Joe Victim: A Thriller

“It’s a stupid message,” she says.

“There’s more. Tell her I got the message, and that it’s happening tomorrow.”

“It’s. Happening. Tomorrow,” she says, writing it down in that messy scrawl of hers. I know what’s coming up before she even asks. “Wait, Joe, are you saying you got the message and the message is happening tomorrow? Or that you’re not getting the message until tomorrow?”

Adam is still grinning at me. Something here is amusing him.

“Just say exactly what I told you,” I tell Mom. “That I got the message and it’s happening tomorrow.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” she says.

“It will to my girlfriend.”

“Okay, Joe, but you’re really making this difficult,” she says, and I imagine she and my lawyer are going to get on great when he calls her. “I’ll talk to her first thing in the morning,” she says.

“No. Call her now, Mom. And if she’s not home and you call her tomorrow, then the message changes, okay? In fact, change the message. Tell her it’s Saturday,” I say, because if she rings tomorrow she’ll say tomorrow, which will make it Sunday. “You get that? It’s very important. You’re telling her I got her message and it’s happening on Saturday. This Saturday. Tomorrow Saturday.”

“I’m not an idiot, Joe.”

“I know that, Mom.”

“Then why do you talk to me sometimes as if I am?”

“It’s my fault,” I tell her.

“I know it’s your fault. Why would I think otherwise?”

“So you’ll call her now then?”

“Okay, Joe.”

“I love . . .” I start, but the phone is dead. “You,” I finish.

I hang up the receiver. Adam smiles at me. He doesn’t need to say how much he’s about to enjoy this, because it’s written all over his face. He walks me back to my cell. The sandwich is where I threw it, wrapped up, sitting on the floor opposite my bed. I was hoping somehow it would have disappeared.

“You remember the deal, don’t you, Joe. You remember there are two sandwiches.”

“I remember.”

“See? That’s good. Because lately all anybody hears from you is that you can’t remember anything. Pick it up,” he says, and points to the sandwich.

I pick the sandwich up and unwrap it. “Before you take a bite,” he says, “why don’t you go ahead and take another look at what’s inside.”

I take another look. Cheese. Some kind of meat that looks like it’s come from a part of the animal nobody could identify, or perhaps the animal itself couldn’t be identified. And in there the clump of pubic hair, tangled up and stuck to everything.

I put the sandwich back together. I think of Melissa and escaping jail, the books, the message. I think of better times from the past and think about the better times coming up.

“The deal,” Adam says.

The deal. I hold my breath and take the first bite.





Chapter Thirty-Five


Shooting The Cleaner at the casino fell through. The casino wasn’t happy with the story line. They didn’t like a TV show suggesting desperate people in desperate times would go into the casino with a Plan A and a Plan B. Plan A was to bet everything they owned on red or black. Plan B all depended on how plan A went. There were two plan Bs. The first was to take the winnings and pay off the mortgage. That was the Plan B everybody hoped for. A fifty percent chance of doubling your money to make your life much better. A paid mortgage, a new car, some cool toys. The problem was it also came with a fifty percent chance of losing your money and making it a lot worse. That’s where the second plan B came into effect. That plan B involved heading into the toilets and taking a bunch of pills or slicing up your wrists or sticking a gun in your mouth.

The problem was the other Plan B happened more often than people would think. It wasn’t something the casino wanted people made aware of. It’s the sort of thing they would give low odds on if you could bet against it. They thought it wasn’t good for business. They were probably right too. Having posters on the wall of guys in suits throwing money into the air at the roulette wheel while pretty women laughed and smiled weren’t going to look good surrounded by posters of people dead in bathrooms with slogans saying Come roll the dice. So for the last month the casino has been saying yes and then last night they said no. The storyline is still going ahead. They have external shots of the casino. No problem there. And they have internal shots from a documentary shot five years earlier, and back then the casino signed a waiver to allow the footage to be used. Well, now it was going to get used in The Cleaner.