The door swings open.
The woman doing the swinging is dressed in winter pajamas and a robe that are a little too big for her, even though the woman is a little too big herself. Still, she’s not as overweight as she was in the papers twelve months ago after she jumped on Joe during his arrest, or even as she was three months ago when Melissa came to see her. Her face is somewhat flushed. She looks like she is running late. She’s wearing a crucifix around her neck. A little Jesus on a little cross. A little Jesus who doesn’t seem happy to be hanging where he’s hanging.
“I thought we had a deal,” the woman says. “You promised you were going to leave me alone.”
“And I have until now, Sally,” Melissa says. “But I’m here to make another deal. You need to start by letting me in,” she says, and she raises the gun and sticks it into Sally’s chest, right where Jesus is doing his best not to look. “Or if you prefer I can shoot you in the stomach and leave you here to rot.”
Chapter Forty-Nine
Raphael wakes up expecting fate to intervene, that he’ll have a sore throat or a bad stomach from something he ate, maybe a racing heart from too much bad food, or at the very least a hangover—even though he didn’t really drink that much yesterday. Fate has never been one for the Can’t we all just get along school of thought, there are too many sad stories in the city that prove that, so for he and Fate to be on the same page about Joe seems like a small miracle.
He holds his hands in front of his face in the six a.m. light and can barely make them out, but can see them enough to tell he doesn’t have any signs of the shakes. For a guy who hardly slept last night, he’s doing remarkably well. It’s been a clock-watching night, where every passing hour his mind would do the math, telling him just how much sleep he wasn’t getting. His mind was racing. In the beginning it was racing with positive thoughts. Then around one a.m., the first negative thought came along. Within thirty minutes the balance had shifted. The negative thoughts were chasing away all the good ones. By three a.m. there were no positive thoughts, just a bunch of frayed nerves he was struggling to keep under control. When he finally fell asleep at around four, he entered a dream world and somewhere in that world all the bad shit disappeared, and he’s woken up feeling good.
He throws back the covers. Even though he sleeps alone these days, he still sleeps on the side of the bed he has slept on since being married. The other side barely has any wrinkles in it. He puts on his robe and slippers and walks through to the kitchen. The house is warm thanks to two heat pumps that have been running during the night. He has no appetite, but forces himself to eat anyway. A bowl of cereal and a glass of orange juice and his hands stay calm the entire time. These are, he thinks, the hands of a killer. He makes toast and burns it so he tosses it into the trash. He puts in four fresh slices and gets it right, but doesn’t eat them, just leaves them in the toaster. It was the same way when he killed the lawyer. Same way when he killed the second one too. No appetite. No reason this morning should be any different.
It’s cold outside. For some reason he’s suddenly transported back to when he was a kid, when he’d have to bike to school in freezing-cold weather along with thousands of other kids across the city, icy roads and frosty air, breath forming clouds in front of his face. Only right now it’s a bit darker than what it was when he used to leave for school. It’s still only seven thirty. People are driving to work with the lights on and with coffee cups in their drink holders, driving to a job involving numbers or materials or words or physical labor—none of them, he imagines, with the idea in mind of killing somebody. It’s too early for the protesters to be showing up. He turns on the radio. Not too early for the protesters to be calling in.
He parks on the street between the office building and the courts, thinks better of it, then moves his car just around the corner, adjacent to the building he’ll be shooting from. Soon this whole area will fill up, and after the shooting he doesn’t want to get caught in a traffic jam ten yards from the back entrance to the court.
It’s a thirty-second walk back to the office building. He takes the stairs up to the third floor and unlocks the office door. The duct tape has held the drop cloth in place, so the office is dark. He paces the office for half a minute, then sits down and leans against the wall. He’s brought a thermos with him full of coffee, and he pours himself one and slowly sips at it and watches the office as it slowly becomes lighter. He takes a photograph of Angela out from his pocket and rests it on his thigh.
What are you doing? she asks him.
“Today’s the day,” he tells her.
Joe Victim: A Thriller
Paul Cleave's books
- The Face of a Stranger
- The Dark Assassin
- Death of a Stranger
- Seven Dials
- The Whitechapel Conspiracy
- Anne Perry's Christmas Mysteries
- Funeral in Blue
- Defend and Betray
- Cain His Brother
- A Breach of Promise
- A Dangerous Mourning
- A Sudden Fearful Death
- Dark Places
- Angels Demons
- Digital Fortress
- After the Funeral
- The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding
- A Pocket Full of Rye
- A Murder is Announced
- A Caribbean Mystery
- Ordeal by Innocence
- Lord Edgware Dies
- A Stranger in the Mirror
- After the Darkness
- Are You Afraid of the Dark
- Master of the Game
- Nothing Lasts Forever
- Rage of Angels
- The Doomsday Conspiracy
- The Naked Face
- The Sands of Time
- The Stars Shine Down
- Pretty Little Liars #14
- Ruthless: A Pretty Little Liars Novel
- The Lying Game #6: Seven Minutes in Heaven
- True Lies: A Lying Game Novella
- Everything We Ever Wanted
- All the Things We Didn't Say
- Pretty Little Liars #15: Toxic
- Pretty Little Liars
- The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly
- Homicide in Hardcover
- The Lies That Bind
- A Cookbook Conspiracy
- Charlie, Presumed Dead
- Manhattan Mayhem
- Ripped From the Pages
- Tangled Webs
- A Baby Before Dawn
- A Hidden Secret: A Kate Burkholder Short Story
- A Cry in the Night
- Breaking Silence
- Operation: Midnight Rendezvous
- Long Lost: A Kate Burkholder Short Story
- Pray for Silence
- The Dead Will Tell: A Kate Burkholder Novel
- Wherever Nina Lies
- Fear the Worst: A Thriller
- The Naturals, Book 2: Killer Instinct
- Never Saw It Coming
- Operation: Midnight Guardian
- Operation: Midnight Tango
- Operation: Midnight Escape
- Cut to the Bone: A Body Farm Novel
- Eve
- Nearly Gone
- Pretty Baby
- The Bone Thief: A Body Farm Novel-5
- Bones of Betrayal
- CARVED IN BONE
- Madonna and Corpse
- The Bone Yard
- The Breaking Point: A Body Farm Novel
- Bad Guys
- Bad Move (Zack Walker Series, Book One)
- Sin una palabra
- Stone Rain
- Broken Promise: A Thriller
- El accidente
- Bone Island 01 - Ghost Shadow
- Bone Island 02 - Ghost Night
- Bone Island 03 - Ghost Moon
- Deadly Gift
- Deadly Harvest
- Deadly Night
- The Dead Room
- The Death Dealer
- Unhallowed Ground
- The Night Is Alive
- The Night Is Watching
- A Grave Matter
- Alert: (Michael Bennett 8)
- In the Dark
- Mortal Arts (A Lady Darby Mystery)
- Picture Me Dead
- The Betrayed (Krewe of Hunters)
- The Dead Play On
- Breakdown
- Brush Back
- Critical Mass