Joe Victim: A Thriller

Glen pushes one hand against my forehead so the back of my head grinds hard against the tile wall. Then he digs his fingers into my cheeks to try and open my jaw. He punches me in the stomach again, and my mouth opens from the impact and his fingers dig my cheeks inward between my teeth so I can’t close my mouth.

Adam brings the sandwich up to my face. It’s a putrid smell, the kind of smell I used to have to deal with back when I was a janitor, back when some drunk asshole in the holding tanks at the police station would shit all over the floor and I’d have to clean it up. Only it’s that smell times a hundred. It’s like they’ve used shit to bury the smell of something that died, the same way hospitals use disinfectant.

Glen pinches my nose shut, and it helps, a little, and any help at this stage is a relief.

The sandwich touches my lips. I feel the lettuce dangling from the edge of it on my chin. I feel the bread—it’s stale and firm and feels like it’s been lightly toasted, but it hasn’t been. Then that bread is on my tongue and scraping the roof of my mouth, and so far it’s okay, it’s okay because bread is all I can taste. The bread starts to get wet. Adam pushes more of it into my mouth, then Glen lets go of my cheeks and pushes my jaw upward and my teeth bite through the sandwich.

My taste buds all head for the hills at the same time as flavors burst into my mouth, they run in the same direction, which pulls my tongue into the back of my throat and causes me to gag. Even with my nose pinched closed I can smell the sandwich again. Something in the back of my throat starts clicking and still the sandwich is being pushed deeper. I can’t breathe now. It’s chew or suffocate. They’re the two choices I have.

So I chew.

I picture my mom and her meat loaf and I try to imagine that’s what I’m eating, but my imagination simply isn’t good enough. What floods my mouth is dirty and foul and makes me wish I’d been quicker a year ago when I tried to shoot myself. I twist my head from side to side, but Glen keeps his hand pressed firmly on it, and as if to prove a point he punches me again in the stomach, only this time lightly.

I figure the best thing to do is chew the minimum amount of times and then swallow. So I do that, chewing even less than the required minimum, and when I try to swallow what happens is a giant wad of whatever the hell I’m eating gets lodged in my throat. I start to choke.

“You’re not getting off that easy,” Glen says, and he spins me around, digs his hands beneath my chest, and pulls upward. The ball of sandwich comes up and hits the wall. He spins me back around again. “Smaller bites are the key, Middleton,” he says, and then we repeat the steps—the punching, the nose squeezing, the flooding of flavors—only this time I chew for longer and my second bite goes down, and then there’s a third. I keep my tongue pressed down and I chew as best as I can without trying to taste anything, but it doesn’t work. I look at the sandwich. Three bites gone.

Bite. Chew. Adam laughs.

Swallow. Repeat. Glen laughs.

The humiliation’s worse than anything I’ve ever felt. Glen pulls out a camera and takes a photo. Then he films me taking a bite. If I can survive having my testicle crushed, I can survive this. It takes ten minutes and then the sandwich is gone. I keep expecting them to make me eat the bit I coughed up, but they don’t. I can feel my face burning, the scar running up to my eye feels tight. My other eye is watering. My bad eye doesn’t, something to do with a damaged tear duct.

“See, that wasn’t so bad now, was it,” Adam says, and lets me go.

I drop to my knees. I start to retch. I can taste bile in the back of my throat, but none of the sandwich wants to come back up, which is probably a good thing because these guys would make me eat it again.

It takes them a few minutes to calm themselves down. Glen has laughed so hard he’s broken into a sweat. It takes me the same amount of time to know I can walk again without vomiting all over myself. They lead me back to my cell. They try to hurry me along, but I maintain a slow speed. They keep laughing at me, and when they leave me in my cell I can hear them laughing back along the corridor.

I look up at the door waiting for Caleb Cole to come in. If he does, there is nothing I can do. So with that in mind, there’s no reason not to turn my back on the door and try to make things a little better. I hold my head under the tab in the basin and pour water into my mouth and rinse it out a dozen times. Then I swallow mouthful after mouthful until I can no longer bear it, and when my stomach seems to turn upside down, I crouch over the toilet. In a rush of surging water from my stomach parts of the sandwich finally appear, but nowhere near as many as I would have liked. It’s turning into a bad day, and I know there are still plenty of ways it can get a whole lot worse.





Chapter Thirty-Eight