Joe Victim: A Thriller

“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.