Paul Cleave - Joe Victim

“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.”

“Here’s the paramedic,” somebody says, but I can’t open my eyes to look. I can’t do much except lie on my back and pray things are going to get better. I’m scared as hell that this may be it for me, that whatever damage has been done inside my body is permanent, that I’ll never be able to escape the tightness and the pain.

“I need a toilet,” I tell them. “Right now.”

There’s a bathroom in the first-aid station. They lead me in there and then leave me alone with my exploding stomach, the sounds of it echoing out into many rooms beyond. I should care, I should feel embarrassed, but I don’t. I’m all hunched over as I sit on the bowl, my wrists and ankles still connected by a chain, and I feel like I’m back in the van.

The relief is immediate and, for the first time since being attacked by Caleb Cole, my stomach remains relaxed. The tail end of the storm is passing. I clean up and walk out of the bathroom and nobody here is laughing. They all look concerned. I sit back down on the cot.

Then I see the paramedic. She looks familiar. And rape-worthy.

“What have we got?” the paramedic asks, and now it’s not just the look of her that’s familiar, but her voice too. My remaining testicle shrivels up, and for a moment I can feel grass on my back, I can see stars up above, and I’m back in that night a year ago where my favorite testicle said hello and then good-bye to Melissa’s pliers.

I focus on her. I look at her eyes, only she’s not looking at me. She’s looking at the nurse.

“Looks like food poisoning,” the nurse says, “but nobody else at the prison got it. He’s vomiting and has bad diarrhea.”

“You’ve taken his blood pressure and temperature?” the paramedic asks, then she looks at me. Melissa? No. It can’t be. But those eyes. . they’re Melissa’s eyes. I’m sure of it.

“Not yet,” the nurse says.

“Then do it,” Melissa says, and I can feel my heart rate rising. “Has he been given any fluids?”

“We tried giving him water, but he couldn’t hold it down,” the nurse says, who then starts to take my blood pressure.

“Take the chains off him,” Melissa says.

“That’s not a good idea,” Jack says.

“There are four of you who are all armed, plus one security guard, and one very sick man. I think we can all handle the risk of his chains being removed.”

“No,” Jack says.

“We’re going to remove them for his trial anyway,” Kent says, “so may as well do it now.”

Jack looks pissed off, and I can’t tell what’s annoyed him more, having to remove my chains or being overruled in front of everybody. He starts undoing the cuffs.

“Blood pressure is elevated,” the nurse says, “but temperature is okay.”

Melissa crouches over me. She starts pressing at the sides of my stomach. She’s looking into my face. She’s conveying a message. It comes through loud and clear. She touches my stomach. I double over in pain that I don’t actually feel. My stomach is still feeling good.

“Don’t touch me,” I say.

“We should get him to the hospital,” Melissa says.

I push her hand away. “It hurts,” I tell her.

“We need to get him into the back of the ambulance. For all we know he’s in the process of bursting his appendix, and if he is then he could die.”

“It’s a trick,” Jack says.

I roll onto my side and start to gag. I try to throw up, but nothing happens, though the sound of me trying is enough to make Kent scrunch up her face.

“He said he ate bad food,” the nurse says.

“And maybe that’s the cause and maybe it isn’t, but I didn’t become a paramedic just so I could watch people suffer when instead they could be helped.” Melissa puts her hands on her hips and stares at him. “If it’s food poisoning, well, food poisoning kills approximately two hundred people in this country every year,” she says, and I’m sure she must be making that figure up, but she delivers it extremely confidently. “Listen, people, I know what you have here. You have a serial killer about to face trial, but if you don’t get him to a hospital you may just have a dead serial killer about to face trial.”

“You say it like it’s a bad thing,” Jack asks, and I want to tell him that I get the point, that everybody does, that he should just get it printed on a T-shirt so then he can shut up.

“It’s my job to save people,” she says. “It’s your job to save people too.”

“Joe isn’t people,” Jack says, and I can feel another vote coming.

“Call it in,” Kent says.

“What?” Jack asks.

“Call it in. Look at him, his trial is due to start in less than five minutes. Call it in. Let the others know we’re taking him to the hospital and we want an escort. The faster we get him sorted, the faster we can get him in front of a judge.”

Jack calls it in. He doesn’t look happy. “Let’s get him to the ambulance,” Melissa says-or, at least, who I hope is Melissa.