Joe Victim: A Thriller

He looks her up and down, at the pregnant stomach, and no doubt he’s thinking her husband is a bastard. “When Angela died,” he says, “Janice left me too. A thing like that, well, marriages often don’t survive.”


“If you could be the person to do it,” she says, “if you were the one to pull the lever or push the button or do whatever it is to finish Joe, would you do it?”

“No,” he says, and he picks the chair back up and puts it into the stack. “I wish I could, but it’s not who I am.”

She rubs at her belly again. This has been a huge waste of time. Three days left and fate led her to the wrong place. It’s her own fault for believing in fate. And she feels stupid for seeing something in Raphael that obviously isn’t there.

“I should be going,” she says.

“It was nice meeting you,” he says.

She grabs her jacket and heads to the back of the hall. Her stolen umbrella has been stolen. She wonders if that’s the universe finding balance. Others are leaving the parking lot—some are standing under the edge of the building chatting, and some of them are smoking. Others are still inside using the bathroom and sipping coffee. It’s still pouring with rain, and the wind has picked up and tugs at the umbrellas of the others out here. She walks carefully to her car and unlocks it and gets in, the jacket protecting her upper body, but her pants are soaking wet. She hates driving in the pregnancy suit, so she takes it off, an awkward procedure that takes about half a minute because she didn’t take her jacket off first. Nobody can see her through all the rain inside her dark car, and even if they could nobody would know what she was doing.

She gets the bump off and tosses it into the backseat, and she’s getting ready to remove the wig when the passenger door swings open and Raphael climbs in.

“So, Stella,” he says, “looking at her stomach and then at the bump in the backseat, the bump that still has her gun inside it, “how about you tell me why you’re really here?”





Chapter Seventeen


The fresh jumpsuit is a little stiff, washed with too much starch and not enough care and certainly without any love. It scratches at my neck. I keep trying to adjust it. Shower time is over and we’re an hour away from being put back into our cells, but I’ve come back to mine anyway to be away from Caleb Cole and his thoughts, and to spend some time alone with my own.

I pick up one of the books Melissa gave me, not the same one I started reading earlier. There are six books in total. The people on the covers with flawless skin and defined muscles all look happy because none of them are facing a possible hanging. I scan through the book looking for Melissa’s message. There are no pencil marks. No marked pages. I flick through the third one, no longer reading, just looking for signs, but still no dog-eared pages, no slips of paper coming out, no underlined passages. Same with the fourth book. Same with the fifth. There is no message here. Same with the sixth. The books have all been read before. The spines are broken and the pages a little dirty.

I head out into the common area. The only privileges we have right now are TV privileges. One TV for thirty people doesn’t seem like much of a privilege, but it certainly helps with the boredom. The buttons have been removed from the set and the remote control lives somewhere beyond our cell walls, which means there are no arguments between us as to what we want to watch. The remote will occasionally make an appearance in the hand of a prison guard if there’s something on that he thinks we may want to watch. Which there never is.

Tonight is the news, but me, my cellmates, we are the news, so we don’t bother watching it since it’s nothing more than a window into our lives, or the lives of people just like us. It’s on, just footage blurring into more footage the same way the tedium of jail blends into more tedium. Colors and shapes of people doing shit, getting shot, going to war, and stealing from the economy. Ads come and go—pills for diabetes, pills for blood pressure, pills for getting an erection, pills that I’d need too if I were to try touching the women in those ads. All those guys need to do to wake up a flagging erection is to corner somebody half their age.

A current-events show comes on after the news. There’s a stage with gray carpet and blue walls, and in the middle stands a man behind a podium. He’s talking to the camera. After a minute he’s joined by two more men who have podiums of their own, one to the left of the stage and one to the right. They walk out to what can only be described as unenthusiastic applause, as if the people in the audience were dragged in from jury duty.