Joe Victim: A Thriller

“You’ve let me come this far, Wilson. No reason to stop now. All I’m asking is to look at the security footage. That’s all. Even that may lead to nothing. Then I’ll get my arm fixed, and then I’ll come into the station and maybe I can help.”


A patrol car pulls into the parking lot. It comes to a stop next to them. Hutton goes over and talks to them about securing the ambulance, then the two of them head back into the hospital, circling their way around to the front and going into the main entrance. Hutton shows his badge to a woman behind a reception counter and tells her they need to talk to somebody about the security cameras. The woman looks excited. She’s putting two and two together and coming up with an answer that suggests all the commotion on the other side of the hospital is linked to something these two cops are looking for. She nods, tells them it’ll be just a minute, then makes a phone call. They say nothing to each other as they watch her, as if their focus can make her speed things along. It works because it takes only half the predicted time. She tells them somebody is on their way.

That somebody is Bevan Middleton—no relation to Joe Middleton—so he tells them as he shakes Hutton’s hand and then stares at Schroder’s broken arm. As he leads them to the security office he tells them he wanted to apply for the police force, but because he’s color-blind he wasn’t allowed. “I thought it was all about the thin blue line,” he tells them. “I thought police work was going to be about shades of gray, but it’s the reds and greens that fucked me.”

The security office is on the ground floor not far from the toilets, so the room smells of urinal cakes and disinfectant. There’s a bank of monitors on one wall, several different viewpoints across the hospital. There are a few computers on various counters, and one on the desk ahead of them, along with a flat-screen monitor that is almost as big as Schroder’s TV. Half the stuff in here is brand new, some ten years old, except for the decor, which is twenty years out of date. Schroder’s arm is good now. The shot he took has his arm humming along quite nicely, thank you very much. It has his mind humming nicely too.

“It’s all getting upgraded,” Bevan says. “So it’s the rear parking lot you want, huh?”

“Exactly,” Hutton says.

The guard starts playing around with a computer keyboard. A moment later the rear entrance shows up on the big monitor ahead of them. Its focus is on the five yards leading up to the doorway. Everybody leans forward a little, straining to see what’s in the not-so-sharp distance.

“That’s the ambulance,” Schroder says.

“Only just,” Hutton says.

“But it’s enough,” Schroder says.

“Can we enhance the image?” Hutton asks.

The guard shakes his head. “Not really.”

Schroder knew he was going to say that. On The Cleaner they would have enhanced the image and cleaned it up and it would have been perfect. They would have enhanced a reflection off a nearby windshield to have gotten a perfect look from a different angle, to have a cell phone number scrawled across the back of somebody’s hand. He wonders what Sherlock Holmes would have made of TV technology.

“Not even a little?” Hutton asks.

“It is what it is,” the guard says, and he enlarges the image and the quality drops off. They can see the ambulance and the two policemen guarding it, but no detail.

“Okay. Wind it back,” Schroder says. “Let’s see when it arrives.”

The guard starts winding it back. Other cars come and go. The shadows get fractionally longer. The day looks as though it gets colder. People are walking around backward. Twenty-five minutes earlier a car drives backward and parks near the ambulance, two people get out and walk backward and climb into the ambulance and then the ambulance backs away. The guard lets the footage play forward at normal speed without the need for anybody to tell him. The ambulance comes in. Blurry Melissa helps Fuzzy Joe out of the back. The sight of them both—even though the detail is poor—makes his skin crawl. They get into the dark blue van. They drive away. Then nothing, just a parked ambulance and other cars and life carrying on as normal. They can’t get a plate from the van.

“None of it helps,” Hutton says, “but we’ll put a call out. A dark blue van—hard to tell what make. I mean, it could be nothing, they may have changed cars again, but I’ll still put out the call. We might get lucky.”

Lucky. There’s that word again.

“Start going back,” Schroder tells the guard. “I want to see when that van first arrived.”

The guard nods enthusiastically as if it’s the best idea in the world. He starts running the footage backward. He jumps it in five-minute intervals. An hour before the ambulance showed up the van is suddenly there. The guard jumps forward five minutes again, then starts winding it back second by second until they see Melissa walking backward and then climbing into it. He presses play.