Joe Victim: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

  He turns off the radio. Right now there will be bomb-sniffing dogs going through the court building. If they’d found explosives he would have heard. So the trial is going ahead.

  At his next red light, he uses his cell phone to look up the number for a florist and is given several options. At the next red light he calls the number, and is halfway through ordering flowers for his wife when the light turns green. He rolls through the intersection and pulls over and focuses on his order and comes up with a message for the card. He smiles at the thought of his wife getting them. It’s not going to solve any problems—but it’s a step in the right direction.

  “Good choice,” the woman tells him, and he’s happy somebody at least thinks he’s making a good decision. “She’ll have them by lunchtime.”

  Schroder spots his first vampire a few blocks from the courthouse—she’s arguing with another girl who’s also dressed as a vampire, a guy standing in between them not doing a great job at moderating, but certainly doing a great job of looking uncomfortable. Schroder wonders if it’s the classic cliché of wearing something unique only to find somebody else wearing it too. Neither vampire seems bothered by the sun.

  Traffic gets thicker, drivers having to slow down as pedestrians start to spill into the street. A few blocks away from the courthouse it comes to a standstill. Hundreds of people are outside the courthouse already. There have been suggestions those numbers could get into the thousands. He turns the radio back on. Callers for the death penalty want people going down there to support their cause. People against the death penalty want people going down there to support their cause. Everybody wants somebody. The students just want to hang out and drink themselves stupid.

  He makes his way to the back of the courthouse. He can see Jonas Jones, who is dressed as a smug psychic, and once again Schroder suspects somebody is leaking him information. The only thing here for the psychic is one more opportunity to get his face in front of a camera.

  There are fifteen parking spaces back here, and four of them have been assigned to the police. One of those four has been given to Schroder, as he was the lead detective on the case and will be here every day. The other spaces are reserved for judges, some for lawyers. There’s even a spot that’s been reserved for an ambulance that will be here soon for the duration of the trial—thanks to all the death threats that have come Joe’s way. Emotions will be running high, so the ambulance is there also for family members of Joe’s victims—it’s easy to imagine people getting upset and fainting or passing out, or having heart attacks brought on by the anger.

  He gets out of the car. Magnum PI, Smurfette, and a couple of nuns are walking by, Magnum making eye contact with him for a split second before stroking his mustache and saying something to one of the male nuns before they all start laughing, and Schroder has the bad idea whatever it is it’s about him. He makes his way to the entrance and shows his ID to the security guard, who looks at it, looks at Schroder, looks out at the street as a guy dressed in a suit with a top hat and rubber chickens hanging from his arms yells at somebody to wait up. The guard looks at the ID again and then writes something down on a clipboard. He shrugs one of those The world is going to shit shrugs, then hands Schroder a pass to clip onto his jacket. More people are on the street now, and he wonders if some of them are figuring out this is the entrance that will be used. He hopes not, because Joe just might not make it inside alive.

  A few seconds later he changes his mind—he decides it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if the crowd got hold of Joe, not really, not a bad thing at all.

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Melissa has slept well. No dreams. No nerves. She’s confident in her abilities. Not so confident in Raphael’s, but definitely in her own. It’s a cold morning. She uses Sally’s shower to warm up. She dresses in Sally’s clothes. She eats a good-sized breakfast in Sally’s kitchen with Sally’s food. She uses up the last of Sally’s milk and puts the container into Sally’s bin, the one labeled Recycling. She’s all about the environment. Last night she slept on Sally’s bed. It was too soft. It reminds her of a fairy tale.

  Sally doesn’t do much as Melissa goes about getting ready. There’s not a lot for her to do, really. Last time Melissa was here things were quite different. She needed a nurse. Sally was a nurse. Melissa needed help and Sally gave it to her, and as a reward Melissa let her live. All she had to do was convince Sally not to go to the police, and she had a lot to convince her with. Plus she let Sally live because she knew that three months later—that today—she would be coming back. Of course Sally didn’t know that.

  So now she’s back and Sally obviously isn’t pleased, but there’s not a lot she can do about it. Melissa finishes off her breakfast. It’s not as healthy as she’d have liked, but a good meal. A filling meal. The kind of meal you want on the morning of the day your boyfriend might not make it back out of.

  By now Raphael will be at the office building. He’ll have assembled the gun and have changed into the police uniform. She can imagine him sitting down and trying to contain his nerves. Maybe he brought a photograph of his daughter along with him to keep him company. Melissa is worried about just how nervous he’s going to be, and whether those nerves are going to send his bullet off target.

  There were always cracks in her plan. But now they’re becoming more obvious.

  She’s starting to worry.

  The nerves that weren’t there during the night have rolled into town, so much so that suddenly she doesn’t see any way for the plan to work. She should cut her losses, cut Sally free, and move on.

  Instead of doing any of that, she leaves Sally tied up on the bedroom floor and she drives into town. Traffic is thick, but she’s allowed for it. There’s roadworks and renovations going on in and around the hospital parking lot. She checked it out a few days ago and confirmed what she suspected—that there are no security cameras in the lot. That’s the thing about Christchurch—the places there ought to be cameras there never are. Or perhaps that’s the thing about hospitals—they figure a good old-fashioned beating isn’t a big deal when the victims only have to drag themselves thirty yards for help. Or maybe they see it as being good for business. She drives there now, past a construction crew rolling out a new piece of pavement, who all pause what they’re doing to stare at her. She’s not wearing the fat suit. She smiles at them, then parks around the back and locks up the van. She drops some coins into the meter and takes the ticket that comes out and rests it on the dashboard before grabbing the rucksack and locking up. She walks toward the hospital. Jackhammering and engine noise and men talking loudly bounce off every surface all around her. She’s wearing Sally’s dark blue nurse’s scrubs. It’s not a great fit, but outside of porn movies and get-well singing telegrams, scrubs never are. That’s not all she took from Sally. She uses Sally’s swipe card to open a staff-only door. She steps into a corridor that’s air-conditioned on a day where it really doesn’t need to be. It’s about sixty feet long with no natural light and dozens of fluorescent tubes in the ceiling. She walks its length and uses the swipe card to gain access to the emergency department. She keeps walking. She takes another corridor and follows the directions Sally was willing to give her. Well, perhaps willing isn’t quite the word Sally would use. After all, Melissa had lifted Sally’s pajama top and squeezed the muffin-top waist and threatened to cut it off.

  It’d been worse for Sally three months ago. Back then Melissa had forced her to strip naked. She had taken photos of her in compromising positions. Sally had just received a fifty-thousand-dollar reward for her help in Joe’s capture, and Melissa wanted what was left of that money. So she photographed Sally and that made up part of what she used to blackmail her. The other part is something she needs to discuss with Joe when the timing is right. Three months ago with Sally naked and tied to the bed, Melissa had considered paying somebody to come and rape her, to take photos of that too to make it even worse. She wasn’t sure she had enough money to cover it, because whoever took
on the job was going to ask for a lot. Ultimately it didn’t get that far. A voice inside her—perhaps belonging to Smelly Melly, or perhaps belonging to her former self before she got this way—told her that with all the line crossing she’d been doing that was one thing that was just too far. She agreed and felt ashamed she had even thought of it, and Melissa hadn’t felt shame in a long time.

  She makes her way to the ambulance bay. It’s situated near a staff room, where nurses and doctors are sitting around drinking coffee and reading magazines, while the other nurses and doctors are playing nurses and doctors in broom closets and bathrooms. She waits by the ambulances and fiddles around on her cell phone because that’s what people do in this day and age when they want to look like they’re doing something other than stalking or looking alone. She knows what to look for—the ambulance crew that isn’t in a hurry.

  It takes five minutes. Then they step out of the staff room. A man and a woman, both wearing paramedic outfits that don’t fit much better than her own. They’re chatting and laughing. They’re not on their way to a road crash or a shooting or a heart attack. They split up and each moves around to one side of the ambulance. The woman is driving. She fires up the engine. Melissa taps on the passenger-side window and the guy winds it down, a good-looking guy in his late twenties who has every chance of living through this if he just does the right thing.

  “Hey,” he says.

  “Hey,” Melissa says, and flashes him her door-opening smile. “You’re the team going to the courthouse?”

  “Yep,” the woman, the driver, says, and she has to be in her midforties and has blond hair streaked with a few grays—it’s pulled back tightly into a ponytail, one of those quickly formed ponytails women make when they’re tired or lazy or don’t give a shit about their appearance anymore. “We’re on duty there all day.”

  “Good. I was wondering, can you guys give me a lift there?” Melissa asks.

  “Would love to,” the guy says, looking her up and down.

  “Not if you’re going there to protest,” the woman asks. “Not dressed in your scrubs.”

  Melissa shakes her head. “No. It’s completely unrelated to the Carver trial,” she says, looking at the man who can’t take his eyes off of her. She widens her smile a little more. The woman looks skeptical. The man nods.

  “Climb in back,” he says.

  She moves around to the back of the ambulance and climbs in. They move forward. About forty yards away is the intersection where the hospital road merges with other traffic. Melissa moves up the ambulance so she’s right behind the paramedics.

  “Before we leave,” Melissa says, “can we pull over for a second before we hit the intersection?”

  “Sorry, we’re on a tight schedule,” the driver says, not glancing back.

  “Does this help change your mind?” Melissa asks, and points a gun at her, then at the guy, then back at the woman. “Right now I want a reason to let you both live,” she says. “But if you can’t give me that reason, then I’ll find another paramedic who can.”

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  There is blood all over the floor, and there’s some on the wall too. The wall blood is in the form of two handprints, each with lines of blood leading from the palm to the floor, each from a left hand even though I can’t remember either Cole or Kenny touching it. I’m still sitting on the toilet. I don’t want to be, but I have to be. The room smells of blood and shit and Kenny shit himself too and I guess it’s one more thing he’ll be remembered for. Santa Suit Kenny—singer of songs, lover of children, and savior of the Christchurch Carver. I wonder what they will say at his funeral. I wonder who the real Kenny was and I guess nobody will ever know.

  Glen and Adam come in. Glen grabs Kenny by his feet and Adam grabs Kenny by his arms, and they don’t even look at me. They just pick him up and he sags in the middle and for a brief moment I think they’re about to fold him in half like a bedsheet, but they don’t, they take him out of the cell. When the police come and ask what happened, they’ll say they rushed him off for treatment. Only there was no rush. They’ve let him bleed out because a guy like Kenny wasn’t worth saving. They just had to make it look like they did something.

  Kenny saved my life. I wish I could thank him. Best I can do is imagine I would have bought one of his books if he’d ever written one. At the least I should buy one of his CDs.

  I finish up on the toilet and flush it and get my clothes tided back up. I stare at the blood on the floor knowing how easily it could have been mine. There is blood on my shirt that isn’t mine. I take it off. I lie down on my bed. I can still see the look on Kenny’s face, the disbelief of being stabbed, the acceptance that he was in trouble, and the hope that he wasn’t dying. I’ve seen that hope in others before, and I always enjoyed seeing that hope fade away, but not this time. This time was different and I don’t want to think about it anymore, I want to move on—after all, I have a big day ahead of me. Kenny would want me to. He’d hate to think he’d died just for me to mope around my cell feeling sorry for myself.

  I pick up the wedding invitation my mother sent me. There will be no support from her during the trial, and I don’t know why that even surprises me. By the end of the day she will be married. I fold the card in half and tuck it into my pocket. My mom won’t be with me today, but having the wedding invite with me goes some way to making me feel less abandoned. Maybe it will bring me some luck. I start to wonder whether I’ll still have to go to trial today, or whether the events of the last few minutes will keep me here.

  I have my answer less than a minute later when four guards come back into my cell. One of them throws me a fresh shirt—at least it’s fresh compared to the one I’m wearing. None of them discuss what just happened as I change into it. It’s almost as if the last five minutes just didn’t happen—the only evidence of it is the blood on the floor and walls, which, I imagine, will be gone when I get back. Santa Kenny’s cell will be filled with somebody new, a different kind of Kenny, but one equally bad.

  They lead me down to the exit, the other prisoners quiet and staring at me out of the slots in their doors. I can’t walk straight from the shock of what just happened—and I can’t walk straight because of the cramping pains in my stomach. This is, without a doubt, what birth must be like—only worse.

  I’m escorted to the front of the prison. It’s just like Saturday. The warden is there and Kent is there and Jack is there and a bunch of other assholes are there and I feel like shit. The warden is wearing the same suit and tie and has the same disdain on his face. I’m given laces and a belt and everybody watches me as I thread them into my outfit. The warden looks annoyed at me. Then I’m chained up.

  It’s sunny outside but cold, though not frosty. There are six police cars out front, and in the middle of them is a van. In each car are two armed officers. There are a few in the van too. It looks like they’re ready for a war. I take a step toward the van and somebody puts their hand on my shoulder and tells me to stop. So I stop. The officers get into the van and into the cars and half a minute later they’re all heading away without me and without Jack and Kent and without the same two officers who were with us on Saturday.

  “What’s going on?” I ask. “Is the trial already over?”

  Kent frowns at me. “I can see why people fell for your act, Joe.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing. Just shut up, okay?”

  The stream of cars is leaving and at the same time a van is arriving. It’s similar to the other one, but that one was white and this one is red. It’s dirty and looks a little beaten-up in places and has Whett Paint Services stenciled all over it, along with the name Lenard Whett and his mobile-phone number and a star that says Money-back guarantee. The money-back guarantee on the side of a tradesman van is a dead giveaway that it’s a fake. It comes to a stop next to us.

  “Come on, Joe, you know the routine.”

  I climb up into the van. I crouch over so they can handcu
ff me to the eyelet. Like I’m going somewhere. Then it’s all the same as Saturday only we don’t turn off to go past the airport to go for a stroll through the edge of a farm to go body hunting and to take a vote on whether or not they should all open fire on me. Instead we carry straight on toward town. I haven’t seen it in a year and didn’t realize I’d missed it until now.

  “Ah, for fuck sake,” the officer opposite me yells as I vomit onto his shoes.

  “I’m . . .” I say, but I can’t add sorry because then I’m throwing up again, plus I’m not really sorry. My stomach is heaving. I didn’t even feel it coming. I don’t know what the hell is down there—a pancreas, liver, other meaty stuff that was weakened by Saturday’s sandwich and then compressed violently by Caleb Cole’s fist.

  Jack starts to pull over.

  “Don’t,” Kent says. “Just keep on driving.”

  “It stinks back here,” the officer with the messy shoes says.

  “What the hell is wrong with him?” Kent asks.

  “He doesn’t look too good,” the other officer says. “Pretrial jitters, I guess.”

  Pretrial jitters mixed in with a bout of pretrial attempted murder, mixed in with a dash of shit sandwich.