Joe Victim

Chapter Fifty-Nine

“Something went wrong,” Trish says. “Didn’t it. Please, just cut your losses and let us go.”

“Not yet,” Melissa says, tucking the phone back into her pocket. She can picture Raphael up in the office building staring through the gun scope at the ambulance. Maybe he’s thinking he could use that armor-piercing round right now.

“How far along are you?” Trish asks.

“What?”

“You’re pregnant,” Trish says, and Melissa glances down at herself knowing she’s not wearing the suit, but still checking just to make sure. “I can tell,” Trish says. “You’re trying to hide it, but I can tell. How far along are you?”

“I’m not pregnant,” Melissa says.

“I can see it in the way you carry yourself, and you keep rubbing your belly. I’ve dealt with a lot of pregnant women. You don’t need to lie about it.”

Melissa says nothing. She didn’t realize she was still rubbing her stomach. She can feel the girdle beneath her scrubs.

“I’m not pregnant,” Melissa says.

“Then you were. And recently too. It doesn’t show. You gave birth, didn’t you?”

Melissa thinks of Sally, of the blood left all over Sally’s bed when she drove to the nurse’s house and forced her at gunpoint to help deliver Joe’s baby. That was a long night. A hard night. One of the toughest of her life. “Three months ago,” she says.

Back then she didn’t know where else to go. She couldn’t go to a hospital. She could change her appearance, but what she couldn’t do was give herself a history of medical records. So she went to Sally. Sally helped her. When the baby was born, Melissa was exhausted, but not exhausted enough to not do what needed doing-and that was to force Sally to lie down on the bed at gunpoint and then handcuff her to it. That’s when she took photographs of Sally naked. After that she forced Sally to go to the bank and draw out her reward money. Melissa wanted it in cash. And Sally had done that. She had done it because she wanted to save the embarrassment of naked pictures of her being put online. And she did it for the baby. Melissa told her that if she didn’t do it, that if Sally went to the police, she would kill the baby. It was simple. All Sally had to do was weigh up her sense of justice against her sense of morality, and no matter what, Sally didn’t want to be responsible for the baby’s death. So she did what she was asked, she returned with the money, and Melissa let her live. Of course Melissa wouldn’t hurt the baby. She loves it. She loved it before it was even born. A small girl named Abigail. And she let Sally live because she needed her for today. She needed her scrubs and her swipe card for the hospital and taking those things three months ago and killing Sally would only have resulted in the swipe card being deactivated. And she let Sally live because, really, Sally had saved Joe’s life. She owed her.

“Are you strapping yourself up?” the nurse asks.

Melissa realizes she was zoning out. “Huh?”

“To hide the excess weight?”

“Yes,” Melissa says.

“That’s a really stupid thing to do.”

“So is talking to me while I’m trying to think,” Melissa says.

“The baby, it’s his, isn’t it,” Trish says, nodding toward the courthouse.

Melissa knows she isn’t referring to the security guard standing outside it. “Yes.”

“He raped you, didn’t he. All that stuff you said earlier, that phone call you made to somebody to hurt my family, that wasn’t real, was it. You’re not a killer, but you’re here to kill him, aren’t you.”

Melissa nods again. Is there an opportunity here? Is this woman, this Trish, going to want to help her? Slowly she starts nodding.

“You’re going about it the wrong way,” the woman says. “It’s not up to us to take a life. This whole death-penalty debate, it’s a mistake. It’s got people thinking stupid thoughts. It’s causing rifts in the community. And it’s wrong, just plain wrong. I understand you’re angry, but every life is sacred. Everybody deserves the chance to be forgiven and to kneel in front of God and-”

Melissa hits her with the gun. She swings it hard into the side of Trish’s head. Once. Twice. Then a third time. Trish isn’t talking anymore, which is a good thing because Trish was really starting to piss her off. The woman slumps forward and Melissa pulls her back before she falls into the horn. The entire plan is turning to shit.

She reaches over and drags the either unconscious or dead woman back with her. She’s heavy, and her limbs and clothes snag at the seat, but she gets her there.

This is getting out of hand.

The other paramedic is already underneath the gurney. She couldn’t risk having a cop help her load Joe into the back and see him. So now she does her best to stuff Trish under there too. The blankets she had put over the guy she now puts over them both. Now it looks like two bodies stuffed under a gurney hidden by blankets. She needs to do better than that. Only she can’t. It is what it is and she’s too invested in this now to cut her losses and leave.

She climbs into the front and is settling in behind the steering wheel when she realizes somebody is standing next to the ambulance. It’s a security guard, but not the same guy who’d been standing by the back door. He looks rushed. She winds the window down and keeps the gun out of sight, knowing that as bad as this day has been going, making it worse for this guy might just make her feel a little better.

“There’s been a situation,” he says, his voice low and quick, the kind of voice she thinks would be great for selling torture porn, “with the Christchurch Carver. We’re going to need your help.”