Joe Victim: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

  Schroder is gripping the steering wheel so tight his knuckles have gone white. They are thirty yards behind the ambulance. There are people everywhere—many between them and Melissa, most though are on the sidewalks.

  “There’s no way she can get away,” Kent says, looking around her, and Schroder can hear the message she isn’t saying: There’s no way she can get away, so no reason for us to keep trying to close the distance, no reason we can’t just stay hanging back so we don’t kill anybody.

  “Maybe she has a plan,” Schroder says, “or maybe she knows there’s nowhere to go and doesn’t care. That could be part of her plan too. But we’re not hanging back. I’m not risking losing her.”

  “I agree she has a plan,” Kent says, “but it doesn’t make sense—how did she know she was going to be asked inside?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Middleton was sick, so we got one of the paramedics to come in. She was waiting for it.”

  “And you believed him?”

  “He wasn’t faking, and even if he was there’s no way she could have known she’d be asked to come inside.”

  “I don’t know then,” he says, annoyed at this new information. If he’d still been a cop he’d have been involved, and he’d never have fallen for that crap. He has to brake slightly as a guy in a wheelchair starts to drift from the sidewalk out in front of him, and he wonders if the guy genuinely can’t walk or if it’s just a costume. He loses a few yards on the ambulance in his effort not to run him over and make the costume permanent.

  “Well it had to be something,” she says, “and it would have worked if somebody hadn’t shot him. How’s that for bad timing for Melissa, huh? Freeing her boyfriend and then another shooter trying to pick him off. I guess her plan was just to drive away without being chased.”

  Schroder claims back the few yards he lost, then a few more. “I saw her. A few days ago.”

  “What?”

  “At the prison. When I went out to see Joe, I ran into her in the parking lot.”

  “Why didn’t you—”

  “Tell you? I had no idea it was her,” he says. “But it was. Shit,” he says. “My keys. When I came out of the prison I couldn’t find my keys. Then I found them on the ground.”

  “She took your keys?”

  “She was pretending to be pregnant. She had the bump and everything. I helped her out of her car. Oh my God she’s good. I had no idea.” He slowly shakes his head. “She must have swiped my keys then. She must have been in my car. . . . Oh shit, that’s why I couldn’t find the photograph of her.”

  “What?”

  “When we were talking to Raphael. Remember I went back to grab a photograph of her?”

  “Why the hell would she risk breaking into your car just to steal a photograph?”

  A young man dressed as a teapot with two spouts extends a hand to give Schroder the finger, probably annoyed at the speeding car without a siren that he almost stepped out in front of. This would be much easier if he had sirens. And a lot easier if people looked where they were going.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “It doesn’t make . . . Wait, what were you saying earlier?”

  “About the photograph?”

  “No. About the plan to escape.”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “I said something about how unlucky she was Joe was shot.”

  “You said it was her plan to drive away without being chased.”

  “Yeah. It must have been.”

  He shakes his head. “No. There has to be more. She was always going to be chased, not chased exactly, but there was always going to be an escort if Joe was sick in the back of the ambulance.”

  “Makes sense,” she says.

  “So how was she going to escape the escort?”

  “Oh Jesus,” she says, and he can tell she’s coming to the same conclusion as him. “You think the explosives?”

  “Has to—” he starts, but doesn’t get to finish, because that’s when the car blows up.

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  The explosion is almost ear shattering. There is no fire, just smoke and glass and twisted pieces of metal. The car is picked up like a child’s toy, and just as casually dismissed like a child’s toy—it’s launched three feet high and a couple of feet to the left before landing back on its wheels. The shock wave blows all the windows out. Bits of flesh hit the interior like paintballs exploding across a wall. People start screaming. Some are running from the blast, others are caught in the shock wave and thrown outward, the explosion an epicenter. Cut faces and cut clothes and a few people aren’t running at all, a few of them are lying on the road surrounded by, and impaled by, shrapnel. The side mirrors go flying, bits of tire, nuts and bolts and screws, and engine components are tossed in all directions, along with pieces of bone and tenderized body parts.

  Schroder’s shoulders climb up around his jaw in expectation of an impact. Kent twists in her seat and looks behind her. Schroder keeps driving, glancing into the mirror back at the explosion. It came from a car that was only twenty or thirty yards behind them. A decoy explosion. Something to shut down the intersection and fill the streets with scared and panicked people.

  “Oh my God,” Kent says. “Somebody was driving that car.”

  “Oh fuck,” Schroder says.

  “I know, I know,” she says.

  “She was in my car,” he says.

  “What?”

  “She was in my fucking car!” he shouts, and he slams on the brakes. “Get out, get out,” he yells, taking off his seat belt.

  “What—”

  “Get the fuck out,” he shouts, and he opens his door and so does Kent. People are running toward them. Away from them. In every direction. He slams the door closed behind him, hoping it will help contain the shock wave and blast that Melissa is going to use to help her escape.

  “Get back,” he screams. “Everybody get back.”

  “Carl—”

  He looks back over the car. “Fire some shots in the air,” he shouts. “Get—”

  His car explodes right in front of him. He sees Kent ride the shock wave ten yards through the air, where she is thrown into a parked car, where she smashes the windshield and enters it. Only it looks like twenty yards because he’s riding the shock wave in the opposite direction. A lot of people are. Twisted metal. Smoke. Flesh and blood.

  Then darkness.

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Two explosions and Melissa tosses the second remote onto the floor. The padding against my wound is soaked with blood so I replace it with some fresh stuff, which will no doubt soak up just as quickly. I realize there are two holes, one in front and one in the back, right through the right-hand side of my chest. I can’t move that arm. I don’t know what’s been hit. I don’t even know really what’s in there. Bone and muscle and tendons, I guess, which means reconstructive surgery and physiotherapy or a future of having a gimpy limb. It seems too high and too far to the side to worry about lung damage, but I don’t know—I’m not a doctor, and nor is Melissa—so I worry anyway.

  I get onto my knees and clutch the wall and the back of the driver’s seat and stare out the windshield as Melissa heads through the next intersection, then another, then turns right at the following one. Now we’re heading back toward the courthouse, only one or two streets over. Then she pulls over.

  “Nobody is following us,” she says.

  “Why are we stopping here?”

  “Just wait a minute.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “Melissa—”

  “Trust me,” she says. “I’ve gotten you this far, trust me to get you the rest of the way.”

  “Who shot me?”

  “It’s complicated,” she says, “but it was a clean shot.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “It was an armor-piercing bullet. It wouldn’t have broken apart on impact. It went through cleanly. Anything else would have made a sma
ll hole going in and a much bigger hole coming out.”

  “Why are we waiting here?” I ask.

  “We can’t be the only ambulance heading away right now,” she says, “because the police will be looking for us. We have to blend in.”

  “What?”

  “Trust me, babe, just stay patient. We’ll be out of here in a few moments,” she says.

  “If you know it was an armor-piercing bullet, then you know who shot me,” I tell her.

  “There was a plan,” she says. “It was the only way to get you out of there in an ambulance.”

  “But you were getting me out because I was sick,” I tell her. “Did you know about the sandwiches?”

  “What sandwiches?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I say.

  “I was waiting there for you to get shot, but then that security guard came out and asked for my help because you were sick.”

  I think about what she’s saying, but it still doesn’t make sense. “So you were working with somebody else, that same somebody who shot me. If you were getting me to the ambulance anyway, why did he still shoot me?”

  “Like I said, babe, it’s complicated, but I’ll go through it all with you later.”

  “But you knew what you were doing,” I tell her. “You said all that stuff to the nurse.”

  “It’s the same stuff TV doctors say all the time. It was all showmanship.”

  “You could have gotten arrested.”

  A couple of ambulances speed through the intersection ahead of us, going left to right.

  “It’s time to go,” she says.

  She pulls away from the curb and we take another right and she pulls over again where the other ambulances are. We’ve circled our way around. There’s one blown-up car behind us now and one blown-up car ahead. She climbs out of the ambulance and makes her way around the back and climbs back in. She drags the dead woman across the floor, then reaches down for the man. She shakes him. “Come on,” she says, “what good are you to me asleep?”

  He doesn’t respond. She checks his pulse. Then she shakes her head. “No,” she says, and I realize the guy has a good excuse for not responding. The best excuse, really. “He was going to help you,” she says.

  “You killed them both?”

  “I didn’t mean to. I guess I got the dosage wrong.”

  “Who’s going to help me now?” I ask, pulling the padding away from my chest. It needs replacing again. “I’m going to die here,” I say, my voice getting higher.

  One of the Grim Reapers I saw earlier, or perhaps a different one, is out there lying on the road. He’s not moving. His hood has been torn aside and half of his face looks gone, or it could be part of the makeup. I can’t tell.

  “We need to go,” I tell her.

  “Not yet,” she says. There are other ambulances pulling over in style with sirens going and with doors popping open before they’ve even rolled to a stop. People jump out and within seconds they’re working on people. Soon they’re going to be loading victims up into the back and taking off as well.

  “Here, let me take a look,” Melissa says, and she crouches in front of me and puts one hand on my good shoulder and uses her other hand to start undoing my shirt. Despite everything I’m suddenly aroused and I put a hand around the back of her neck and pull her in for a kiss that she resists. “Not now, Joe.”

  “I’ve missed you,” I tell her.

  “I know. You’ve said already,” she says.

  She closes the ambulance doors and moves back into the cab. She starts the ambulance and turns on the sirens. The streets are still full of people, but they’ve dispersed somewhat—the big groups breaking up into smaller groups, the smaller groups breaking up into pairs.

  We take the same route as before. We drive south. Then we turn right. I keep expecting a hundred police cars to cut us off—men with guns, that Sunday morning a year ago taking place all over, only this time me without a gun or a Fat Sally. It doesn’t happen. We follow another ambulance. We stay in a straight line all the way to the hospital. Only we’re not going to the hospital because that doesn’t make sense. Except that’s exactly what we are doing. Instead of taking the ambulance entrance, she takes the public one. She turns off the sirens. We drive around the back into the parking lot. It’s full. She double-parks near a white van. I’m sick of vans. She kills the engine. She comes around and opens the back door and helps me outside. Sunlight floods us. Cars and trees and a machine to pay for parking, a picnic bench with a bucket full of sand next to it full of cigarette butts, a few empty coffee cups on the bench, but no people anywhere. Coffee break is over for everybody in the hospital thanks to Melissa.

  Melissa fills up her rucksack with medical supplies. We start walking. Our target is the white van. I’m leaving a blood trail. She grabs keys out of her pocket and swings the back doors of the van open. She helps me climb inside.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “You were supposed to have help.”

  “I don’t want to die,” I tell her.

  “You’re not going to,” she says. “Just stay calm.”

  She gets into the front seat. She looks over her shoulders at me.

  “I’ve missed you too,” she says.

  “I knew you’d come for me,” I tell her.

  “I was pregnant,” she tells me. “From our weekend together. I had the baby. It’s a girl. It’s your girl. Our girl. Her name is Abigail. She’s beautiful.”

  It’s too much information to absorb. Me, a father? “Take me back to jail,” I say, and finally I pass out.

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Schroder can see the sky. It’s blue in all directions, a few clouds, one of them looks like a palm tree. One looks like a face. There’s a dark gray cloud forming close by. It’s smoke. From the car. He tries to move his head, but can’t. He can move his eyes. That’s a start, but a frightening one.

  He can remember every detail. It’s strange. A thing like that has every chance of wiping a few seconds’, a few minutes’, even a few days’ worth of memories. But not for him. For some reason he wonders if that’s because last year he died for a few minutes and then came back, as if that experience means his mind is hardwired a little differently now, immune to forgetting things, then he dismisses the idea for what it really is—a stupid one.

  He’s too frightened to try moving his arms and legs. He has to know they work, but what if they don’t? What if he’s never going to walk again? By not trying to move them, he can put that fate off for another time. His ears are ringing. He can feel the cold ground beneath him. He can feel one of his arms pinned under his back. His right. That makes him happy. If his back was broken he wouldn’t be able to feel that, would he? His left arm, he can’t feel. He can taste blood. He can feel more of it on his face. Over the ringing in his ears he can hear screaming.

  He closes his eyes and he prays, he actually prays for the first time since he was a kid, back when he figured out that praying didn’t get you anywhere in this world, that praying and misery went hand in hand just like peanut butter and jelly. But he prays now for his legs to move and they do, they move a little and without pain and he knows his prayer wasn’t answered, that he’s been lucky, that’s all it is. He was lucky and others probably won’t have been. Like Kent. He manages to tilt slightly onto his side, the blue sky disappearing, replaced with rooftops, then office windows and walls, then the street. His car has been lifted and has turned a quarter circle and come back down. There are no flames. It’s all twisted to shit and there is glass everywhere. There are other people lying on the ground, some tilting onto their sides and viewing the world the same way as him, some not moving at all.

  There is a death toll here. He prays it’s a low one.

  He prays God is listening to him.

  He rests on his back. He doesn’t want to, but he has no choice. He closes his eyes. His chest feels tight. Somebody puts a hand on his shoulder and he opens his eyes and Detective Wilson Hutton is crouching over him.
People have stopped screaming and started sobbing instead.

  “Hang on,” Hutton says.

  “Kent,” Schroder says.

  “It’s . . . it’s bad,” Hutton says.

  He can hear sirens. He can see ambulances. He didn’t see them arrive.

  “How long have I been out?”

  “Three, maybe four minutes.”

  “Joe?” he asks.

  Hutton shrugs, which sets off a chain reaction of rolling flesh down his chin and into his chest. “Gone,” he says.

  Schroder closes his eyes and for a few moments the chaos disappears, even the sobs and sirens. He opens them back up. “What about Kent?”

  Hutton shakes his head. “She’s not going to make it,” he says.

  “No,” Schroder says. His neck is too sore to shake his head, but his eyes aren’t too sore to tear up. He tries to get up. If he can just get up, then she’ll be okay. Somehow. He’s sure of it. “Help me up.”

  “That’s not a good idea,” Hutton says.

  “Goddamn it, help me up.”

  “Listen to me. Carl. It’s not a good idea. You’re in bad shape. Okay?”

  His breath catches in his throat. “How bad?”

  “Multiple cuts. Your left arm is broken. Could be a broken leg. Could even be a broken neck.”

  “My neck is fine,” Schroder says. He moves his head. Yep. Fine. He can move both feet so his legs are fine, but Hutton is right about the arm. He doesn’t care. He wants to see Kent. If he’d pulled over a few seconds earlier, if he’d yelled at her to get away from the car louder, would she be okay?

  It’s none of that. The fuckup happened at the prison. When he didn’t figure out he was talking to Melissa. Or for that matter, why not backtrack a year to when Melissa came into the station? Or go back even further to when Joe first started working for them. That’s where they could have made a difference.

  “Help me up,” he says, then uses his good arm to start getting to his feet. Hutton shakes his head, then sighs, then helps him. When he’s up he puts an arm around Hutton for support. His broken arm hangs by his side, all the pain flowing into it along with the blood, and it hurts, but he knows it’s going to hurt even more soon because that pain is only getting warmed up. His legs feel fine. He can take his own weight. He’s a little light-headed, but okay. He lifts his hand to his forehead and his fingers come away with blood on them. He focuses on them, then they fade as he focuses on what’s behind them. On the view.