Joe Victim

Chapter Sixty-Eight

Schroder can see the sky. It’s blue in all directions, a few clouds, one of them looks like a palm tree. One looks like a face. There’s a dark gray cloud forming close by. It’s smoke. From the car. He tries to move his head, but can’t. He can move his eyes. That’s a start, but a frightening one.

He can remember every detail. It’s strange. A thing like that has every chance of wiping a few seconds’, a few minutes’, even a few days’ worth of memories. But not for him. For some reason he wonders if that’s because last year he died for a few minutes and then came back, as if that experience means his mind is hardwired a little differently now, immune to forgetting things, then he dismisses the idea for what it really is-a stupid one.

He’s too frightened to try moving his arms and legs. He has to know they work, but what if they don’t? What if he’s never going to walk again? By not trying to move them, he can put that fate off for another time. His ears are ringing. He can feel the cold ground beneath him. He can feel one of his arms pinned under his back. His right. That makes him happy. If his back was broken he wouldn’t be able to feel that, would he? His left arm, he can’t feel. He can taste blood. He can feel more of it on his face. Over the ringing in his ears he can hear screaming.

He closes his eyes and he prays, he actually prays for the first time since he was a kid, back when he figured out that praying didn’t get you anywhere in this world, that praying and misery went hand in hand just like peanut butter and jelly. But he prays now for his legs to move and they do, they move a little and without pain and he knows his prayer wasn’t answered, that he’s been lucky, that’s all it is. He was lucky and others probably won’t have been. Like Kent. He manages to tilt slightly onto his side, the blue sky disappearing, replaced with rooftops, then office windows and walls, then the street. His car has been lifted and has turned a quarter circle and come back down. There are no flames. It’s all twisted to shit and there is glass everywhere. There are other people lying on the ground, some tilting onto their sides and viewing the world the same way as him, some not moving at all.

There is a death toll here. He prays it’s a low one.

He prays God is listening to him.

He rests on his back. He doesn’t want to, but he has no choice. He closes his eyes. His chest feels tight. Somebody puts a hand on his shoulder and he opens his eyes and Detective Wilson Hutton is crouching over him. People have stopped screaming and started sobbing instead.

“Hang on,” Hutton says.

“Kent,” Schroder says.

“It’s. . it’s bad,” Hutton says.

He can hear sirens. He can see ambulances. He didn’t see them arrive.

“How long have I been out?”

“Three, maybe four minutes.”

“Joe?” he asks.

Hutton shrugs, which sets off a chain reaction of rolling flesh down his chin and into his chest. “Gone,” he says.

Schroder closes his eyes and for a few moments the chaos disappears, even the sobs and sirens. He opens them back up. “What about Kent?”

Hutton shakes his head. “She’s not going to make it,” he says.

“No,” Schroder says. His neck is too sore to shake his head, but his eyes aren’t too sore to tear up. He tries to get up. If he can just get up, then she’ll be okay. Somehow. He’s sure of it. “Help me up.”

“That’s not a good idea,” Hutton says.

“Goddamn it, help me up.”

“Listen to me. Carl. It’s not a good idea. You’re in bad shape. Okay?”

His breath catches in his throat. “How bad?”

“Multiple cuts. Your left arm is broken. Could be a broken leg. Could even be a broken neck.”

“My neck is fine,” Schroder says. He moves his head. Yep. Fine. He can move both feet so his legs are fine, but Hutton is right about the arm. He doesn’t care. He wants to see Kent. If he’d pulled over a few seconds earlier, if he’d yelled at her to get away from the car louder, would she be okay?

It’s none of that. The fuckup happened at the prison. When he didn’t figure out he was talking to Melissa. Or for that matter, why not backtrack a year to when Melissa came into the station? Or go back even further to when Joe first started working for them. That’s where they could have made a difference.

“Help me up,” he says, then uses his good arm to start getting to his feet. Hutton shakes his head, then sighs, then helps him. When he’s up he puts an arm around Hutton for support. His broken arm hangs by his side, all the pain flowing into it along with the blood, and it hurts, but he knows it’s going to hurt even more soon because that pain is only getting warmed up. His legs feel fine. He can take his own weight. He’s a little light-headed, but okay. He lifts his hand to his forehead and his fingers come away with blood on them. He focuses on them, then they fade as he focuses on what’s behind them. On the view.

“Oh my God,” he says. There are people lying in the street. A few near him, but most further down by the other blown-to-shit car. Some burns. Lots of blood coming from people who have friends and strangers trying to comfort them. There are five, six, no, maybe ten ambulances. Metal and plastic and glass have been shredded from the bombed car and thrown about like confetti, going further than he can see, the sun glinting off a thousand pieces of wreckage.

“Where’s Kent?” he asks.

“This way,” Hutton says.

Schroder is led past his car. It’s still smoking. He’s seen plenty of cars destroyed in accidents-he’s seen cars with roofs missing as they’ve jammed themselves beneath trucks, he’s seen cars cut in half by busses-but he’s never seen one detonated by an explosive. It’s charred and twisted metal, less of a car now than some weird modern-art exhibit. He carries his broken arm in his good arm.

Kent is lying on the other side of the exhibit and on the sidewalk. Nearby, Spider-Man is lying facedown in a gutter, a side mirror next to his head, a patch of blood on both of them from the impact. He doesn’t know if Kent somehow bounced out of the car she was thrown into, or if the paramedics pulled her out.

Kent looks up at him. She smiles. “Hey,” she says.

“Hey.”

“I should have been quicker,” she says.

“Yeah, you should have been,” he says, trying to smile, and she tries to smile too. It breaks his heart. Breaking her heart is a piece of metal embedded in her chest. Her limbs are twisted. Her hands are burned. One side of her face is covered in blood, and beneath it he can see overlapping skin, like somebody has lifted a piece of wallpaper and set it back down slightly off-center. “You’re going to be fine,” he tells her, and then the paramedics get her up onto a gurney and start moving her toward the ambulance.

“Joe,” Kent says.

“We’ll get him,” he says.

She reaches out and grabs his hand. The paramedics tell her to let go and she doesn’t. “Joe said Calhoun was a bad guy,” she says. “You always,” she says, then coughs up a little blood, “you always said-”

“Just rest,” he tells her.

“That somebody else killed Daniela Walker. Joe said it was Calhoun.”

“Joe’s a liar and a madman.”

“I believed him,” she says, and her eyes flicker closed and she lets go. The gurney starts moving again and he hobbles to stay with it. Her eyes open back up. She smiles. A sweet, bloody smile, what he thinks may be her last. “Should have been quicker,” she says again.

He says nothing.

“Do me a favor, Carl,” she says, and she reaches down and unclips the latch to her pistol. And then her arm falls away. “Promise me something,” she says, struggling with her remaining breaths, and she nods down toward her firearm.

He already knows what it’s going to be. He looks up. Hutton is looking back at the wreckage. He’s not watching. “I’ll get him,” he says, and he reaches down and takes her gun. Neither of the paramedics seem to mind. “I’ll get them both. I promise.”