Paul Cleave - Joe Victim

“Are you up for this?” Kent asks.

I nod. I appreciate her concern. When I come to her house when this is all over, I’ll make things quick.

“Okay. Here are the rules,” Kent says, standing over me. “You do what we say. You answer our questions. You make good on the deal. You don’t do any of that and we bring you straight back. You try to escape, we shoot you in the spine. You have anything planned we shoot you in the spine. Hell, we may just shoot you in the spine anyway. You get what I’m saying?”

“I thought you were going to shoot me in the back of the head. Now it’s the spine?”

“It will be both,” she says. “And probably the balls too. Though we’ll have to aim accurately since you only have one left.”

“Funny,” I tell her, and try to get back onto my feet.

“Is this some kind of gimmick?” she asks.

I shake my head. “I ate something bad, that’s all.”

“You going to toughen up and go through with it?” she asks, and she sounds like my mom used to sound when I was sick in the morning before school. Back then she would ask me if I was a girl or a boy or a man.

I find my balance and step into the back of the van, which answers her question. My handcuffs are connected to the eyelet by a chain that keeps me stooped over, which is fine because my stomach would be stooping me over anyway. There are no windows in the back. There’s wire mesh between the back and the front, so I can see outside and I could jam knitting needles at the driver if I had them, but nothing more. The driver is armed and looks familiar, but I can’t place him. Kent climbs in next to him. The other two heavily armed officers climb in the back with me. There’s a shovel lying across the floor. Four people for Melissa to deal with and they’ve even brought along the supplies to hide the bodies.

The van starts rolling forward. This is the furthest I’ve been from my prison cell since I pled not guilty and was held over for trial. This is the view my mother and my lawyer see every time after they’ve come to see me.

“Which way?” Kent asks.

“Right,” I tell her. “Can you open a window?”

“No.”

We have to wait for a gap in traffic, then we’re swinging out over the lanes and heading toward the city.

“Please? It’s hot back here.”

“It’s not hot,” Kent says.

“He doesn’t look so good,” Officer Nose says, and that’s the name of the guy sitting opposite me, the guy with the nose that looks like it’s been broken a few times. The guy next to him is wearing glasses and my name for him is Officer Dick.

“How far do we go?” Kent asks, winding down the window halfway.

“I don’t know,” I tell her. “I can barely see out the window.”

“How about you just give me an address?”

“There is no address,” I tell her. “That’s why we’re in this situation. We’re looking for a paddock. I can’t tell you where it is, but I can figure out the way.”

“Great,” the driver says.

“It is, isn’t it?” I ask.

We get closer toward town. We pass the big Christchurch sign that somebody has added graffiti to, but I can’t see what. We keep driving. More boring shit to the left. The same boring shit to the right. I don’t know how people do it. I don’t know why more people aren’t shooting themselves.

“Go left toward the back of the airport,” I tell them.

We slow and make the turn. I can see a plane overhead coming in to land. I’ve never been on a plane before. Never been out of the country, never even been up to the North Island, never really left Christchurch. I wonder where Melissa is planning on taking me. Australia? Europe? Mexico? I can’t wait. It must be so cool, looking down on the world, seeing people scurrying around like ants. It is how I see them, most of the time anyway. I wonder how I’ll see them from a few thousand feet in the air. Then I wonder why a cockpit is called a cockpit, who came up with the term, and what they were doing in the process.

“Keep going straight for a while,” I tell them.

We do just that. We pass open fields and landing planes and runways in the near distance lined by lights and more fields. As we drive it’s all coming back to me. The night with Calhoun. He was the detective who had killed Daniela Walker. I was the person who had figured it out. I’d have made a great cop. He had staged the scene so it would be pinned on me-the Christchurch Carver-and I wasn’t pleased about it. At the same time Melissa was blackmailing me. So I tied Calhoun up and Melissa ended up stabbing him, and I filmed the whole thing without her knowing. It all worked out great. It got me and Melissa on the same page. I don’t know how it works-she pulped my testicle with a pair of pliers, and yet I love her. Her sister was murdered by a cop, she herself was raped by a bad man, and yet she loves me. You can’t deny the chemistry.

The sky is getting a little darker. I’m not sure of the difference between twilight and dusk. Is there one? Both are approaching. I guess one arrives first, and then the other. Twilight might be when there is still some light in the sky and dusk is when there isn’t. Another hour and it won’t matter because they’ll both be gone. Perhaps that’s part of Melissa’s plan. When it’s dark she’ll start shooting. My stomach is feeling a little better, but not much.

“Take the next left,” I tell the driver, and after that I tell him the next right. We go through a series of turns. Just when it feels like we’re looping back in on ourselves, and right when they’re starting to accuse me of messing them around, we reach the dirt road I found last year. There’s a gate going across it.

“It’s. .” I say, then a bolt of cramp grips my stomach and I crouch further forward and grit my teeth until it passes. “Here,” I finish saying, and the driver pulls over and comes to a stop. We all stay seated in the van. Kent is on the phone. Probably updating the address with somebody in case they all go missing. I no longer feel sweaty and hot. In fact it’s the opposite.

“Take the road,” I tell him.

“Not without a four-wheel drive,” the driver says. “Track’s too wet. How far in?”

“Not far,” I tell him.

He looks at Kent. “This is private property,” he says. “What do you want to do?”

She lowers the phone so she can chat to him. “Can’t see any signs of life out there,” she says. “Let’s start walking.”

Kent and the driver get out of the van. They come around to the back and open the doors. Officer Dick climbs out while the others point their guns at me, then Officer Nose unlocks the chain from the eyelet. He helps me out of the van and I try to straighten my back. It’s sore from the twenty-minute drive. It’d help if I could push my palms into it and stretch it out. Kent has finished her phone call.

The view consists of rocks, trees, dirt, and mud. Mountains in the distance. A stream nearby. More trees and open paddocks and I imagine it would be nice for a picnic if picnics are your thing. It would also be a nice place to string up the warden or Carl Schroder if stringing up assholes is your thing. What I don’t see are any other cars. No sign of Melissa. But she’s here. I can feel it. My ball is tingling. It feels it too.

Kent is wearing a bulletproof vest that she wasn’t wearing back at the prison. She doesn’t offer me one. That hurts. I give her my big Slow Joe smile and she looks mad at me, mad because it could be muddy where we’re going and she doesn’t want her hiking shoes getting dirty. The others are all wearing vests too.

“What happened to your face?” she asks.

“I walked into a door.”

“Good,” she says. “You should keep walking into doors. It looks good on you. Matches your scar,” she says, and I try to reach up to touch my scar only my hands won’t go that far because of the chain between them and my ankle bracelets. “How far away is the body?” she asks.