Joe Victim: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

  “You killed your goldfish?” she asks.

  I try to stay calm, but I can feel the anger building up inside of me. For her to ask that means she just doesn’t get me. It seems to be a common problem. What is wrong with people? First she thinks my mom abused me, now she thinks I killed my fish. What is the world coming to? Now I’d almost certainly give my right and only remaining nut to get hold of the pen she’s using and drive it into her neck.

  “No. No I didn’t,” I say forcefully. “It was a cat.”

  “You look angry, Joe.”

  “I’m not angry. I just hate the fact people always think the worst of me.”

  “You killed a lot of people,” she says.

  “I don’t remember any of them,” I say, “and I sure as hell didn’t hurt my fish.”

  She writes something else down. She underlines it, then she rings a couple of circles around it. I’m pretty sure she’s doing it deliberately. I think she’s trying to throw me off guard, and that’s why her questions are all over the place. It’s not going to work. I think good things about my mom and about my fish, good things about Melissa. I think about doing good things to Ali once I get out of here. I might be a bad-thoughts kind of guy, but I’m a good-things kind of person. I’m Optimistic Joe. It’s how I roll.

  “Tell me,” she says, “does the name Ronald Springer mean anything to you?”

  Ronald Springer. Now she really has thrown me off guard. “No,” I say. “Should it?” I ask. The police asked me about Ronald a few months ago. Schroder did. They asked if I had known him. If I had any idea what had happened to him. I told them I never knew him, and they seemed disappointed, but had no reason not to believe me. No reason, sure, but they still spent a few hours questioning me about him.

  “It means nothing?”

  “It means something,” I tell her, knowing I’ve already reacted to the name, knowing she’ll have been told about my previous interviews. “Detective Carl came to see me a while ago to ask if I had known him. Ronald went to my school.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “No. I knew who he was, but that was only after he was murdered. I could tell Schroder wasn’t expecting any connection, he was just hoping to wrap up a cold case, only I had nothing to do with it.”

  “You’re positive?”

  “Of course I’m positive.”

  “So how is it you can be positive when you don’t remember killing any of these other people?” she asks.

  “Because killing isn’t in my nature.”

  “That’s a quick response,” she says.

  I shrug. I don’t really know how to respond to it.

  “Killing is in your nature,” she says. “You just don’t know you’re doing it. Which means it’s possible you did hurt Ronald and just don’t remember it. Ronald went missing the same month your auntie stopped raping you.”

  “Raping?”

  “That’s what she was doing, Joe,” she says, but I’m shaking my head.

  “That’s the wrong word,” I tell her.

  “What’s the right word then? Punishing you?”

  “No. She was forgiving me. Forgiving me for breaking into her house.”

  “Is that really how you see it, Joe?”

  “Of course it is. Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “You say you only knew of him after he was murdered,” she says.

  “That’s right.”

  “The police never said he was murdered. Ronald just disappeared. How would you know he was murdered?”

  “It’s just an assumption,” I tell her, and I hate her for trying to fool me. “The police thought so. Everybody thought so. That’s what normally happens when people go missing, right?”

  “Sometimes,” she says.

  “Well if he wasn’t murdered, what then?”

  “Tell me about Ronald.”

  “There’s nothing to tell. He was a kid that nobody knew until he was mur . . . until he went missing, then people were figuring out who he was, then suddenly he’d been everybody’s best friend. People were going around school telling Ronald stories. There were rumors, right, that he had run away, that he had been abducted, that his parents had killed him. School was nearly over and the way people were talking, you’d think Ronald had been a hot topic since school started. It was weird. Knowing Ronald made you popular. I didn’t understand it. Ronald would have hated all of those guys. Every one of them.”

  “You knew him, then?”

  “No. I mean, I’d spoken to him a few times because we were in some of the same classes. But people gave him a hard time. They gave me a hard time too. We had that in common, I suppose.”

  “Sounds like you knew him a little.”

  “I mean we didn’t hang out. Maybe a few times at school we’d eat lunch together because neither of us really had any other friends.”

  “Why did the other kids pick on him?”

  “You know already,” I tell her. “If you’ve read about him.”

  “Because he was gay,” she says.

  I shrug. “It didn’t matter if he was gay or not, not for real,” I say, “but once people start throwing around labels like gay boy or serial killer, they stick. People need to be more careful with that kind of thing—but at that age nobody is.”

  “How long had you known him?”

  “For always. We started school together when we were five, so I’ve always known who he was.”

  “Did you kill him, Joe?”

  I shake my head. “No.”

  “Or you did, but can’t remember.”

  “I guess that’s possible,” I say. “Why are you so interested in Ronald anyway?”

  “Because your lawyer asked me to ask you about him. It seems the people prosecuting you have been looking into the case. We don’t know what their interest is, but they may introduce it at trial.”

  I shake my head. “I liked Ronald,” I tell her. “I wouldn’t have hurt him.”

  “How long were you friends?”

  “We weren’t friends. I just knew who he was, and I liked him because he was the guy people teased, and you need kids like that in school so the rest of us are safe.”

  “How long had you been having lunch with him?”

  I shrug. I think about it. “A year. Maybe two. Not long. And it wasn’t every day.”

  “Did you see him outside of school?”

  “Never.”

  “Did you used to think that he was attracted to you?”

  I almost laugh at that. “What? No. No way. I’m not gay,” I tell her.

  “That’s not what I asked,” she says. “I asked if you thought he liked you.”

  “I’m sure he probably did. I was the only guy who talked to him that wasn’t giving him a hard time.”

  “I mean, Joe, do you think he liked you in a sexual nature?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know where you’re going with any of this,” I say, “but I didn’t kill him. I don’t know what happened, and the prosecution can dig into it all they want because I had nothing to do with it. Can we move on?”

  “No. Not yet. Tell me something else about Ronald. Tell me about the last time you saw him.”

  “Jesus, why the hell is everybody hung up on Ronald? I’m telling you, I don’t know what happened to the guy.”

  She stares at me and says nothing and I realize I’ve been shouting. I shake my head and I think about Ronald, and I picture him the way I saw him last. School wasn’t a whole lot of fun for either of us, and I imagine it’s like that for most people. We weren’t best friends, but he was a pretty good friend. He’d come around after school sometimes, we’d head down to the beach, sometimes mountain bike around the sand dunes, or climb trees in the park. We’d talk about the kind of stuff that sixteen-year-old boys talked about, except for women. We didn’t talk about them. I knew he was gay. When we were fifteen, though, he was so deep in the closet I’m sure he could taste Turkish delight. I knew he liked me. I didn’t mind—having a gay guy like yo
u doesn’t make you gay, it just makes you feel flattered. Then things changed. The Big Bang happened, followed by two years of smaller bangs, and my friendship with Ronald got pushed aside. I saw him around at school, but I hardly spoke to him. I saw him getting a hard time, but that just meant things were easier for me, and now that I was paying off my bullies, life was actually pretty good. Except for the auntie-loving rape, as Ali would put it.

  When my relationship with Auntie Celeste stopped, I started hanging out with Ronald again. Only things were different—I think the most awkward thing between us was the fact he didn’t want me hanging out with him anymore, but I’d still follow him around anyway. I knew he’d come around. After all, the guy had had a crush on me the previous year, and crushes like that don’t disappear. It only made sense he’d want to be my friend again. Truth is, him ignoring me annoyed me just as much as my auntie ignoring me. I felt abandoned all over.

  I wanted to punish my auntie. Not for what she had done, but for finally making me enjoy it, and then for cutting off the supply. So when Ronald started rejecting me too—well, I didn’t just feel abandoned, but I felt angry too. The same anger I felt toward my auntie—only with Ronald I could do something about it.

  “I can’t really remember the last time I saw him,” I tell her. “One day he was there, and the next day he wasn’t, and that’s how most people will always remember him.”

  “But not you,” she says. “You remember him in a different way.”

  The way I remember him is indeed different. The way I remember him is with a hole in the side of his skull that a claw hammer would fit nicely into. “I didn’t kill him,” I say, only I did kill him. He rejected me and I hit him with a hammer. People say you always remember your first—and people don’t get much right, but in this case it’s spot on. Ronald was my first—I remember him—I just don’t think about him.

  “Are you sure?” she asks.

  “Positive,” I say.

  “He didn’t come on to you, and you rejected him by killing him?”

  “Nothing like that happened at all,” I say.

  “That’s a shame,” she says. Again it takes a few seconds for her words to sink in. They only just have when she carries on. “If you had, then we could have linked everything back to the events with your auntie. We could have shown it all started back then, and that what has happened to you since were results of that. People aren’t going to believe that you let twelve years slip by between the events of your auntie and killing your first person.”

  It feels like a test, like she is baiting me to suddenly say that I do remember killing him.

  “Joe?”

  “Yes?”

  “I think I have what I need,” she says.

  “Already?”

  “Yes,” she says, and she stands up.

  “And?”

  “And what?” she asks.

  “What are you going to tell the courts?” I ask.

  “I’ll spend the rest of the day going over my notes, Joe, and then I’ll talk to your lawyer.”

  “So you believe me?”

  She knocks on the door and turns toward me. “Like I said, Joe, I’ll talk to your lawyer,” she says, and then she is gone.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  It’s a lazy Sunday. He used to have them with his wife most Sundays, really. Before they had Angela, while they were raising Angela, and they carried on the tradition after Angela moved out of the house. It’d always been their job as parents to prepare her for the world—to set her on a journey into the world—but for the last year he’s thought that that was a mistake. If they’d kept her closer she’d still be alive. If they’d encouraged her to stay at home. If they’d put a lock on her door and protected her.

  Ultimately, Raphael knows no matter how you look at it, he let his daughter down. He let his family down. You can attack the argument from any angle, he’s heard it all before—but the proof is, as his mother used to say, in the pudding. Angela was dead. He had failed her. End of story.

  The last two days have been good for him. Therapeutic. He’s been thinking that killing Joe Middleton will start a healing process. He doesn’t expect to be able to move on—how can you after what that maniac did to his daughter—but he can expect, perhaps, to start coping better. To live again. Maybe he can try to patch things up with his wife.

  Most days since losing Angela have been lazy Sundays, and though he made some progress since Thursday night, he’s reverted back to what has become his normal self. He spent a few hours this morning in Angela’s room, staring at the newspaper articles pinned to the wall. Then he spent some time going through photo albums.

  Lazy Sunday is progressing along nicely now. He’s sitting in the lounge and the sun has been and gone and he’s watching video footage of Angela’s twenty-first. She had moved out of the house the year earlier and was renting in town with two of her friends. The party was held in this house. It feels like a hundred years ago. He certainly looks a hundred years younger. He was happy back then. He’s not sure where the Red Rage is right now—buried somewhere, he guesses, beneath the alcohol and the depression, waiting for tomorrow to get on with the show.

  He knows why he’s watching the video today. He knows the reason for the sadness. This is his last lazy Sunday. There’ll be no more flicking through photo albums and watching home movies. He knows the Red Rage will get the job done tomorrow. He has one bullet for Joe and one bullet for Melissa, and he has one bullet left over in case he misses—but he won’t miss. He’s on a mission—a movement—and he can’t fail.

  It’s after the shooting where things get tricky. Even if he does manage to get away from the scene, he knows the police will come for him. Of course they will. They’re not stupid. Stupid enough, maybe, to have let Joe Middleton kill for as long as he did—but not stupid enough to not figure out tomorrow’s events.

  Tomorrow may be therapeutic, but he’s kidding himself when he thinks it’s going to start a healing process. He’s kidding himself in thinking he can get back together with his wife. By the end of tomorrow he’s pretty sure he’s going to be in a prison cell, but he’s okay with that. He will have avenged his daughter and for that he’d be happy to go to jail for a thousand years.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Melissa is tired and excited and nervous. It’s not a good combination. It’s been a long day, albeit a good day, and she did manage to get some nap time a few hours ago. She’s been trying to relax since getting home after stashing the gun back in the office ceiling. Her house isn’t in the middle of nowhere, but her nearest neighbors are a two-minute walk away and she’s never seen them. It’s nice and private and she prepaid her rent the same way she prepaid her gardener. When she stopped being Natalie and became Melissa, she cleaned out her bank accounts. She has cleaned out bank accounts of others since then too. It’s how she survives.

  The day has gone now, as has the heat, and what’s left is a cold winter evening of the type nobody in their right mind could enjoy. Her shoulder is hurting too from all of that gun use this morning and she wanted to pop some painkillers and anti-inflammatories, but decided against it.

  She left the van she hired earlier parked in the driveway rather than putting it into the adjoining garage. She paid for the van in cash and used a fake ID and took out insurance on it not because she needed it, but because that’s what most people did, and she wanted to be considered part of the most-people culture.

  The van is important.

  She locks the house behind her and walks to the van, tightening her jacket around her. It takes two minutes for the van to warm up, by which point she’s tightened her jacket so much it’s almost strangling her. The windshield is frosted over. Everything is frosted over. It’s a still evening. No wind. No clouds. Cold, but perfect shooting conditions.

  She turns on the wipers and tries to use the jets to spray water onto the windshield, but the jets are blocked. The wipers don’t help, they just swish back and forth over the thin ic
e. The heater warms up the windshield and then the wipers start tearing at the ice. A few minutes later she can see.

  There are a few other cars around. Not many. She turns on the radio to break the monotony of the van engine. Like she knew there would be, a radio DJ is talking about the day’s events, and those that will follow tomorrow, and perhaps later this year. A body—most likely to be that of Detective Inspector Robert Calhoun—has been found. Found by a psychic, of all people. She finds that hard to believe. Impossible to believe, and wonders what the real truth is and suspects Joe may have played a hand in giving up the location. If so, for what? Something to do with the trial, no doubt.

  “And of course tomorrow is the big day, ladies and gentlemen,” so the DJ tells her and anybody else who’s listening. “Tomorrow the trial of Joe Middleton begins. The Christchurch Carver. The man for whom the death penalty is being voted on.” She’s expecting the DJ to open up the lines to callers from around the country to give their views on the death penalty, but he doesn’t, not that that matters because she, like everybody else, has heard them all before. Everybody thinks that it’s a dividing issue, that you’re either strongly for it or strongly against it. She doesn’t care one way or the other.

  It takes her fifteen minutes to get to the house she wants, the van warming up early in the drive. She rubs her hands together. Warms up her fingers and grabs her handgun. It’s an okay neighborhood. Not great. Not cheap. Just okay. The kind of place people living by themselves tend to flock to. Two-bedroom dwellings, small yards, not old, not modern, but okay—heaven for people who are in love with all things bland. TVs are glowing from behind windows, lights are on in lounges and bedrooms, but otherwise there are no signs of life, other than a couple of cats sitting at opposite ends of a fence. Last time she was here was three months ago. It was warmer. A lot warmer. She made a mess. A big mess. There was blood and tearing flesh and crying. A lot of crying. Through it all she knew that she would be back here tonight.

  She parks the van out on the street and locks the door and knows the entire plan will fall apart if somebody steals her ride. She walks up the path. The garden is neat and tidy. There are the legs of a garden gnome and no body, just jagged edges where the body used to be attached. Out there other gnomes are suffering the loss. There are lights on inside the house. She can see patterns of moving colors from a TV behind the curtain. She climbs up the step and holds her finger on the bell for half a second. She doesn’t have to wait long before the footsteps come toward her.