Joe Victim: A Thriller (35 page)

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?”

“Oh Jesus,” she says, and he can tell she’s coming to the same conclusion as him. “You think the explosives?”

“Has to—” he starts, but doesn’t get to finish, because that’s when the car blows up.

Chapter Sixty-Six

The explosion is almost ear shattering. There is no fire, just smoke and glass and twisted pieces of metal. The car is picked up like a child’s toy, and just as casually dismissed like a child’s toy—it’s launched three feet high and a couple of feet to the left before landing back on its wheels. The shock wave blows all the windows out. Bits of flesh hit the interior like paintballs exploding across a wall. People start screaming. Some are running from the blast, others are caught in the shock wave and thrown outward, the explosion an epicenter. Cut faces and cut clothes and a few people aren’t running at all, a few of them are lying on the road surrounded by, and impaled by, shrapnel. The side mirrors go flying, bits of tire, nuts and bolts and screws, and engine components are tossed in all directions, along with pieces of bone and tenderized body parts.

Schroder’s shoulders climb up around his jaw in expectation of an impact. Kent twists in her seat and looks behind her. Schroder keeps driving, glancing into the mirror back at the explosion. It came from a car that was only twenty or thirty yards behind them. A decoy explosion. Something to shut down the intersection and fill the streets with scared and panicked people.

“Oh my God,” Kent says. “Somebody was driving that car.”

“Oh fuck,” Schroder says.

“I know, I know,” she says.

“She was in my car,” he says.

“What?”

“She was in my fucking car!” he shouts, and he slams on the brakes. “Get out, get out,” he yells, taking off his seat belt.

“What—”

“Get the fuck out,” he shouts, and he opens his door and so does Kent. People are running toward them. Away from them. In every direction. He slams the door closed behind him, hoping it will help contain the shock wave and blast that Melissa is going to use to help her escape.

“Get back,” he screams. “Everybody get back.”

“Carl—”

He looks back over the car. “Fire some shots in the air,” he shouts. “Get—”

His car explodes right in front of him. He sees Kent ride the shock wave ten yards through the air, where she is thrown into a parked car, where she smashes the windshield and enters it. Only it looks like twenty yards because he’s riding the shock wave in the opposite direction. A lot of people are. Twisted metal. Smoke. Flesh and blood.

Then darkness.