Joe Victim: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

  “Third time’s the charm,” Raphael says, though he doesn’t know if she can hear him. It turns out third time isn’t the charm. Nor is the fourth. Nor fifth. She lays the gun down on the blanket and rolls off to the side and takes off her earmuffs. She gives him a small I tried my best shrug, and he gives her a small Don’t worry about it smile.

  “See what you think,” she says.

  Raphael nods. He feels like a kid at Christmas.

  He squats down, his knees hurting a little, the left one popping, and he feels a little embarrassed, he feels old. Stella puts her earmuffs back into place. He lies in the same position she was in. The gun feels like a natural extension of his arms. It makes him feel powerful. He likes feeling that way. He puts his eye up to the scope. It’s incredibly clear. So clear he doesn’t see how anybody could miss with something like this. Of course people miss because the conditions change. Wind. Rain. Glare from the sun. Other people around. All sorts of stuff. Shooting a tin can is different from shooting a man. The cans are still. There is no sense of urgency, no sense of panic, no sense of hitting the wrong can and ruining the lives of other cans who loved it.

  He squeezes the trigger. The tin can takes flight, landing and skidding to a stop five yards away, where it lies on its side, half dented with a hole going through one side and out the opposite. He eyes up one of the tins half-hidden by a thick tree root. That one goes flying too. He’s two for two. He’s a natural.

  He looks back through the scope. He thinks about his daughter. He knows how she died. He knows Joe broke into her house. He killed her cat before dragging her from her bathroom. He knows exactly what he did to her. The way he tied her to the bed, the way he pushed an egg into her mouth, the way he pushed himself into her. . . .

  This third shot misses. Wild right. He pulls his face away from the scope. Stares at the ground beneath his chest.

  “What’s wrong?” Stella asks.

  He looks up at her. “Nothing,” he says. “Just . . . just nothing. Give me a second,” he says, and he sucks in a few deep breaths and he wants to scream. He wants to drive to the prison right now and take this gun into the cells and shoot Joe where he stands, shoot the fucker in the knees, stomp on them, punch him in the face over and over. He wants to cut his eyelids off, rip his organs out, drown him, revive him, set fire to him. There isn’t a single bad thing he doesn’t want to do. The Red Rage wants to keep the fucker alive for as long as he can, and just keep cutting and stomping, cutting and hurting.

  And Stella—sweet, sweet Stella is going to give him that chance.

  He puts his eye back up to the scope. He takes another shot and misses by just as much as the last one. Damn it. He closes his eyes. This isn’t working. Not when he’s angry.

  “Raphael?”

  He gets onto his knee. “Give me a minute,” he says, and gets to his feet, the other knee popping this time, only this time he’s too angry to feel embarrassed. He stares out at the foundations of the cabin, and in those long blades of grass hidden from view are parts of the walls too. If he’s missing now, he’s going to miss when the shot presents itself.

  Stella puts a hand on his shoulder. “It’s going to be okay,” she says. “You just need to focus.”

  “I am focusing,” he says, but he’s focusing on the wrong damn things. He has to stop thinking of his daughter, of her naked beneath Joe, of the fear racing in her head, of Joe being the last thing she would see and of her knowing that. He can’t think about how there were many people who loved her and how none of them were there to help her. He has to think about Joe. Joe with a bullet in his head. Joe with his head in a cardboard box. Joe with a lot of bad shit happening to him.

  None of it will bring Angela back.

  He lies back down, his knee popping again. He looks through the scope. He stares at the tin can hanging from the tree. That tin can is Joe’s head. That’s what he thinks. He has to let go of the anger. Not for good, just for now, just when he’s behind the barrel of the gun. Breathe in. Breathe out. Stay calm. Empty his mind. He’s doing a good thing here. Focus on that. Stay calm and fantastic things are going to happen. Not closure, he can never have that, but he can have revenge. It’s there waiting for him. He just has to take it.

  He squeezes the trigger. The tin can doesn’t disappear, but he does wing it. He takes another shot. This time it flies out of sight. He shoots another one. And another. His heart rate is slowing. He could probably shoot a thousand tins now if he wanted to.

  He’s calm now. Calm and this is easy. He uses up the rest of the clip. All the tin cans are gone. Stella shows him how to take the magazine out. He reloads it himself. He shoots more tins, shooting the ones now that have already been shot. He goes through the magazine once again.

  Then he rolls onto his side and looks up at Stella. He thinks about the Red Rage. The Red Rage is happy. “We’re really doing this,” he says.

  “We really are,” she says, and he loads the magazine back up and carries on shooting.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Twelve months ago I couldn’t even remember it had happened to me. Twelve months ago there were more important things on my mind, wonderful distractions—the kind of distractions that had an entire police force hunting me down. Since being locked away I’ve had time to think about things—in fact time is the only thing I have had. My past is a blend of memories so distant they feel like they belong to somebody else, or perhaps they’re TV moments I’ve seen and somehow claimed as my own.

  I was sixteen years old and I had never done a single illegal thing except for breaking into a few homes, shoplifting, and once burning down a barn that had goats inside that I didn’t know were there. I used to sneak out of my room at night and walk around the streets, not looking for anything, but just walking, being one with my neighborhood and thinking of those that were in it. I could always hear the ocean only a few blocks away. Sometimes I’d walk down the beach and stare out at the water as the moon hung over it. On calm nights when the moon was full it’d reflect off the wet ripples in the sand that were formed by the leaving tide. I’d think about swimming, but then I’d think about how cold that water would be, about the things out there swimming beneath the surface. Hungry things.

  I shift on my seat and look at Ali, at her soft skin, at her face. She’s taking notes even though the recorder is capturing everything. I tell her all about it, my remaining testicle throbbing as the memory stirs up more than just some emotions.

  I used to break into people’s homes. It wasn’t about money. I couldn’t buy things without my parents noticing. I couldn’t steal a TV and bring that home because back then TVs were almost as heavy as dishwashers. I broke in for a different reason. I used to pick out girls at school I liked, and during summer holidays when I knew their families were away I’d sneak into their bedrooms. When the house was empty like that, you could spend all day long in those rooms, lying on the bed and really getting to know somebody. You could really make yourself at home. The fridge and pantry would provide sustenance, the bed somewhere to relax, the underwear I’d find in the girl’s drawers would provide texture to the fantasy. When school was back the girls would never know what I’d touched while they were away, and that gave me a feeling of superiority. They’d be walking around wearing panties that I’d spent time with. That’s the truth, and it’s a truth that I can’t tell the woman opposite me.

  When I broke into my auntie’s house, it was purely about money. I wasn’t breaking in to spend time eating her food and cuddling her underwear. I was being beaten at school by a pair of brothers—twins, actually, who told me the solution to making those beatings go away was for me to pay them. So in a way all of this started from those two. Simple, really. Two bullies who were older than me created a serial killer. I had no money. But I knew I had to get some. Up until my auntie’s house I’d only broken into homes where I knew the people were away on holiday. Nobody holidayed during the school term.

  “I needed the money,” I tell my ps
ychiatrist, and I tell her why. She doesn’t look saddened by the tale, she doesn’t frown and go Poor Joe, you were even a victim back then, but she does perhaps jot it down since her pen doesn’t stop moving. I wouldn’t put it past her to be doodling a picture of her and me naked. “The only place I could think to get it was my auntie’s house. Auntie Celeste. She was my mom’s sister.”

  “Was?”

  “She died about five years ago.”

  “How?” she asks, and her tone is suspicious.

  “Cancer, I think,” I say, but it could have been anything. A tumor. A heart condition. Whatever it is people tend to start getting when they’re over sixty. It certainly wasn’t me.

  “So you broke into her house?”

  The house was a single-story dwelling that was a little nicer than my parents’, but not nice enough for me to break in and stay a while. It was a town house built on the edge of South Brighton heading toward New Brighton, not that there’s really anything that new in either suburb. It was a ten-minute bike ride between the two houses. Auntie Celeste’s house had a concrete tile roof and wooden siding, it had aluminum joinery and windows that my auntie cleaned the salt spray from every day. It had a pretty good lock on the back door that was stronger than the hinges on the door, so if you gave it a good kick the screws would rip away from the frame and the door would cave in. Or, you could take the alternative option—I used my mom’s key. My mother and her sister had swapped keys after Celeste’s husband had died from an unexpected heart attack. They felt safer knowing they could get into each other’s house in an emergency.

  This was an emergency.

  I snuck out of my bedroom a little after midnight. It was pretty easy to do, it was just a matter of opening the window and having the athletic ability to drop a few feet. I rode my bike to within a block of my auntie’s house where there was a park. You had to be careful with parks at night in Christchurch. I knew it back then and I’ve certainly had bad experiences in them since. I didn’t see anybody about, so I hid my bike in a bunch of bushes. I didn’t lock it. I walked the rest of the way. The street was pretty dead. People were in bed for work, or for school. It was a Sunday night. People are pretty much less alert on a Sunday night than any other night of the week. There were a few lights on, but not many, and certainly none inside my aunt’s house. I could hear the ocean, the tide bringing in the waves. They crashed against the shore only a few hundred yards away, each one covering any sound I made.

  It was dark around the back of the house. There were no gates or fences blocking access from the front to the back. There were fences on each side between properties, and one running along the back. All the fences in this part of the neighborhood were run-down, the sun and salt air having warped the planks enough to make archery bows out of them. The backyard was mostly brown patches of burned-off grass. There was an old vegetable garden that was overgrown with weeds and old potatoes—my uncle’s pride and joy, but not my auntie’s. She was letting nature take its course the same way it took its course with my uncle.

  I reached the back door and used the key and made my way inside. I was as nervous as hell. So nervous I’d even thrown up back at the park where I parked my bike. I knew the layout of the house. My parents had dragged me here a thousand times over the years. The bedrooms were at the back, and only one of them was a bedroom, the other one was a sewing room that my auntie never really used for sewing, but my uncle used for drinking. The back door took me into the lounge and dining area. I didn’t turn on any lights. I had a small flashlight and no knife because I didn’t need a weapon. I was sixteen years old and had never had the desire to kill anybody—not for real, other than those who were bullying me at school, and maybe some of the neighbors, and the fantasies I had about the girls at school whose underwear and bedrooms I spent time with may have involved some nasty thoughts, but me stabbing them wasn’t one of them. Not back then.

  My auntie had a wad of cash inside a tea-bag container in the pantry. She’d always go to it if she was giving money to my mom if mom was going to the store, and could mom pick up a packet of cigarettes or some sugar or whatever else Auntie Celeste was short of. I opened the lid and pulled out the money, but didn’t take the time to count it. There was no point. I wanted to get out of there. I was nervous, and the kitchen stank of cigarette smoke just how it always did, and I wanted to be gone. I closed the pantry and had halved the distance to the back door when the lights came on. My auntie was standing in the dining room. She was wearing a pink robe and her hair was in curlers and she had a crossbow in her hands. It was my auntie—but I didn’t recognize her. She had a hard look on her face.

  “A crossbow?” the psychiatrist asks when I get to this part of the story. “Your auntie had a crossbow?”

  “I never knew she had one,” I tell her. “If I’d known, I wouldn’t have gone there.”

  “But a crossbow? Really?”

  I understand her surprise. Aunties aren’t the kind of people to own crossbows. Except for the ones who do. And my auntie was one of those. “I’m not lying,” I tell her.

  “No, I didn’t think you were. Why do you think she had one? Did your uncle go hunting?”

  “Not that I know of. I don’t know why she had one, and I never asked her. I remember seeing it five years ago when she died. We had to go around to her house and go through her stuff. It still looked the same. I don’t know if she ever fired it.”

  “Was your mum surprised to see it?”

  “If she was, she didn’t say.”

  “That night in her house, what did you do?”

  “She told me to stand still, and that’s exactly what I did. I thought I was going to throw up again. I was sure if I moved, even if I blinked, she was going to shoot me. I’d seen enough movies to know exactly how it was going to happen. She’d pull the trigger then there’d be a whistling sound that lasted half a second, then I’d clutch my stomach with my fingers around the end of an arrow. I even held my breath in case that was enough of an incentive for her to shoot me.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing happened. Not right away. Neither of us said anything for about ten seconds or so, and then she said my name. I think it took her that long not to figure out it was me, but to figure out that it really could be me. I think she recognized me immediately, discarded it, went through a whole bunch of other possibilities looking for a better fit before coming back to me. When she got there she didn’t lower the crossbow.

  “She said she was going to call the police. I asked her not to. She said it would be for my own good. I begged her not to. She said she was disappointed in me. Extremely disappointed. I’d heard that before, but didn’t tell her. She said it was going to crush my parents. I told her I was desperate for the money. Then I told her why, about the bullies and their threats and how paying them off was the only way I was going to be able to walk around school without having my pants pulled down around my ankles in front of everybody, or not getting pushed into walls and dog shit smudged into my hair. She nodded and seemed to understand, but kept the crossbow trained on me. She said everything I told her was awful, that school sounded tough, but no matter how tough it was that gave me no excuse for breaking into her house. I still had her money in my hand. It felt warm in there, it was crushed into a ball and my hand was sweating. Both hands were shaking a little, but hers were rock solid. It was like I was the fourth or fifth person she had caught that night.”

  I was nervous about being shot, but given the choice, I was starting to think I’d prefer getting shot than having my parents find out. There was no way my aunt wouldn’t tell them. My mind was racing for ideas, for something I could bargain with. All I could think of was somehow getting my hands on that crossbow. My parents would know of my burglary attempt by morning. I didn’t know what would happen then, but it wouldn’t be good. I would be grounded, but that was no big deal. They would be disappointed in me, but that didn’t mean much either. They might call the police. That’s what I was
afraid of. I’d rather have been shot than accept what the police would do to me. At sixteen years old, that’s the way my mind worked. So I was thinking about how I could get hold of the crossbow and how I could leave the house and my dead auntie and have nobody figure out it had been me.

  “You felt guilty,” Ali-Ellen says.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. I felt bad, really bad.”

  “Hmm,” she says, and notes something down, then looks back up at me. “Tell me, Joe, was it the fact you were stealing from your auntie that made you feel bad, or the fact you had been caught?”

  It’s a good question. I had been breaking into people’s homes for the best part of a year and I thought I was above being caught. And caught by a woman more than three times my age. That meant even if I could get hold of the crossbow, I would probably get caught afterward.

  “At both,” I say.

  “Uh huh. Okay, what happened next?”

  “My aunt asked me what my parents would say if she told them,” I say, and as the words come out I travel back in time again, back to that moment leading up to what I would later think of as the Big Bang. My aunt’s exact words were What would your parents say if I told them? She didn’t say when I tell them, but if I tell them.

  They’ll hate me for it, I told my aunt. And maybe they’ll want to kick me out. I didn’t think they would, but I wanted my aunt to feel sorry for me.

  They probably would, she said, and yet she still didn’t lower the crossbow. Are you armed, Joe? she asked.

  No.

  Have you ever been with a woman, Joe?

  What?

  A woman. Have you ever made love to a woman?

  I’m only sixteen, I told her.