Joe Victim: A Thriller

She’s glad she came out here. She almost turned around and left him to it once she realized where they were going, but turning around isn’t in her nature. Plus, who knew when there’d be another opportunity to go into his car? And time is short. And, of course, Schroder is now part of her escape plan. She takes out the C-four. She reaches up and under the steering column, right around toward the back of the car stereo. The square block changes shape slightly as she jams it to a stop back there. Then she reaches back under and jams the detonator into the not-so-perfectly-square lump of clay, the receiver attached to the end of it.

She gets back to her own car. She yawns heavily for a few seconds—she was up half of last night and more than anything right now she wants to take a nap, but can’t. She drives past the guard booth who asks her to pop the trunk to make sure nobody is hiding in there. When she gets out to the motorway she pulls over and takes off the baby bump, and suddenly she’s no longer nine months pregnant, no longer overweight and needing to use a bathroom every fifteen minutes. She tosses it into the backseat. She tosses the red wig back there too.

She programs the new address into the GPS function of her cell phone. Like always, it takes her and her GPS application a few minutes to come to an understanding, but they get there in the end, and then she has the directions of the man who is going to help her shoot Joe Middleton. But first she needs to go into town. She needs to find a new place where Joe can be shot from. And she already has a pretty good idea where that will be.





Chapter Seven


The prison officer has bloodshot eyes, as if every night while he sleeps the unibrow above them extends downward and scratches at them. He hands over the tray of Schroder’s belongings. Car keys, wallet, phone, coins—actually, that’s a negative on the car keys. He looks into the empty tray, then pats down his pockets.

“My keys aren’t here,” he says.

The prison officer doesn’t look impressed. He looks like he’s being accused of something. “You didn’t give me any car keys.”

“I must have.”

“Then they’d be here,” the prison officer says, his unibrow turning into a uni-V.

“That’s my point. I gave them to you and they should be here.”

“And my point is that if you did give them to me then I’d have just given them back. Maybe you dropped them. Maybe they’re hanging out of your car door. Maybe they’re in the ignition. Maybe you left them at home and walked here.”

Schroder shakes his head. “Unlikely,” he says. “To any of those.”

“No. What’s unlikely is that I’d hide them from you, or steal them. What’s unlikely is that I gave them to some guy locked up inside and told him to take a joyride. Tell you what, you go take a look outside. If they’re not there, then you come back in and we watch the security footage,” he says, and points to a camera above the desk. “I can bet you a hundred bucks right now that you didn’t hand any keys to me.”

Schroder looks up at the camera, then pats down his pockets again. Did he lock his car? Of course he did. He always does. Only this time he was distracted by the pregnant woman. Distracted enough to leave them in the ignition? Maybe. Certainly distracted enough not to notice he didn’t put them into the tray when emptying his pocket. But does he ever? When he comes here it’s just like going through security at an airport—he doesn’t really notice what he’s taking out of his pockets, all he’s focused on is making them empty.

“Okay,” he says. “I’ll check outside.”

“You do that.”

Schroder follows the corridor back the way he came, past the waiting area, past the corridor to the bathrooms, past more puddles of water that have formed from other visitors. He stands at the door and puts on his jacket then heads into the rain. There’s a similar number of cars in the lot as before—some gone, some new ones. The pregnant woman’s car is gone. Probably whoever she was visiting she couldn’t visit for long, her future baby pushing against her bladder would have put an end to that. He tightens his collar.

His car is locked. His keys are lying on the ground next to where the pregnant woman’s car was. He must have been carrying them in his hand. He must have dropped them when he caught her. He feels like an idiot. Part of him thinks he ought to go back inside and apologize to the prison officer, but it’s a small part, nowhere near big enough to make him actually do it. The guy was too big a dick for that.