Joe Victim: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

  “That’s the going theory,” Hutton says. “We think he dressed as a cop knowing officers would be on their way and he could blend in in case they got to the building before he got out of it. He got into his car and then boom.”

  Schroder looks up at the office building, his eyes fixing on the open window with a curtain behind it. For a moment he remembers a case last December where a guy with suction cups strapped to his hands and knees was found at the base of a similar-looking building, his body looking exactly the way you’d expect it to look after falling ten stories and hitting the pavement. With that thought he realizes his mind keeps drifting. He needs to focus on the case. This case, and only this case, but it’s difficult. “Let’s go take a look,” he says.

  “Listen, Carl, I know with all that’s going on you’ve forgotten you’re no longer a cop. It’s one thing letting you this far, but you can’t go up there.”

  Schroder wants to argue, but he knows Hutton is right. But he argues anyway. “Come on, Wilson, I know the Carver case better than anybody. You need my eyes on this.”

  Hutton nods. “Look, don’t take this personally, okay, because we’re all at fault here, but your eyes were on this case for a couple of years while Joe was running free and they’ve been on the Melissa X case for twelve months, so your eyes aren’t really needed right now.”

  The comment comes as a blow, and he takes a moment trying to figure out how to respond and can’t think of anything other than Fuck you, Hutton, but the sad truth is Hutton is right. Of course he’s right. If he wasn’t right then there wouldn’t be so much blood on the roads.

  “Listen, like I said, we’re all at fault,” Hutton says. “We all missed what we should have seen. You’ve been gone a month and none of us are any closer to finding Melissa, and I know you’re the guy who got the break with finding her real name,” he says, and Schroder knows even that’s not entirely true—it was Theodore Tate who got that. “What I’m saying is we’re all responsible.”

  “What you’re saying is you don’t think I can help,” Schroder says.

  “I’m not saying that,” Hutton says, only he is and both men know it. “I’m just saying it’s not your job anymore.”

  Hutton stares at him waiting for a response, and it takes Schroder a little over five seconds to come up with it. “I need this,” he says.

  “Carl—”

  “I need this, Wilson. I’m the one who came up with the idea of a decoy route to the courthouse. I’m the one Melissa stole it from.”

  “She—”

  Schroder holds his hand up. “She broke into my car when I was visiting Joe in prison. I spent a few minutes talking to her beforehand and had no idea who she was.”

  “Jesus, Carl, what the fuck?”

  “I’m the one whose car she put the bomb in. What happened to Kent, that’s on me too. If Joe kills anybody, if Melissa kills anybody else, that’s on me. You see that, right?” He looks at Jack lying dead on the ground. “That’s on me too,” he says, and Hutton can see where he’s looking. “Don’t do this, don’t send me away, please, Wilson, I’m begging you as a friend, don’t do this.”

  Now it’s Hutton’s turn to say nothing for five seconds. He looks around to see who else is nearby and he must think what the hell, because then he shrugs, he shakes his head first in a I can’t believe I’m about to do this gesture, and then starts nodding.

  “Okay, but don’t touch anything.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Fuck it,” Hutton says. “If the roles were reversed, would you let me in?”

  No, Schroder thinks, and then nods. The roles have been reversed in the past, not with him and Hutton, but with him and Tate, and in those cases Tate always heard no as a yes. “Of course I would.”

  “Yeah, right. If anybody asks you’re here as a witness, that’s all, and if you end up getting me fired over this, you’re going to wake up in bathtub full of ice and I’m going to have sold your organs because I’m going to need the money. I’ll break your other arm too. Come on, let’s go, before I change my mind.”

  Chapter Seventy-One

  My daughter’s name is Abby. She’s twenty years old and has her mother’s looks, the kind of looks I’d like to see on any twenty-year-old girl that I shared a deserted alleyway with. Abby isn’t short for Abigail, but short for Accidental Baby, and me and Melissa are planning on telling that story at her twenty-first birthday party, which is tomorrow. Abby has a great sense of humor and she’ll get the joke. I love her. Abby has changed my life, just as Melissa has. She’s our only child. Abby was four months old when I had a vasectomy, choosing to have it done professionally rather than taking the shortcut of having Melissa take care of it. One child was enough.

  My mom will be at tomorrow’s party. So will her new husband, Henry. Walt died a few years ago. He was hit by a car. I’ve always suspected it was a lifestyle choice rather than an accident. My mother is in her eighties now.

  One of the best things about having a twenty-one-year-old daughter was her twenty-one-year-old friends. Every weekend some of them would be around at the house and every weekend I kept my hands and knives to myself in fear of going back to jail.

  Of course jail is in the past. Melissa saved me. We’ll tell that story too at Abby’s twenty-first. Maybe show some photos of her as a baby, the first time she rolled over, the first time she walked, the first time she killed a pet. After I was shot and saved and healed, the justice system realized I’d been punished enough, they came around to my way of thinking. I was set free. Counseling was part of the deal. I would see Benson Barlow twice a week for ten years and we actually became pretty good friends. Not good enough to socialize, but good enough to chat about the weather if I ran into him on the street.

  People say your life flashes in front of your eyes when you’re about to die. I can’t really be sure why my life is flashing at me now, mostly it’s the events of the last few days that are replaying themselves—the trip out to the woods with Kent and her team, the money I earned, the . . .

  Last few days?

  No. That’s not right. It was those few days twenty years and change ago.

  It’s a warm morning and the sun is on my face and I’m lying in bed, and from somewhere I can hear Melissa’s voice. I can smell bacon and eggs. I feel happy. I’m content. I’m the man I never thought I would be. There’s a white picket fence outside and later today I’m going to mow the lawns, I’m going to make idle chitchat with the neighbor and help him shift his old fridge from his kitchen into his garage. I can hear Sally’s voice too, and it’s something I haven’t heard in years.

  Months.

  But there it is now, she’s in conversation with Melissa because Sally is coming tomorrow too. So is Carl Schroder. Schroder turned out to be a pretty good guy, in the end, probably because he ended up spending ten years in jail having the cop raped out of him.

  And I feel sleepy and the voices fade a little. Dreams within dreams. My past flashing at me. I open my eyes into a world that is full of Sally. She is leaning over me. Are we sleeping together? I try to get back to the white picket fence where bacon is being cooked in the kitchen, but something is keeping me here, it’s something so strong that I can even feel the pain in my shoulder that I felt back then. I can smell antiseptic. The air tastes stale. The bed doesn’t feel like mine. I’m lying in a stranger’s bed and bad things are happening and I just close my eyes and let it happen, just like I did with my auntie all those years ago. I open my eyes. Melissa is standing by the wall. Sally is hovering over me. The Sally. I close my eyes. It’s time to wake up. It’s time to be with my family.

  I don’t wake up.

  Things come and go. One moment The Sally is over me, then there is nobody, then she is back. She’s working on the bullet wound. It reminds me of another time, back twenty years ago.

  No it wasn’t.

  Long in the past, memories that should be dead and buried.

  “Where’s Abby?” I ask.

&nbs
p; “She’s safe,” Melissa says. “You’ll get to see her soon. She misses you,” she says, which I figure is such a mom thing to say even though my mom has never said it. It also means that the Melissa I knew a year ago isn’t the same as the Melissa in front of me.

  A year ago?

  The Sally looks jealous—and I realize the crush she has on me hasn’t faded, her love still burns strong and Melissa better not turn her back on her because nothing sums up crazy as much as a fat woman in love.

  “It’s her birthday,” I say.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Melissa asks.

  “She’s twenty-one,” I say.

  “It’s the medication,” The Sally says. “It’s messing with his mind, that’s all. It’s nothing to worry about.”

  “Do you remember our wedding?” I ask Melissa.

  She smiles at me and it’s a stupid question—of course she remembers it. Why wouldn’t she? It was an amazing day, made more amazing by the fact that my mother got the dates confused and missed it.

  “I love you,” I tell her.

  “You’re going to be okay, Joe,” she tells me.

  I’m naked from the waist up. My clothes are in a bloody pile at the foot of the bed. It’s no loss—it’s just the cheap jail suit the warden will replace with one of his own, or with thirty bucks from the petty cash drawer. I’m becoming increasingly concerned about how real the dream is feeling. I try to focus on Abby, which kind of works and kind of doesn’t, because when I try to think about her features, I can’t find them. What color are her eyes? What shape is her nose? Her cheeks? Her hair? Then I try to remember Mom’s new husband. I try to remember my sessions with Benson Barlow. I try to remember Walt’s funeral, but maybe I didn’t go. The neighbor with the fridge, what’s his name? And what did Schroder do to get himself locked up?

  It’s a bad dream. That’s all. Just like the bad dream I had following the removal of my testicle.

  So I go with it. I stick with the dream and see where it leads. My biggest red flag, if I’m looking for one—which I’m not—is that out of all the people I could dream about, why would The Sally be one of them?

  It wouldn’t.

  I would never dream about somebody like Sally.

  The Sally.

  Never.

  And that, more than anything, tells me that this is real.

  “You need to go to a hospital, Joe,” The Sally says.

  I look around the room. Sally’s bedroom. This must be a dream come true for her. There’s a poster on one wall of a vase of flowers, but no vase of flowers anywhere. Why not put up a picture of a window and keep the curtains closed? There’s a mirror above a chest of drawers and poked into the side of the mirror are what must be family photographs. They take up a lot of real estate and I guess that’s so there’s less reflective space and less of a chance for Sally to keep seeing herself.

  “It hurts,” I tell her, which is perhaps the most honest thing I’ve ever told her.

  “The bullet went right through,” The Sally says. “You’ve got muscle and ligament damage. I’ve stopped the bleeding, and you’re okay for now, and I’ve cleaned it, but it’s going to get infected, and you’re probably never going to be able to use your shoulder properly.”

  I shake my head at the thought of that, of my shoulder locking up and going into spasm right when I’m in the middle of cut-cut-cutting. “Fix it,” I tell her.

  “You need surgery. It’s not going to heal by itself,” she says.

  “Then operate.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Find somebody who can.”

  Melissa steps away from the window. She looks down at me and she looks concerned. “I think what Sally is saying,” she says, “is that she’s done all she can. Isn’t that right?” she asks, looking over at The Sally.

  The Sally nods. “You should still take him to a hospital. If you don’t want it infected and if there’s any chance of him using it a hundred percent again, then you have to take him.”

  Melissa nods. “It’s funny,” she says, “because you’re talking and all I hear you saying is that we have no more use for you,” she says, and she raises her hand and there’s a gun in it and she points it at The Sally, and in the moment I realize that Melissa hasn’t changed at all, that she’s still the same woman I fell in love with, that I’m so lucky to have found her.

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  The office has no dividing walls. Just four walls and a door, and a window that’s currently being covered by a painter’s drop cloth. Duct tape is holding it up. Schroder doesn’t need to pull it aside to know what it overlooks, but he does anyway—him on the left, Hutton on the right—and they stare down into the back of the courthouse. At the edges of the cordons police officers are restraining the last few university students who are trying to push their way into the scene to get photographs of themselves drinking, probably to post online, but for the most part the students are still hanging back. They’re down there hugging each other—there are a lot of tears, a lot of people sitting down with their knees pulled into their chests. The majority of people are walking away from the scene, just wanting to get home. Some have blood on their faces.

  “An easy shot to make,” Hutton says.

  For a moment Schroder thinks Hutton is talking about the students and their cameras, but of course he isn’t—he’s talking about the shot the shooter made. Schroder looks back into the courthouse, he looks at the spot where his car was parked, and he knows the shooter must have been up here for some time, and that getting a parking space nearby means he was here before this morning’s cordons were set up. That means when Schroder showed up his face was in the sights of the same gun that’s lying behind him. He shudders at the thought, and then agrees with Hutton that yes, it would have been an easy shot to make. There are three casings on the floor, they’ll be checked for prints—maybe they’ll get lucky.

  The gun that would have focused on Schroder as he stepped out of his car earlier is beyond them lying on the floor. There won’t be any prints on it, because it’s been covered in white paint from one of the tins that’s laying on its side, surrounded by more white paint that’s soaked into the concrete floor. The top of a paint tin is open, and there’s a set of earmuffs in there, one edge of them sticking out. The rule of renovating, Schroder knows, is work your way down. Ceiling, walls, then carpets. This office still had some work to do. There’s a guy leaning over the gun, a forensic tech whose name Schroder on normal days can never pronounce correctly, but after today’s explosion he’s completely forgotten. The gun will yield ballistic results, and they’ll know if it’s been used before, but it was likely taken from Derek Rivers, and Derek hasn’t been in a real talkative mood since either Melissa or somebody else put two in his chest.

  The forensic tech is taking a photograph of three shell casings.

  “You said there was only the one shot,” Schroder says.

  “There was.”

  “There are three casings,” Schroder says. “And if Joe was shot, and Jack was shot, then that’s two shots.”

  “I can explain that,” the tech says, and he stands up to face them. He’s a guy in his late twenties with a hairline Schroder wishes he had, and though he can’t remember what his name is he suddenly remembers that the guy is a pub-quiz master who spends two or three weeknights every week winning bar tabs. “Okay, so we have three casings because there were three shots, but you only heard one, right?”

  “Right,” Hutton says. “Everybody only heard the one shot.”

  “Okay,” the tech says, nodding. “The barrel is clogged.”

  “Clogged?” Schroder says.

  “With a bullet. And if you all only heard one shot, then it’s probably clogged with two bullets. Bullet one was fired, bullet two got jammed, and bullet three got lodged right behind it.”

  “That’s still three gunshots,” Hutton says. “Wouldn’t we have heard that?”

  “My guess is the bullets were modified. I’m g
uessing the gunpowder was removed. Bullets are made up of four main parts, right? The bullet itself, the casing, the gunpowder, and the primer. The primer ignites the gunpowder and—”

  “And we know how bullets work,” Schroder says.

  “Okay, okay, well, if the gunpowder was removed, you’ve still got the primer that’s going to ignite, right? It’s going to go bang, but it’s not going to go boom. You’re going to hear it in the office here, but you’re not going to hear it out in the street. So the shooter, he fires the first bullet, then the second and third don’t sound or react the same. And those bullets are going to travel into the barrel but aren’t going to come out. I need to get it back to the lab to run some tests, but for now that’s my guess. Also, the magazine is empty, so whoever was up here only ever planned on firing three shots.”

  “What about Jack?” Schroder asks. “He was shot.”

  “But probably not by this. Could be the same gun that killed Derek Rivers and Tristan Walker. I’ll know more later.”

  He goes about bagging up the gun and Hutton and Schroder go about thinking what all this means.

  “If Raphael and Melissa were working together,” Hutton says, “then she really screwed him. But if she was planning on blowing him up anyway, why sabotage two of the three bullets?”

  “There were two water glasses,” Schroder says.

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” Schroder says, and he should have trusted his bad feeling about Raphael. When he was at his house showing him the photographs, was Melissa there too? Is that what happened? Did Raphael think she was somebody else? Somebody who wanted Joe dead as much as he did? Yes—yes, it’s possible. It’s possible she heard his conversation with Raphael, possible she suspected he recognized her from the photograph. “They found an arm,” Hutton says. “An arm with two fingers attached and not a lot more, and those two fingers were badly burned. We’ve got people heading to his house now to get prints. If it was Raphael we’ll know it soon.”