Joe Victim: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

  “It’s a lot different,” Hutton says, and Schroder knows it. “We knew that thing was going to be empty. Whereas this time we know they’re in there. If only we had Jonas Jones along with us. He’d be able to tell us what’s going on inside.”

  “Funny. Look, they wouldn’t have come here if Sally was dead,” Schroder says. “They’ve come here for her help. Most likely for her medical skills. I say we go in. We have to. We owe it to Sally.”

  “We owe it to Sally to give her the best chance we can, and her best chance is if we wait for backup, and nobody from backup is going to have a busted arm. Three minutes, that’s all,” Hutton says, and Schroder knows he’s right, and in Hutton’s position he’d be making the same decision. So then why does the right thing to do feel so very, very wrong?

  He opens the car door and steps outside.

  “Jesus, Carl,” Hutton says, and he does the same. Schroder starts walking. “Have you forgotten you’re not even a cop anymore?”

  “We have to do something, Wilson.”

  “Don’t make me arrest you.”

  “And what? Cause a scene?”

  “You’re going to get me fired.”

  “And you’re thinking of your job over saving Sally’s life.”

  “That’s a really shitty thing to say, Carl,” Hutton says.

  “I know. You’re right, and I’m sorry. But we can’t just stand by and wait.”

  “Two minutes,” Hutton says. “Just two minutes now.”

  “Then that’s less time for us to fuck up.”

  Schroder keeps walking to the house. He can do this. He can save Sally and Hutton can arrest Joe and Melissa. It’s what they’re trained for. Only it’s not. They’re trained to investigate. And they’re trained to stand back and send in the AOS team in these situations. Melissa is armed. She’s already killed one policeman today. No reason to make it easy for her to kill a second. He stops walking.

  “Okay,” he says.

  So they wait twenty more seconds and then Schroder decides twenty seconds is long enough. The thing is, a lot can happen in two minutes. People can die. Joe and Melissa can hear the police arrive and cut their losses and kill whoever they have in there with them. So he takes a few steps toward the house. There’s a throbbing in his head, a pound-pound-pounding, and he realizes it’s the sound of his footsteps on the pavement as he runs toward the house.

  “Goddamn it,” Hutton says, but Hutton is overweight and hasn’t seen the inside of a gym in years, and all that extra eating holds him back. Even with a broken arm Schroder outruns him.

  He reaches the house. The van has been reversed into the driveway and it’s easy to see the front is empty. Kent’s gun is back in his hand. The back doors of the van are open and he comes around the side of it and peers in and it’s empty too, except for some blood on the wall. Hutton is only a house away now, but he’s stopped running. Not because of the strain on his body, but because to catch Schroder now would be to create a confrontation. Still there are no sounds of sirens in the distance. Either they’re late, caught in traffic, or are running silent.

  The house is a single-story dwelling with weatherboard walls and a concrete tile roof. The garden is tidy and looked after but uninspiring. There’s a headless garden gnome by the step to the front door. The front door is closed. Schroder peers through the window and can see into the lounge. There’s nobody in there. He ducks down and listens for any sound, but there’s nothing. He moves to the side of the house and looks through another window into the same room and gets the same view, but from a different angle. Next window looks into the kitchen. Small but tidy. He tries the back door. It rattles, but it’s locked. He puts the side of his face against it and listens. Nothing. No movement inside. No sirens approaching from the street. No sign of Hutton. Further around the house and now he’s looking into the bedroom window. There’s a body on the floor. It’s Sally. She’s face down. He can’t tell whether she’s dead or alive, but knows what he’d put his money on. The bed has blood on it. There are medical supplies scattered around the room. Some bloody clothes. A paramedic uniform. Joe and Melissa are gone, probably in Sally’s car.

  He moves to the front door. He tries it. It’s unlocked. He pushes it open and moves into the bedroom, the gun pointing ahead. He crouches down next to Sally and has to put the gun on the floor so he can put two fingers on her neck. He looks for a pulse and finds one, steady and strong. He rolls her onto her back. There’s a big bruise on the side of her forehead and some blood.

  “Sally,” he says, shaking her a little with his good arm. He wonders why they let her live. He wonders how Melissa and Joe go about putting a value on human life. “Sally?”

  Sally doesn’t stir. So he slaps her slightly on the side of the face, and then a little harder. “Come on, Sally, it’s important.”

  Sally doesn’t seem to think so. He moves into the kitchen. He finds a bucket beneath the sink. He fills it up with cold water. He thinks about the gun and knows what’s going to happen within the next few minutes. He takes it out and wraps it in a tea towel and sets it on the counter near the sink. He carries the water back into the bedroom. His arm is starting to wake up.

  “I’m sorry,” he tells her, and then he pours it over her face. She wakes up a quarter of the way into it, starts sputtering, and by the end she’s rolled onto her side and is coughing.

  “Sally,” he says, and he crouches down next to her.

  “Detective Inspector Schroder?” she says.

  “You’re safe now,” he tells her.

  “Where are they?” she asks. “Have you arrested them?”

  “No,” he says. “Please, Sally, tell me what happened. Did they say where they are going? Do you still have your car? Did they take it?”

  “The woman, Melissa, she came here last night,” she says. “She threatened to shoot me. She tied me up and used my uniform and took my ID card. Then she left this morning and came back with Joe. He’d been shot. They made me help him. I thought . . . I thought they were going to shoot me.”

  “You’re safe now,” he tells her again. “What did they say? Do you know where they’re going?”

  She shakes her head, then quickly puts one hand on the side of it and closes her eyes, the movement enough to bring her close to passing out. He helps her up so she can sit on the bed. Okay, his arm is really starting to hurt now. He pulls out the second of his three syringes.

  “What are you doing?” Sally asks.

  “Don’t worry, it’s not for you,” he says, and plunges the needle into his arm.

  “You shouldn’t be doing that,” she says.

  “Tell me what happened here,” he says, and puts the cap on the syringe and dumps it on the floor. The numbness in his arm begins to return.

  “They had a baby,” Sally says.

  “What?”

  “Not with them,” she says. “But . . . but Melissa made me help.”

  “Wait. She had the baby last night?”

  Sally shakes her head. “Three months ago. She came here and—”

  “And you didn’t tell us?”

  “I couldn’t,” Sally says, looking down.

  “Why the hell not?”

  She starts to cry. And she tells him why. He should be more sympathetic than he is, but all he can feel is the anger and frustration. People have died. Cops have died. She should have come to them. They could have done something with that information. They could have caught Melissa and the baby would have been safe.

  “Tell me about today,” he says. “How bad was the wound?”

  “He was shot in the shoulder. The bullet went right through.”

  “And you’re sure neither of them said anything that might help?”

  “Nothing.”

  Before he can say anything more half a dozen men storm into the room, all of them dressed in black, one of them shouting at him to Get down, get down. A knee is put in the middle of his back and his face pressed into the floor, and then he screams into
the carpet as his broken arm is pulled out of the sling and behind him, the numbness leaving in an instant as the handcuffs go on.

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  It’s been over a year since I drove out to my mother’s house, but the same feelings I had back then I’m having again now. The dread. The shivers. The only good thing about being in jail was not having to come out here for meat loaf every week.

  We’re about five minutes away when Melissa slows down and pulls over. The pain in my shoulder is dull, it feels like a warm ball bearing has been sewn into it. Melissa’s pulling over because the building tension is reaching its peak. If we don’t get each other’s clothes off within the next few seconds we’re going to explode. Only there’s a problem—if we get each other’s clothes off in the car people are apt to see. Some even apt enough to go about calling the police.

  “The police will be visiting your mother,” Melissa says, turning toward me.

  “Huh?”

  “They’ll be waiting for us there.”

  I’m not following her train of thought. Hopefully our relationship isn’t going to be based on her not making sense and me trying to figure her out. “Why? They’ll know I was shot. My mother would be the last place they’d think I’d go.”

  “I’m not so sure. I think it’ll be one of the first places, not because the police think you’ll go there, but because they have to start sending people somewhere rather than nowhere. They have more manpower than they do ideas, so they can afford to send them all on wild-goose chases. They’ll send people there just for the act of something to do.”

  I shake my head. “Normally I’d agree, but today is different. Mom isn’t home. That’s what makes breaking in there and getting the money so much easier for us.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She’s getting married today.”

  “Do the police know that?”

  “No,” I say. “Shit, but of course the police don’t know that, so they have no reason not to go to her house. Maybe they’ve been already and found out she wasn’t home.”

  Melissa shakes her head. “Or maybe they’ve been and left people there. We can’t go there, Joe. We can’t take the risk.”

  She’s right. I know she’s right. But fifty thousand dollars is too much money to just not think about. There has to be another way.

  “Plus we don’t even know that she drew the money out,” she adds.

  “She will have,” I say. Over the years I’ve dipped into my mom’s savings hidden under her bed. If I had done that when I was a teenager instead of going to my aunt’s house, I wonder how different life would have turned out. Only I didn’t know it back then.

  “We should just head back home.”

  “Home,” I say, thinking about what home is now. It’s not jail. It’s not my mother’s. It’s not my apartment. It’s Melissa’s house. Home is with her and a baby.

  “Unless you’ve got somewhere better to be?” she asks, and she says it in an accusing way that makes me think of my mother.

  “Of course not,” I tell her, and then because I think she needs to hear it, I say, “I love you.”

  She smiles. “I would hope so,” she says. “After what I’ve gone through to get you here.”

  She turns the car around. We start heading back the way we came. I divide my time between staring out the window, and staring at her. She looks different from that weekend we spent together. Part of it is the wig. She looks puffier in the face and neck and her eyes are a different color too, meaning she’s either wearing contacts or she was wearing contacts when I met her last year.

  “What?” she asks, looking at me.

  “Just remembering how beautiful you are,” I tell her.

  She smiles. “You know what I’m thinking about?”

  I nod. I know. But like I thought earlier people are apt to start making phone calls.

  “I’m thinking about that money,” she says. “There has to be a way to get to it.”

  “You’re right, though. We can’t risk going to my mother’s. Not now anyway.”

  “You’re sure the police don’t know about your mother’s wedding plans?”

  I think about it. My mother wanted me to be at the wedding. She wanted me to get the warden to let me out for the day. Will she have followed that up? Will she have gone to the police to try and talk them into releasing me just for that?

  “If there’s a wedding,” she says, “often there’s a honeymoon. If the police know she’s gone away, they’ll stop watching the house, which means . . . Joe, hey, are you okay?”

  I’m not okay. I’m thinking about the honeymoon. I had forgotten about that. I don’t know where they’ll be going. Somewhere awful. I’m thinking about the fifty thousand dollars my mother will have drawn out in cash.

  “Joe?”

  I’m thinking that money may not be at the house at all, but with her, that their honeymoon starts right after the wedding and the trip will consist of her and Walt and all that cash. She doesn’t think I’m ever getting out of jail. She doesn’t see any reason not to spend it.

  “Joe? What’s wrong?”

  “We need to go to the wedding. We need to find my mother now.”

  “Why?”

  Because I know my mother. I tell Melissa this and she keeps on driving, her hands tightening on the wheel.

  “We should just let it go,” she says.

  “It’s not in my nature to let things go,” I tell her.

  “It’s not in mine either. Do you know where the wedding is?”

  “I can’t . . . Oh, wait,” I say, and I lean sideways and reach into my pants and find the invitation I’d folded in half this morning, the invitation I was hoping would bring me some luck. It seems it’s done just that. I hand it to her. She glances at it then back at the road.

  “We should let it go,” she says. “We can see her in a few months and if there’s anything left—”

  “I went through a lot to earn that money,” I tell her.

  “And I went through a lot to get us to this point.”

  “The police have no reason to go there,” I say.

  She seems to agree, because we stop talking about it and we start driving in the direction of my mother’s big day.

  Chapter Seventy-Eight

  Schroder is sitting down at the kitchen table. There’s nobody else in the room. His hands are still cuffed behind him and he’s doing his best to stay as still as possible because any movement brings him close to passing out. His mind is still buzzing. The sling is still hanging from his neck. The third syringe he took from the ambulance is sitting on the table in front of him, and the second shot he took earlier isn’t helping in this position. A minute ago Hutton came in to check on him, and then to abuse him too—by the end of the day there was a good chance Hutton would be losing his job. Or at the very least he would be suspended. Perhaps demoted. It was a world of possibility.

  “Where’s the gun?” Hutton asks, keeping his voice low.

  “I lost it.”

  “They patted you down. Where’d you hide it?”

  “I can’t remember,” Schroder says, and he knows Hutton can’t mention it to anybody else. Not only is Hutton in a world of trouble for letting Schroder come here, but if they found out he came here armed, then getting suspended or fired would be the least of his problems.

  “Goddamn it, Carl, you promised me.”

  “Nobody knows I have it,” he says, “and I promise I’ll never say you knew I had it.”

  “You don’t make great promises,” Hutton says.

  “I intend to keep the one I made Kent.”

  Hutton walks out. Superintendent Dominic Stevens walks in. Stevens is the man who covered Schroder’s crime four weeks ago. He’s the man that fired him.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Stevens asks. “Don’t you see what you’ve become? What you’re becoming? I could have you arrested for this. You could have cost people their lives.”

  “Kent—” />
  “I don’t give a fuck about any of your excuses,” Stevens says, “or your reasons. You’re more trouble than you’re worth. You used to be a great cop, and now . . . now I don’t know.” He sighs, then leans against the kitchen counter. He takes a few seconds to calm down. “Listen, Carl, I know how much you’re hurting these days, and I know you’re probably blaming yourself for some of what’s happened, but you can’t be here. You just can’t. And the man I used to know would have known that.”

  Schroder doesn’t have an answer.

  “Do I need to carry on?”

  “No,” Schroder says.

  “I’m tempted to leave you in cuffs for the next twenty-four hours. What’s wrong with your arm? Is it broken?”

  “From the explosion.”

  “You’re lucky to be alive,” he says.

  “And Kent?” Schroder asks.

  “They’re still working on her,” he says, “but we’ve been told she’ll pull through.”

  Schroder feels his body flood with relief. It’s a warm sensation. “Thank God.”

  “So here’s what’s going to happen. There’s an ambulance outside treating Sally. She’s going to stay to help us, but you’re going to climb into the back and they’re going to take you to the hospital.”

  “I can still help,” Schroder says.

  “Go home, Carl.”

  “I know Joe better than anybody here.”

  “If you knew him that well he’d still be in custody.”

  “Let me help. I don’t have to be on the team chasing him, but let me help figure out where he’s going to go. Sally said they had a baby. We can start—”

  “Listen, Carl, this is me staying calm, okay? This is me acknowledging it’s been a tough day for you. But I swear to God if the next word out of your mouth isn’t good-bye as you leave for the hospital then I will have you arrested.”

  “But—”

  Stevens winces as if he’s just been hurt. “That wasn’t a good-bye,” he says.

  “Please—”

  “Don’t test me on this, Carl. Like I said, this is me calm. In about five seconds I won’t be.”