Joe Victim: A Thriller (24 page)

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Raphael should have trusted his initial gut instinct last night. It told him there was more to Stella than she presented, but he saw what he wanted to see. The lies were good. So good he imagined anybody would fall for them. And the change in looks. Boy, she could almost fool anybody. She fooled him. Even when Schroder gave him the photograph, he didn’t pick it. Not at first. Not until he took a good look and then he started seeing. She looked different. Different makeup, different hairstyle—hell, a completely different hair color. Plus she’s put on weight, not much, but a little around the neck and face.

He connected the dots.

Stella wasn’t Stella. She wasn’t a rape victim who’d lost her baby.

She was Melissa.

The realization was almost like a blow to the stomach. He felt his breath catch and it took all of his composure to stay calm, to not let on that he knew the woman in the picture. He stood there staring at it while his mind was racing. What he felt was a sense of betrayal. What he should have felt was a need to tell Schroder she was in his house—and yes, that was a consideration—but not what he settled on. Telling Schroder would be the first step in the process of he himself going to jail—after all, he did kill two lawyers.

Of course Schroder sensed something. How could he not? But he recovered from the pause—he told the ex-policeman that he recognized her from the news, and Schroder bought it. No reason not to. Will Melissa buy it too?

What he can’t figure out is why she wants Joe dead. The trial must have something to do with it. That’s what the timing suggests. She wants Joe dead, and he’s okay with that. He wants Joe dead too. So their desires fall in line quite nicely.

Where things don’t line up are their views on people who take innocent lives. Melissa has been doing a lot of that lately. Other cops. Security guards. Paramedics. People in uniform. The media even labeled her the Uniform Killer for a while there, though that name doesn’t seem to have stuck much. The police uniform he has, it looks authentic because it is—it’s come from somebody she’s killed.

He knows the irony. He’s a smart guy. Smart enough to know that he’s a killer working with another killer to kill another killer. It’s not complicated.

Law Abiding Raphael knows he should go to the police. Red Rage Raphael thinks he should just shoot both Joe and Melissa and let the chips fall where they may. Sensible Raphael knows he can’t go to the police because Melissa saw the articles pinned to the wall in his daughter’s bedroom. She made the connection. If he goes to the police then he’ll be thrown in jail alongside her. Then Joe will get his trial. He’ll have his chance to plead his insanity defense, and then you just never know what will happen. He’ll be found guilty, has to be, but that doesn’t sit well with Raphael. So Sensible Raphael agrees with the Red Rage. There are more than enough bullets to go around. The plan allows for that. In fact, the very nature of the plan allows for it perfectly. And if he gets caught because he’s taken that extra shot? Then so what. So. What.

So he covered with Schroder while these thoughts went through his mind, and then he covered with Melissa too while those same thoughts were there. If she suspected he knew who she was, she would kill him. He didn’t know how. He wasn’t arrogant enough to think that just because he was bigger and perhaps stronger that that gave him an advantage. There was a reason she had killed so many people. It was foolish to underestimate her.

But she didn’t suspect. Had no reason to, not when he spoke about his anger toward Joe, and what Joe had done to him, his daughter, and to Stella. He spoke of his excitement to be the one to take Joe’s life. They spoke about the plan. They went over and over the plan. It wasn’t a simple plan. Not really. But he has a great way to streamline it.

Melissa rang him this morning. The next part of the plan was happening today. She said she would be by this afternoon to pick him up. Sometime around three thirty.

“It’s important we’re not late,” she had told him.

And now it’s three thirty and he’s waiting by the door, and he only has to wait another minute before her car pulls up. He heads out and climbs in. She’s still got black hair, but he wonders if it’s a wig or if she’s dyed it. He tosses the bag with the police uniform into the backseat.

“Then we’re doing this,” he says. “We’re really going to shoot Joe.”

“Gun’s in the back,” she says, and puts the car into gear and starts driving.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

I end up lying down, hoping for my stomach to settle, which it doesn’t seem to want to do. The sandwich has set about some motions that I don’t know how to stop. There are cramps and there are sharp pains and there are occasional moments where the two combine, other rarer moments where there is no pain at all. I give up looking at the door every time I hear somebody coming near me. If Caleb Cole came in with his makeshift knife he’d be doing me a favor.

Eventually a set of footsteps slow down. They enter the cell. I’m too busy feeling sorry for myself to look up. It’s more than one set of feet. Eight feet, four guards, one underlying current of anger. None of the guards are Adam or Greg. My hands are cuffed in front of me. There are ankle cuffs with a length of chain about a yard long between my feet. A length of chain runs up from that chain and connects to the handcuffs. It’s the kind of thing Harry Houdini would wear to a fetish party.

I struggle to keep up with the guards, and when I do slow down too much I get pushed in the back. At the front of the prison is a police detective I haven’t seen before. A woman. She’s signing forms and talking to the warden. The woman is perhaps a couple of years older than me. Beautiful hair. Beautiful features. Great curves all wrapped up in some pretty sleek packaging. She glances up at me and barely gives me a second’s worth of attention before carrying on her conversation with the warden. The warden is in his mid-fifties and is wearing the kind of suit telling the world there’s just no point in mugging him.

Both the warden and the woman come over to me. I’ve got my stomach muscles clenched and my ass clenched because my organs are performing some weird kind of ballet, they’re dancing around so fast they’re turning into fluid.

“If you put one foot out of line,” the warden says, “these people will shoot you.”

“Which is the wrong one?” I ask him.

He doesn’t answer.

“My name is Detective Kent,” Detective So Hot I’d Rather Abduct You Than Kill You says, and my oh my, what fun we could have together. “And what the warden said here is absolutely one hundred percent correct,” she says, and I could get lost listening to her voice, looking into her eyes, cutting her open. Even the warden seems to be mentally trading his wife in for her.

“Joe will behave,” I tell her.

“Good,” she says. “Because the general consensus is that Joe has something planned.”

“Joe don’t have a plan.”

“Good. Because if anything happens, Joe’s going to find himself with a bullet in the back of his head,” she says.

“Joe just wants to do the right thing.” Everybody is giving me the same kind of look they’d give a stand-up comedian misreading his audience. “Where is Detective Carl?” I ask.

“Detective Schroder won’t be joining us,” she says.

“I miss Carl,” I tell her.

“I’m sure he misses you too,” she says. “Now let’s get this show on the road.”

I’m escorted to the door. Outside are three heavily armed officers. The afternoon is chilly. Mostly gray skies, but some patches of blue in the distance. No sun. The day is cool, but my skin is feeling hot and my stomach is riddled with what feels like large worms on the loose. I’m led to the back of a white van. There is nothing special looking about it. The back doors are opened and I’m told to climb inside. There’s a metal eyelet that’s been welded into the floor. I step up and my legs buckle under me and somebody has to catch me.

“Stop fucking around,” somebody says.

I suck in a deep breath and hold it. I can feel the world slipping a little.

“He’s going to hurl,” somebody says. “Get back!”

Everybody gets back. I drop to my knees heavily enough that I’ll have bruises on both of them this time tomorrow. I open my mouth, but nothing happens. Sweat is dripping off my face. I widen my eyes and my mouth then exhale heavily. My stomach is struggling to hold on. The sandwich is threatening to fire out in all directions.

“Are you up for this?” Kent asks.

I nod. I appreciate her concern. When I come to her house when this is all over, I’ll make things quick.

“Okay. Here are the rules,” Kent says, standing over me. “You do what we say. You answer our questions. You make good on the deal. You don’t do any of that and we bring you straight back. You try to escape, we shoot you in the spine. You have anything planned we shoot you in the spine. Hell, we may just shoot you in the spine anyway. You get what I’m saying?”

“I thought you were going to shoot me in the back of the head. Now it’s the spine?”

“It will be both,” she says. “And probably the balls too. Though we’ll have to aim accurately since you only have one left.”

“Funny,” I tell her, and try to get back onto my feet.

“Is this some kind of gimmick?” she asks.

I shake my head. “I ate something bad, that’s all.”

“You going to toughen up and go through with it?” she asks, and she sounds like my mom used to sound when I was sick in the morning before school. Back then she would ask me if I was a girl or a boy or a man.

I find my balance and step into the back of the van, which answers her question. My handcuffs are connected to the eyelet by a chain that keeps me stooped over, which is fine because my stomach would be stooping me over anyway. There are no windows in the back. There’s wire mesh between the back and the front, so I can see outside and I could jam knitting needles at the driver if I had them, but nothing more. The driver is armed and looks familiar, but I can’t place him. Kent climbs in next to him. The other two heavily armed officers climb in the back with me. There’s a shovel lying across the floor. Four people for Melissa to deal with and they’ve even brought along the supplies to hide the bodies.

The van starts rolling forward. This is the furthest I’ve been from my prison cell since I pled not guilty and was held over for trial. This is the view my mother and my lawyer see every time after they’ve come to see me.

“Which way?” Kent asks.

“Right,” I tell her. “Can you open a window?”

“No.”

We have to wait for a gap in traffic, then we’re swinging out over the lanes and heading toward the city.

“Please? It’s hot back here.”

“It’s not hot,” Kent says.

“He doesn’t look so good,” Officer Nose says, and that’s the name of the guy sitting opposite me, the guy with the nose that looks like it’s been broken a few times. The guy next to him is wearing glasses and my name for him is Officer Dick.

“How far do we go?” Kent asks, winding down the window halfway.

“I don’t know,” I tell her. “I can barely see out the window.”

“How about you just give me an address?”

“There is no address,” I tell her. “That’s why we’re in this situation. We’re looking for a paddock. I can’t tell you where it is, but I can figure out the way.”

“Great,” the driver says.

“It is, isn’t it?” I ask.

We get closer toward town. We pass the big
Christchurch
sign that somebody has added graffiti to, but I can’t see what. We keep driving. More boring shit to the left. The same boring shit to the right. I don’t know how people do it. I don’t know why more people aren’t shooting themselves.

“Go left toward the back of the airport,” I tell them.

We slow and make the turn. I can see a plane overhead coming in to land. I’ve never been on a plane before. Never been out of the country, never even been up to the North Island, never really left Christchurch. I wonder where Melissa is planning on taking me. Australia? Europe? Mexico? I can’t wait. It must be so cool, looking down on the world, seeing people scurrying around like ants. It
is
how I see them, most of the time anyway. I wonder how I’ll see them from a few thousand feet in the air. Then I wonder why a cockpit is called a
cockpit,
who came up with the term, and what they were doing in the process.

“Keep going straight for a while,” I tell them.

We do just that. We pass open fields and landing planes and runways in the near distance lined by lights and more fields. As we drive it’s all coming back to me. The night with Calhoun. He was the detective who had killed Daniela Walker. I was the person who had figured it out. I’d have made a great cop. He had staged the scene so it would be pinned on me—the Christchurch Carver—and I wasn’t pleased about it. At the same time Melissa was blackmailing me. So I tied Calhoun up and Melissa ended up stabbing him, and I filmed the whole thing without her knowing. It all worked out great. It got me and Melissa on the same page. I don’t know how it works—she pulped my testicle with a pair of pliers, and yet I love her. Her sister was murdered by a cop, she herself was raped by a bad man, and yet she loves me. You can’t deny the chemistry.

The sky is getting a little darker. I’m not sure of the difference between twilight and dusk. Is there one? Both are approaching. I guess one arrives first, and then the other. Twilight might be when there is still some light in the sky and dusk is when there isn’t. Another hour and it won’t matter because they’ll both be gone. Perhaps that’s part of Melissa’s plan. When it’s dark she’ll start shooting. My stomach is feeling a little better, but not much.

“Take the next left,” I tell the driver, and after that I tell him the next right. We go through a series of turns. Just when it feels like we’re looping back in on ourselves, and right when they’re starting to accuse me of messing them around, we reach the dirt road I found last year. There’s a gate going across it.

“It’s . . .” I say, then a bolt of cramp grips my stomach and I crouch further forward and grit my teeth until it passes. “Here,” I finish saying, and the driver pulls over and comes to a stop. We all stay seated in the van. Kent is on the phone. Probably updating the address with somebody in case they all go missing. I no longer feel sweaty and hot. In fact it’s the opposite.

“Take the road,” I tell him.

“Not without a four-wheel drive,” the driver says. “Track’s too wet. How far in?”

“Not far,” I tell him.

He looks at Kent. “This is private property,” he says. “What do you want to do?”

She lowers the phone so she can chat to him. “Can’t see any signs of life out there,” she says. “Let’s start walking.”

Kent and the driver get out of the van. They come around to the back and open the doors. Officer Dick climbs out while the others point their guns at me, then Officer Nose unlocks the chain from the eyelet. He helps me out of the van and I try to straighten my back. It’s sore from the twenty-minute drive. It’d help if I could push my palms into it and stretch it out. Kent has finished her phone call.

The view consists of rocks, trees, dirt, and mud. Mountains in the distance. A stream nearby. More trees and open paddocks and I imagine it would be nice for a picnic if picnics are your thing. It would also be a nice place to string up the warden or Carl Schroder if stringing up assholes is your thing. What I don’t see are any other cars. No sign of Melissa. But she’s here. I can feel it. My ball is tingling. It feels it too.

Kent is wearing a bulletproof vest that she wasn’t wearing back at the prison. She doesn’t offer me one. That hurts. I give her my big Slow Joe smile and she looks mad at me, mad because it could be muddy where we’re going and she doesn’t want her hiking shoes getting dirty. The others are all wearing vests too.

“What happened to your face?” she asks.

“I walked into a door.”

“Good,” she says. “You should keep walking into doors. It looks good on you. Matches your scar,” she says, and I try to reach up to touch my scar only my hands won’t go that far because of the chain between them and my ankle bracelets. “How far away is the body?” she asks.

“Same as I told him,” I say, nodding toward the driver.

“Well consider this your chance to tell me too.”

“A few minutes’ walk,” I tell her. “And bring the shovel.”

The driver reaches in and grabs it. I finally recognize him. It’s Jack, the man in black who put the boot of his heel into my eyelid and squished it into the ground. He sees me staring at him and he figures out I’ve just figured out who he is.

He smiles at me.

“How’s the eye?” he asks.

“Still good enough to see me fucking your wife when all this is over,” I tell him.

He jumps forward at me, but two of his colleagues are quicker and they grab hold of him.

“Enough,” Kent shouts, but it’s not enough because Jack keeps struggling. “Damn it, guys, I said enough.”

The message gets through. Jack stops struggling and the others let him go. Then we’re all standing in a circle and I’m the odd one out.

“Now, Joe, stop jerking us around and lead us to Detective Calhoun,” Kent says.

I head up to the gate. There’s a chain and a padlock that took me only a few seconds last year to pick. The gate is just below chest height. A wire fence heads out from each direction and along the edge of the property.

“Cut the lock?” Jack asks. “Or climb it?”

“Nobody can know we were here,” Kent says.

So we climb the fence, which is pretty awkward for a guy chained up. Two go over first, then they half drag me while the other two half push. When we’re all on the other side we start walking. The road is in rougher condition than when I was last here, the winter months treating it the same way death treats a newcomer—parts of it black, parts of it lumpy in areas, parts of it dissolving. My prison shoes are not up to the task and a few steps further my right shoe is sucked off by mud. Tree roots and rocks are covered in moss. All these guns pointing at me. People all around me. I’m the center of attention. I crouch down to pull out my shoe, then I flick it to clear as much off it as I can and put it back on. We keep walking. More trees and no gunshot. I keep getting ready to duck. When somebody stands on a branch and it cracks loudly, I drop to the ground.

“Stop fucking around,” Jack says, and drags me back to my feet, the cuffs digging painfully into my wrists.

A warm glow is starting to burn deep in the side of my stomach. We keep walking. A hundred yards. Two hundred. I can remember clearly driving out here last year. The weather was similar, though we’d just come off the back of a very long summer. The glow in my stomach is making its way into a sharp pain, an appendix-bursting pain if you had two appendixes. I bury my thumb into the area and it helps a little.