Joe Victim: A Thriller

Instead of the bathroom at the casino, they are using the bathroom on the second floor at the TV studio. Some set dressing has been added. Nicer doors. Nicer furnishings. They’ll fill in the background noise with some stock sounds of slot machines. It’ll work.

“So what do you think?” the scriptwriter asks, and it’s the same guy he dealt with yesterday, a guy by the name of Chuck Jones. Chuck is no relation to Jonas, and sometimes Schroder doubts that Chuck is related to anybody. “Blood look authentic enough?”

Schroder looks around the bathroom. Blood on the ceiling and high up on the wall. Blood from somebody putting a gun under their chin and pulling the trigger. Must be a powerful gun, going by all the fake blood. Must have made one hell of a make-believe sound. But he has seen it before, and this looks about right if only a little overdone.

“Looks fine,” Schroder says.

“So in this story line the body and police are long gone,” he says. “Suicide is three days earlier and the scene is clear.”

“Scene would be cleared quicker than that,” Schroder says. “Especially in a place like this.”

“Okay, cool, but in this case it hasn’t been. I don’t know, maybe there were complications. We’ll figure it out. Anyway the blood has dried. Dried pretty hard, and the guys are struggling to clean up. Jake, he climbs up on the toilet to try and reach up high and the toilet breaks away from the wall, and that’s when they find the hidden casino chips because they come out of the toilet tank. Of course the guys decide to keep them.”

“Sounds . . .” Schroder says, but doesn’t finish. Sounds what? Charming? Stupid?

“It’ll work,” Chuck says. “Like all good drama you want to throw some comedy in there somewhere.”

“The show is about cleaners scrubbing up after the dead,” Schroder says. “Here you’ve got some poor bastard who came into the casino hoping for the best and preparing for the worst, and the worst is what he got. You really think that can be that funny?”

“Anything can be funny if you deliver it the right way,” Chuck says. “Like I said, it’ll work. So, the guys are struggling because the blood has dried really good. It’s stuck between the tiles in the grouting.”

“You seem to have everything under control,” Schroder says.

“Good. Good, I just wanted to make sure.”

Schroder doubts that. Everything he’s pointed out so far since working on The Cleaner has been dismissed because it doesn’t work in with the story line. It’s like what Chuck said on day one—sometimes reality can get in the way of a good story. Schroder is learning that the other thing that gets in the way of a good story is bad writing.

More lighting is added to the bathroom and the fake toilet is finally bolted to a fake tile wall. The scene is still being staged when his cell phone goes off. It’s Rebecca Kent. He’s been both looking forward to and dreading this phone call.

“You heard the news?” she asks, and there is no hello, and he knows she’s pissed at him.

“What news?”

“The prosecution just made a deal with Middleton. He’s going to take us to Detective Calhoun’s body.”

“That’s good news,” Schroder says.

“They offered him immunity on Calhoun on account of the fact we know he didn’t kill him.”

“Really,” Schroder says.

“Don’t sound so surprised,” Kent says. “There’s more to the deal and you know it, since you’re the one who put it together.”

“Look, Rebecca—”

“This is a bullshit deal, Carl,” she says, raising her voice loud enough for Chuck to turn and look at him. He steps out into the corridor to take the abuse so that the dialogue doesn’t get added to a future episode. “And the worst part is fuck all people will ever know about it. You know how many people are taking Joe out there? Four. Four people. Including me, because they can’t have many people knowing what’s really going on. That’s a risk, Carl. If it’s a trap—”

“It’s not a trap,” Schroder says.

“That’s what people keep saying. But I’ll tell you this: if it’s a trap, the first bullet any of us fire goes straight into Joe.”

“I understand.”

“Jesus, Carl, what were you thinking? First you make a deal with Jones, now with Joe? What the hell happened to you? Four weeks ago you were one of us. Now you’ve turned your back on us.”

“I wanted Calhoun found,” Schroder says, her words hurting. “He was a good man. He deserves to be buried. He doesn’t deserve to be out in the woods or in a river or wherever it is that Joe put him.”

“This isn’t the right way to go about it. You’re paying Joe a lot of money. This is wrong, Carl. You know it’s wrong. You’re rewarding a criminal. What do you think that will do if this ever gets out? Crime isn’t only going to pay,” she says, “but it’ll be an investment that keeps on paying even after you’ve been arrested.”

“Well somebody agrees with me,” Carl says. “Otherwise the deal wouldn’t be going ahead.”

“That’s a bullshit answer, Carl. If anything happens tomorrow it’s on you,” she says.