Paul Cleave - Joe Victim

It’s after the shooting where things get tricky. Even if he does manage to get away from the scene, he knows the police will come for him. Of course they will. They’re not stupid. Stupid enough, maybe, to have let Joe Middleton kill for as long as he did-but not stupid enough to not figure out tomorrow’s events.

Tomorrow may be therapeutic, but he’s kidding himself when he thinks it’s going to start a healing process. He’s kidding himself in thinking he can get back together with his wife. By the end of tomorrow he’s pretty sure he’s going to be in a prison cell, but he’s okay with that. He will have avenged his daughter and for that he’d be happy to go to jail for a thousand years.

Melissa is tired and excited and nervous. It’s not a good combination. It’s been a long day, albeit a good day, and she did manage to get some nap time a few hours ago. She’s been trying to relax since getting home after stashing the gun back in the office ceiling. Her house isn’t in the middle of nowhere, but her nearest neighbors are a two-minute walk away and she’s never seen them. It’s nice and private and she prepaid her rent the same way she prepaid her gardener. When she stopped being Natalie and became Melissa, she cleaned out her bank accounts. She has cleaned out bank accounts of others since then too. It’s how she survives.

The day has gone now, as has the heat, and what’s left is a cold winter evening of the type nobody in their right mind could enjoy. Her shoulder is hurting too from all of that gun use this morning and she wanted to pop some painkillers and anti-inflammatories, but decided against it.

She left the van she hired earlier parked in the driveway rather than putting it into the adjoining garage. She paid for the van in cash and used a fake ID and took out insurance on it not because she needed it, but because that’s what most people did, and she wanted to be considered part of the most-people culture.

The van is important.

She locks the house behind her and walks to the van, tightening her jacket around her. It takes two minutes for the van to warm up, by which point she’s tightened her jacket so much it’s almost strangling her. The windshield is frosted over. Everything is frosted over. It’s a still evening. No wind. No clouds. Cold, but perfect shooting conditions.

She turns on the wipers and tries to use the jets to spray water onto the windshield, but the jets are blocked. The wipers don’t help, they just swish back and forth over the thin ice. The heater warms up the windshield and then the wipers start tearing at the ice. A few minutes later she can see.

There are a few other cars around. Not many. She turns on the radio to break the monotony of the van engine. Like she knew there would be, a radio DJ is talking about the day’s events, and those that will follow tomorrow, and perhaps later this year. A body-most likely to be that of Detective Inspector Robert Calhoun-has been found. Found by a psychic, of all people. She finds that hard to believe. Impossible to believe, and wonders what the real truth is and suspects Joe may have played a hand in giving up the location. If so, for what? Something to do with the trial, no doubt.

“And of course tomorrow is the big day, ladies and gentlemen,” so the DJ tells her and anybody else who’s listening. “Tomorrow the trial of Joe Middleton begins. The Christchurch Carver. The man for whom the death penalty is being voted on.” She’s expecting the DJ to open up the lines to callers from around the country to give their views on the death penalty, but he doesn’t, not that that matters because she, like everybody else, has heard them all before. Everybody thinks that it’s a dividing issue, that you’re either strongly for it or strongly against it. She doesn’t care one way or the other.

It takes her fifteen minutes to get to the house she wants, the van warming up early in the drive. She rubs her hands together. Warms up her fingers and grabs her handgun. It’s an okay neighborhood. Not great. Not cheap. Just okay. The kind of place people living by themselves tend to flock to. Two-bedroom dwellings, small yards, not old, not modern, but okay-heaven for people who are in love with all things bland. TVs are glowing from behind windows, lights are on in lounges and bedrooms, but otherwise there are no signs of life, other than a couple of cats sitting at opposite ends of a fence. Last time she was here was three months ago. It was warmer. A lot warmer. She made a mess. A big mess. There was blood and tearing flesh and crying. A lot of crying. Through it all she knew that she would be back here tonight.

She parks the van out on the street and locks the door and knows the entire plan will fall apart if somebody steals her ride. She walks up the path. The garden is neat and tidy. There are the legs of a garden gnome and no body, just jagged edges where the body used to be attached. Out there other gnomes are suffering the loss. There are lights on inside the house. She can see patterns of moving colors from a TV behind the curtain. She climbs up the step and holds her finger on the bell for half a second. She doesn’t have to wait long before the footsteps come toward her.

Melissa holds the gun down by her side, just slightly out of view.

The door swings open.

The woman doing the swinging is dressed in winter pajamas and a robe that are a little too big for her, even though the woman is a little too big herself. Still, she’s not as overweight as she was in the papers twelve months ago after she jumped on Joe during his arrest, or even as she was three months ago when Melissa came to see her. Her face is somewhat flushed. She looks like she is running late. She’s wearing a crucifix around her neck. A little Jesus on a little cross. A little Jesus who doesn’t seem happy to be hanging where he’s hanging.

“I thought we had a deal,” the woman says. “You promised you were going to leave me alone.”

“And I have until now, Sally,” Melissa says. “But I’m here to make another deal. You need to start by letting me in,” she says, and she raises the gun and sticks it into Sally’s chest, right where Jesus is doing his best not to look. “Or if you prefer I can shoot you in the stomach and leave you here to rot.”

Raphael wakes up expecting fate to intervene, that he’ll have a sore throat or a bad stomach from something he ate, maybe a racing heart from too much bad food, or at the very least a hangover-even though he didn’t really drink that much yesterday. Fate has never been one for the Can’t we all just get along school of thought, there are too many sad stories in the city that prove that, so for he and Fate to be on the same page about Joe seems like a small miracle.

He holds his hands in front of his face in the six a.m. light and can barely make them out, but can see them enough to tell he doesn’t have any signs of the shakes. For a guy who hardly slept last night, he’s doing remarkably well. It’s been a clock-watching night, where every passing hour his mind would do the math, telling him just how much sleep he wasn’t getting. His mind was racing. In the beginning it was racing with positive thoughts. Then around one a.m., the first negative thought came along. Within thirty minutes the balance had shifted. The negative thoughts were chasing away all the good ones. By three a.m. there were no positive thoughts, just a bunch of frayed nerves he was struggling to keep under control. When he finally fell asleep at around four, he entered a dream world and somewhere in that world all the bad shit disappeared, and he’s woken up feeling good.

He throws back the covers. Even though he sleeps alone these days, he still sleeps on the side of the bed he has slept on since being married. The other side barely has any wrinkles in it. He puts on his robe and slippers and walks through to the kitchen. The house is warm thanks to two heat pumps that have been running during the night. He has no appetite, but forces himself to eat anyway. A bowl of cereal and a glass of orange juice and his hands stay calm the entire time. These are, he thinks, the hands of a killer. He makes toast and burns it so he tosses it into the trash. He puts in four fresh slices and gets it right, but doesn’t eat them, just leaves them in the toaster. It was the same way when he killed the lawyer. Same way when he killed the second one too. No appetite. No reason this morning should be any different.