Joe Victim

Chapter Forty-Two

It’s cold but dry and Melissa is relieved that the weather seems like it’s going to do its part. It’s Sunday morning. People are sleeping in. Some going to church. Some hungover from the night before. Kids are climbing into bed with their parents, kids are sitting in front of TVs, kids are playing in backyards. Melissa remembers that life. She and her sister on Sunday mornings snuggled in bed with their parents. Her sister’s name was actually Melissa. That’s where she got it from. Her own name was Natalie. Was being the key word. Melissa and Natalie watching cartoons and eating cereal and, on occasion, trying to make breakfast for their parents. Once they set fire to the toaster. It was more her sister’s doing, really-she was the one on toaster duty, whereas Natalie was on cereal and orange-juice duty. Her sister had put jam on the slices before toasting them. Something caught fire. After that their parents made them promise not to try making breakfast for them again, at least not for a few more years, and that’s a promise they would keep.

She misses her sister. They used to call her sister Melly-though Natalie would call her Smelly Melly whenever she was trying to annoy her. Which was reasonably often. Melly was younger. Blond hair in ponytails. Big blue eyes. A sweet smile that became sweeter as she started a journey through her teens she wouldn’t finish. Everybody loved her. One day a stranger loved her. He loved her and killed her and then stuck a gun into his mouth and killed himself. The guy was a cop. They’d never seen him before. Don’t know how his life and Melly’s life shared the same orbit. But they did. For one brief painful afternoon they did. There was no meaning in it. It was-for no better summation-just one of those things.

She struggled with the loss. Eventually that loss killed her father. Life carried on. And life was strange. It was a policeman that had killed her sister, yet it was policemen she started to become fascinated by. Not obsessed-that would happen later-but in the early days it was just a fascination. Her psychiatrist at the time put it in terms she was too young to understand. She didn’t understand how she could like the very thing that had hurt her so much. So her psychiatrist, a Dr. Stanton, had explained it more simply-he had said she wasn’t becoming fascinated with the police because it was a cop that had hurt her sister, but because the police represented justice. She got his point. After all, it was the police she loved, not individuals who raped and murdered young girls.

It was only a handful of years between the events of losing her sister and it becoming her turn to share an orbit with a really bad guy. It felt like her family was cursed. This time the bad guy was a university professor. She was studying psychology. She wanted to know what made people tick. She wanted to be a criminologist. Then came the bad orbit and the curse, and she shared the first half of the same fate Melly had shared. The other half she would have shared too, she was sure of it, but that’s when Melly came to help her. From the dead she could hear her sister’s voice telling her to fight back. And she did. She did all the things Melly wasn’t able to do. She fought back and she’s been fighting ever since. So much in fact that she got to like it. Like it a lot. And it didn’t make sense. She hadn’t studied psychology enough to understand it, and she didn’t think Dr. Stanton would be able to explain it either. Dr. Stanton was at least right about something-she didn’t become fascinated with policemen because it was a cop who killed her sister, because if that had been true then she would have become fascinated with professors too. What did happen is after her own attack her fascination with the police became full-blown obsession. She would hang outside the police station. She would follow some home. She would sneak into their houses. She knew it was crazy. She knew it made her crazy, but there it was. She was fascinated by policemen and by the men they looked for.

She started calling herself Melissa back when she heard her sister’s voice, but she doesn’t hear it anymore. That’s because Melly wouldn’t approve of all that she’s done. She knows that, because Melly told her. It was the last thing her sister told her from beyond the grave. It was in a dream. Melly said she didn’t approve, and Melissa told her that men were bastards. All men. Melissa pointed out some are better at hiding it, but all deserve to be treated like the pigs they are. Melly didn’t have a response for that-unless disappearing forever was a response, which Melissa suspects might just be.

She still misses her.

In the process of following the police, she began to learn good ones from bad ones, and there were a few bad ones around. And then she met Joe. She didn’t follow him because he was a cop. In fact, she didn’t follow him at all. He was a janitor. That much was obvious. Then a year ago she ran into him in a bar and they started chatting, and the rest is history.

She misses him.

Her obsession with the police ended that night, and her obsession with Joe started. Joe, a man she should hate-a man similar to the man that took away her sister, similar to the man that raped her-and she’s obsessed with him. She’s in love with him. There is something wrong inside of her, something terribly, terribly wrong. She knows it, she’s felt it every day since the police came to her house and spoke to her parents, the day she hid at the end of the hallway where she could just make out snippets of conversation that included the words dead, naked, policeman, suicide. If she asked Dr. Stanton to put it into layman’s terms, he would tell her she was fucked-up. But knowing you’re fucked-up doesn’t solve anything, not when you like how it feels, and Melissa likes how it feels. In fact she’s come to like it a lot. It makes her feel alive. If the bad shit in her life hadn’t happened, if Melly were still around, would things have turned out the same? Would she have found another way to become this person?

She has asked herself this question a thousand times, and she’s no closer to answering it now than she was a year ago when she first met Joe.

There are a few cars parked out front of the hardware store, but for the most part the store feels deserted. She hasn’t been into a hardware store since she was a kid and her dad came here a few times the way dads do when they’re planning on fixing something around the house or building a deck. It’s been a while, and while hammers and screwdrivers all look the same, the power tools all seem to be made of brighter colors than the last time she was here, some of them going as far as looking like they were made in the future. She’s wearing the red wig, but not the pregnancy suit. She isn’t real sure where to look, but a bald guy with moles littering his arms and neck helps her out, and a few hundred dollars later she has what she wants.

The next stop is town. She parks outside the office building, getting the same parking space as yesterday evening. She goes inside and takes the lift up to the third floor, feeling too lazy to use the stairs. The environment may not thank her, but her calves do. The office is just how she left it. Why wouldn’t it be? The drop cloth is still playing curtain, but there’s enough ambient light to see. The gun is exactly where it was left. She gets it down and rests it on the bench they made then goes to the window. She gets her hardware-store purchase out and quickly browses the instructions. The device uses a laser to measure distances. She points it over the road where Joe is going to be standing, but can’t see the red dot of the laser pointer and can’t tell where she’s pointing. She gives it a minute and is about to give up in frustration when she suddenly spots it in the shade of the back door to the courthouse. She follows it to the spot where Joe will be standing tomorrow and locks in the distance. With the elevation, it’s almost forty yards.

She takes the tool and the gun and heads back down in the elevator. She puts the gun into the trunk. Traffic doesn’t increase over the next hour. It never does, no matter what the hour on a Sunday morning. The temperature doesn’t increase much either. Maybe one degree, if that. She drives with the heater on and the radio on. She’s listening to Bruce Springsteen. He’s singing about a guy who went on a killing spree with his girlfriend in the fifties. Things were simpler back then.

Driving the car is easier when you’re not eight or nine months pregnant, but she puts the suit on now. She pulls into the parking lot of the gun store and goes inside. The guy who helps her is in his forties, has thick glasses and eyebrows reaching across to shake hands with each other. His name is Arthur. Arthur seems a little in shock. He seems to think she’s going to give birth to a redheaded baby right there in the store. He looks like a friendly guy that the world hasn’t beaten up. She tells him what she needs. A box of ammunition. Plus a bullet puller for taking apart bullets and a bullet-seating die for reassembling them. She tells him they are for her husband. He nods thoughtfully, probably thinking the husband was planning on shooting himself rather than face what was balancing a fine line between staying in her womb and spilling out of it onto the floor. He gets the items for her and she pays in cash.

“Tell him,” Arthur says, “if he has any questions to come in and see me. People messing around with this stuff, using pliers and vise grips instead of the right tools, can blow off their fingers.”

She thanks him and gets back on the road.

When she gets to the forest she takes the same route as before and parks in the same place and takes a blanket and the gun, but forgoes any tins as those from last time are still here-not that she needs them. The ground is a little drier today. The air is still. It’s going to be the same weather conditions tomorrow morning, but it’s supposed to rain later on in the day. At least that’s what the weather report is telling them. She uses the tool to measure out the same distance from a tree and lays down the blanket when she gets there. She gets out the gun. She loads the magazine. Puts the gun together. And points it at the tree.

She picks a spot. A big knot. She aims in on it, calms her breathing, and fires. The gunshot is muted through her earmuffs. The knot in the tree is splintered as the bullet crashes into it. She lines the knot back up. Takes another shot. Fires the second bullet within an inch of the first. Accurate enough. Way more accurate than she showed Raphael. A few hundred shots she could probably shoot the tree down.

As she shoots, she thinks about how the plan has changed for both of them. In some pretty big ways too. Instead of Melissa being the collector, she will be victim number two. And Joe, instead of being collected, will be victim number one. She’s sure of it. The plan was never to shoot Joe in the head, but to wound him. Melissa, dressed in her paramedic’s uniform, will pick him up. Then, thanks to the C-four, she’ll evade the police. Raphael originally thought they were picking Joe up to torture and kill him. That was never the real plan. The first part, yes, but not the second part.

She looks through the sight at the bullet impact. It’s four, maybe five inches below the knothole. She adjusts the sights again. Takes aim. Fires. This time the bullet hits the tree even lower. She sets the gun down and walks to the tree and gets out a tape measure. Puts it from the knothole to the last bullet hole. Eleven inches. Just about perfect. She walks back to the gun. Adjusts the sights again, this time slightly to the side. Takes aim at the knothole. Steadies the gun. Fires.

This time the bullet hits the tree eleven inches down from the knothole and a few inches to the left. She uses up most of the bullets.

It’s perfect. A calculated risk, certainly, but perfect nonetheless.

And the truth of it is it’s not her life on the line here, but Joe’s. And that’s an acceptable risk.