Joe Victim: A Thriller

Another phone call to Detective Hutton gave him little in the way of information about this morning’s homicide, but enough to know that there’s nothing of value in it to Jonas Jones, and enough to know what Hutton meant when he said it was a bad one. The victim was an ex-con who did time for smuggling weapons into the country. The smuggling was one thing, but what those weapons were used for was a whole different thing. He didn’t care who the buyers were, just as the buyers didn’t care about the people who would have died if they had managed to detonate the various explosives they were trying to stack around the parliament building in the country’s capital city. Schroder wasn’t so sure much of the public would have cared either if the country had woken up one morning a hundred politicians shorter than the day before. The guy who imported the explosives was Derek Rivers and Derek was treated to twelve years of cinder-block views. He was released from jail a year ago, and this morning was treated to two shots to the chest. According to Hutton, electronic explosive sniffers have confirmed that Rivers has recently been in touch with explosives.

“There was a manhole in the wardrobe,” Hutton had told him. “He’d stored weapons and explosives under there. Our best guess is whoever he bought them for is who shot him. That means somebody is covering their tracks. That means—”

“The explosives are going to be used for something pretty bad,” Schroder had finished for him before they’d hung up.

Schroder could remember Rivers from the case way back when. He was a real piece of work. Not the kind of guy anybody is going to miss. Nothing in it for the psychic. Not yet. Maybe if somebody manages to blow something up and take a lot of lives—then there’s a whole lot of somethings in it for Jonas.

Jonas Jones.

He can barely stand the smug bastard. In the past Jonas has ruined cases, gotten in the way, he’s released information to the public that has sprung police traps and gotten people hurt. There are no real psychics, but somehow Jones has a loyal fan base that seems to be growing by the day. And, if Jones is to find Detective Calhoun’s body that fan base will grow stronger, it will grow in numbers, and no doubt Jones will churn out another bullshit book. At the very least it will make for great TV.

In some ways he hopes Joe keeps his mouth shut. Trumping that desire is Calhoun’s family’s right to have his body returned. In the background, of course, is the bonus. Despite everything, he needs the money. His family does. He’s profiting on something bad, but hey, dentists profit on cavities, roofers profit from storms, car wreckers profit from accidents.

Sometimes Schroder likes to think that, honestly, he didn’t have any real choice but to accept the job. After all, he was unemployed. He has a select set of job skills that were of no use because he couldn’t be a cop again, and though he had applied for a PI license, he had been turned down with no explanation within a week of applying. He was sure it was something to do with the police department. Somebody somewhere had thrown a wrench in the works because they felt the last thing the city needed was another private investigator. He could flip burgers. He couldn’t sell cars. He could go back to school. He couldn’t work in retail. And when the TV studio approached him to be the police consultant on set for Jonas’s show, plus for other TV shows, he took it. He gave it only a day’s thought. It was better pay than being on the force. Fewer hours. Less bullshit. Only dealing with Jonas made him want to shower more. If it was all about Jonas, he’d rather have shot himself. But it’s not. It’s about his family, about paying the bills, about keeping the house, about forging ahead and finding a new career path.

And anyway—dealing with Jonas is only a small part of his job and, right now, not part of his job at all.

One of the producers of the TV show The Cleaner comes over and tells him he needs to finish up, that shooting is going to begin in fifteen minutes. The show is about a pair of crime-scene cleaners who struggle with the emotional impact of a rising crime rate, centering around a main character on the edge of a nervous breakdown who, scriptwriters have told him, keeps thinking about how he could get away with a murder of his own since he can make a crime scene “disappear.” They’re currently shooting the sixth episode, with the first going to air in two weeks’ time. Already there are billboards up across the city, ads on TV, articles in newspapers to promote the show. If the reviews are good, it will continue to be shot. It doesn’t bother Schroder either way. This show, or the next show, or another show—he gets paid the same either way. He guesses The Cleaner has an okay concept—he’s not big on TV shows—but it’s his job to help stage the scenes and to give authenticity to them. The diner they’re shooting in today is a real diner, closed for the afternoon, but the owner, who is being paid for having his business shut for the day, offered to cook Schroder a quick lunch. Schroder isn’t big into hugging people, but he definitely could have hugged that guy.

He finishes up his meal and hides the plate behind the counter. The story, so it goes, is that two men broke in during the night and tortured the owner for information, pounding bits of him into the floor with a hammer, getting blood and bone in places that require elbow grease and chemicals and witty banter and no doubt some mood music too when it goes through editing.

The actors get into their positions.

“Everything good?” one of the scriptwriters asks him, and the scriptwriter is wearing a T-shirt with the words Climb on board Uncle Daddy’s love bus across it, and Schroder wonders if the scriptwriter scripted that himself. He hopes not—because that doesn’t look good for the show.

Schroder takes one last look out over the scene. “For the most part it all looks fine.”

“Most part?”

“Chalk outline,” he says, and not for the first time.