Joe Victim: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

  “Oh my God,” he says. There are people lying in the street. A few near him, but most further down by the other blown-to-shit car. Some burns. Lots of blood coming from people who have friends and strangers trying to comfort them. There are five, six, no, maybe ten ambulances. Metal and plastic and glass have been shredded from the bombed car and thrown about like confetti, going further than he can see, the sun glinting off a thousand pieces of wreckage.

  “Where’s Kent?” he asks.

  “This way,” Hutton says.

  Schroder is led past his car. It’s still smoking. He’s seen plenty of cars destroyed in accidents—he’s seen cars with roofs missing as they’ve jammed themselves beneath trucks, he’s seen cars cut in half by busses—but he’s never seen one detonated by an explosive. It’s charred and twisted metal, less of a car now than some weird modern-art exhibit. He carries his broken arm in his good arm.

  Kent is lying on the other side of the exhibit and on the sidewalk. Nearby, Spider-Man is lying facedown in a gutter, a side mirror next to his head, a patch of blood on both of them from the impact. He doesn’t know if Kent somehow bounced out of the car she was thrown into, or if the paramedics pulled her out.

  Kent looks up at him. She smiles. “Hey,” she says.

  “Hey.”

  “I should have been quicker,” she says.

  “Yeah, you should have been,” he says, trying to smile, and she tries to smile too. It breaks his heart. Breaking her heart is a piece of metal embedded in her chest. Her limbs are twisted. Her hands are burned. One side of her face is covered in blood, and beneath it he can see overlapping skin, like somebody has lifted a piece of wallpaper and set it back down slightly off-center. “You’re going to be fine,” he tells her, and then the paramedics get her up onto a gurney and start moving her toward the ambulance.

  “Joe,” Kent says.

  “We’ll get him,” he says.

  She reaches out and grabs his hand. The paramedics tell her to let go and she doesn’t. “Joe said Calhoun was a bad guy,” she says. “You always,” she says, then coughs up a little blood, “you always said—”

  “Just rest,” he tells her.

  “That somebody else killed Daniela Walker. Joe said it was Calhoun.”

  “Joe’s a liar and a madman.”

  “I believed him,” she says, and her eyes flicker closed and she lets go. The gurney starts moving again and he hobbles to stay with it. Her eyes open back up. She smiles. A sweet, bloody smile, what he thinks may be her last. “Should have been quicker,” she says again.

  He says nothing.

  “Do me a favor, Carl,” she says, and she reaches down and unclips the latch to her pistol. And then her arm falls away. “Promise me something,” she says, struggling with her remaining breaths, and she nods down toward her firearm.

  He already knows what it’s going to be. He looks up. Hutton is looking back at the wreckage. He’s not watching. “I’ll get him,” he says, and he reaches down and takes her gun. Neither of the paramedics seem to mind. “I’ll get them both. I promise.”

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  The roads aren’t as congested out past the hospital. Melissa is calm. No reason not to be. Joe has passed out in the back. She hopes it’s from the blood loss and the pain, and not from the news that he’s become a father. He’s still losing blood. She’s sure it’s a shoulder wound. She’s sure the bullet hasn’t hit his lung. If she starts freaking out he’s going to die. She needs to start helping him, but first she needs to put more distance between them and the hospital and the courthouse.

  The plan may have started unraveling, but she saved it. The explosions were perfect. When she left her earmuffs in Raphael’s car on Saturday, that was no accident. When she went back she had placed C-four in the same place in his car that she did in Schroder’s. Raphael will have been blown into a dozen pieces. Probably more. He probably rained down over five city blocks in bite-sized pieces. She knows Schroder got out of his car. But not by much. She saw him flying through the air. As for the bystanders, well, she didn’t want them hurt, but there wasn’t much she could do about that except hope for the best. People had to take responsibility for their actions—and in this case all those victims were accountable for being at the courthouse when they should have been at work or at home or studying, and they were accountable for not getting out of the way in time.

  She drives for two more minutes. Then she pulls over. She gets into the back of the van. She opens up her bag and pours the supplies out on the floor. She lays Joe out flat. The whole point of the van was so she could have a mobile operating space. There were supposed to be two paramedics back here—or at least one. She unbuttons his shirt, then uses a pair of scissors to cut away the part of his shirt and jacket getting in the way. Like she hoped, it looks like a clean wound. She doesn’t know what to do. She has the idea of getting the van cigarette lighter from the dashboard and using it to cauterize the wounds, but she doesn’t know if that really works. She wads up some gauze and stuffs it into the hole. She rolls him onto his side and stuffs more into the back of the wound too. Then she puts padding on both sides and uses bandaging to apply pressure. It’s the best she can do. For now. Until she gets help. And she knows where to get it.

  She gets back behind the wheel. She turns on the radio and listens to unconfirmed reports that there are dozens dead and hundreds wounded and she knows it can’t be that many. She keeps driving. The unconfirmed reports stay unconfirmed, and the estimates drop a little, and the only thing they get right are the amount of explosions. And the stampede—people are fleeing the area. There are unconfirmed gunshots and no mention of Joe.

  Fifteen minutes later she pulls into the same street she was in earlier this morning and pulls into the same driveway of the same house. She gets out and uses Sally’s keys to open Sally’s front door, and Sally is hog-tied and gagged just where she left her, still dressed in her pajamas and robe. The fatty looks sad. She also looks like she’s wet herself.

  “Scream and I kill you. You understand?” Melissa asks.

  Sally nods. Melissa takes off her gag.

  “You help us, and you get to live. You understand?”

  “Who’s us?” Sally asks.

  “I have a patient out in a van. I need you to help me bring him inside. It’s Joe.”

  “Joe? I . . . I don’t understand.”

  “He’s been hurt, you Jesus-loving heffalump,” Melissa says, quickly losing patience. “I want you to help him. If you don’t, so help me, I’ll shoot those flappy breasts of yours and leave you for dead.”

  “I—”

  Melissa slaps her in the face. “Here’s how it’s going to work,” she says. “You’re going to help Joe and if he dies then you die and if he lives then you get to live. It really is that simple. You get it, right? You see how it works?”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “He’s been shot.”

  “I thought—”

  “You people, you Jesus freaks, you’re all about the forgiveness, right? It’s your job to forgive what he’s done,” Melissa says. “And now you’re a nurse so it’s your job to help people. You get to combine your love of God with your love of helping people. Think of this as the perfect storm.”

  “I don’t have any supplies.”

  “I have a bag full of them,” Melissa says, then she pulls out a knife and cuts the plastic binds around Sally’s arms and the binds from around her feet. Sally sits up and starts massaging her wrists. Melissa shows her the gun.

  “One wrong move,” she says, “and it’s over.”

  They head outside. To her credit Sally doesn’t try to run and to Melissa’s credit she doesn’t have any reason to shoot her in the back. They help Joe out and get him inside and the kitchen table is too small so they carry him down a very short corridor into the very small bedroom where Melissa slept last night. There are stuffed toys on the floor, thrown there last night when Melissa laid on the bed, and now those toys ge
t stood on and stepped over. They get Joe laid down on the bed, then Melissa tips up the bag of medical supplies on the end of the bed near his feet.

  “We need to cut away his clothes,” Sally says.

  “Then cut,” Melissa says.

  Sally runs the blade of the scissors all the way from Joe’s waist to his collar, then cuts the shoulder of the jacket, cutting the bandaging Melissa had put there earlier. She peels back the clothes and the padding and pulls out the gauze, exposing the wound, a hole big enough to poke a finger into, but no bigger. The whole time Melissa stays a few yards back, the gun lowered to her side.

  Sally shakes her head as she stares at the wound. “He needs a hospital.”

  “Think of this as a hospital,” Melissa says. “Think of yourself as a doctor and me as your assistant. Think of this as the test run you’ve always wanted. You keep the patient alive and you fix him up and you get a gold star. You get promoted from a victim to a survivor.”

  Sally shakes her head. She’s being stubborn. Melissa doesn’t like stubborn people. “He needs a hospital,” she says again.

  “And you need to start doing your job,” Melissa says.

  “You’re not understanding me,” Sally says. “He’s already lost a lot of—”

  “Sally?” Joe says, opening his eyes and looking up at her. “Sweet, sweet Sally,” he says, and Melissa instantly feels a pang of jealousy, until he follows it up with, “Sally with the wobbly belly.” Then he grins, laughs for a couple of seconds, and closes his eyes again.

  Melissa smiles. Good ol’ Joe. “Fix him,” she says.

  “Even if I can, this isn’t a sterile environment. He’s going to be prone to infection, and we don’t have—”

  “Sally,” Melissa says, saying the name in an abrupt voice that makes Sally turn from Joe and toward her. “Just do the best you can. I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

  “And if it’s not fine?”

  “Then I’m going to shoot you in the fucking head.”

  Chapter Seventy

  Schroder refuses the ambulance ride. He sees no point. A broken arm—so what? But he does accept the bandaging applied to the top of his forehead and the bandaging to his leg. The cuts aren’t deep. They’ll need stitches, but he doesn’t care. At least the bleeding has stopped. Hell, for a few minutes last year he was dead—the broken bones and torn flesh life throws his way aren’t a big deal.

  “Can I have something for the arm?” he asks.

  The paramedic is a guy in his sixties who looks like he spent his twenties and thirties as a professional wrestler. Big and with a disfigured nose, his voice is deep and gravelly, one of those Don’t mess with me voices. “You can have the break set and a cast applied,” he says.

  “And I will,” Schroder says. “Later today. But I need something for the pain right now.”

  “That pain is only going to get worse,” the paramedic says. “I can put it in a sling and I can give you some painkillers, the kind of thing you’d buy at the pharmacy, but nothing stronger, and they’re not going to do a hell of a lot. You want something stronger, then climb in the back of the ambulance and let me take you back to the hospital.”

  “I’ll take what you can give me,” Schroder says.

  Both camps of protesters, along with the students, have broken up, and the crowd mostly dispersed so Schroder isn’t banging into anybody as he walks back toward the courthouse. His arm is in the sling and already feels a whole lot better than having it hanging by his side. Hutton is carrying a police radio. There are reports of witness sightings of the ambulance leaving the scene, but there were and are lots of ambulances, and pulling them over is putting lives at risk, and as of the moment nobody can rightly say which one they should be looking for. Joe is out there in the back of one of them, though he doubts that’s the case anymore. He wonders if the serial killer is dead and hopes that he is.

  “So far there’s two confirmed deaths,” Hutton says. “Jack Mitchel,” he says. “He was a good man.”

  “He was . . . ah, shit,” Schroder says. “He was trying to help the paramedic. He didn’t know it was Melissa.”

  “She shot him,” Hutton says.

  “Christ, I didn’t even see him there. Who’s the second?”

  “The second is the driver of the first car that exploded. We were able to run the license plate. Car belonged to Raphael Moore.”

  Hutton is puffing a little, struggling to keep up. Schroder is walking like a man on a mission who was just half blown up, which is exactly what he is. The painkillers aren’t helping yet, and he’s not sure they even will. He pauses and turns toward the detective. The courthouse is fifty yards away. “Raphael Moore?”

  “Yeah. I know you knew him.”

  “I just spoke to him,” Schroder says, and he thinks back to Saturday and the conversation they had, and to the one on Thursday night too. He thinks of the bad feeling Raphael gave him. Now he knows why. Soon he will revisit those feelings and question what he could have done differently. He should have made more of an effort to convince Kent there was something wrong. Or he should have just followed him.

  He reaches into his pocket with his good arm for his caffeine pills, but they’re not there—they must have fallen out either while being propelled through the air or on impact. “Melissa must have known him,” he says, searching his pocket.

  “Could just be a coincidence,” Hutton says. “She just planted a bomb in a car she saw in the area. Could be—” he starts, and then his cell phone starts ringing.

  Hutton takes the call, leaving Schroder to think of what Hutton’s could be was going to be, adding a lot of his own could bes to it. The two men start walking again. Mostly what Hutton says are a lot of Uh huhs and a few Okays. Schroder is thankful it’s not going to be his job to talk to the woman who was in the process of becoming Raphael’s ex-wife, a woman who is now technically a widow. He thinks of Raphael’s grandchildren and wonders how much they’ll feel the loss, and wonders if the loss of their mother was so strong that losing a grandfather won’t make much of an impact. Then he thinks of Jack Mitchel, and he thinks back to the day they arrested Joe Middleton and how much Jack was itching to put a bullet into the serial killer. That’s not a could be, but a could have been. That could have been would have given today an entirely different outcome. His imagination takes another trip down the path not taken. No Joe, no trial, no protests, no gunshots and bombs. Tonight when the adrenaline has worn off, there’s going to be a whole lot of guilt waiting for him.

  They pass Raphael’s car. The scene has started to clear of people and the police presence has grown. The small remaining crowds have been pushed back a block, but they are gathering back there with police officers trying to keep the scene contained. They’re not doing as good a job as they’d like, because there are still a few people within the cordon, those who aren’t cops or victims or paramedics are mostly media. No longer are the decoy cars surrounded. They walk through the intersection and turn left at the end of the block and head around to the back of the courthouse, where there are four patrol cars all with sirens off, but lights flashing.

  “That was an interesting call,” Hutton says. “Witnesses have said the man getting into Raphael’s car was a police officer.”

  Schroder pauses again and turns his back to the courthouse and looks at Hutton, who is framed by the image of Raphael’s smoldering car. “What?”

  “That’s not all,” Hutton says. A couple of reporters start arguing a few yards away from them with a pair of officers trying to push them back. Schroder and Hutton carry on walking. “We got a report that it was the same person in the car that came out of there,” he says, pointing over at the office building where currently a steady stream of forensic technicians is pouring into.

  “Can never reply on witness reports,” Schroder says.

  “I know that, but the person who saw him getting into the car is one of us.”

  “So . . . so what are we saying here?”

  Hutton
shrugs. Schroder wonders how much time has passed. It feels like five minutes, but it’s longer because he spent time unconscious and time watching over Rebecca as the paramedics worked at saving her. He looks at his watch, but it didn’t survive the blast. For this amount of cops to be here and the crime-scene tape already up, it has to have been at least fifteen minutes. It could even be half an hour. He needs to phone his wife. Needs to tell her he’s okay.

  “What time is it?” he asks Hutton.

  “Ten forty.”

  So it’s been just over forty minutes since the first gunshot rang out. They reach the back of the courthouse. Jack Mitchel is lying on his back. Schroder stares at the dead man thinking of another could be, in this case it’s a could have been, as in what could have been if Melissa had decided to detonate Raphael’s car second. An hour ago none of this was a possibility, and now it simply doesn’t feel like a reality.

  “So,” Schroder says, “we’ve got a police officer climbing into Raphael Moore’s car outside the scene of a shooting, and not long—”

  “No,” Hutton says, shaking his head and interrupting.

  “You just said—”

  “What we have is somebody dressed as a police officer getting into Raphael’s car. That doesn’t mean it’s a cop.”

  Schroder takes a few seconds to think about it. It’s a good point. He should have thought of that. Instead of the pain in his arm starting to disappear, it’s getting stronger. The paramedic gave him only four pills, two to take now and two to take in another few hours. He takes the second two now, working up enough saliva in his mouth then dropping them in one at a time and swallowing. “Okay, so let’s play this out. If it’s Raphael and he’s dressed as a cop and he’s coming out of the building Joe was shot from, then it stands to reason Raphael is the guy who did the shooting. Right?”