Paul Cleave - Joe Victim

“You promise? How the hell-”

She interrupts him. “I’ll stay down here the entire time,” she says. “Don’t overthink it. Just stay calm and do what needs doing.”

She hears him sigh. She can imagine him up there in his police uniform, running his hands through his hair, maybe covering his face with his hands.

“Raphael,” she says.

“Suddenly all of this is seeming like a bad idea,” he says.

“It’s not a bad idea. It was just a small piece of bad luck. Or bad timing, really. There’s something wrong with him. He’s sick. For all we know they might bring him right back out. For all we know you’ll get another chance in five minutes.”

He doesn’t respond. She can hear him breathing into the phone. Can hear him wondering if this may end up being true. Trish is staring at her. Within the last minute the crowd outside the back of the courthouse has swelled as people have figured out Joe came this way. The signs don’t mess around- Die fucker die is a good litmus test for how the crowd is feeling. And what the hell is it with all these stupid outfits some of them are wearing?

“Are you still there?” she asks.

“I’m here,” he says.

“We can do this. If not now then at the end of the day when Joe comes back out. It’ll be just as good then. Maybe even better,” she says, not really believing that last bit. Better would be if Raphael had taken a successful shot already.

“Okay,” he says, “I’ll wait and get him on the way back out. I promise,” he says, and he hangs up and Melissa stares at the back door of the court building and tries to figure out how long is too long when it comes to waiting for a guy like Raphael, and hopes he can keep his nerve long enough to stay where he is.

They drag me toward the holding cells until somebody decides that it’s a bathroom that I need dragging to, at which point they start me in a different direction. When I try to use my legs I find I just can’t get them to grip the ground beneath me. The organs squashed earlier aren’t bouncing back into shape. Instead they’re getting tighter. I’m placed in front of a toilet and the view of a chunk of shit caked above the waterline is better at helping the purging process than jamming my fingers down my throat.

I have never in my life felt this sick. Sweat is dripping off me. I throw up again, then topple forward and somebody catches me before I lose my front teeth against the porcelain. They get me up and I don’t see much of the journey except for some blurry walls and sometimes my own feet, but I’m taken into a first-aid station and I’m laid down on a cot, but none of the chains are removed. The room smells of ammonia and ointments and recently wiped-away vomit. It smells exactly how the first-aid station back in school used to smell, and for a moment, just one brief moment, I’m back there, I’m eight years old and I’m feeling sick and the nurse is soothing back my hair and telling me I’m going to be okay. That doesn’t happen this time.

“Joe,” somebody says. I open my eyes. It’s a nurse. She’s attractive and I try to smile at her, but can’t manage it. She’s looking down at me. “Tell me how you’re feeling,” she says.

“I feel sick.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“Real sick,” I tell her, being real specific. She hands me some water and tells me to drink and I manage a few sips, then roll onto my side and start gagging.

Hot Detective Kent, Jack, and the other two officers are in the room with us. The nurse is chatting to them, but I can’t focus on what she’s saying. Then Hot Detective is making a call somewhere. The nurse comes back, Hot Nurse, and I must be sick because as much as I try to imagine Hot Nurse making out with Hot Detective, my mind just won’t go there. It wanders off to other things. I think about my mom’s wedding. I think about Santa Suit Kenny. I think about my nights spent with Melissa.

“Joe, what have you eaten over the last few days?”

“Shit food,” I tell her.

“Can you be more specific?”

“Real shit food,” I tell her, being real specific again, wondering if this woman needs everything in life explained.

“Does this hurt?” she asks, then pushes her fingertips into the side of my stomach. I can hear fluid moving in there. We all can. It doesn’t hurt and I don’t tell her it doesn’t hurt so therefore she doesn’t ask me to be more specific. She pushes a little harder and I have to tighten my ass muscles to stop a huge mess from happening.

“Yes,” I tell her, wanting to push something sharp into her stomach and ask her the same thing. “It’s a sharp pain,” I tell her.

“Where exactly?”

“Everywhere.”

Kent comes over. She’s shaking her head. “Nobody else at the prison is sick,” she says.

“He’s faking it,” Jack says, but it sounds like even he doesn’t believe it.

The nurse shakes her head. “I don’t think so,” she says. “I think we need to get him to a hospital.”

“There’s an ambulance out in the parking lot,” Kent says, then turns toward the security guard. “Go get the paramedics,” she says, “and let’s hope we can get this sorted out so we don’t have to delay the trial.”

“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.