Joe Victim: A Thriller

“No it won’t, Joe. I can help you.”


“You can’t help Joe in here,” I tell her. “You have no idea what it’s like.”

It’s Saturday morning. It was a rough night sleeping, as the side of my face hurt like hell. Last night before we were all put back into our cells Caleb Cole came and saw me. He told me he’d decided that he’d rather kill me than take the money. He didn’t see any reason in waiting. After all, prison was all about waiting, and all you had to break the tedium was doing, so doing was more entertaining than waiting. He came at me and his first punch got me in the stomach, and his next punch got me in the face. The problem is I’m a lover, not a fighter, and don’t know how to defend myself. Before he could get a third shot in, Adam came in and Caleb stopped. When he asked Cole what was going on, Cole said he’d seen me fall and was just trying to help. He was shaking his hands afterward, the punches he gave hurting him just as much as me.

Is that what happened, Middleton? Adam had asked.

Things were a little blurry. I had nodded, said yes, that’s exactly what it was, and Adam had been satisfied. He wasn’t going to go home and be kept awake by any kind of guilt. I was just lucky he’d at least even put a stop to it. No doubt that’s because he can’t force-feed me whatever sandwich creation he’s coming up with next if I’m dead.

“Joe, if somebody is threatening you, you need to tell me,” Ali says.

“Why? Do you think the guards are going to care?”

“Joe—”

“Please, can we just talk about what we need to talk about for the trial? The rest will work itself out.”

She doesn’t answer.

“Please,” I tell her.

“Okay, Joe, if that’s what you want.”

My psychiatrist—and I’ve decided to settle on Ali because it’s a shorter name—has dressed a little more casually for the weekend. She’s wearing tight jeans that give me bad thoughts. A buttoned shirt that also gives me bad thoughts. Maybe I’m just a bad-thoughts kind of guy.

“When did your auntie stop abusing you?”

“We’re back to that, are we?”

“Just answer the question, Joe.”

“I told you already,” I say. “It was close to two years.”

“I mean, when did she stop. What time of the year? Do you remember?”

I’m not sure why it matters. I close my eyes and picture it. Now I’m a different kind of bad-thoughts kind of guy. School days were coming to an end, not just for the year, but for me they were ending forever. I had an unknown future, a world of unemployment was a strong possibility. I had never known what I wanted to do and, truth be told, I still don’t know. Maybe open a pet store. It was a scary time. Throughout the previous six months of school, guidance counselors had been trying to help us all figure out what paths to take, and being a grade-A serial killer wasn’t an option. Hell, back then I didn’t even know that’s what I wanted to be. Not really.

“It was near the end of my final year at school,” I tell her. “About a month short—so around November I guess.”

“You were eighteen?”

“Seventeen. My birthday is in December. The tenth, actually,” I say, and I had to spend my thirty-second birthday in jail, but my thirty-third will be spent elsewhere. “You know what the tenth of December is?”

She shakes her head.

“It’s Human Rights Day,” I tell her, then smile. “Kind of ironic for a guy who the public’s trying to kill.”

“There are people who would see it as being ironic for other reasons,” she says.

“Like what?” I ask.

“A serial killer being born on Human Rights Day, who believes nobody but himself is due any rights.”

“It’s not like that,” I tell her. “I have no—”

“Memory,” she finishes for me. “Therefore you can’t remember what you were thinking in those moments. Yes, I get it. However, human rights are what this entire debate is all about. The people for the death penalty would say they want their rights heard, that it’s the right of the victims to have their killers given the same sentences as they themselves were given. Have you thought about it from that point of view?”

I’m not sure if I have and, hearing what she’s saying, I’m not so sure I want to give it any thought. Why should I care? “No.”

“I think you should. I think you might find it insightful.”

“Okay,” I say, and sure, I’ll get right on it.

“Tell me about the first time you killed somebody,” she says.

At first I think I’ve misheard her. I’m not expecting the question, so it takes an extra couple of seconds to realize she hasn’t said Tell me about the first time you kissed anybody, which would have been my auntie, and I hope the pause makes me look like I’m actually trying to remember. Which I can. But that’s not what I tell her. “I don’t . . . I don’t remember.”