Joe Victim

by Paul Cleave

  He holds his breath.

  He puts the crosshairs over Joe’s face.

  He pulls the trigger.

  The result is instant. Of course it is-yet somehow he was expecting it to take a second, maybe a second and a half for the physics to catch up. The sound of the shot is muffled by the earmuffs, but it’s louder than out at the forest, loud enough to make his ears ring. It echoes around the office and out into the street and as one everybody out there looks up in his direction.

  Except Joe.

  Because Joe is losing balance. The problem-and of course there were always going to be problems and he was a fool to think it could be otherwise-is that the shot has taken Joe in the chest, maybe in the shoulder, and certainly not in the head like he wanted. Maybe it was the dynamics of the bullet, or the nerves-he doesn’t know. What he does know is that the Red Rage is screaming at him to take another shot, and of course he’s going to. He still has time.

  The two officers holding Joe up don’t seem to feel any responsibility to him. They let him go and run for cover. Joe, without the aid of his human crutches, falls into a very similar pile to the one he started in when exiting the van earlier. Detective Kent hides behind Schroder’s car. Everybody is hiding-all except Joe and Melissa.

  Melissa. And why would she hide? He shot Joe in the shoulder just the way she always wanted him to. She starts dragging Joe toward the ambulance. The whole shooting and collecting part of the plan must still be going through her mind. He puts the crosshairs in the middle of her body. It may not be a kill shot, but at the very least the police will figure out who she is. The Red Rage is pleased by the idea.

  He pulls the trigger.

  This time the gun bucks in his hands and the gunshot is much quieter, almost only a fraction of the first, or at least it seems that way because his ears are still ringing from the first shot, and maybe it’s quieter anyway because it’s a different type of bullet. The barrel pulls up into the drop cloth and pulls it up off the ground. With the world reacting below him, he again spends a second determining what has gone wrong, and quickly decides nothing has, that he’s lost balance because of the platform he’s lying on.

  He repositions the gun and sees Melissa hasn’t been hit. He has one shot left. Her or Joe. Well, Joe’s already been hit, and if luck is on Raphael’s side and not on Joe’s, then that fucker is going to bleed to death in the parking lot. So he chooses Melissa. He pulls the trigger in the exact same way he pulled the damn thing all those times out where he buried the lawyers and shot the shit out of defenseless tin cans, and this time the gun bucks so wildly it’s wrenched from his hands. He hears his finger break. Feels it even more. He rolls off the bench and hits the floor, his shoulder taking the impact.

  He doesn’t understand. .

  And he’s out of time now. And out of bullets.

  He gets to his feet. He’s already been here longer than he should have. A look out the gap in the drop cloth shows a cop helping Melissa and Joe toward the ambulance and Schroder bursting through the back door into the parking lot. He doesn’t know how much time has gone. Fifteen seconds, maybe. Too long, definitely.

  He doesn’t bother putting the gun back into the ceiling. He peels the latex gloves off and it hurts his finger like crazy. He stuffs them into his pocket. He pulls off the earmuffs and tosses them onto the floor, then realizes that’s stupid, that his fingerprints are going to be on them. Fuck. He’s pulled his gloves off too early. Has he touched any of this stuff without gloves? Maybe. When he assembled the gun. When he fired it the other day. When he came here Saturday night. Was he wearing gloves then? He thinks he was, but suddenly he’s not so sure.

  He doesn’t have time to wipe down the gun. He looks around. Looks at the paint. Looks at the gun. It’ll work. He pulls his gloves back on, then twenty seconds later he’s heading down the stairs.

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  All hell is breaking loose.

  Joe Middleton is on the ground. There’s blood over the front of him. His blood. He’s writhing in agony. Kent has taken cover behind Schroder’s car. Two of the armed officers have also taken cover behind different cars. They’re hunkered down trying to figure out where they’re being shot from and by how many people. One of them is talking quickly into a radio. A paramedic starts doing her best to drag Joe out of the line of fire and toward the ambulance. The security guard is staying low, making his way back toward the courthouse. People in the street are shouting and ducking down and covering their heads with their arms and placards, no more two, four, six, eight from anybody.

  Schroder spends two seconds taking it all in. The way everybody is hiding tells him the direction the gunfire is coming from. There’s an office building across the road. He looks up and sees an open window with a curtain behind it. He stays low and moves over to his car and squats down next to Kent.

  “What the-” he says.

  “One shot,” she says, holding a pistol in her hands. “Office building over the road. I saw muzzle fire. Middleton is down.”

  “Why was he back out-”

  “Doesn’t matter right now,” she says. “All that matters is some fucker is shooting at us.”

  “At us? Or at him?” he asks.

  “Why don’t you put your head up and find out?”

  “If it’s only the one shot then it suggests it’s not us being shot at,” he says, but even so, rather than putting his head up, he leans down and looks under the car. The paramedic is still dragging Joe toward the ambulance. She’s the only one in the open. He can see her feet and legs and her arms and he has a view of the top of her head as she angles down to pull Joe along. He doesn’t know why the hell she would risk her life for Joe, then decides she can’t know who it is she’s trying to save. Or perhaps she’s running on instinct. It’s her nature to save people. Either way, she’s making a huge mistake.

  “She’s going to get herself killed,” Schroder says.

  “Who?” Kent asks. “The paramedic?”

  “Yeah.”

  Kent lifts her head and looks through the windows of the car. “What the fuck is she doing?”

  “I’ll get her,” Schroder says.

  “The hell you will,” Kent says, and grabs his tie and pulls him back down. “You’re a sitting duck if you go out there. I’ll go. At least I’m wearing a vest.”

  She starts to get up. Just then Jack runs across the parking lot. He puts his arm around the paramedic to pull her into cover, but she doesn’t let go of Joe, and Jack ends up dragging them both toward the ambulance.

  “We need to get into that building,” Schroder says.

  “No,” Kent says. “You stay here. Backup is-” The ambulance starts up. The sirens come on. “That’s one fearless paramedic,” Kent says, without looking up. It speeds toward the gate, which is still closed, but doesn’t slow down.

  Schroder pokes his head up. Sees the paramedic through the side window. Sees her face. Sees the ambulance heading for the fence. Sees that the people on the street can see what’s about to happen and are diving out of the way.

  “Oh fuck,” he says.

  “What is it?”

  He stands up, but nobody takes a shot at him. That’s because the shooting has stopped.

  “That was Melissa,” he says. “The driver, it was Melissa. Come on,” he says, climbing into his car, “let’s go.”

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  The ambulance crashes through the fence and the impact jars through my body. It’s been a few days of hell, with vomiting and shitting and getting banged-up knees, and now I’ve been shot and now I’m in an ambulance that’s probably going to tip over or crash into a truck.

  I roll toward the left wall as Melissa turns right. The pain is the second worst pain I’ve ever felt. It feels like somebody has punched their fist into my chest and clutched their fingers around whatever they could find and yanked it out, then set fire to what was left. The ambulance is swerving all over the road. Stuff is falling off the shelves. I’m lying
on the floor in blood and surrounded by all the things that can help me, but I don’t know how to use any of them. There’s a dead woman by my feet. She’s half covered by a sheet, and the half exposed shows she’s wearing the same uniform Melissa is wearing, and the dead woman is actually covering what appears to be another dead person-this one a man, and the man is mostly naked. The woman has one arm and one leg flopping against the floor.

  The ambulance straightens and there are thuds as it bounces into people. There’s lots of screaming and yelling and it feels like I’m slap-bang in the middle of an action movie. Melissa is talking to herself, telling people to get the hell out of the way, people who can’t hear her, and she has to keep swerving and tapping her foot on the brake. She has the sirens on, but we’re not traveling that fast.

  When I try to sit up I can’t. I know I’ve been shot, but it’s a hard concept to grab hold of. Shot? I’ve never been shot before-but of course that’s not true. I shot myself a year ago, though that wasn’t really being shot-that was having my face plowed by a bullet. Shot? Not compared to this.

  I give sitting up another go, and this attempt is better than the first, and I can see out the front window. I put my hand over the wound, then study the blood on the palm of my hand, then press it back to my shoulder. I want to say something to Melissa, but I don’t know what. Plus she’s focusing on driving. Focusing hard. Some people have dropped their signs and some of those signs she runs over, they crunch under the wheels like bones in a dog. A leprechaun bounces off the side of the ambulance, so do two zombies and one Marilyn Monroe. They fall into the distance, dazed and confused-all of them targets for whoever is going to follow us. I have no idea why people are dressed the way they are. I glance to our right as we go through the intersection, and I can see the front of the courthouse and the decoy cars from this morning. They’re locked in by the swarming people, angry people rocking the cars and banging their fists on the windows because word hasn’t gotten to them that I’m not in there. Only these people are dressed like normal people, they’re in jeans and shirts and dresses and jackets-none of them with masks or Hollywood outfits, but many of them carrying signs. The armed officers can’t move. They can’t open fire. No doubt they want to climb onto the roofs of their cars and spray bullets into the air-or perhaps they’re even angry enough to spray them into the crowd so they can part it like the Red Sea so they can follow us. In which case they ought to ask the guy dressed as Moses who is carrying two large old-model iPads made out of cardboard, each the size of a torso. On each tablet are the commandments, only they’ve been modified and I have time to read just Thou shall rock out with thy cock out before a guy dressed in a cowboy outfit complete with gorilla mask appears from the sea of people, jumps onto him, and they both disappear below the tide line.

  I sink back down to the floor. I grab some padding and press it into my wound. Thank God my stomach is still feeling okay, but I’m concerned that it’s not, that my body has other issues to deal with right now and is giving me a break on that one for a moment.

  “My bag,” Melissa shouts, and she glances over her shoulder at me.

  “What?”

  “My bag. Hand me my bag.”

  “What bag?”

  She glances back over her shoulder, and this time her eyes move around the floor. “There,” she says, “next to the woman’s foot. The black bag.”

  There’s a small black bag right where she said it’d be.

  “Hand it to me,” she says.

  “What’s in it?”

  “Hurry up, Joe,” she says. “Schroder is going to be right behind us.”

  I reach out and grab the bag. I hand it to her. She opens it up with one hand while keeping the other hand on the wheel. She pulls out a small box with a plastic top on it, and she lifts the top to reveal a trigger. It’s a remote. She puts it between her legs so it doesn’t fall on the floor, and then she puts both hands back onto the wheel. She keeps looking into her mirrors.

  “It’s all about timing,” she says.

  “I’ve missed you,” I tell her.

  “This confusion and chaos,” she says, “it’s just how I saw it. This is about to get easy for us, Joe, and about a hundred different types of messy for everybody else,” she says, and she keeps watching her mirrors and then hovers one hand over the remote.

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Raphael thought he would have been caught. He thought he would have been cornered in the stairwell by cops armed if not with guns, then with batons and fists and pepper spray. He was prepared to give a description of the man he was chasing, something like White uniform covered in paint, a hat on backward.

  None of that happens. On the street people are running in every direction. They bounce against Raphael and he lets himself get lost in them. They’re running for their lives. None of them are hurt but many are acting as if they’ve just been shot. Suddenly he’s not sure he’s even going to be able to drive out of here. He can see the ambulance two blocks away. Its sirens are on, but the people around it keep it moving slower than Melissa would have liked. He reaches his car and at the same time Detective Schroder’s car hits the street just ahead of him and turns the same way as the ambulance. It’s all happening just ahead of him. He can hear other sirens far in the distance.

  He begins to follow them. Did Melissa sabotage the gun? If so, then why give him a uniform? Why help him avoid arrest? He doesn’t know. It’s something to think about once he’s gotten the hell out of here. There’ll be a simple explanation, but he can’t search for it right now.

  Melissa keeps going south. Schroder follows, and Schroder is surrounded by the same crowd of people, though that crowd is starting to disperse. Raphael slows down. He’ll go left. He’ll start putting distance between him and the courthouse. The entire thing has been a disaster.

  He hopes like hell both Joe and Melissa are gunned down in a hail of bullets. He hopes Joe is already dead. He extends those hopes and prays he won’t be arrested, but only time will tell. He puts on his signal and waits for the people to get out of the way so he can turn into the intersection.

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  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?”