Joe Victim

by Paul Cleave

  He moves to the front door. He tries it. It’s unlocked. He pushes it open and moves into the bedroom, the gun pointing ahead. He crouches down next to Sally and has to put the gun on the floor so he can put two fingers on her neck. He looks for a pulse and finds one, steady and strong. He rolls her onto her back. There’s a big bruise on the side of her forehead and some blood.

  “Sally,” he says, shaking her a little with his good arm. He wonders why they let her live. He wonders how Melissa and Joe go about putting a value on human life. “Sally?”

  Sally doesn’t stir. So he slaps her slightly on the side of the face, and then a little harder. “Come on, Sally, it’s important.”

  Sally doesn’t seem to think so. He moves into the kitchen. He finds a bucket beneath the sink. He fills it up with cold water. He thinks about the gun and knows what’s going to happen within the next few minutes. He takes it out and wraps it in a tea towel and sets it on the counter near the sink. He carries the water back into the bedroom. His arm is starting to wake up.

  “I’m sorry,” he tells her, and then he pours it over her face. She wakes up a quarter of the way into it, starts sputtering, and by the end she’s rolled onto her side and is coughing.

  “Sally,” he says, and he crouches down next to her.

  “Detective Inspector Schroder?” she says.

  “You’re safe now,” he tells her.

  “Where are they?” she asks. “Have you arrested them?”

  “No,” he says. “Please, Sally, tell me what happened. Did they say where they are going? Do you still have your car? Did they take it?”

  “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-”

  “I went through a lot to earn that money,” I tell her.

  “And I went through a lot to get us to this point.”

  “The police have no reason to go there,” I say.

  She seems to agree, because we stop talking about it and we start driving in the direction of my mother’s big day.

  Chapter Seventy-Eight

  Schroder is sitting down at the kitchen table. There’s nobody else in the room. His hands are still cuffed behind him and he’s doing his best to stay as still as possible because any movement brings him close to passing out. His mind is still buzzing. The sling is still hanging from his neck. The third syringe he took from the ambulance is sitting on the table in front of him, and the second shot he took earlier isn’t helping in this position. A minute ago Hutton came in to check on him, and then to abuse him too-by the end of the day there was a good chance Hutton would be losing his job. Or at the very least he would be suspended. Perhaps demoted. It was a world of possibility.

  “Where’s the gun?” Hutton asks, keeping his voice low.

  “I lost it.”

  “They patted you down. Where’d you hide it?”

  “I can’t remember,” Schroder says, and he knows Hutton can’t mention it to anybody else. Not only is Hutton in a world of trouble for letting Schroder come here, but if they found out he came here armed, then getting suspended or fired would be the least of his problems.

  “Goddamn it, Carl, you promised me.”

  “Nobody knows I have it,” he says, “and I promise I’ll never say you knew I had it.”

  “You don’t make great promises,” Hutton says.

  “I intend to keep the one I made Kent.”

  Hutton walks out. Superintendent Dominic Stevens walks in. Stevens is the man who covered Schroder’s crime four weeks ago. He’s the man that fired him.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Stevens asks. “Don’t you see what you’ve become? What you’re becoming? I could have you arrested for this. You could have cost people their lives.”

  “Kent-”

  “I don’t give a fuck about any of your excuses,” Stevens says, “or your reasons. You’re more trouble than you’re worth. You used to be a great cop, and now. . now I don’t know.” He sighs, then leans against the kitchen counter. He takes a few seconds to calm down. “Listen, Carl, I know how much you’re hurting these days, and I know you’re probably blaming yourself for some of what’s happened, but you can’t be here. You just can’t. And the man I used to know would have known that.”

  Schroder doesn’t have an answer.

  “Do I need to carry on?”

  “No,” Schroder says.

  “I’m tempted to leave you in cuffs for the next twenty-four hours. What’s wrong with your arm? Is it broken?”

  “From the explosion.”

  “You’re lucky to be alive,” he says.

  “And Kent?” Schroder asks.

  “They’re still working on her,” he says, “but we’ve been told she’ll pull through.”

  Schroder feels his body flood with relief. It’s a warm sensation. “Thank God.”

  “So here’s what’s going to happen. There’s an ambulance outside treating Sally. She’s going to stay to help us, but you’re going to climb into the back and they’re going to take you to the hospital.”

  “I can still help,” Schroder says.

  “Go home, Carl.”

  “I know Joe better than anybody here.”

  “If you knew him that well he’d still be in custody.”

  “Let me help. I don’t have to be on the team chasing him, but let me help figure out where he’s going to go. Sally said they had a baby. We can start-”

  “Listen, Carl, this is me staying calm, okay? This is me acknowledging it’s been a tough day for you. But I swear to God if the next word out of your mouth isn’t good-bye as you leave for the hospital then I will have you arrested.”

  “But-”

  Stevens winces as if he’s just been hurt. “That wasn’t a good-bye,” he says.

  “Please-”

  “Don’t test me on this, Carl. Like I said, this is me calm. In about five seconds I won’t be.”

  “Joe will-”

  “Fucking hell, you don’t get it, do you? Okay, we’ll do it your way.” He calls out into the hall for two men to come in. “Take him down to the station,” he says. “Sit him in an interrogation room and leave him there until-”

  “Good-bye,” Schroder says.

  Stevens stops talking. He looks at Schroder. His face is expressionless. He’s working away at a decision and Schroder stays still and silent as the superintendent makes it. He looks down for a few seconds. Then he looks back up. Stevens nods.

  “Belay that,” he says to the two men, and tells them to go back into the hall. “Not one more word,” he says, then crouches behind Schroder and undoes the cuffs. Now it’s Schroder’s turn to wince as he brings his broken arm back in front of his body. He says nothing. He nods at Stevens, who nods back.

  Schroder knows he needs to take the risk. He can’t imagine Stevens arresting him for his next request. But you never know.

  “Can I have the syringe back?”

  “No.”

  “Can I at least get a glass of water?”

  “Make it quick.”

  He moves to the sink. Pours a glass of water and gulps it down. He keeps his back to Stevens the entire time. He grabs the tea towel with the gun inside and makes a show of drying off his hand, his back still to Stevens. He slips the gun into the sling and tucks it between his arm and chest. If Stevens sees it he knows he’ll go straight into a holding cell. But Stevens doesn’t see it. Then he makes his way down the hall and outside. Sally is being treated by a couple of paramedics. Hutton is talking to another detective. He throws Schroder an angry glance. Schroder gives him an apologetic smile, which doesn’t work.

  The paramedic looking Sally over finishes up with her, and she’s escorted back into the house. “Let’s take a look at the arm,” the paramedic says. Schroder gives him a look. “Okay, climb in back and we’ll get you sorted.”

  So Schroder climbs into the back. The ambulance doors are shut. He stares out the window at Sally’s house.
But he’s not seeing the house. Instead he’s seeing Joe and Melissa and he’s thinking about what Sally said, about the reward money, and that makes him think of the fifty thousand dollars Joe earned from Jonas Jones.

  The ambulance doesn’t start. The paramedic is outside chatting to somebody.

  Schroder reaches into his pocket. He finds the business card for Kevin Wellington. He drags out his cell phone and dials the number.

  Wellington answers.

  “It’s Carl Schroder,” he says. “I need your help.”

  “I’ve seen the news,” Wellington says. “So whatever you’re going to ask is covered by client-lawyer confidentially,” he says.

  “Goddamn-”

  “Hear me out,” he says. “Middleton is on the run and I didn’t become a lawyer to help bad people, I became one to stop bad things from happening. So I’ll answer anything you have to ask and in return you don’t tell anybody where you got your information from. I think that’s a pretty amazing deal under the circumstances. Agree?”

  “Completely,” Schroder says. “Do you know where he might go? Anything like that?”

  “No.”

  “The fifty thousand dollars, has it been transferred?”

  “Last night.”

  “Which bank does Joe use?”

  “The money didn’t go to him. It went into his mother’s account.”

  “His mother’s?”

  “Yeah. She’s a strange one, I’m telling you.”

  Schroder has met her and he agrees. You can’t get much stranger. So Joe’s mother has the money. That means Joe will go to her to get it. Hutton said before the police were at her house and there was no sign of her. Joe might have contacted her already. She might be at the bank.

  “What bank does she use? Which branch?” he asks, and the front door of the ambulance opens and closes and there’s a transference of weight and then the engine starts.