Joe Victim

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.

“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.