Joe Victim: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

“Take the next left,” I tell the driver, and after that I tell him the next right. We go through a series of turns. Just when it feels like we’re looping back in on ourselves, and right when they’re starting to accuse me of messing them around, we reach the dirt road I found last year. There’s a gate going across it.

  “It’s . . .” I say, then a bolt of cramp grips my stomach and I crouch further forward and grit my teeth until it passes. “Here,” I finish saying, and the driver pulls over and comes to a stop. We all stay seated in the van. Kent is on the phone. Probably updating the address with somebody in case they all go missing. I no longer feel sweaty and hot. In fact it’s the opposite.

  “Take the road,” I tell him.

  “Not without a four-wheel drive,” the driver says. “Track’s too wet. How far in?”

  “Not far,” I tell him.

  He looks at Kent. “This is private property,” he says. “What do you want to do?”

  She lowers the phone so she can chat to him. “Can’t see any signs of life out there,” she says. “Let’s start walking.”

  Kent and the driver get out of the van. They come around to the back and open the doors. Officer Dick climbs out while the others point their guns at me, then Officer Nose unlocks the chain from the eyelet. He helps me out of the van and I try to straighten my back. It’s sore from the twenty-minute drive. It’d help if I could push my palms into it and stretch it out. Kent has finished her phone call.

  The view consists of rocks, trees, dirt, and mud. Mountains in the distance. A stream nearby. More trees and open paddocks and I imagine it would be nice for a picnic if picnics are your thing. It would also be a nice place to string up the warden or Carl Schroder if stringing up assholes is your thing. What I don’t see are any other cars. No sign of Melissa. But she’s here. I can feel it. My ball is tingling. It feels it too.

  Kent is wearing a bulletproof vest that she wasn’t wearing back at the prison. She doesn’t offer me one. That hurts. I give her my big Slow Joe smile and she looks mad at me, mad because it could be muddy where we’re going and she doesn’t want her hiking shoes getting dirty. The others are all wearing vests too.

  “What happened to your face?” she asks.

  “I walked into a door.”

  “Good,” she says. “You should keep walking into doors. It looks good on you. Matches your scar,” she says, and I try to reach up to touch my scar only my hands won’t go that far because of the chain between them and my ankle bracelets. “How far away is the body?” she asks.

  “Same as I told him,” I say, nodding toward the driver.

  “Well consider this your chance to tell me too.”

  “A few minutes’ walk,” I tell her. “And bring the shovel.”

  The driver reaches in and grabs it. I finally recognize him. It’s Jack, the man in black who put the boot of his heel into my eyelid and squished it into the ground. He sees me staring at him and he figures out I’ve just figured out who he is.

  He smiles at me.

  “How’s the eye?” he asks.

  “Still good enough to see me fucking your wife when all this is over,” I tell him.

  He jumps forward at me, but two of his colleagues are quicker and they grab hold of him.

  “Enough,” Kent shouts, but it’s not enough because Jack keeps struggling. “Damn it, guys, I said enough.”

  The message gets through. Jack stops struggling and the others let him go. Then we’re all standing in a circle and I’m the odd one out.

  “Now, Joe, stop jerking us around and lead us to Detective Calhoun,” Kent says.

  I head up to the gate. There’s a chain and a padlock that took me only a few seconds last year to pick. The gate is just below chest height. A wire fence heads out from each direction and along the edge of the property.

  “Cut the lock?” Jack asks. “Or climb it?”

  “Nobody can know we were here,” Kent says.

  So we climb the fence, which is pretty awkward for a guy chained up. Two go over first, then they half drag me while the other two half push. When we’re all on the other side we start walking. The road is in rougher condition than when I was last here, the winter months treating it the same way death treats a newcomer—parts of it black, parts of it lumpy in areas, parts of it dissolving. My prison shoes are not up to the task and a few steps further my right shoe is sucked off by mud. Tree roots and rocks are covered in moss. All these guns pointing at me. People all around me. I’m the center of attention. I crouch down to pull out my shoe, then I flick it to clear as much off it as I can and put it back on. We keep walking. More trees and no gunshot. I keep getting ready to duck. When somebody stands on a branch and it cracks loudly, I drop to the ground.

  “Stop fucking around,” Jack says, and drags me back to my feet, the cuffs digging painfully into my wrists.

  A warm glow is starting to burn deep in the side of my stomach. We keep walking. A hundred yards. Two hundred. I can remember clearly driving out here last year. The weather was similar, though we’d just come off the back of a very long summer. The glow in my stomach is making its way into a sharp pain, an appendix-bursting pain if you had two appendixes. I bury my thumb into the area and it helps a little.

  Another hundred yards.

  Then I slow down. I start studying the trees. The open clearing ahead is full of dirt that a year ago was also full of dirt. It’s all coming back, sure, but it’s also all looking a little different. The leaves have fallen from the trees and formed a brown paste with the earth. There is moss on the stones and rocks. Last year the same trees were hanging onto life a little better.

  “He’s here,” I say to nobody in particular. I point at one patch of dirt that looks like any other while keeping my other thumb buried into my side. “I think,” I add. “If not here, then close to here.”

  “That’s not too specific,” Kent says.

  “A lot better than what you had before, don’t you think?”

  The body is going to be a mess. These people hate me now, and what I did to Calhoun isn’t going to win me any admirers. Unless people admire those who cut off fingertips and pull teeth. Maybe it’s possible. If people can admire midget porn, they can admire anything. I dumped Calhoun’s parts into a plastic bag along with his identification to dispose of later. As hard as I try, I can’t remember what I did with that bag. It wasn’t found on me when I was arrested. I must have dumped it somewhere. If I told that to Ali, she wouldn’t believe me. But I was distracted that night. With blackmail and violence and love. Under the circumstances anybody could be forgiven for misplacing a bag of fingertips.

  Jack begins to dig. Calhoun isn’t deep, maybe only a few feet. It doesn’t take Jack long to find evidence of it. The shovel hits a bone and Jack stops digging.

  “We’ve got something,” he says, then uses the tip of the shovel to carefully scoop away the dirt covering Calhoun, creating a funnel into which dirt starts to sprinkle back inside. “Remains,” he says.

  “Okay,” Kent says. “Cover him back up. We’re done here.”

  “You’re kidding,” Jack says.

  “You knew the deal coming into this,” Kent says. “You know we’re leaving him here.” Then she looks at all of them. “You all know the deal here. You’re not expected to like it, but it’s your job to shut up about it.”

  “This is fucked-up,” Officer Dick says.

  “No, this is the job,” Kent says. “And it is what it is. Put the dirt into place and pat it down,” she says, and she gets her cell phone out and starts playing with a GPS feature, marking the location of the grave.

  Jack doesn’t start covering the grave. He’s leaning on the handle with both hands and he’s deep in thought. Then that thought makes its way out into the open. “There’s nothing to stop us from shooting him,” he says, and if I remember rightly he brought that subject up during the drive from my apartment to the hospital on the day I was arrested. It’s time to move on. “We shoot him and say he made a break f
or it. Then there’s no deal left to be made, right? We shoot him and we bring Calhoun back home.”

  Kent lowers her phone. I start to raise my arms, but they don’t get far because the chain makes a clanking sound and brings any movement to a halt. “That’s not the deal,” I say.

  “But it’s a good deal,” Jack says. “I say we vote on it.”

  Nobody else says anything. They all look like they’re thinking about it. Really, really thinking about it. The air is so still that any sound could travel a mile, but right now nobody within a mile is making any kind of noise. I look from one face to the next, there are some poker faces in there and some faces with thoughts written all over them.

  “Can’t we all just get along?” I ask.

  Nobody answers. In fact only Jack is looking at me. The others are looking past me or through me. They’re still playing various scenarios in their heads. They’re playing out all the possibilities. Except Jack, who has played them out already. This is one of those moments that comes along in life that can change the direction of a man. A turning point. It’s a Big Bang moment all over again.

  “Everybody needs to take a deep breath,” I say.

  “The same kind of deep breath women would take when they found you in their homes?” Officer Nose asks.

  Exactly! But I don’t say it. I look at Kent. I get the sense if she agrees with the idea then in the next few seconds I’ll be one part human and twelve parts bullet. Melissa is taking her sweet time about opening fire.

  “I deserve a trial,” I tell them, but I don’t finish it up by saying I’m innocent. I think that would put them over the edge.

  “We should take a vote,” Jack says again.

  “It needs to be unanimous,” Officer Dick says.

  “I agree,” Officer Nose says.

  Suddenly we’re all looking at Kent. She is now the center of attention the way I was earlier. My life is in her hands. My heart is racing and my legs feel a little weak and I’m actually close to throwing up. A year ago I tried to shoot myself when the police found me, but that was impulsive and stupid. I don’t want to die. Not here, not now. Not ever. Not at the hands of these assholes.

  At least it would stop the stomach pains.

  Then, slowly, Kent shakes her head. “This is ridiculous,” she says, without any emotion, as if she’s reading The cow goes moo off a cue card. Then she injects a little more conviction into it. But only a little. “I’m not going to risk my career for him,” she adds.

  “There’s no risk,” Jack says.

  “Of course there is,” she says. “You think we can say Joe ran so we had to shoot him? That we couldn’t catch him?”

  “Why not? You think people will care?” Jack asks, and suddenly it’s looking like if Kent doesn’t agree, I’m not going to be the only one having new holes made inside them. They can say I got hold of a gun and shot her before they shot me. Then they’ll have an excuse for putting so many holes into me. Kent doesn’t see it. If she did, she’d stop arguing.

  “People will care,” she says.

  “Who?” Jack asks. “Come on, Rebecca, this is a freebie. This is why we became cops, right? To right some wrongs. To give justice. If we do this, then we can be honest about why we were out here. We don’t have to fuck around with this psychic shit.”

  She doesn’t answer right away. There’s a pendulum swinging—or a wrecking ball—and she still hasn’t decided to go with it or against it. “Family members of victims will care,” she says.

  “No they won’t. They’ll be thrilled,” Officer Dick says.

  “They deserve to face him in court,” she says. “They deserve the right to confront him.”

  Everybody goes quiet. More thoughts and no Melissa, just tension mounting upon more tension, and more tension rising in my stomach. I push my thumb a little deeper. Something in there swirls around. Something in there doesn’t want to be in there anymore.

  “We can do this, Rebecca,” Jack says. “We can do it and say whatever we want. You know that, right?”

  She nods. A slow, purposeful nod. “I . . . I don’t know,” she says. “But . . .”

  “You can’t do this,” I say.

  “Shut up,” Jack says. “Rebecca . . .”

  “Can we live with it?” she asks.

  “Don’t—” I say.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Jack says.

  “I can live with it,” Officer Dick says.

  My stomach does one final turn, then my legs turn to jelly and my ass muscles just can’t hold on, and before anybody can add anything else a sound like a thunderclap tears itself free from my ass. It echoes through the trees and across the fields. The mess that follows is like a mudslide.

  “Oh fuck,” Jack says, and Officer Nose says something similar and so does Dick and Kent, so it’s a chorus of fucks. They all jump back from me. I fall to my knees and into the mud. There are more thunderclaps, quickly followed by what sounds like a bucket of water being thrown at a mattress. I fall onto my side. Dick looks like he’s going to throw up, and then Jack starts laughing. He throws his head back and he has to hold on to the shovel to stay balanced, and he laughs just as hard as Adam and Glen did earlier—harder, probably. He laughs like a man who is in danger of tearing his vocal chords. Kent starts to laugh too, just a grin at first that widens and makes her look even more beautiful. Jack’s laugh becomes infectious, the harder he laughs the harder the others join in. Officers Dick and Nose are on the brink of losing control. My stomach lets go once more—not so much a thunderclap this time, but like somebody sticking a knife into a car tire. I can feel fluid running across my thighs. I try to get to my knees, but don’t have the strength.

  “Now we really should shoot him,” Jack says, and he’s laughing as he’s saying it, but there’s still some seriousness in there, some tension, but it’s been broken. “Let him stink up the coroner’s van instead of ours.”

  Kent is smiling and shaking her head. She is holding her nose with one hand and talking into her hand. “Let’s just get him back,” she says, “and let the prison clean him up.”

  Nobody objects. Nobody suggests they ought to shoot me again. Part of that may be to do with the technical details—I’m covered in shit, and shooting an unarmed man covered in shit is going to be a much harder sell.

  “It’s gonna smell,” Dick says, and they’re all still laughing only not as hard now. It’s dying down.

  “Let’s just go,” Kent says.

  “Wait,” I say. I’m still lying on my side with my face in the cold mud.

  “What for?” she asks.

  For Melissa to shoot you. All of you. For her to come and save me. It’s getting darker, but the sun hasn’t quite set yet. Isn’t this twilight? Didn’t Mom pass along my message?

  “I want to pay my respects,” I say.

  “Let’s go,” Jack says, and he reaches down and pulls me to my feet. Officer Dick puts the dirt back into place and pats it down.

  The trip out here is put into reverse order. Now the mountains in the distance are on my right. Same trees, same dirt, same rocks with mold. Same view all around except darker. A hundred yards. Two hundred. The seat of my prison jumpsuit is cold. It’s sticking to my legs and ass and smells just like the sandwich. The walk is slow thanks to the chains around my ankles. The pain in my stomach has lessened, but I can already feel it starting to build again. Melissa is in the trees somewhere, but taking her time, just waiting for the perfect shot. Being covered in my own shit will be a mood killer for her, but I’ll clean up good. I lose my shoe in the same place I lost it earlier, but don’t have the strength to bend down and look for it. It’s getting darker by the minute. My sock is soaked in mud and my foot is cold and it hurts when I step on a tree root or a stone or anything else that isn’t flat. Then we’re at the fence. We go over it the same way as before, two ahead of me to drag me, but the two behind me don’t want to push. They don’t want to touch me. So the two ahead have to do all the work because I don’t have
any strength to help them. When I’m over I break the fall with my arms and am given only a few seconds before being pulled back up. We approach the van. My feet are heavy with mud. My bank account is about to be heavy with cash. Cash I can’t use unless Melissa starts shooting. Only she doesn’t. Nobody does.

  We all stand at the back of the van wondering how to make the next step less messy than it’s going to get, but nothing comes to mind, there’s nothing to lay across the seat first, so I head in and the reverse order continues. Hell, even Calhoun was found and then not found. The only thing that hasn’t been taken back is me shitting myself—that one was for keeps. The chain between the eyelet and my handcuffs is fastened. I’m all hunched over. The two cops back here sit as far from me as they can. Jack opens his window. Kent opens hers the rest of the way. There’s a moment where the van doesn’t want to start, a good two-second turnover of the engine where I get to think Melissa has done something to it, but then it catches and Jack pumps the accelerator a few times then releases the hand brake and pulls a U-turn. More lefts and rights, but in the opposite order. Jack flicks on the headlights. A rabbit on the road twenty yards away is all lit up and seems happy with the idea of being hit by the van, and that happiness probably fades as he goes tumbling under the wheels. Moths are flying into the lights and splattering over the windshield. It’s as though nature is trying to kill itself around me, that we are a van of death driving into town. Traffic is thin. My feet are wet and cold. Melissa didn’t come.

  She didn’t come.

  Chapter Forty

  The outer shell of the building is complete. Inside are offices in various stages of completion. The complex won’t reach the finish line until hard economic times become good economic times. Nobody knows when that will be. Opposite the building are the Christchurch Criminal Courts that, until recently, were also under construction. Hard times or good times—it doesn’t matter where the economy is at when it comes to prosecuting crime. The old courts are a few blocks away, but Christchurch was a growing city with bigger problems, and it needed bigger courts to reflect that and to feed bad people into the prison population at a faster rate.