Joe Victim

by Paul Cleave

  She gets back to her own car. She yawns heavily for a few seconds-she was up half of last night and more than anything right now she wants to take a nap, but can’t. She drives past the guard booth who asks her to pop the trunk to make sure nobody is hiding in there. When she gets out to the motorway she pulls over and takes off the baby bump, and suddenly she’s no longer nine months pregnant, no longer overweight and needing to use a bathroom every fifteen minutes. She tosses it into the backseat. She tosses the red wig back there too.

  She programs the new address into the GPS function of her cell phone. Like always, it takes her and her GPS application a few minutes to come to an understanding, but they get there in the end, and then she has the directions of the man who is going to help her shoot Joe Middleton. But first she needs to go into town. She needs to find a new place where Joe can be shot from. And she already has a pretty good idea where that will be.

  Chapter Seven

  The prison officer has bloodshot eyes, as if every night while he sleeps the unibrow above them extends downward and scratches at them. He hands over the tray of Schroder’s belongings. Car keys, wallet, phone, coins-actually, that’s a negative on the car keys. He looks into the empty tray, then pats down his pockets.

  “My keys aren’t here,” he says.

  The prison officer doesn’t look impressed. He looks like he’s being accused of something. “You didn’t give me any car keys.”

  “I must have.”

  “Then they’d be here,” the prison officer says, his unibrow turning into a uni-V.

  “That’s my point. I gave them to you and they should be here.”

  “And my point is that if you did give them to me then I’d have just given them back. Maybe you dropped them. Maybe they’re hanging out of your car door. Maybe they’re in the ignition. Maybe you left them at home and walked here.”

  Schroder shakes his head. “Unlikely,” he says. “To any of those.”

  “No. What’s unlikely is that I’d hide them from you, or steal them. What’s unlikely is that I gave them to some guy locked up inside and told him to take a joyride. Tell you what, you go take a look outside. If they’re not there, then you come back in and we watch the security footage,” he says, and points to a camera above the desk. “I can bet you a hundred bucks right now that you didn’t hand any keys to me.”

  Schroder looks up at the camera, then pats down his pockets again. Did he lock his car? Of course he did. He always does. Only this time he was distracted by the pregnant woman. Distracted enough to leave them in the ignition? Maybe. Certainly distracted enough not to notice he didn’t put them into the tray when emptying his pocket. But does he ever? When he comes here it’s just like going through security at an airport-he doesn’t really notice what he’s taking out of his pockets, all he’s focused on is making them empty.

  “Okay,” he says. “I’ll check outside.”

  “You do that.”

  Schroder follows the corridor back the way he came, past the waiting area, past the corridor to the bathrooms, past more puddles of water that have formed from other visitors. He stands at the door and puts on his jacket then heads into the rain. There’s a similar number of cars in the lot as before-some gone, some new ones. The pregnant woman’s car is gone. Probably whoever she was visiting she couldn’t visit for long, her future baby pushing against her bladder would have put an end to that. He tightens his collar.

  His car is locked. His keys are lying on the ground next to where the pregnant woman’s car was. He must have been carrying them in his hand. He must have dropped them when he caught her. He feels like an idiot. Part of him thinks he ought to go back inside and apologize to the prison officer, but it’s a small part, nowhere near big enough to make him actually do it. The guy was too big a dick for that.

  He gets into the car and peels the wet jacket off him and tosses it into the back next to a box full of files from the Carver case. One of the sleeves lands on top of it, so he leans back and flicks it aside, not wanting water from his jacket to soak onto the files-files he shouldn’t have. The Carver case has lived with him for the last few years-it would come home with him, it would invade the room of his house that he had turned into an office, an office he made his wife promise never to go into because the content inside would give her nightmares. In a way the file invaded his marriage too. He would work at work and he would work at home when there was spare time, of which there wasn’t much because of the kids. Then that all changed and he lost his job, and all the copies of documents and photos he’d brought home had to be returned. Only he made copies of those copies first, and it’s some of those copies that occupy the cardboard box in his car. It wasn’t his case anymore, but with the trial coming up he wanted to be prepared for whatever came his way.

  What he really wanted to come his way was a chance to strangle Joe. Hell, he’s imagined his hands around his neck a thousand times. He’s imagined shooting him, stabbing him. He’s imagined setting him on fire. He’s imagined a lot of things, all of which end very badly for Joe Middleton. He’s confident many people across the city have imagined all those same things.

  Honesty being the policy and all that, not a day has gone by when Schroder hasn’t hated himself too. A serial killer was in their midst. They saw him five days a week. The bastard even made him coffee. Schroder doesn’t deserve to be a cop. None of them do. How many hours does that add up to? How many minutes did Joe make fools of them all?

  The drive back into town isn’t any different from the drive out here. Same view. Same animals. Same guys in tractors making more money than he’ll ever earn, but they’re getting up far earlier every morning than he’d ever want to. The rain is still persistent. It’s beating down on the car and he isn’t sure he can make it through winter. If things don’t work out well with the new job, maybe it’s time to leave the city. He could pack the family in the car and drive up to Nelson, the sunshine capital of New Zealand. He has a sister who lives up there. Nelson is the kind of place where everybody has a relative who lives there because it’s so damn nice. He could work at a vineyard. Pick grapes and make wine. Or become a tour bus driver-take people on wine-tasting tours and watch them get trashed.

  Joe. Fucking Joe. Thoughts of Nelson disappear and, like always, Joe replaces them. When the trial is over maybe then he can get some closure.

  There aren’t too many cars on the roads, but what traffic is there is much slower because of the weather, giving the appearance of a slight traffic jam. It worsens as he gets toward town. He has a lunch date with Detective Wilson Hutton, which he’s going to be late for. He pulls over and uses his cell phone to call his ex-colleague to give him an extra fifteen minutes, but before he can the phone rings anyway. It’s Hutton.

  “I was just about to call you,” he says.

  “Listen, Carl, sorry, but I’m going to have to cancel lunch,” Hutton says.

  “Let me guess,” Schroder says, “another homicide?” It’s meant to be a joke, and Hutton is supposed to say no, but as soon as Schroder says it he knows it doesn’t sound like a joke at all-it’s just his bad mood coming through by suggesting the worst-case scenario, and anyway, there’s nothing funny about people dying. He already regrets saying it.

  “Yeah, body was found this morning,” Hutton says.

  “Ah, shit,” Schroder says.

  “Well at least this time the victim was a bad guy, Carl, so don’t start feeling too bad.”

  In that case Schroder doesn’t feel bad at all. The world with one less bad guy in it? Why would he?

  “Details?” Schroder asks, and he stares out the window at a campaign billboard looking down over the intersection. The billboard is for the already prime minister who is hoping to do what Schroder wasn’t able to do this year-keep his job. A vote for him is a vote for the future of New Zealand, according to the poster, but doesn’t specify if that’s a better or worse future. The prime minister has the look of a confident man, even though the polls suggest he does
n’t have the right to be. The election is only a few months away. Schroder isn’t sure who he’s going to vote for-probably for the candidate who doesn’t put up as many distracting billboards at intersections.

  “Sorry, Carl, you know I can’t do that.”

  “Come on, Hutton. .”

  “All I can tell you is that it’s bad.”

  “What kind of bad?”

  “Not the kind of bad you’re thinking of. Listen, I’ll tell you when I can.”

  “A drink tonight?” Schroder asks.

  “Why? So you can pump me for information for that TV show of yours?”

  “Weren’t you the one who said they believed in psychics?”

  “I’ll give you a call if I can make it,” he says. “Later, Carl,” he adds, and hangs up.

  Schroder tosses his phone onto the passenger seat next to the folder with Finding the Dead sketched across the cover. He wonders what Hutton means, and how bad it can get in a city where bad things happen a lot.

  Now that he’s missing lunch he heads straight in to the TV station. He swallows his pride while still maintaining the sensation of selling his soul, and steps out into the rain and heads into the building to talk with Jonas Jones.

  Chapter Eight

  I’m left sitting in the interview room by myself for a few minutes until Adam and Glen come back in.

  “Your choice,” Adam says. “Your lawyer is due here soon. You can either wait here for half an hour or we can take you back to your cell.”

  It’s all the same to me. Almost. The difference is that here is a little bigger and I don’t have to listen to other prisoners. “I’ll wait here.”

  Adam shakes his head. “You don’t get it, do you,” he says.

  “Get what?”

  “You don’t get to make choices. I heard you’ve already fucked up one test today, and now you just fucked up another. Come on, let’s go.”

  They lead me back to my cell. We go through more doorways and pass other prison guards, more concrete walls and concrete floors and no daylight, no escape, no future. They make fun of me along the way, innocent kind of fun, really, especially compared to the fun I’ll have with them when my lawyer gets me out of here. When I was unfairly arrested, I was inundated by offers from lawyers all wanting to become my best friend. They wanted to defend me and they wanted the fame and business that came along with it. My trial is going to be the biggest the country has ever seen, and whoever defends me will become a household name. I couldn’t afford a lawyer, but that didn’t matter. My first lawyer’s name was Gabriel Gabel, a forty-six-year-old partner of Gabel, Wiley, and Dench. Apart from having somewhat of an unfortunate name, Gabel was my lawyer for six days when news of the death threats against him were made public. He was my lawyer for six more days after that before he disappeared off the face of the earth.

  After that, a second lawyer jumped at the chance to defend me, the case somehow having become more famous since Gabel’s disappearance. Again it was six days before the death threats started flooding in, and this time my lawyer didn’t simply disappear, but was found in a car parking building with his head caved in by a hammer. I’m not sure how hard the police looked for his killer. I can’t imagine task forces hanging out in the conference room at the police station coming up with big ideas, I can’t imagine much overtime was put in. I doubt any of them lost any sleep.

  No more lawyers wanted to be my best friend anymore. I was assigned a lawyer by the courts, and the death threats stopped. My lawyer was a man who didn’t want to defend me, but who had no choice, and that was made clear to the public. If the public kept killing my lawyers there would be no trial, and ultimately the public wanted a trial more than they wanted another dead lawyer.

  Since then I’ve seen my lawyer less than half a dozen times. He doesn’t like me. I just think he needs to get to know me better. The trial starts in a matter of days, and I’ve been in jail twelve months and the wheels of justice seemed to have ground to a halt, only now they’re slowly moving forward again. Or wheels of injustice, really.

  I think about what Schroder offered and I wonder if this is it for me, this cell, this part of the jail, if this is the best I can hope for. I wonder if fifty thousand dollars can make my life any better and decide that it can’t make it worse. The two prison guards send me through a final door to my cellblock and leave me to it. The cell doors are open, and the thirty of us who share this cellblock are free to roam around as far as the room allows, which isn’t far. We can chat, we can sit around a communal area and play cards or share stories, or sneak into one another’s cells for some fucking or some fighting. I sit in my cell and stare at the ceiling and suddenly I’m no longer alone.

  “What makes you so popular?” Santa Kenny asks, and he’s standing in the doorway leaning against the wall. I haven’t been in the mood any other time to make conversation, and now is no different. I ignore the question, and a few moments later he fires off another one. “What do they want? Are they still trying to make you look guilty?”

  I pick up one of the romance novels. I’ve read them all a couple of times, but there isn’t much else to do. This one I’m reading backward, trying to kill some time, enjoying the happily-ever-after becoming corrupted as the man with the abs and chiseled jaw and the woman with the beautiful hair and fantastic boobs drift apart to a time before they ever met.

  “They just don’t get it,” Santa Kenny says. “They see us, the city is in a state of paranoia, and they see us and they target us for their blame. They can’t find the real guys, but they hate us because somebody always has to pay.”

  I put the book down and look up at him. “It’s crazy the shit that makes us look guilty,” I tell him. “Hell, just because you were caught in a stolen car wearing a Santa suit with an eight-year-old boy locked in the trunk,” I say, “that doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Exactly,” Santa Kenny says.

  “And the fact it was in April didn’t help. It made you stand out.”

  “Exactly. So what, it’s a crime now to wear a Santa suit around Easter?”

  “Shouldn’t be,” I tell him. “You think it’s a crime to wear an Easter Bunny outfit during Christmas?”

  “And how the fuck was I to know that kid was even in the back?”

  “No way you could have.”

  “And I wasn’t stealing the car, I thought it was mine. Looked like mine. And it was dark. People make mistakes.”

  “Things look different in the dark,” I tell him.

  “That’s my point. That kid, he thinks I’m the one who took him, but how could he know that when I put a blindfold over his eyes?”

  “Right,” I tell him, and we’ve had this conversation before, quite a few times actually. I guess I could use some of the fifty thousand dollars to pay somebody to shut him up permanently.

  “Play some cards?” he asks.

  “Maybe soon,” I tell him.

  He shrugs, like soon is an insult to him. “Lunch in twenty minutes,” he says, and then he disappears. I pick the romance book back up. I stare at the pages and read some of the same words over and over. If I ever write a book where men and women fall in love, it’d be real, it’d be the kind of thing I had with Melissa. I miss her. A lot.

  The two prison guards come and get me again. They really seem to have taken a shine to me today.

  “Good news,” Adam says.

  “I’m going home?”

  “See? Sometimes you do catch on quick,” he says.

  They lead me back out of the cellblock. Weirdly I’m thankful for the break in the routine. These next few days are going to be like that because of the trial. A month ago, and a month before that, and a few more before that were all the same. I wake up. I stare at stuff. I eat. I stare at more stuff. Then it’s lights out. Next week I’ll be put in front of a jury, and there’s no way they’ll convict me. I’m Joe. People like Joe.

  I’m taken back to the same interview room. My lawyer is waiting in there already. He p
rops his briefcase up on the table and for a moment I wonder if it’s full of knives. He’s in his late fifties. He has just the right amount of not looking so young that he’s cocky, and not looking so old that all the experience and wisdom he has gained will be spilling into a coffin along with the rest of him before Christmas. His name is Kevin, and Kevin is wearing a nice suit that I would never wear, cologne that makes me feel sick, and has an overweight wife that I would never touch. The photo of her clipped inside the lid of his briefcase must weigh as much as the briefcase itself.

  The guards handcuff me to my chair. Then they leave.

  “I got some news for you,” Kevin says.

  “Good news I assume?”

  He shakes his head and frowns. “Bad news.”

  “I’ll have the good news first.”

  “Err. . you’re missing the point, Joe,” he says. “It’s bad news, worse news really.”

  “Then the bad news first.”

  “The prosecution is making you an offer.”

  “That’s good news,” I tell him. “They’re letting me go?”

  “No, Joe, they’re not. But they do think in the interest of expediting things, of saving taxpayer money, and of avoiding the risk of turning this whole thing into a circus, they are offering you life in jail without the option of parole. They’re trying to avoid what is looking to be a streetful of people protesting for or against the death penalty.”

  “Death penalty? I don’t get it,” I say, but I’m afraid that I do.

  “That’s the worse news, and I’ll get to that in a second.”