Joe Victim: A Thriller (39 page)

Chapter Seventy-Three

The Sally gasps inward when she sees the gun.

“Joe,” Melissa says, “I was keeping her alive for you to kill, kind of like a present.”

“Like a housewarming present,” I say, and I’m not real sure why I say it because as great a housewarming gift as it’d be, it’s not like me and Melissa are moving in here. Unless we are. “Are we moving in here?” I ask.

“No,” Melissa says.

The Sally has backed up against the wall. Her palms are facing outward and they’re in line with her shoulders. She’s wearing a wristwatch that’s spun around upside down, so the face covers the underside of her wrist. I can see the time. I can also see an alarm clock on the bedside drawer, and the alarm clock is two minutes ahead of her wristwatch, and suddenly I know why everything seems so fucked-up—I’m two minutes in the future and it’s messing with my equilibrium. Which means whatever The Sally’s fate is, it’s already happened and I’m just watching now to see how it unfolded.

“So how do you want to do it?” Melissa asks me, her question crossing the time barrier.

“I don’t know,” I answer.

“Please don’t, please don’t hurt me,” The Sally says and, for all that she’s done, I don’t really see any need to.

Of course not seeing a need isn’t the same as deciding to let her go.

“Just shoot her,” I say, because I want to get out of this place with its fractured time zones and, gun to my head, I’d have to confess I don’t really want to do it.

“Please, Joe,” Sally says. “I don’t want die. I’ve always been good to you. I know I never came to see you in jail, but how could I, after what you’d done?”

“I’m sorry, Sally,” I say, and the truth is I am sorry.

“I brought you books,” she says.

“What?” I say, and point my palm to Melissa in a stopping gesture in case she’s about to pull the trigger.

“I didn’t bring them to you, but I gave them to your mother to give you. Romance novels. I remembered how much you loved them. So I gave them to her. I’ve been good to you, Joe, even after all the bad things you’ve done. Please don’t hurt me.”

Melissa looks at me for guidance, and I realize this is all playing right out in front of me—there’s no dream, no difference in time. The Sally gave my mother those books, not Melissa.

“That was
your
message?” I ask. “You were the one trying to help me escape?”

Melissa looks confused, which is exactly how The Sally looks too. “Escape?” Melissa asks, then she looks back at The Sally. “You were trying to help him escape?”

The Sally doesn’t answer, so I answer for her. “There was a message in the books,” I say. “She wanted me to show the cops where Detective Calhoun was buried, and she was going to help me escape, only my mom didn’t give me the books in time and . . . and . . . and I thought they were from you. Why are you looking at me like that?” I ask Melissa.

“You were given medication,” she says. “You’re not thinking straight.”

“I am!” I say, louder than I wanted to. I grit my teeth and inhale deeply, and I notice there is no pain in my shoulder. Whatever drugs they gave me I want to keep taking. “They were romance novels. She picked specific titles, but my mom messed it up.”

“Your mother?” Melissa asks.

“Please,” Sally says to Melissa, “all I’ve ever done is help Joe. I helped him last year when you crushed his testicle, I saved his life when he was arrested, and now . . .”

And now I’m no longer listening. I’m thinking of my trip into the woods. It was The Sally who was planning my escape. Me and The Sally, running through the forest and leaving behind a pile of dead cops, me and The Sally sitting in a tree,
K
-
I
-
L
-
L
-
I
-
N
-
G,
we’re running toward our future, only a future with Sally is about as appealing as . . . well, as having my testicle crushed, as being locked away in jail, as being given the death penalty, as being a father.

“Joe,” Melissa shouts, and I realize she’s said my name a few times now. “You’re still thinking about those books, I can tell. She wasn’t trying to help you escape.”

“I . . . I don’t understand.”

“Did you give him the books he’s talking about?” Melissa asks.

Sally nods. “He likes romance novels,” she says, looking at me and talking to Melissa as if I weren’t in the room.

“There was a message,” I say, and my words don’t even convince me.

“Yeah? Then ask her what the message is,” Melissa says.

“Please,” Sally says, shaking her head, and she’s looking at me and talking to me, and I remember the conversations we used to have at work, I remember her making me a sandwich every day, good ol’ reliable Sally, kindhearted Sally, Simple Sally. The Sally. Sandwiches that wouldn’t make me sick, Sally.

“We have no use for her,” Melissa says.

“No, I don’t suppose we do,” I say.

“Joe,” Sally says.

“Sssh,” I say, and I put my finger to my lips. “It’s going to be okay,” I tell her.

“Joe,” she says, her voice higher now. “Joe . . .”

“I kept her alive for you, Joe,” Melissa says. “I kept her for you to kill.”

Sally. Poor Sally. Overweight Sally. Always trying to help. Sally always plodding her way around the police station and ignored by everybody, the same way I used to plod and be ignored, only I’d be plodding with forty pounds less than her. I shake my head. It’s time to show people that I’m a human being, and what better time to start than here and now.

“I’m not going to shoot her,” I tell Melissa.

The Sally looks happy. Melissa looks sad.

“You do it,” I tell Melissa. “But make it quick,” I tell her. I don’t want The Sally to suffer. That is my humanity.

Chapter Seventy-Four

This part of the hospital is a maze. Schroder has been in it before, visiting people. He’s waited outside operating rooms as victims inside have died. He’s been in here as friends have fought for their lives—some making it, some not.

Dr. Hearse sees him and comes over. He has the same disapproving look on his face his dentist has when he sees Schroder hasn’t been regularly flossing. “I know you’re impatient, but they’re still working on her.”

“I need the quickest way out into the back parking lot.”

“The hell you do. You need medical attention.”

“Just give me something for the pain.”

“What the hell is it with cops? You want us to perform miracles when your life is on the line, but when it comes to injuries you just don’t seem to care.”

“It’s one of life’s ironies,” he says. “Look, it’s important. Please, can you give me something or not?”

“No. You need to come back and—”

“Later,” Schroder says. “Look, at least show me the way to the parking lot.”

The way consists of a few more turns and a pissed-off doctor who rolls his eyes whenever Schroder looks at him. Then they’re in a corridor that’s about twenty yards long with doors at each end and no windows. Hearse has to walk with him to use his security card to get the doors to open. They both step outside into the sun. There are sirens wailing in the not-too-far distance.

“I don’t understand,” Hearse says, looking out at the parking lot and seeing the same thing that Schroder is seeing—an ambulance surrounded by sedans and SUVs and a few motorbikes. Dirt and dust from nearby construction floats above all of it like a blanket. The weather hasn’t changed any—the sun has climbed a little higher and made the shadows shorter, but that’s about it. Hutton has parked ten yards from the ambulance. He’s standing behind his car.

“That ambulance shouldn’t be there,” Dr. Hearse says. “What is—” he starts, then stops when he notices Hutton is holding a gun.

“Stay here,” Schroder says to the doctor, then skirts around the cars and, staying low, makes his way over to Hutton. “What’s the situation?”

“Not sure. But it has to be the one, right? I’ve called it in. AOS is ten minutes away.”

Schroder doesn’t think they need to wait. The Armed Offenders Squad is going to arrive only to find an empty ambulance. Still, they need to be cautious. “We can’t wait that long.”

“I know,” Hutton says. “That’s why I called you. I’m going to go in.”

Schroder nods. “And if somebody comes out? What do you want me to do? Shoot them with my fingers?”

“Why don’t you use Kent’s gun? I saw you take it.”

Schroder nods. Fair point.

They approach the ambulance. It’s clear there’s nobody in the front. Hutton stands at the back and gives Schroder the go signal, then Schroder rests Kent’s gun in his sling, uses his good arm to pull the door open, and at the same time he jumps back and grabs Kent’s gun. Hutton points his gun inside and a moment later lowers it. Schroder puts Kent’s back into his pocket then calls out to Dr. Hearse, who comes running over. He looks inside the ambulance.

“Jesus,” he says. “That’s Trish. And where . . . Oh, shit, Jimmy,” he says, looking at the second body, then climbing in.

The back of the ambulance is a mess. There are supplies littered over the floor. Blood. A nurse’s outfit. The man has been stripped down to his underwear. Hearse checks Trish for a pulse, then quickly turns toward Schroder.

“She’s alive,” he says. “Get some people out here,” he says, and pulls off his security tag and hands it to Hutton. “Quickly,” he adds, and Hutton runs toward the doors.

Schroder looks at the clothes. Melissa showed up in nurse scrubs, then changed into the clothes the naked victim was wearing. Hearse checks for a pulse on the second victim, then puts the side of his face against the man’s chest, then checks for a pulse again. “It’s weak,” he says. “What the hell happened here?”

“This was used in the escape,” Schroder says. Dressed in the nurse scrubs, Melissa would have found it easy to be given a ride. Then she probably pulled a gun on them. She could have ordered the scrubs from any work-uniform shop online. Or she got them from a nurse. If she got them from a nurse, then she might have gotten ID cards to open the doors to the hospital too.

“Help me with the gurney,” Hearse says, and between them they get it onto the ground, Schroder using his only good arm. Then they get the woman loaded onto it. There is blood around her face and her hair is matted in it. Blunt force trauma to the head. Schroder has seen enough of it to diagnose the condition and knows if she survives there can be some serious ongoing problems. The second paramedic has no signs of violence at all. He looks like he’s just fallen asleep. Hearse starts pushing the woman toward the door they came out of. He’s almost there when it’s thrown open and four doctors come running into the parking lot. Two of them take the gurney with Trish, and the other two come back to the ambulance with Hearse and another gurney. The second victim is loaded onto it, then for a moment it’s just Hearse and Schroder.

“You’re looking for the person who did this, aren’t you,” Hearse says.

“Yes.”

Hearse nods. “I can’t do this for you, but you see that plastic drawer up there?” he asks, nodding toward a whole stack of small drawers along the inside of the ambulance. “The one with the green handle?”

“I see it.”

“You’ll find something for your arm in there. It’ll give you a few hours. You won’t feel much, but you won’t feel any pain either.”

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 running the footage backward. He jumps it in five-minute intervals. An hour before the ambulance showed up the van is suddenly there. The guard jumps forward five minutes again, then starts winding it back second by second until they see Melissa walking backward and then climbing into it. He presses play.

“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.

Schroder can feel a pulse throbbing in his forehead. He can feel adrenaline starting to pump. He feels that if he had to, he could lift a car and flip it over, even with his broken arm.

“Whose swipe card is she using?” Schroder asks, pointing at the monitor, and the moment he asks the question, he knows—he knows for sure what the answer is going to be. He should have figured it out when he was in the parking lot.