Joe Victim

He chases after his colleagues and Schroder climbs into the ambulance and opens the drawer with the green handle. There are half a dozen syringes in there—all identical, and all loaded with some type of clear fluid. He uses his teeth to pull off the protective lid, then plunges the needle into his arm. He doesn’t know what’s inside it, but by the time he puts the cap back on the needle and tosses the empty syringe onto the floor, the pain starts to fade. He takes a second syringe and drops it into his pocket. He figures what the hell, and takes a third too. He steps out of the back just as Hutton arrives.

“I’ve canceled the call to AOS,” he says, “but forensics are on their way.”

“Look at that,” Schroder says, pointing to a blood patch on the wall.

“It’s not from the paramedic,” Hutton says. “Doesn’t fit in with the other blood patterns.”

“It’s from Joe. He sat down here and leaned against the wall. There are plenty of blood drops leaving the ambulance, and here too,” he says, pointing at the ground. “Melissa switched vehicles.”

“She probably had one here ready rather than stealing one,” Hutton says.

“Exactly. Quicker and easier,” Schroder says. He looks up around the parking lot. “No cameras,” he says.

Hutton shakes his head. “That’s where you’re wrong,” he says. “It’s part of the upgrade. Cameras are getting installed in all the entranceways, and soon in the parking lot too.”

“Soon doesn’t help us.”

“No, it doesn’t, but the camera at the entrance there might,” Hutton says, and points toward the public entrance. “It’s designed to see people coming and going, but it does point toward the parking lot. Maybe if we’re lucky . . .”

Lucky. He wonders how that word is defined. Joe was lucky because he escaped. Schroder was lucky he got out of the car before it exploded. So that means there has to be a balance. For each piece of good luck there has to be bad luck. That’s the thing about Christchurch. Good luck for Joe and Melissa, bad luck for Rebecca and Jack and for Raphael too.

“Let’s check it out.”

“Listen, Carl—” Hutton starts.

“Hey, look, this is a hospital, and this is a broken arm,” he says, “which means I’m going back in there anyway. You’re going in there too—no reason we can’t both go the same way.”

“Carl—”

“You’ve let me come this far, Wilson. No reason to stop now. All I’m asking is to look at the security footage. That’s all. Even that may lead to nothing. Then I’ll get my arm fixed, and then I’ll come into the station and maybe I can help.”

A patrol car pulls into the parking lot. It comes to a stop next to them. Hutton goes over and talks to them about securing the ambulance, then the two of them head back into the hospital, circling their way around to the front and going into the main entrance. Hutton shows his badge to a woman behind a reception counter and tells her they need to talk to somebody about the security cameras. The woman looks excited. She’s putting two and two together and coming up with an answer that suggests all the commotion on the other side of the hospital is linked to something these two cops are looking for. She nods, tells them it’ll be just a minute, then makes a phone call. They say nothing to each other as they watch her, as if their focus can make her speed things along. It works because it takes only half the predicted time. She tells them somebody is on their way.

That somebody is Bevan Middleton—no relation to Joe Middleton—so he tells them as he shakes Hutton’s hand and then stares at Schroder’s broken arm. As he leads them to the security office he tells them he wanted to apply for the police force, but because he’s color-blind he wasn’t allowed. “I thought it was all about the thin blue line,” he tells them. “I thought police work was going to be about shades of gray, but it’s the reds and greens that fucked me.”

The security office is on the ground floor not far from the toilets, so the room smells of urinal cakes and disinfectant. There’s a bank of monitors on one wall, several different viewpoints across the hospital. There are a few computers on various counters, and one on the desk ahead of them, along with a flat-screen monitor that is almost as big as Schroder’s TV. Half the stuff in here is brand new, some ten years old, except for the decor, which is twenty years out of date. Schroder’s arm is good now. The shot he took has his arm humming along quite nicely, thank you very much. It has his mind humming nicely too.

“It’s all getting upgraded,” Bevan says. “So it’s the rear parking lot you want, huh?”

“Exactly,” Hutton says.

The guard starts playing around with a computer keyboard. A moment later the rear entrance shows up on the big monitor ahead of them. Its focus is on the five yards leading up to the doorway. Everybody leans forward a little, straining to see what’s in the not-so-sharp distance.

“That’s the ambulance,” Schroder says.

“Only just,” Hutton says.

“But it’s enough,” Schroder says.

“Can we enhance the image?” Hutton asks.

The guard shakes his head. “Not really.”

Schroder knew he was going to say that. On The Cleaner they would have enhanced the image and cleaned it up and it would have been perfect. They would have enhanced a reflection off a nearby windshield to have gotten a perfect look from a different angle, to have a cell phone number scrawled across the back of somebody’s hand. He wonders what Sherlock Holmes would have made of TV technology.

“Not even a little?” Hutton asks.

“It is what it is,” the guard says, and he enlarges the image and the quality drops off. They can see the ambulance and the two policemen guarding it, but no detail.

“Okay. Wind it back,” Schroder says. “Let’s see when it arrives.”

The guard starts winding it back. Other cars come and go. The shadows get fractionally longer. The day looks as though it gets colder. People are walking around backward. Twenty-five minutes earlier a car drives backward and parks near the ambulance, two people get out and walk backward and climb into the ambulance and then the ambulance backs away. The guard lets the footage play forward at normal speed without the need for anybody to tell him. The ambulance comes in. Blurry Melissa helps Fuzzy Joe out of the back. The sight of them both—even though the detail is poor—makes his skin crawl. They get into the dark blue van. They drive away. Then nothing, just a parked ambulance and other cars and life carrying on as normal. They can’t get a plate from the van.

“None of it helps,” Hutton says, “but we’ll put a call out. A dark blue van—hard to tell what make. I mean, it could be nothing, they may have changed cars again, but I’ll still put out the call. We might get lucky.”

Lucky. There’s that word again.

“Start going back,” Schroder tells the guard. “I want to see when that van first arrived.”

The guard nods enthusiastically as if it’s the best idea in the world. He starts ru

“Where is she going?” Schroder asks.

“Hard to tell. She could be getting ready to circle around the entire building, and there are some more parking spaces out back for staff, but it could also be she’s heading toward the staff entrance.”

“You got a camera over that door?” Hutton asks.

“Sure we have, it’s been there about two years.”

“Line it up with this footage,” Schroder says, tapping the monitor.

The guard plays around with the controls and gets the footage in sync with the other camera. It’s the same entrance Schroder and the doctor came out earlier. They watch Melissa enter the corridor. It’s a different camera and she’s much closer so the quality is much better. The guard keeps switching cameras and they follow her through the emergency department and around to the ambulance bay. Schroder can’t believe the confidence she has, how casually she behaves as though she is meant to be there. She pauses for a few minutes and does something with her phone, though Schroder thinks she may just be pausing for time and watching her environment. Then she chats to the two paramedics he saw unconscious earlier and climbs into the back of their ambulance.