Paul Cleave - Joe Victim

He takes a side road from the motorway, through farm country for another five minutes, and then another turnoff-this time onto a shingle road that after two hundred yards becomes compacted dirt as the scenery changes from open fields to forest. The road is bumpy, but the four-wheel drive manages it easily enough. He goes slow. There aren’t many twists and turns, but the back wheels occasionally skid off large tree roots as they round the few corners there are. It’s almost untouched New Zealand scenery. It’s why people come here, film movies here, farm sheep, and raise children. Snowy mountains in the near distance, clear rivers, massive trees.

He pulls into a clearing. It’s just like he told her. Nobody around for miles.

“It’s scenic,” Stella says.

“Easy to fall in love with,” he says.

They climb out of the car. The air is completely still. And quiet. The only thing Raphael can hear is the engine pinging from the SUV, and Stella moving about. No birds, no signs of life-they could be the last two people in the world. He walks around to the back of the SUV and pulls out the gun case. Stella starts messing around with a rucksack, reorganizing the order of things inside it before throwing it over her shoulder. His wife used to do the same thing with her handbag. Their feet sink a little into the dirt as they move beyond the car, through the trees, and toward another clearing, toward where the getaway used to be until one day somebody thought it would be fun to set fire to it.

“I can’t believe I’ve never fired a gun,” he says, and he really can’t believe it. What kind of guy gets to fifty-five years old without ever having fired one? “It’s always something I wanted to do,” he says, and he wishes he hadn’t said it. All he’s doing is confirming he might not be the right guy for this. And nothing could be further from the truth. Just ask the Red Rage.

Stella doesn’t answer him. He knows she’s fired one. It’s one of the reasons she’s come to him. She told him she’s a terrible shot. She told him that if he is a terrible shot too, then this mission is over. Only she didn’t call it a mission. He wonders if the police would call it a movement.

She opens the rucksack and starts taking out some tin cans. They’re all empty. Baby-food tins, spaghetti tins, soup tins. She starts lining them up a few feet from each other. She leaves some in full view, others slightly hidden behind roots, others she pins in between branches at different heights. After a few minutes they have a shooting gallery and some very ugly tree decorations.

They move thirty yards into the clearing. They’re now two hundred yards from the car with a belt of trees between them, trees that will stop any stray bullets from hitting the SUV. Another hundred yards away are the foundations of the cabin, but they’re covered in long grass, as if the scorched earth made the ground more fertile. “This is a good distance,” she says.

Raphael drops to his knees. Immediately moisture seeps out of the ground and into his pants. He rests the case on the ground and pops the lid. It’s the first time he’s seen the gun and he whistles quietly at it. It just happens instinctively-maybe the same way people whistle at nice-looking women or sports cars. There’s no instruction booklet. “Wow,” he says. And then again, “Wow. I hope you know how it goes together?”

“I was given a lesson,” she says.

“From the gun store?” he asks, and he’s fishing for information, and it’s obvious he’s fishing for information, and obvious he’s not going to get it.

“Exactly,” she says.

He picks up the barrel. It’s black and solid and feels dangerous and is a little lighter than he thought it would have been. He puts it back into the case. He’s itching to try slotting things together, but instead he waits. It’s her show-and he doesn’t want to risk breaking something. That’d be a real mood killer. It takes her a few minutes, the pieces snapping together with firm clicking sounds. He stands up to watch her doing it; kneeling down over the case was hurting his back a little. She pulls a box of ammunition out from her rucksack and loads it into the magazine. It takes twenty bullets, and there are twenty-four in the case. He can tell from the way she goes about it that she wasn’t kidding when she said she’s not good with guns.

“How many boxes?” he asks.

“Three,” she says. “We can practice with them all. We just need to keep two rounds, plus our special round.” She reaches back into the rucksack. “Here,” she says, and she hands him a set of earmuffs. Then she starts looking back through the bag.

“Lost something?” he asks.

“No,” she says. “I know they’re. . Oh, wait, I took them out back at the car.”

“Took what out?”

“My earmuffs.”

“I’ll get them,” Raphael says.

“It’s okay,” she says, “I’ll go. Here, set this up,” she says, and hands him a blanket from the rucksack before walking off in the direction of the car, taking the rucksack with her.

He spreads the blanket out. It’s big enough for two people to lie on without feet or hands overlapping onto the grass. It’s thick too, but it’ll only be a matter of time before it starts soaking up the rain from the damp ground, especially once they lie on it. It reminds him of when he used to picnic here. Janice, his wife, and Angela, his little girl. Janice still lives in the city and Raphael talks with her, but not often-there is too much sadness there, it was a downward spiral neither of them could break. Best to focus on the good times. Like coming out here with a picnic blanket and a fishing rod. They’d hit the river half a mile away, but in all the years never did they catch a single fish, which was a relief, really, because he wouldn’t have known what to do with it. Of course those were summer days. He has never been here in the winter.

Stella comes back. She’s carrying her earmuffs. His are orange and hers are blue, but other than that they look identical. She holds them up and gives him an apologetic smile before putting them on. He smiles back, then puts his on too. The sounds both he and Stella are making are dulled dramatically. She lies down and takes hold of the gun. He stands a little behind her, watching the curves of her body, watching the gun, watching the targets up ahead. She stabilizes her elbows into the ground. She shrugs her shoulders around a little, twists her head back and forth, and finds a comfortable position. This time yesterday he was watching morning TV and eating toast that he’d been too lazy to put butter on. He’d been hanging out in his underwear with the heaters on full so he wouldn’t have to get dressed. He’d been wondering what the hell to do that day before the counseling session, and had ended up continuing to do what he’d started doing that morning.

Stella reaches up and brushes her hair back over her ears to keep it away from the scope. She adjusts herself one more time, then reaches for the trigger. Her finger settles on it. Raphael holds his breath.

The gun kicks up as the bullet explodes from the barrel. It sounds like a thunderclap. It’s so loud for a moment he thinks the earmuffs are there just to hold the blood that’s going to run from his ears. Only there is no blood. There would be, he’s sure of it, if it weren’t for the muffs. He can’t tell which tin she was aiming at because none of them have moved.

“Wow,” Raphael says, the word sounding like it’s coming from deep underground.

She lines up the tin again. Takes her time. He watches her breathe in. Breathe out. He can’t wait to have a turn. He can feel his heart racing. She pulls the trigger. The same explosion. This time he sees a divot appear in the ground about a foot from a tin. She wasn’t kidding about being a bad shot.