Joe Victim

by Paul Cleave

  “Are you still there?” she asks.

  “I’m here,” he says.

  “We can do this. If not now then at the end of the day when Joe comes back out. It’ll be just as good then. Maybe even better,” she says, not really believing that last bit. Better would be if Raphael had taken a successful shot already.

  “Okay,” he says, “I’ll wait and get him on the way back out. I promise,” he says, and he hangs up and Melissa stares at the back door of the court building and tries to figure out how long is too long when it comes to waiting for a guy like Raphael, and hopes he can keep his nerve long enough to stay where he is.

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  They drag me toward the holding cells until somebody decides that it’s a bathroom that I need dragging to, at which point they start me in a different direction. When I try to use my legs I find I just can’t get them to grip the ground beneath me. The organs squashed earlier aren’t bouncing back into shape. Instead they’re getting tighter. I’m placed in front of a toilet and the view of a chunk of shit caked above the waterline is better at helping the purging process than jamming my fingers down my throat.

  I have never in my life felt this sick. Sweat is dripping off me. I throw up again, then topple forward and somebody catches me before I lose my front teeth against the porcelain. They get me up and I don’t see much of the journey except for some blurry walls and sometimes my own feet, but I’m taken into a first-aid station and I’m laid down on a cot, but none of the chains are removed. The room smells of ammonia and ointments and recently wiped-away vomit. It smells exactly how the first-aid station back in school used to smell, and for a moment, just one brief moment, I’m back there, I’m eight years old and I’m feeling sick and the nurse is soothing back my hair and telling me I’m going to be okay. That doesn’t happen this time.

  “Joe,” somebody says. I open my eyes. It’s a nurse. She’s attractive and I try to smile at her, but can’t manage it. She’s looking down at me. “Tell me how you’re feeling,” she says.

  “I feel sick.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “Real sick,” I tell her, being real specific. She hands me some water and tells me to drink and I manage a few sips, then roll onto my side and start gagging.

  Hot Detective Kent, Jack, and the other two officers are in the room with us. The nurse is chatting to them, but I can’t focus on what she’s saying. Then Hot Detective is making a call somewhere. The nurse comes back, Hot Nurse, and I must be sick because as much as I try to imagine Hot Nurse making out with Hot Detective, my mind just won’t go there. It wanders off to other things. I think about my mom’s wedding. I think about Santa Suit Kenny. I think about my nights spent with Melissa.

  “Joe, what have you eaten over the last few days?”

  “Shit food,” I tell her.

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “Real shit food,” I tell her, being real specific again, wondering if this woman needs everything in life explained.

  “Does this hurt?” she asks, then pushes her fingertips into the side of my stomach. I can hear fluid moving in there. We all can. It doesn’t hurt and I don’t tell her it doesn’t hurt so therefore she doesn’t ask me to be more specific. She pushes a little harder and I have to tighten my ass muscles to stop a huge mess from happening.

  “Yes,” I tell her, wanting to push something sharp into her stomach and ask her the same thing. “It’s a sharp pain,” I tell her.

  “Where exactly?”

  “Everywhere.”

  Kent comes over. She’s shaking her head. “Nobody else at the prison is sick,” she says.

  “He’s faking it,” Jack says, but it sounds like even he doesn’t believe it.

  The nurse shakes her head. “I don’t think so,” she says. “I think we need to get him to a hospital.”

  “There’s an ambulance out in the parking lot,” Kent says, then turns toward the security guard. “Go get the paramedics,” she says, “and let’s hope we can get this sorted out so we don’t have to delay the trial.”

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  “Something went wrong,” Trish says. “Didn’t it. Please, just cut your losses and let us go.”

  “Not yet,” Melissa says, tucking the phone back into her pocket. She can picture Raphael up in the office building staring through the gun scope at the ambulance. Maybe he’s thinking he could use that armor-piercing round right now.

  “How far along are you?” Trish asks.

  “What?”

  “You’re pregnant,” Trish says, and Melissa glances down at herself knowing she’s not wearing the suit, but still checking just to make sure. “I can tell,” Trish says. “You’re trying to hide it, but I can tell. How far along are you?”

  “I’m not pregnant,” Melissa says.

  “I can see it in the way you carry yourself, and you keep rubbing your belly. I’ve dealt with a lot of pregnant women. You don’t need to lie about it.”

  Melissa says nothing. She didn’t realize she was still rubbing her stomach. She can feel the girdle beneath her scrubs.

  “I’m not pregnant,” Melissa says.

  “Then you were. And recently too. It doesn’t show. You gave birth, didn’t you?”

  Melissa thinks of Sally, of the blood left all over Sally’s bed when she drove to the nurse’s house and forced her at gunpoint to help deliver Joe’s baby. That was a long night. A hard night. One of the toughest of her life. “Three months ago,” she says.

  Back then she didn’t know where else to go. She couldn’t go to a hospital. She could change her appearance, but what she couldn’t do was give herself a history of medical records. So she went to Sally. Sally helped her. When the baby was born, Melissa was exhausted, but not exhausted enough to not do what needed doing-and that was to force Sally to lie down on the bed at gunpoint and then handcuff her to it. That’s when she took photographs of Sally naked. After that she forced Sally to go to the bank and draw out her reward money. Melissa wanted it in cash. And Sally had done that. She had done it because she wanted to save the embarrassment of naked pictures of her being put online. And she did it for the baby. Melissa told her that if she didn’t do it, that if Sally went to the police, she would kill the baby. It was simple. All Sally had to do was weigh up her sense of justice against her sense of morality, and no matter what, Sally didn’t want to be responsible for the baby’s death. So she did what she was asked, she returned with the money, and Melissa let her live. Of course Melissa wouldn’t hurt the baby. She loves it. She loved it before it was even born. A small girl named Abigail. And she let Sally live because she needed her for today. She needed her scrubs and her swipe card for the hospital and taking those things three months ago and killing Sally would only have resulted in the swipe card being deactivated. And she let Sally live because, really, Sally had saved Joe’s life. She owed her.

  “Are you strapping yourself up?” the nurse asks.

  Melissa realizes she was zoning out. “Huh?”

  “To hide the excess weight?”

  “Yes,” Melissa says.

  “That’s a really stupid thing to do.”

  “So is talking to me while I’m trying to think,” Melissa says.

  “The baby, it’s his, isn’t it,” Trish says, nodding toward the courthouse.

  Melissa knows she isn’t referring to the security guard standing outside it. “Yes.”

  “He raped you, didn’t he. All that stuff you said earlier, that phone call you made to somebody to hurt my family, that wasn’t real, was it. You’re not a killer, but you’re here to kill him, aren’t you.”

  Melissa nods again. Is there an opportunity here? Is this woman, this Trish, going to want to help her? Slowly she starts nodding.

  “You’re going about it the wrong way,” the woman says. “It’s not up to us to take a life. This whole death-penalty debate, it’s a mistake. It’s got people thinking stupid thoughts. It’s causing rifts in the community.
And it’s wrong, just plain wrong. I understand you’re angry, but every life is sacred. Everybody deserves the chance to be forgiven and to kneel in front of God and-”

  Melissa hits her with the gun. She swings it hard into the side of Trish’s head. Once. Twice. Then a third time. Trish isn’t talking anymore, which is a good thing because Trish was really starting to piss her off. The woman slumps forward and Melissa pulls her back before she falls into the horn. The entire plan is turning to shit.

  She reaches over and drags the either unconscious or dead woman back with her. She’s heavy, and her limbs and clothes snag at the seat, but she gets her there.

  This is getting out of hand.

  The other paramedic is already underneath the gurney. She couldn’t risk having a cop help her load Joe into the back and see him. So now she does her best to stuff Trish under there too. The blankets she had put over the guy she now puts over them both. Now it looks like two bodies stuffed under a gurney hidden by blankets. She needs to do better than that. Only she can’t. It is what it is and she’s too invested in this now to cut her losses and leave.

  She climbs into the front and is settling in behind the steering wheel when she realizes somebody is standing next to the ambulance. It’s a security guard, but not the same guy who’d been standing by the back door. He looks rushed. She winds the window down and keeps the gun out of sight, knowing that as bad as this day has been going, making it worse for this guy might just make her feel a little better.

  “There’s been a situation,” he says, his voice low and quick, the kind of voice she thinks would be great for selling torture porn, “with the Christchurch Carver. We’re going to need your help.”

  Chapter Sixty

  “Here’s the paramedic,” somebody says, but I can’t open my eyes to look. I can’t do much except lie on my back and pray things are going to get better. I’m scared as hell that this may be it for me, that whatever damage has been done inside my body is permanent, that I’ll never be able to escape the tightness and the pain.

  “I need a toilet,” I tell them. “Right now.”

  There’s a bathroom in the first-aid station. They lead me in there and then leave me alone with my exploding stomach, the sounds of it echoing out into many rooms beyond. I should care, I should feel embarrassed, but I don’t. I’m all hunched over as I sit on the bowl, my wrists and ankles still connected by a chain, and I feel like I’m back in the van.

  The relief is immediate and, for the first time since being attacked by Caleb Cole, my stomach remains relaxed. The tail end of the storm is passing. I clean up and walk out of the bathroom and nobody here is laughing. They all look concerned. I sit back down on the cot.

  Then I see the paramedic. She looks familiar. And rape-worthy.

  “What have we got?” the paramedic asks, and now it’s not just the look of her that’s familiar, but her voice too. My remaining testicle shrivels up, and for a moment I can feel grass on my back, I can see stars up above, and I’m back in that night a year ago where my favorite testicle said hello and then good-bye to Melissa’s pliers.

  I focus on her. I look at her eyes, only she’s not looking at me. She’s looking at the nurse.

  “Looks like food poisoning,” the nurse says, “but nobody else at the prison got it. He’s vomiting and has bad diarrhea.”

  “You’ve taken his blood pressure and temperature?” the paramedic asks, then she looks at me. Melissa? No. It can’t be. But those eyes. . they’re Melissa’s eyes. I’m sure of it.

  “Not yet,” the nurse says.

  “Then do it,” Melissa says, and I can feel my heart rate rising. “Has he been given any fluids?”

  “We tried giving him water, but he couldn’t hold it down,” the nurse says, who then starts to take my blood pressure.

  “Take the chains off him,” Melissa says.

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

  “There are four of you who are all armed, plus one security guard, and one very sick man. I think we can all handle the risk of his chains being removed.”

  “No,” Jack says.

  “We’re going to remove them for his trial anyway,” Kent says, “so may as well do it now.”

  Jack looks pissed off, and I can’t tell what’s annoyed him more, having to remove my chains or being overruled in front of everybody. He starts undoing the cuffs.

  “Blood pressure is elevated,” the nurse says, “but temperature is okay.”

  Melissa crouches over me. She starts pressing at the sides of my stomach. She’s looking into my face. She’s conveying a message. It comes through loud and clear. She touches my stomach. I double over in pain that I don’t actually feel. My stomach is still feeling good.

  “Don’t touch me,” I say.

  “We should get him to the hospital,” Melissa says.

  I push her hand away. “It hurts,” I tell her.

  “We need to get him into the back of the ambulance. For all we know he’s in the process of bursting his appendix, and if he is then he could die.”

  “It’s a trick,” Jack says.

  I roll onto my side and start to gag. I try to throw up, but nothing happens, though the sound of me trying is enough to make Kent scrunch up her face.

  “He said he ate bad food,” the nurse says.

  “And maybe that’s the cause and maybe it isn’t, but I didn’t become a paramedic just so I could watch people suffer when instead they could be helped.” Melissa puts her hands on her hips and stares at him. “If it’s food poisoning, well, food poisoning kills approximately two hundred people in this country every year,” she says, and I’m sure she must be making that figure up, but she delivers it extremely confidently. “Listen, people, I know what you have here. You have a serial killer about to face trial, but if you don’t get him to a hospital you may just have a dead serial killer about to face trial.”

  “You say it like it’s a bad thing,” Jack asks, and I want to tell him that I get the point, that everybody does, that he should just get it printed on a T-shirt so then he can shut up.

  “It’s my job to save people,” she says. “It’s your job to save people too.”

  “Joe isn’t people,” Jack says, and I can feel another vote coming.

  “Call it in,” Kent says.

  “What?” Jack asks.

  “Call it in. Look at him, his trial is due to start in less than five minutes. Call it in. Let the others know we’re taking him to the hospital and we want an escort. The faster we get him sorted, the faster we can get him in front of a judge.”

  Jack calls it in. He doesn’t look happy. “Let’s get him to the ambulance,” Melissa says-or, at least, who I hope is Melissa.

  The officers who helped me earlier help me again. I sway a little even though I’m still feeling much better. The officers get me out into the corridor, Kent and Jack behind me, the security guard and Melissa leading the way to the exit and back outside to the chanting crowds and placards and the occasional person dressed as Jesus.

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Something is happening.

  Five minutes ago Raphael watched the security guard come up to the ambulance, knock on the window, then Melissa followed him back inside. The second woman who was in the ambulance didn’t get out. It didn’t make sense. But then suddenly it did-Melissa has done something to her. She wouldn’t have killed her. Since Melissa isn’t really a paramedic, then she’s going to need to keep the paramedic alive. Melissa wants to keep Joe alive. He’s sure of it. So that explained the second paramedic, but it didn’t explain what the security guard wanted. Something to do with Joe being sick? He sure as hell looked sick.

  Raphael rests his finger on the trigger guard. His hands are still steady. There are no nerves now. That’s a sign that he’s doing the right thing. Like every fiber of his being is in on the decision, every cell is in harmony-they’re all getting along and are going to make this happen. He’s not going to shoot Joe in the shoulder like they t
alked about. Now he’s going to shoot him in the head. It was meant to be about wounding him, not killing him. Raphael would do the wounding, and Melissa would pick Joe up in the ambulance.

  Raphael was the shooter.

  Melissa was the collector.

  And together they were going to make Joe suffer.

  Now Raphael is the shooter, and he’s going to shoot to kill. Of course he’s upset he can’t torture Joe. But this will at least give him some satisfaction.

  He watches the back of the courthouse. He keeps the sights on the door. Then the door opens. Melissa and the security guard step outside, followed by Joe with the same two officers who helped him earlier helping him now, followed by louder screams from the crowd, followed by Kent and the guy who drove the van earlier. Whatever was wrong with Joe before is still wrong with him now. His skin is pale. He looks to be in a lot of pain. Good.

  Melissa looks up at Raphael. He can see her face in the scope. She slowly shakes her head and he slowly smiles, he can’t help it. She doesn’t want him to take the shot. There is no need to. Something happened and she’s gotten Joe out of there, but not in the way they planned. Something to do with Joe being sick. Has to be. Joe’s sick, and of course everybody down there thinks Melissa is a genuine paramedic.

  He moves the scope back onto Joe.

  Joe, the man who took away his daughter.

  Joe, the man who took away his life.

  He thinks about Vivian wanting to be a pop-singing ballerina. He thinks about Adelaide wanting to go to a Harry Potter school and learn magic. He thinks about how he never gets to see them, how much he misses his daughter, how Vivian and Adelaide will grow up without a mother.

  Hello, Red Rage. Nice to have you back.