreciate her concern. When I come to her house when this is all over, I’ll make things quick.

  “Okay. Here are the rules,” Kent says, standing over me. “You do what we say. You answer our questions. You make good on the deal. You don’t do any of that and we bring you straight back. You try to escape, we shoot you in the spine. You have anything planned we shoot you in the spine. Hell, we may just shoot you in the spine anyway. You get what I’m saying?”

  “I thought you were going to shoot me in the back of the head. Now it’s the spine?”

  “It will be both,” she says. “And probably the balls too. Though we’ll have to aim accurately since you only have one left.”

  “Funny,” I tell her, and try to get back onto my feet.

  “Is this some kind of gimmick?” she asks.

  I shake my head. “I ate something bad, that’s all.”

  “You going to toughen up and go through with it?” she asks, and she sounds like my mom used to sound when I was sick in the morning before school. Back then she would ask me if I was a girl or a boy or a man.

  I find my balance and step into the back of the van, which answers her question. My handcuffs are connected to the eyelet by a chain that keeps me stooped over, which is fine because my stomach would be stooping me over anyway. There are no windows in the back. There’s wire mesh between the back and the front, so I can see outside and I could jam knitting needles at the driver if I had them, but nothing more. The driver is armed and looks familiar, but I can’t place him. Kent climbs in next to him. The other two heavily armed officers climb in the back with me. There’s a shovel lying across the floor. Four people for Melissa to deal with and they’ve even brought along the supplies to hide the bodies.

  The van starts rolling forward. This is the furthest I’ve been from my prison cell since I pled not guilty and was held over for trial. This is the view my mother and my lawyer see every time after they’ve come to see me.

  “Which way?” Kent asks.

  “Right,” I tell her. “Can you open a window?”

  “No.”

  We have to wait for a gap in traffic, then we’re swinging out over the lanes and heading toward the city.

  “Please? It’s hot back here.”

  “It’s not hot,” Kent says.

  “He doesn’t look so good,” Officer Nose says, and that’s the name of the guy sitting opposite me, the guy with the nose that looks like it’s been broken a few times. The guy next to him is wearing glasses and my name for him is Officer Dick.

  “How far do we go?” Kent asks, winding down the window halfway.

  “I don’t know,” I tell her. “I can barely see out the window.”

  “How about you just give me an address?”

  “There is no address,” I tell her. “That’s why we’re in this situation. We’re looking for a paddock. I can’t tell you where it is, but I can figure out the way.”

  “Great,” the driver says.

  “It is, isn’t it?” I ask.

  We get closer toward town. We pass the big Christchurch sign that somebody has added graffiti to, but I can’t see what. We keep driving. More boring shit to the left. The same boring shit to the right. I don’t know how people do it. I don’t know why more people aren’t shooting themselves.

  “Go left toward the back of the airport,” I tell them.

  We slow and make the turn. I can see a plane overhead coming in to land. I’ve never been on a plane before. Never be
en out of the country, never even been up to the North Island, never really left Christchurch. I wonder where Melissa is planning on taking me. Australia? Europe? Mexico? I can’t wait. It must be so cool, looking down on the world, seeing people scurrying around like ants. It is how I see them, most of the time anyway. I wonder how I’ll see them from a few thousand feet in the air. Then I wonder why a cockpit is called a cockpit, who came up with the term, and what they were doing in the process.

  “Keep going straight for a while,” I tell them.

  We do just that. We pass open fields and landing planes and runways in the near distance lined by lights and more fields. As we drive it’s all coming back to me. The night with Calhoun. He was the detective who had killed Daniela Walker. I was the person who had figured it out. I’d have made a great cop. He had staged the scene so it would be pinned on me—the Christchurch Carver—and I wasn’t pleased about it. At the same time Melissa was blackmailing me. So I tied Calhoun up and Melissa ended up stabbing him, and I filmed the whole thing without her knowing. It all worked out great. It got me and Melissa on the same page. I don’t know how it works—she pulped my testicle with a pair of pliers, and yet I love her. Her sister was murdered by a cop, she herself was raped by a bad man, and yet she loves me. You can’t deny the chemistry.

  The sky is getting a little darker. I’m not sure of the difference between twilight and dusk. Is there one? Both are approaching. I guess one arrives first, and then the other. Twilight might be when there is still some light in the sky and dusk is when there isn’t. Another hour and it won’t matter because they’ll both be gone. Perhaps that’s part of Melissa’s plan. When it’s dark she’ll start shooting. My stomach is feeling a little better, but not much.