Joe Victim: A Thriller

Adam shakes his head. “You don’t get it, do you,” he says.


“Get what?”

“You don’t get to make choices. I heard you’ve already fucked up one test today, and now you just fucked up another. Come on, let’s go.”

They lead me back to my cell. We go through more doorways and pass other prison guards, more concrete walls and concrete floors and no daylight, no escape, no future. They make fun of me along the way, innocent kind of fun, really, especially compared to the fun I’ll have with them when my lawyer gets me out of here. When I was unfairly arrested, I was inundated by offers from lawyers all wanting to become my best friend. They wanted to defend me and they wanted the fame and business that came along with it. My trial is going to be the biggest the country has ever seen, and whoever defends me will become a household name. I couldn’t afford a lawyer, but that didn’t matter. My first lawyer’s name was Gabriel Gabel, a forty-six-year-old partner of Gabel, Wiley, and Dench. Apart from having somewhat of an unfortunate name, Gabel was my lawyer for six days when news of the death threats against him were made public. He was my lawyer for six more days after that before he disappeared off the face of the earth.

After that, a second lawyer jumped at the chance to defend me, the case somehow having become more famous since Gabel’s disappearance. Again it was six days before the death threats started flooding in, and this time my lawyer didn’t simply disappear, but was found in a car parking building with his head caved in by a hammer. I’m not sure how hard the police looked for his killer. I can’t imagine task forces hanging out in the conference room at the police station coming up with big ideas, I can’t imagine much overtime was put in. I doubt any of them lost any sleep.

No more lawyers wanted to be my best friend anymore. I was assigned a lawyer by the courts, and the death threats stopped. My lawyer was a man who didn’t want to defend me, but who had no choice, and that was made clear to the public. If the public kept killing my lawyers there would be no trial, and ultimately the public wanted a trial more than they wanted another dead lawyer.

Since then I’ve seen my lawyer less than half a dozen times. He doesn’t like me. I just think he needs to get to know me better. The trial starts in a matter of days, and I’ve been in jail twelve months and the wheels of justice seemed to have ground to a halt, only now they’re slowly moving forward again. Or wheels of injustice, really.

I think about what Schroder offered and I wonder if this is it for me, this cell, this part of the jail, if this is the best I can hope for. I wonder if fifty thousand dollars can make my life any better and decide that it can’t make it worse. The two prison guards send me through a final door to my cellblock and leave me to it. The cell doors are open, and the thirty of us who share this cellblock are free to roam around as far as the room allows, which isn’t far. We can chat, we can sit around a communal area and play cards or share stories, or sneak into one another’s cells for some fucking or some fighting. I sit in my cell and stare at the ceiling and suddenly I’m no longer alone.

“What makes you so popular?” Santa Kenny asks, and he’s standing in the doorway leaning against the wall. I haven’t been in the mood any other time to make conversation, and now is no different. I ignore the question, and a few moments later he fires off another one. “What do they want? Are they still trying to make you look guilty?”

I pick up one of the romance novels. I’ve read them all a couple of times, but there isn’t much else to do. This one I’m reading backward, trying to kill some time, enjoying the happily-ever-after becoming corrupted as the man with the abs and chiseled jaw and the woman with the beautiful hair and fantastic boobs drift apart to a time before they ever met.

“They just don’t get it,” Santa Kenny says. “They see us, the city is in a state of paranoia, and they see us and they target us for their blame. They can’t find the real guys, but they hate us because somebody always has to pay.”

I put the book down and look up at him. “It’s crazy the shit that makes us look guilty,” I tell him. “Hell, just because you were caught in a stolen car wearing a Santa suit with an eight-year-old boy locked in the trunk,” I say, “that doesn’t mean anything.”

“Exactly,” Santa Kenny says.

“And the fact it was in April didn’t help. It made you stand out.”

“Exactly. So what, it’s a crime now to wear a Santa suit around Easter?”

“Shouldn’t be,” I tell him. “You think it’s a crime to wear an Easter Bunny outfit during Christmas?”

“And how the fuck was I to know that kid was even in the back?”

“No way you could have.”

“And I wasn’t stealing the car, I thought it was mine. Looked like mine. And it was dark. People make mistakes.”