Joe Victim

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 get 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.