Joe Victim: A Thriller

You’re going to kill him?

“Yes,” he tells her, but of course she isn’t really here, he knows that, but boy, wouldn’t it be great if somehow, somewhere, she really could hear him. “I know it doesn’t bring you back,” he tells her, “but I hope it makes you feel better.”

You think killing him honors me? she asks. You think taking a life in your daughter’s name is something mom would want? Or I would want?

“Yes,” he says.

She doesn’t answer him.

“Isn’t it?”

Yes, she says.

“I wasn’t there to protect you. This isn’t going to make it right, but it’s all I can do.”

I’m sorry you weren’t there to protect me either, she says. You were meant to be there. That was your job.

“I know,” he says, and he’s crying now. “I’m sorry.”

Thank you for killing him for me, she says, and I’m glad you’re doing it in my name. Make him suffer, Daddy. Make him suffer and then he can rot in Hell. I just wish you could kill him ten times over. A hundred times over.

“I miss you, baby,” he says, and he puts the photograph back into his pocket and reaches up into the ceiling for the gun.





Chapter Fifty


I wake up at seven o’clock. We all do. A loud buzzer goes off. It rips into our dreams and puts an end to any of the good stuff going on in there. Though in this case the good stuff was me remembering the blank look on Ronald’s face when the hammer cracked open his skull. He just stood there staring at me for a few seconds. I think he knew he was dead, but his body was still catching up. I thought he would have dropped like a rock, but it took two or three seconds for him to fall. It was the strangest thing, a physics-defying thing. Killers like to say they don’t remember what happened—that they just snapped, that it was a dream. But the exact opposite is true. Killing has a way of making you feel alive—who the hell would want to forget that?

I use the toilet and wait patiently in my cell for thirty minutes until my block is taken through for breakfast, which appears to be something a patient with the Ebola virus coughed up. My stomach is feeling good. Whatever was in that sandwich has done its best, it’s gone through the motions, and I’ve come out on top. Adam comes and finds me. He looks me up and down. He doesn’t look happy.

“You look better, Middleton.”

“Fuck you,” I tell him.

He laughs. “We showed those photos of you eating that sandwich to a lot of our buddies,” he tells me. “Got a whole lot of laughs.”

“I just need a list,” I tell him.

“What?”

“A list. Because when I get out of here, I’m going to fucking kill every one of them, and I’m going to start with you.”

He laughs at me again, even harder this time. “Christ, Joe, you really do make me laugh. This prison needs people like you, and thankfully for us you’re going to be here for a very long time—unless they end up hanging you, which would be a shame, I guess, until the next funny bastard comes along and we forget all about you.”

He takes me down to the showers. I get cleaned up and Adam tosses me some clothes. It’s a suit. It’s the same suit other prisoners have worn in the past who are my size. The same suit I wore when I was charged a few days after I was arrested. A gray suit with a dark blue shirt and black shoes. I look like a bank manager. Only one without shoelaces or a belt. Adam promises me I’ll be given those before I leave. The shirt has stains in the armpits and smells like cabbage and I shake it out, hoping whatever head lice are asleep in there lands on the floor.

I’m taken back to my cell. I have to wait an hour. Most of it I spend sitting on the edge of my bed wondering about the trial. For the first time the reality of it is all kicking in. I always knew this day was coming, but part of me always believed it never would—part of me was sure I’d be out of here by now, that the police would have found a reason to let me go. The trial date just kept on rolling forward and now it’s here, and suddenly the nerves of the trial kick in and I almost throw up. And then I do throw up. When I’m done I back away from the toilet and Caleb Cole is standing in my doorway.

“A farewell present,” he says, and then he rushes me with something sharp.