Joe Victim: A Thriller by Paul Cleave

Author:Paul Cleave [Cleave, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Thriller
ISBN: 9781451677973
Amazon: 1451677979
Barnesnoble: 1451677979
Goodreads: 16130299
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2013-09-03T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirty-Five

Shooting The Cleaner at the casino fell through. The casino wasn’t happy with the story line. They didn’t like a TV show suggesting desperate people in desperate times would go into the casino with a Plan A and a Plan B. Plan A was to bet everything they owned on red or black. Plan B all depended on how plan A went. There were two plan Bs. The first was to take the winnings and pay off the mortgage. That was the Plan B everybody hoped for. A fifty percent chance of doubling your money to make your life much better. A paid mortgage, a new car, some cool toys. The problem was it also came with a fifty percent chance of losing your money and making it a lot worse. That’s where the second plan B came into effect. That plan B involved heading into the toilets and taking a bunch of pills or slicing up your wrists or sticking a gun in your mouth.

The problem was the other Plan B happened more often than people would think. It wasn’t something the casino wanted people made aware of. It’s the sort of thing they would give low odds on if you could bet against it. They thought it wasn’t good for business. They were probably right too. Having posters on the wall of guys in suits throwing money into the air at the roulette wheel while pretty women laughed and smiled weren’t going to look good surrounded by posters of people dead in bathrooms with slogans saying Come roll the dice. So for the last month the casino has been saying yes and then last night they said no. The storyline is still going ahead. They have external shots of the casino. No problem there. And they have internal shots from a documentary shot five years earlier, and back then the casino signed a waiver to allow the footage to be used. Well, now it was going to get used in The Cleaner.

Instead of the bathroom at the casino, they are using the bathroom on the second floor at the TV studio. Some set dressing has been added. Nicer doors. Nicer furnishings. They’ll fill in the background noise with some stock sounds of slot machines. It’ll work.

“So what do you think?” the scriptwriter asks, and it’s the same guy he dealt with yesterday, a guy by the name of Chuck Jones. Chuck is no relation to Jonas, and sometimes Schroder doubts that Chuck is related to anybody. “Blood look authentic enough?”

Schroder looks around the bathroom. Blood on the ceiling and high up on the wall. Blood from somebody putting a gun under their chin and pulling the trigger. Must be a powerful gun, going by all the fake blood. Must have made one hell of a make-believe sound. But he has seen it before, and this looks about right if only a little overdone.

“Looks fine,” Schroder says.

“So in this story line the body and police are long gone,” he says.

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