Joe Victim: A Thriller

She picks a spot. A big knot. She aims in on it, calms her breathing, and fires. The gunshot is muted through her earmuffs. The knot in the tree is splintered as the bullet crashes into it. She lines the knot back up. Takes another shot. Fires the second bullet within an inch of the first. Accurate enough. Way more accurate than she showed Raphael. A few hundred shots she could probably shoot the tree down.

As she shoots, she thinks about how the plan has changed for both of them. In some pretty big ways too. Instead of Melissa being the collector, she will be victim number two. And Joe, instead of being collected, will be victim number one. She’s sure of it. The plan was never to shoot Joe in the head, but to wound him. Melissa, dressed in her paramedic’s uniform, will pick him up. Then, thanks to the C-four, she’ll evade the police. Raphael originally thought they were picking Joe up to torture and kill him. That was never the real plan. The first part, yes, but not the second part.

She looks through the sight at the bullet impact. It’s four, maybe five inches below the knothole. She adjusts the sights again. Takes aim. Fires. This time the bullet hits the tree even lower. She sets the gun down and walks to the tree and gets out a tape measure. Puts it from the knothole to the last bullet hole. Eleven inches. Just about perfect. She walks back to the gun. Adjusts the sights again, this time slightly to the side. Takes aim at the knothole. Steadies the gun. Fires.

This time the bullet hits the tree eleven inches down from the knothole and a few inches to the left. She uses up most of the bullets.

It’s perfect. A calculated risk, certainly, but perfect nonetheless.

And the truth of it is it’s not her life on the line here, but Joe’s. And that’s an acceptable risk.





Chapter Forty-Three


Schroder hates working on Sundays. It seems he’s busier now than he was when he was a cop. His wife sure thinks so. She was grumpy with him this morning over breakfast. The excuse that This is his job was no better today than it has been over the last twenty years. And the kids were being annoying. The baby last night was hard work. He’d sleep for half an hour and then whimper and be grizzly and then wake up. So Schroder would wake up too. So would his wife. They’d take turns at feeding him. At one point the baby shit himself so bad Schroder thought they were going to have to call in an exorcist to clean up the mess. It’s been a night of broken sleep, following a week of broken sleep, following what has now felt like forever. He loves his kids more than anything, but every night as four a.m. rolls into five, he figures the difference between being a good dad and a bad dad is that a good dad doesn’t put a pillow over the baby to make it go quiet. He knows from the job that there have been plenty of bad dads over the years. Bad mums too.

There are things to be pleased about this morning. Reasons to be calm. Joe led the police to a body yesterday evening. It hadn’t been a trap. Melissa didn’t reveal herself. There were no explosions, no splashes of blood. Schroder had been expecting bad news. When the call came he was almost too afraid to answer it. It wasn’t Joe calling on the dead detective’s cell phone, it was Kent herself reporting in.

The deal was going ahead. The body, as far as the rest of the world was concerned, was still missing. So Jonas Jones was going to become a hero. Or he is facing a huge embarrassment if the body belongs to somebody else. Though, knowing Jones, there’ll be a way to spin that into a positive. He’ll probably say Calhoun, even from the spirit world, is still first and foremost a cop.

Also, Kent had said, have you heard about the university students?

Yeah, I’ve heard.

I just don’t understand young people, she said.

Nobody does, he said. Not even young people.

People have been killed, people are hurting, but it’s just an excuse for a party for these kids. I just hope none of them dress as any of the victims. You think they’d do that?

Schroder didn’t know, but hoped not, and told her so.

He stopped for coffee on the way to the TV station. He popped a couple of caffeine pills into his mouth and they disappeared with the first swallow of coffee, the extra hit helping him wake up, but the problem with those extra hits is they just don’t last as long as they used to.