Paul Cleave - Joe Victim

“Listen, Carl, I know with all that’s going on you’ve forgotten you’re no longer a cop. It’s one thing letting you this far, but you can’t go up there.”

Schroder wants to argue, but he knows Hutton is right. But he argues anyway. “Come on, Wilson, I know the Carver case better than anybody. You need my eyes on this.”

Hutton nods. “Look, don’t take this personally, okay, because we’re all at fault here, but your eyes were on this case for a couple of years while Joe was running free and they’ve been on the Melissa X case for twelve months, so your eyes aren’t really needed right now.”

The comment comes as a blow, and he takes a moment trying to figure out how to respond and can’t think of anything other than Fuck you, Hutton, but the sad truth is Hutton is right. Of course he’s right. If he wasn’t right then there wouldn’t be so much blood on the roads.

“Listen, like I said, we’re all at fault,” Hutton says. “We all missed what we should have seen. You’ve been gone a month and none of us are any closer to finding Melissa, and I know you’re the guy who got the break with finding her real name,” he says, and Schroder knows even that’s not entirely true-it was Theodore Tate who got that. “What I’m saying is we’re all responsible.”

“What you’re saying is you don’t think I can help,” Schroder says.

“I’m not saying that,” Hutton says, only he is and both men know it. “I’m just saying it’s not your job anymore.”

Hutton stares at him waiting for a response, and it takes Schroder a little over five seconds to come up with it. “I need this,” he says.

“Carl-”

“I need this, Wilson. I’m the one who came up with the idea of a decoy route to the courthouse. I’m the one Melissa stole it from.”

“She-”

Schroder holds his hand up. “She broke into my car when I was visiting Joe in prison. I spent a few minutes talking to her beforehand and had no idea who she was.”

“Jesus, Carl, what the fuck?”

“I’m the one whose car she put the bomb in. What happened to Kent, that’s on me too. If Joe kills anybody, if Melissa kills anybody else, that’s on me. You see that, right?” He looks at Jack lying dead on the ground. “That’s on me too,” he says, and Hutton can see where he’s looking. “Don’t do this, don’t send me away, please, Wilson, I’m begging you as a friend, don’t do this.”

Now it’s Hutton’s turn to say nothing for five seconds. He looks around to see who else is nearby and he must think what the hell, because then he shrugs, he shakes his head first in a I can’t believe I’m about to do this gesture, and then starts nodding.

“Okay, but don’t touch anything.”

“I won’t.”

“Fuck it,” Hutton says. “If the roles were reversed, would you let me in?”

No, Schroder thinks, and then nods. The roles have been reversed in the past, not with him and Hutton, but with him and Tate, and in those cases Tate always heard no as a yes. “Of course I would.”

“Yeah, right. If anybody asks you’re here as a witness, that’s all, and if you end up getting me fired over this, you’re going to wake up in bathtub full of ice and I’m going to have sold your organs because I’m going to need the money. I’ll break your other arm too. Come on, let’s go, before I change my mind.”

My daughter’s name is Abby. She’s twenty years old and has her mother’s looks, the kind of looks I’d like to see on any twenty-year-old girl that I shared a deserted alleyway with. Abby isn’t short for Abigail, but short for Accidental Baby, and me and Melissa are planning on telling that story at her twenty-first birthday party, which is tomorrow. Abby has a great sense of humor and she’ll get the joke. I love her. Abby has changed my life, just as Melissa has. She’s our only child. Abby was four months old when I had a vasectomy, choosing to have it done professionally rather than taking the shortcut of having Melissa take care of it. One child was enough.

My mom will be at tomorrow’s party. So will her new husband, Henry. Walt died a few years ago. He was hit by a car. I’ve always suspected it was a lifestyle choice rather than an accident. My mother is in her eighties now.

One of the best things about having a twenty-one-year-old daughter was her twenty-one-year-old friends. Every weekend some of them would be around at the house and every weekend I kept my hands and knives to myself in fear of going back to jail.

Of course jail is in the past. Melissa saved me. We’ll tell that story too at Abby’s twenty-first. Maybe show some photos of her as a baby, the first time she rolled over, the first time she walked, the first time she killed a pet. After I was shot and saved and healed, the justice system realized I’d been punished enough, they came around to my way of thinking. I was set free. Counseling was part of the deal. I would see Benson Barlow twice a week for ten years and we actually became pretty good friends. Not good enough to socialize, but good enough to chat about the weather if I ran into him on the street.

People say your life flashes in front of your eyes when you’re about to die. I can’t really be sure why my life is flashing at me now, mostly it’s the events of the last few days that are replaying themselves-the trip out to the woods with Kent and her team, the money I earned, the. .

Last few days?

No. That’s not right. It was those few days twenty years and change ago.

It’s a warm morning and the sun is on my face and I’m lying in bed, and from somewhere I can hear Melissa’s voice. I can smell bacon and eggs. I feel happy. I’m content. I’m the man I never thought I would be. There’s a white picket fence outside and later today I’m going to mow the lawns, I’m going to make idle chitchat with the neighbor and help him shift his old fridge from his kitchen into his garage. I can hear Sally’s voice too, and it’s something I haven’t heard in years.

Months.

But there it is now, she’s in conversation with Melissa because Sally is coming tomorrow too. So is Carl Schroder. Schroder turned out to be a pretty good guy, in the end, probably because he ended up spending ten years in jail having the cop raped out of him.

And I feel sleepy and the voices fade a little. Dreams within dreams. My past flashing at me. I open my eyes into a world that is full of Sally. She is leaning over me. Are we sleeping together? I try to get back to the white picket fence where bacon is being cooked in the kitchen, but something is keeping me here, it’s something so strong that I can even feel the pain in my shoulder that I felt back then. I can smell antiseptic. The air tastes stale. The bed doesn’t feel like mine. I’m lying in a stranger’s bed and bad things are happening and I just close my eyes and let it happen, just like I did with my auntie all those years ago. I open my eyes. Melissa is standing by the wall. Sally is hovering over me. The Sally. I close my eyes. It’s time to wake up. It’s time to be with my family.

I don’t wake up.

Things come and go. One moment The Sally is over me, then there is nobody, then she is back. She’s working on the bullet wound. It reminds me of another time, back twenty years ago.

No it wasn’t.

Long in the past, memories that should be dead and buried.

“Where’s Abby?” I ask.

“She’s safe,” Melissa says. “You’ll get to see her soon. She misses you,” she says, which I figure is such a mom thing to say even though my mom has never said it. It also means that the Melissa I knew a year ago isn’t the same as the Melissa in front of me.