Paul Cleave - Joe Victim

He turns off the radio. Right now there will be bomb-sniffing dogs going through the court building. If they’d found explosives he would have heard. So the trial is going ahead.

At his next red light, he uses his cell phone to look up the number for a florist and is given several options. At the next red light he calls the number, and is halfway through ordering flowers for his wife when the light turns green. He rolls through the intersection and pulls over and focuses on his order and comes up with a message for the card. He smiles at the thought of his wife getting them. It’s not going to solve any problems-but it’s a step in the right direction.

“Good choice,” the woman tells him, and he’s happy somebody at least thinks he’s making a good decision. “She’ll have them by lunchtime.”

Schroder spots his first vampire a few blocks from the courthouse-she’s arguing with another girl who’s also dressed as a vampire, a guy standing in between them not doing a great job at moderating, but certainly doing a great job of looking uncomfortable. Schroder wonders if it’s the classic cliché of wearing something unique only to find somebody else wearing it too. Neither vampire seems bothered by the sun.

Traffic gets thicker, drivers having to slow down as pedestrians start to spill into the street. A few blocks away from the courthouse it comes to a standstill. Hundreds of people are outside the courthouse already. There have been suggestions those numbers could get into the thousands. He turns the radio back on. Callers for the death penalty want people going down there to support their cause. People against the death penalty want people going down there to support their cause. Everybody wants somebody. The students just want to hang out and drink themselves stupid.

He makes his way to the back of the courthouse. He can see Jonas Jones, who is dressed as a smug psychic, and once again Schroder suspects somebody is leaking him information. The only thing here for the psychic is one more opportunity to get his face in front of a camera.

There are fifteen parking spaces back here, and four of them have been assigned to the police. One of those four has been given to Schroder, as he was the lead detective on the case and will be here every day. The other spaces are reserved for judges, some for lawyers. There’s even a spot that’s been reserved for an ambulance that will be here soon for the duration of the trial-thanks to all the death threats that have come Joe’s way. Emotions will be running high, so the ambulance is there also for family members of Joe’s victims-it’s easy to imagine people getting upset and fainting or passing out, or having heart attacks brought on by the anger.

He gets out of the car. Magnum PI, Smurfette, and a couple of nuns are walking by, Magnum making eye contact with him for a split second before stroking his mustache and saying something to one of the male nuns before they all start laughing, and Schroder has the bad idea whatever it is it’s about him. He makes his way to the entrance and shows his ID to the security guard, who looks at it, looks at Schroder, looks out at the street as a guy dressed in a suit with a top hat and rubber chickens hanging from his arms yells at somebody to wait up. The guard looks at the ID again and then writes something down on a clipboard. He shrugs one of those The world is going to shit shrugs, then hands Schroder a pass to clip onto his jacket. More people are on the street now, and he wonders if some of them are figuring out this is the entrance that will be used. He hopes not, because Joe just might not make it inside alive.

A few seconds later he changes his mind-he decides it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if the crowd got hold of Joe, not really, not a bad thing at all.

Melissa has slept well. No dreams. No nerves. She’s confident in her abilities. Not so confident in Raphael’s, but definitely in her own. It’s a cold morning. She uses Sally’s shower to warm up. She dresses in Sally’s clothes. She eats a good-sized breakfast in Sally’s kitchen with Sally’s food. She uses up the last of Sally’s milk and puts the container into Sally’s bin, the one labeled Recycling. She’s all about the environment. Last night she slept on Sally’s bed. It was too soft. It reminds her of a fairy tale.

Sally doesn’t do much as Melissa goes about getting ready. There’s not a lot for her to do, really. Last time Melissa was here things were quite different. She needed a nurse. Sally was a nurse. Melissa needed help and Sally gave it to her, and as a reward Melissa let her live. All she had to do was convince Sally not to go to the police, and she had a lot to convince her with. Plus she let Sally live because she knew that three months later-that today-she would be coming back. Of course Sally didn’t know that.

So now she’s back and Sally obviously isn’t pleased, but there’s not a lot she can do about it. Melissa finishes off her breakfast. It’s not as healthy as she’d have liked, but a good meal. A filling meal. The kind of meal you want on the morning of the day your boyfriend might not make it back out of.

By now Raphael will be at the office building. He’ll have assembled the gun and have changed into the police uniform. She can imagine him sitting down and trying to contain his nerves. Maybe he brought a photograph of his daughter along with him to keep him company. Melissa is worried about just how nervous he’s going to be, and whether those nerves are going to send his bullet off target.

There were always cracks in her plan. But now they’re becoming more obvious.

She’s starting to worry.

The nerves that weren’t there during the night have rolled into town, so much so that suddenly she doesn’t see any way for the plan to work. She should cut her losses, cut Sally free, and move on.

Instead of doing any of that, she leaves Sally tied up on the bedroom floor and she drives into town. Traffic is thick, but she’s allowed for it. There’s roadworks and renovations going on in and around the hospital parking lot. She checked it out a few days ago and confirmed what she suspected-that there are no security cameras in the lot. That’s the thing about Christchurch-the places there ought to be cameras there never are. Or perhaps that’s the thing about hospitals-they figure a good old-fashioned beating isn’t a big deal when the victims only have to drag themselves thirty yards for help. Or maybe they see it as being good for business. She drives there now, past a construction crew rolling out a new piece of pavement, who all pause what they’re doing to stare at her. She’s not wearing the fat suit. She smiles at them, then parks around the back and locks up the van. She drops some coins into the meter and takes the ticket that comes out and rests it on the dashboard before grabbing the rucksack and locking up. She walks toward the hospital. Jackhammering and engine noise and men talking loudly bounce off every surface all around her. She’s wearing Sally’s dark blue nurse’s scrubs. It’s not a great fit, but outside of porn movies and get-well singing telegrams, scrubs never are. That’s not all she took from Sally. She uses Sally’s swipe card to open a staff-only door. She steps into a corridor that’s air-conditioned on a day where it really doesn’t need to be. It’s about sixty feet long with no natural light and dozens of fluorescent tubes in the ceiling. She walks its length and uses the swipe card to gain access to the emergency department. She keeps walking. She takes another corridor and follows the directions Sally was willing to give her. Well, perhaps willing isn’t quite the word Sally would use. After all, Melissa had lifted Sally’s pajama top and squeezed the muffin-top waist and threatened to cut it off.