Joe Victim: A Thriller

I’m naked from the waist up. My clothes are in a bloody pile at the foot of the bed. It’s no loss—it’s just the cheap jail suit the warden will replace with one of his own, or with thirty bucks from the petty cash drawer. I’m becoming increasingly concerned about how real the dream is feeling. I try to focus on Abby, which kind of works and kind of doesn’t, because when I try to think about her features, I can’t find them. What color are her eyes? What shape is her nose? Her cheeks? Her hair? Then I try to remember Mom’s new husband. I try to remember my sessions with Benson Barlow. I try to remember Walt’s funeral, but maybe I didn’t go. The neighbor with the fridge, what’s his name? And what did Schroder do to get himself locked up?

It’s a bad dream. That’s all. Just like the bad dream I had following the removal of my testicle.

So I go with it. I stick with the dream and see where it leads. My biggest red flag, if I’m looking for one—which I’m not—is that out of all the people I could dream about, why would The Sally be one of them?

It wouldn’t.

I would never dream about somebody like Sally.

The Sally.

Never.

And that, more than anything, tells me that this is real.

“You need to go to a hospital, Joe,” The Sally says.

I look around the room. Sally’s bedroom. This must be a dream come true for her. There’s a poster on one wall of a vase of flowers, but no vase of flowers anywhere. Why not put up a picture of a window and keep the curtains closed? There’s a mirror above a chest of drawers and poked into the side of the mirror are what must be family photographs. They take up a lot of real estate and I guess that’s so there’s less reflective space and less of a chance for Sally to keep seeing herself.

“It hurts,” I tell her, which is perhaps the most honest thing I’ve ever told her.

“The bullet went right through,” The Sally says. “You’ve got muscle and ligament damage. I’ve stopped the bleeding, and you’re okay for now, and I’ve cleaned it, but it’s going to get infected, and you’re probably never going to be able to use your shoulder properly.”

I shake my head at the thought of that, of my shoulder locking up and going into spasm right when I’m in the middle of cut-cut-cutting. “Fix it,” I tell her.

“You need surgery. It’s not going to heal by itself,” she says.

“Then operate.”

“I can’t.”

“Find somebody who can.”

Melissa steps away from the window. She looks down at me and she looks concerned. “I think what Sally is saying,” she says, “is that she’s done all she can. Isn’t that right?” she asks, looking over at The Sally.

The Sally nods. “You should still take him to a hospital. If you don’t want it infected and if there’s any chance of him using it a hundred percent again, then you have to take him.”

Melissa nods. “It’s funny,” she says, “because you’re talking and all I hear you saying is that we have no more use for you,” she says, and she raises her hand and there’s a gun in it and she points it at The Sally, and in the moment I realize that Melissa hasn’t changed at all, that she’s still the same woman I fell in love with, that I’m so lucky to have found her.





Chapter Seventy-Two


The office has no dividing walls. Just four walls and a door, and a window that’s currently being covered by a painter’s drop cloth. Duct tape is holding it up. Schroder doesn’t need to pull it aside to know what it overlooks, but he does anyway—him on the left, Hutton on the right—and they stare down into the back of the courthouse. At the edges of the cordons police officers are restraining the last few university students who are trying to push their way into the scene to get photographs of themselves drinking, probably to post online, but for the most part the students are still hanging back. They’re down there hugging each other—there are a lot of tears, a lot of people sitting down with their knees pulled into their chests. The majority of people are walking away from the scene, just wanting to get home. Some have blood on their faces.

“An easy shot to make,” Hutton says.