Joe Victim: A Thriller

Except Joe.

Because Joe is losing balance. The problem—and of course there were always going to be problems and he was a fool to think it could be otherwise—is that the shot has taken Joe in the chest, maybe in the shoulder, and certainly not in the head like he wanted. Maybe it was the dynamics of the bullet, or the nerves—he doesn’t know. What he does know is that the Red Rage is screaming at him to take another shot, and of course he’s going to. He still has time.

The two officers holding Joe up don’t seem to feel any responsibility to him. They let him go and run for cover. Joe, without the aid of his human crutches, falls into a very similar pile to the one he started in when exiting the van earlier. Detective Kent hides behind Schroder’s car. Everybody is hiding—all except Joe and Melissa.

Melissa. And why would she hide? He shot Joe in the shoulder just the way she always wanted him to. She starts dragging Joe toward the ambulance. The whole shooting and collecting part of the plan must still be going through her mind. He puts the crosshairs in the middle of her body. It may not be a kill shot, but at the very least the police will figure out who she is. The Red Rage is pleased by the idea.

He pulls the trigger.

This time the gun bucks in his hands and the gunshot is much quieter, almost only a fraction of the first, or at least it seems that way because his ears are still ringing from the first shot, and maybe it’s quieter anyway because it’s a different type of bullet. The barrel pulls up into the drop cloth and pulls it up off the ground. With the world reacting below him, he again spends a second determining what has gone wrong, and quickly decides nothing has, that he’s lost balance because of the platform he’s lying on.

He repositions the gun and sees Melissa hasn’t been hit. He has one shot left. Her or Joe. Well, Joe’s already been hit, and if luck is on Raphael’s side and not on Joe’s, then that fucker is going to bleed to death in the parking lot. So he chooses Melissa. He pulls the trigger in the exact same way he pulled the damn thing all those times out where he buried the lawyers and shot the shit out of defenseless tin cans, and this time the gun bucks so wildly it’s wrenched from his hands. He hears his finger break. Feels it even more. He rolls off the bench and hits the floor, his shoulder taking the impact.

He doesn’t understand . . .

And he’s out of time now. And out of bullets.

He gets to his feet. He’s already been here longer than he should have. A look out the gap in the drop cloth shows a cop helping Melissa and Joe toward the ambulance and Schroder bursting through the back door into the parking lot. He doesn’t know how much time has gone. Fifteen seconds, maybe. Too long, definitely.

He doesn’t bother putting the gun back into the ceiling. He peels the latex gloves off and it hurts his finger like crazy. He stuffs them into his pocket. He pulls off the earmuffs and tosses them onto the floor, then realizes that’s stupid, that his fingerprints are going to be on them. Fuck. He’s pulled his gloves off too early. Has he touched any of this stuff without gloves? Maybe. When he assembled the gun. When he fired it the other day. When he came here Saturday night. Was he wearing gloves then? He thinks he was, but suddenly he’s not so sure.

He doesn’t have time to wipe down the gun. He looks around. Looks at the paint. Looks at the gun. It’ll work. He pulls his gloves back on, then twenty seconds later he’s heading down the stairs.





Chapter Sixty-Two


All hell is breaking loose.

Joe Middleton is on the ground. There’s blood over the front of him. His blood. He’s writhing in agony. Kent has taken cover behind Schroder’s car. Two of the armed officers have also taken cover behind different cars. They’re hunkered down trying to figure out where they’re being shot from and by how many people. One of them is talking quickly into a radio. A paramedic starts doing her best to drag Joe out of the line of fire and toward the ambulance. The security guard is staying low, making his way back toward the courthouse. People in the street are shouting and ducking down and covering their heads with their arms and placards, no more two, four, six, eight from anybody.

Schroder spends two seconds taking it all in. The way everybody is hiding tells him the direction the gunfire is coming from. There’s an office building across the road. He looks up and sees an open window with a curtain behind it. He stays low and moves over to his car and squats down next to Kent.

“What the—” he says.

“One shot,” she says, holding a pistol in her hands. “Office building over the road. I saw muzzle fire. Middleton is down.”

“Why was he back out—”

“Doesn’t matter right now,” she says. “All that matters is some fucker is shooting at us.”

“At us? Or at him?” he asks.