Joe Victim: A Thriller

He can’t remember the last time he had a good night’s sleep. He has had them since his daughter was murdered, but only when his body has become so exhausted all its core systems have shut down and it was either sleep or die. Often he’d hope it was the latter, only to wake up to find it was the former. Often he thinks of ways to change that. Life isn’t great when you wake up in the morning and think about what your friends will say about you at your funeral. It’s not great thinking about the way you’ll die, the best way to not make a mess for everybody, and there are a lot of ways—a lot of clever ways and a lot of simple ways. He has planned his suicide how many times? A hundred? A thousand? Once a day, sometimes five times a day, sometimes more. Sometimes he can’t figure out why he hasn’t done it already. It’s just a matter of time. He knows that. Whenever he hears about somebody who has killed himself, he thinks Seems like a good idea to me.

Of course he wants to be strong. Wants to be strong for his dead daughter, for his son-in-law, and of course for his grandchildren. Not that he ever sees any of them. Three months after Angela died, his son-in-law moved away. He took the kids with him and traveled to the other side of the world. He had family in England. In a small village somewhere. A village, he said, that didn’t harbor crazy people like Joe.

Raphael is more alone than he has ever been in his life.

He stands in the doorway and watches the car pulling into the parking lot. Probably some other poor bastard who’s lost somebody in this city. The car comes to a stop. One person climbs out. Then a second. Both of them flick their collars up against the rain and walk quickly toward him. Schroder and somebody else. His heart races a little. Police don’t come visiting unless they have bad news. His wife? Oh God, has his wife followed through on his fantasy? Has she upended a bottle of sleeping pills?

“Detective,” Raphael says, his voice a little shaky. He offers his hand.

“It’s no longer detective,” Schroder says, shaking it, “just Carl now. This is Detective Inspector Rebecca Kent,” he adds, and then says to Kent, “and this is Raphael Moore.”

He looks at Kent. Her hair is wet and strands are stuck to the side of her face. He has the urge to reach forward and stroke some of them away, and thinks he has that urge because Detective Kent is an extremely attractive woman.

“It’s an awful night,” he says, and he figures if he can just keep them talking about the inane, then he won’t have to hear about the real.

“You’ve just wrapped up a session?” Kent asks, and all three of them glance through the open doorway into the hall where there are six stragglers sipping coffee and talking. He wonders if the two detectives—no, wait, one detective and one no-longer-detective—recognize them. At some point over the last few years these people were all given bad news. It’s a bad-news kind of country, a worse-case-scenario kind of city.

“About ten minutes ago,” Raphael says, looking back at them now. “Has something happened? Is it my wife?”

Schroder shakes his head. “No, no, it’s not that kind of visit,” Schroder says.

Raphael breathes a sigh of relief. Thank God. He glances back inside. Hopefully the others will leave soon. Hopefully he can get rid of these two quickly. He wants to get back to Stella. Stella with her fake baby and her plan to kill Joe Middleton, and really, has there been a day that has gone by where he has not thought about murdering Middleton just as often as he’s thought about killing himself? “We haven’t seen you in a while, Carl.”

“I know. I’m sorry, I’ve been busy,” Schroder says.

Raphael doubts that’s it. In the beginning both he and Schroder thought it was good to have a police presence at the group, but it turned out they were wrong—it turned out a police presence gave the group somebody to blame.

“You should come back,” Raphael says. “It was helpful. It made the people here feel like they had a voice. So why are you here then? Something to do with Middleton? This about his trial?”

“In a way,” Schroder says, and he steps closer to the doorway, but the rain is still getting him. Raphael doesn’t make any more room. He wants to keep this meeting outside. Wants to keep it short.

“Was Tristan Walker one of your group?” Kent asks.

“Tristan Walker?” he asks. “To be honest,” he says, “I’m not so sure I’m comfortable telling you who comes along here. I mean, all of these people have the right to privacy,” he says, and the moment the words are out of his mouth he knows it makes no sense—half a minute ago he was asking Schroder to start coming back.

“Please, Raphael,” Schroder says, “don’t make this difficult for us. We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t important.”

Raphael nods. “Why? Has he done something?”

“Did he come to the group?” Kent asks, and she flashes her smile at him and for a brief moment Raphael wants to tell her everything about his secret fantasy to wrap himself in plastic and hide himself beneath the house and take a bunch of pills so that nobody will ever find him, nobody will ever know what happened, so that he will have just disappeared from this life and this world. He imagines a lot of men would give in to that smile, and on other nights he would too. But not tonight. Not with Stella waiting for him, not with thoughts of killing Joe Middleton running around in his head.

“I contacted him a few times, but he always said no, then I stopped trying.”

“Why’d you stop trying?” Schroder asks.

Raphael shrugs. “Well, he wasn’t thrilled with me contacting him,” he says. “But then I heard a rumor and realized he wasn’t really the kind of person I wanted in this support group.”