Joe Victim

“The woman, Melissa, she came here last night,” she says. “She threatened to shoot me. She tied me up and used my uniform and took my ID card. Then she left this morning and came back with Joe. He’d been shot. They made me help him. I thought . . . I thought they were going to shoot me.”

“You’re safe now,” he tells her again. “What did they say? Do you know where they’re going?”

She shakes her head, then quickly puts one hand on the side of it and closes her eyes, the movement enough to bring her close to passing out. He helps her up so she can sit on the bed. Okay, his arm is really starting to hurt now. He pulls out the second of his three syringes.

“What are you doing?” Sally asks.

“Don’t worry, it’s not for you,” he says, and plunges the needle into his arm.

“You shouldn’t be doing that,” she says.

“Tell me what happened here,” he says, and puts the cap on the syringe and dumps it on the floor. The numbness in his arm begins to return.

“They had a baby,” Sally says.

“What?”

“Not with them,” she says. “But . . . but Melissa made me help.”

“Wait. She had the baby last night?”

Sally shakes her head. “Three months ago. She came here and—”

“And you didn’t tell us?”

“I couldn’t,” Sally says, looking down.

“Why the hell not?”

She starts to cry. And she tells him why. He should be more sympathetic than he is, but all he can feel is the anger and frustration. People have died. Cops have died. She should have come to them. They could have done something with that information. They could have caught Melissa and the baby would have been safe.

“Tell me about today,” he says. “How bad was the wound?”

“He was shot in the shoulder. The bullet went right through.”

“And you’re sure neither of them said anything that might help?”

“Nothing.”

Before he can say anything more half a dozen men storm into the room, all of them dressed in black, one of them shouting at him to Get down, get down. A knee is put in the middle of his back and his face pressed into the floor, and then he screams into the carpet as his broken arm is pulled out of the sling and behind him, the numbness leaving in an instant as the handcuffs go on.

Chapter Seventy-Seven

It’s been over a year since I drove out to my mother’s house, but the same feelings I had back then I’m having again now. The dread. The shivers. The only good thing about being in jail was not having to come out here for meat loaf every week.

We’re about five minutes away when Melissa slows down and pulls over. The pain in my shoulder is dull, it feels like a warm ball bearing has been sewn into it. Melissa’s pulling over because the building tension is reaching its peak. If we don’t get each other’s clothes off within the next few seconds we’re going to explode. Only there’s a problem—if we get each other’s clothes off in the car people are apt to see. Some even apt enough to go about calling the police.

“The police will be visiting your mother,” Melissa says, turning toward me.

“Huh?”

“They’ll be waiting for us there.”

I’m not following her train of thought. Hopefully our relationship isn’t going to be based on her not making sense and me trying to figure her out. “Why? They’ll know I was shot. My mother would be the last place they’d think I’d go.”

“I’m not so sure. I think it’ll be one of the first places, not because the police think you’ll go there, but because they have to start sending people somewhere rather than nowhere. They have more manpower than they do ideas, so they can afford to send them all on wild-goose chases. They’ll send people there just for the act of something to do.”

I shake my head. “Normally I’d agree, but today is different. Mom isn’t home. That’s what makes breaking in there and getting the money so much easier for us.”

“Where is she?”

“She’s getting married today.”

“Do the police know that?”

“No,” I say. “Shit, but of course the police don’t know that, so they have no reason not to go to her house. Maybe they’ve been already and found out she wasn’t home.”

Melissa shakes her head. “Or maybe they’ve been and left people there. We can’t go there, Joe. We can’t take the risk.”

She’s right. I know she’s right. But fifty thousand dollars is too much money to just not think about. There has to be another way.

“Plus we don’t even know that she drew the money out,” she adds.

“She will have,” I say. Over the years I’ve dipped into my mom’s savings hidden under her bed. If I had done that when I was a teenager instead of going to my aunt’s house, I wonder how different life would have turned out. Only I didn’t know it back then.

“We should just head back home.”

“Home,” I say, thinking about what home is now. It’s not jail. It’s not my mother’s. It’s not my apartment. It’s Melissa’s house. Home is with her and a baby.

“Unless you’ve got somewhere better to be?” she asks, and she says it in an accusing way that makes me think of my mother.

“Of course not,” I tell her, and then because I think she needs to hear it, I say, “I love you.”

She smiles. “I would hope so,” she says. “After what I’ve gone through to get you here.”

She turns the car around. We start heading back the way we came. I divide my time between staring out the window, and staring at her. She looks different from that weekend we spent together. Part of it is the wig. She looks puffier in the face and neck and her eyes are a different color too, meaning she’s either wearing contacts or she was wearing contacts when I met her last year.

“What?” she asks, looking at me.

“Just remembering how beautiful you are,” I tell her.

She smiles. “You know what I’m thinking about?”

I nod. I know. But like I thought earlier people are apt to start making phone calls.

“I’m thinking about that money,” she says. “There has to be a way to get to it.”

“You’re right, though. We can’t risk going to my mother’s. Not now anyway.”

“You’re sure the police don’t know about your mother’s wedding plans?”

I think about it. My mother wanted me to be at the wedding. She wanted me to get the warden to let me out for the day. Will she have followed that up? Will she have gone to the police to try and talk them into releasing me just for that?

“If there’s a wedding,” she says, “often there’s a honeymoon. If the police know she’s gone away, they’ll stop watching the house, which means . . . Joe, hey, are you okay?”

I’m not okay. I’m thinking about the honeymoon. I had forgotten about that. I don’t know where they’ll be going. Somewhere awful. I’m thinking about the fifty thousand dollars my mother will have drawn out in cash.

“Joe?”

I’m thinking that money may not be at the house at all, but with her, that their honeymoon starts right after the wedding and the trip will consist of her and Walt and all that cash. She doesn’t think I’m ever getting out of jail. She doesn’t see any reason not to spend it.

“Joe? What’s wrong?”

“We need to go to the wedding. We need to find my mother now.”

“Why?”

Because I know my mother. I tell Melissa this and she keeps on driving, her hands tightening on the wheel.

“We should just let it go,” she says.

“It’s not in my nature to let things go,” I tell her.

“It’s not in mine either. Do you know where the wedding is?”

“I can’t . . . Oh, wait,” I say, and I lean sideways and reach into my pants and find the invitation I’d folded in half this morning, the invitation I was hoping would bring me some luck. It seems it’s done just that. I hand it to her. She glances at it then back at the road.

“We should let it go,” she says. “We can see her in a few months and if there’s anything left—”