Joe Victim

Chapter Sixty-One

Something is happening.

Five minutes ago Raphael watched the security guard come up to the ambulance, knock on the window, then Melissa followed him back inside. The second woman who was in the ambulance didn’t get out. It didn’t make sense. But then suddenly it did-Melissa has done something to her. She wouldn’t have killed her. Since Melissa isn’t really a paramedic, then she’s going to need to keep the paramedic alive. Melissa wants to keep Joe alive. He’s sure of it. So that explained the second paramedic, but it didn’t explain what the security guard wanted. Something to do with Joe being sick? He sure as hell looked sick.

Raphael rests his finger on the trigger guard. His hands are still steady. There are no nerves now. That’s a sign that he’s doing the right thing. Like every fiber of his being is in on the decision, every cell is in harmony-they’re all getting along and are going to make this happen. He’s not going to shoot Joe in the shoulder like they talked about. Now he’s going to shoot him in the head. It was meant to be about wounding him, not killing him. Raphael would do the wounding, and Melissa would pick Joe up in the ambulance.

Raphael was the shooter.

Melissa was the collector.

And together they were going to make Joe suffer.

Now Raphael is the shooter, and he’s going to shoot to kill. Of course he’s upset he can’t torture Joe. But this will at least give him some satisfaction.

He watches the back of the courthouse. He keeps the sights on the door. Then the door opens. Melissa and the security guard step outside, followed by Joe with the same two officers who helped him earlier helping him now, followed by louder screams from the crowd, followed by Kent and the guy who drove the van earlier. Whatever was wrong with Joe before is still wrong with him now. His skin is pale. He looks to be in a lot of pain. Good.

Melissa looks up at Raphael. He can see her face in the scope. She slowly shakes her head and he slowly smiles, he can’t help it. She doesn’t want him to take the shot. There is no need to. Something happened and she’s gotten Joe out of there, but not in the way they planned. Something to do with Joe being sick. Has to be. Joe’s sick, and of course everybody down there thinks Melissa is a genuine paramedic.

He moves the scope back onto Joe.

Joe, the man who took away his daughter.

Joe, the man who took away his life.

He thinks about Vivian wanting to be a pop-singing ballerina. He thinks about Adelaide wanting to go to a Harry Potter school and learn magic. He thinks about how he never gets to see them, how much he misses his daughter, how Vivian and Adelaide will grow up without a mother.

Hello, Red Rage. Nice to have you back.

He holds his breath.

He puts the crosshairs over Joe’s face.

He pulls the trigger.

The result is instant. Of course it is-yet somehow he was expecting it to take a second, maybe a second and a half for the physics to catch up. The sound of the shot is muffled by the earmuffs, but it’s louder than out at the forest, loud enough to make his ears ring. It echoes around the office and out into the street and as one everybody out there looks up in his direction.

Except Joe.

Because Joe is losing balance. The problem-and of course there were always going to be problems and he was a fool to think it could be otherwise-is that the shot has taken Joe in the chest, maybe in the shoulder, and certainly not in the head like he wanted. Maybe it was the dynamics of the bullet, or the nerves-he doesn’t know. What he does know is that the Red Rage is screaming at him to take another shot, and of course he’s going to. He still has time.

The two officers holding Joe up don’t seem to feel any responsibility to him. They let him go and run for cover. Joe, without the aid of his human crutches, falls into a very similar pile to the one he started in when exiting the van earlier. Detective Kent hides behind Schroder’s car. Everybody is hiding-all except Joe and Melissa.

Melissa. And why would she hide? He shot Joe in the shoulder just the way she always wanted him to. She starts dragging Joe toward the ambulance. The whole shooting and collecting part of the plan must still be going through her mind. He puts the crosshairs in the middle of her body. It may not be a kill shot, but at the very least the police will figure out who she is. The Red Rage is pleased by the idea.

He pulls the trigger.

This time the gun bucks in his hands and the gunshot is much quieter, almost only a fraction of the first, or at least it seems that way because his ears are still ringing from the first shot, and maybe it’s quieter anyway because it’s a different type of bullet. The barrel pulls up into the drop cloth and pulls it up off the ground. With the world reacting below him, he again spends a second determining what has gone wrong, and quickly decides nothing has, that he’s lost balance because of the platform he’s lying on.

He repositions the gun and sees Melissa hasn’t been hit. He has one shot left. Her or Joe. Well, Joe’s already been hit, and if luck is on Raphael’s side and not on Joe’s, then that fucker is going to bleed to death in the parking lot. So he chooses Melissa. He pulls the trigger in the exact same way he pulled the damn thing all those times out where he buried the lawyers and shot the shit out of defenseless tin cans, and this time the gun bucks so wildly it’s wrenched from his hands. He hears his finger break. Feels it even more. He rolls off the bench and hits the floor, his shoulder taking the impact.

He doesn’t understand. .

And he’s out of time now. And out of bullets.

He gets to his feet. He’s already been here longer than he should have. A look out the gap in the drop cloth shows a cop helping Melissa and Joe toward the ambulance and Schroder bursting through the back door into the parking lot. He doesn’t know how much time has gone. Fifteen seconds, maybe. Too long, definitely.

He doesn’t bother putting the gun back into the ceiling. He peels the latex gloves off and it hurts his finger like crazy. He stuffs them into his pocket. He pulls off the earmuffs and tosses them onto the floor, then realizes that’s stupid, that his fingerprints are going to be on them. Fuck. He’s pulled his gloves off too early. Has he touched any of this stuff without gloves? Maybe. When he assembled the gun. When he fired it the other day. When he came here Saturday night. Was he wearing gloves then? He thinks he was, but suddenly he’s not so sure.

He doesn’t have time to wipe down the gun. He looks around. Looks at the paint. Looks at the gun. It’ll work. He pulls his gloves back on, then twenty seconds later he’s heading down the stairs.