Paul Cleave - Joe Victim

The security office is on the ground floor not far from the toilets, so the room smells of urinal cakes and disinfectant. There’s a bank of monitors on one wall, several different viewpoints across the hospital. There are a few computers on various counters, and one on the desk ahead of them, along with a flat-screen monitor that is almost as big as Schroder’s TV. Half the stuff in here is brand new, some ten years old, except for the decor, which is twenty years out of date. Schroder’s arm is good now. The shot he took has his arm humming along quite nicely, thank you very much. It has his mind humming nicely too.

“It’s all getting upgraded,” Bevan says. “So it’s the rear parking lot you want, huh?”

“Exactly,” Hutton says.

The guard starts playing around with a computer keyboard. A moment later the rear entrance shows up on the big monitor ahead of them. Its focus is on the five yards leading up to the doorway. Everybody leans forward a little, straining to see what’s in the not-so-sharp distance.

“That’s the ambulance,” Schroder says.

“Only just,” Hutton says.

“But it’s enough,” Schroder says.

“Can we enhance the image?” Hutton asks.

The guard shakes his head. “Not really.”

Schroder knew he was going to say that. On The Cleaner they would have enhanced the image and cleaned it up and it would have been perfect. They would have enhanced a reflection off a nearby windshield to have gotten a perfect look from a different angle, to have a cell phone number scrawled across the back of somebody’s hand. He wonders what Sherlock Holmes would have made of TV technology.

“Not even a little?” Hutton asks.

“It is what it is,” the guard says, and he enlarges the image and the quality drops off. They can see the ambulance and the two policemen guarding it, but no detail.

“Okay. Wind it back,” Schroder says. “Let’s see when it arrives.”

The guard starts winding it back. Other cars come and go. The shadows get fractionally longer. The day looks as though it gets colder. People are walking around backward. Twenty-five minutes earlier a car drives backward and parks near the ambulance, two people get out and walk backward and climb into the ambulance and then the ambulance backs away. The guard lets the footage play forward at normal speed without the need for anybody to tell him. The ambulance comes in. Blurry Melissa helps Fuzzy Joe out of the back. The sight of them both-even though the detail is poor-makes his skin crawl. They get into the dark blue van. They drive away. Then nothing, just a parked ambulance and other cars and life carrying on as normal. They can’t get a plate from the van.

“None of it helps,” Hutton says, “but we’ll put a call out. A dark blue van-hard to tell what make. I mean, it could be nothing, they may have changed cars again, but I’ll still put out the call. We might get lucky.”

Lucky. There’s that word again.

“Start going back,” Schroder tells the guard. “I want to see when that van first arrived.”

The guard nods enthusiastically as if it’s the best idea in the world. He starts running the footage backward. He jumps it in five-minute intervals. An hour before the ambulance showed up the van is suddenly there. The guard jumps forward five minutes again, then starts winding it back second by second until they see Melissa walking backward and then climbing into it. He presses play.

“Where is she going?” Schroder asks.

“Hard to tell. She could be getting ready to circle around the entire building, and there are some more parking spaces out back for staff, but it could also be she’s heading toward the staff entrance.”

“You got a camera over that door?” Hutton asks.

“Sure we have, it’s been there about two years.”

“Line it up with this footage,” Schroder says, tapping the monitor.

The guard plays around with the controls and gets the footage in sync with the other camera. It’s the same entrance Schroder and the doctor came out earlier. They watch Melissa enter the corridor. It’s a different camera and she’s much closer so the quality is much better. The guard keeps switching cameras and they follow her through the emergency department and around to the ambulance bay. Schroder can’t believe the confidence she has, how casually she behaves as though she is meant to be there. She pauses for a few minutes and does something with her phone, though Schroder thinks she may just be pausing for time and watching her environment. Then she chats to the two paramedics he saw unconscious earlier and climbs into the back of their ambulance.

Schroder can feel a pulse throbbing in his forehead. He can feel adrenaline starting to pump. He feels that if he had to, he could lift a car and flip it over, even with his broken arm.

“Whose swipe card is she using?” Schroder asks, pointing at the monitor, and the moment he asks the question, he knows-he knows for sure what the answer is going to be. He should have figured it out when he was in the parking lot.

“That’s a really good question,” the guard says, because the guard doesn’t know Sally, the guard doesn’t know she worked with Joe, was one of the reasons he was caught, that she returned to studying nursing last year and now her training is at the hospital. The guard’s fingers fly across the keyboard for a few seconds. A moment later a photograph and an ID come up on the monitor, and Schroder looks at the picture of Sally, and Hutton looks at the picture of Sally, and then Schroder and Hutton look at each other.

“Shit,” Hutton says.

“I know,” Schroder says.

“Let’s go,” Hutton says, and the two men race out the door and back into the parking lot.

Joe stays mostly quiet as she gets him dressed into a new shirt. She had forgotten how his skin smelled. Forgotten how he felt. The last year without him was tough. Not the first few months. Back then she was annoyed he’d been arrested, but life goes on. Then she found out she was pregnant. Then a whole bunch of hormones flooded her body. Things would make her cry, random things, but mostly stories in the newspapers that involved animals or children. Bad stories. And there were always bad stories. She developed a craving for weird food. She would eat raw potatoes. Couldn’t get enough of them. And chocolate. For a month there she was sure she was single-handedly keeping the chocolate labor force of New Zealand in work. Then those cravings left and new ones came-suddenly it was all about fruit, all about chicken and Thai food, and through it all her feelings for Joe intensified. Three months into her pregnancy she started figuring out how to help him escape. She wanted her baby to have a father-and most of all she wanted her baby. She’s always wanted one.

“Where are we going to go?” he finally asks.

Melissa is also getting changed. She brought clothes with her last night for this. And a new wig. She’s going shoulder-length light brown. “We’re heading home,” she says. “We lay low for a bit. The police look for people who run. They’re easy to find. But we hide out and-”

“Do we really have a daughter?” he asks, “Or did I just imagine that?”

They are still in Sally’s house. She hates it here. She can’t imagine this being much better than where Joe spent his last twelve months, and she has a good imagination. The rooms feel damp. It doesn’t get a lot of sun. And she’s pissed off at Sally for not having kept the refrigerator nicely stocked. She’s hungry and there’s nothing here to eat.

“Yes,” she says. “She’s beautiful. She has your eyes.” She knew it was going to be a shock for Joe. She knew he would need time to adjust to it. Hell, she had nine months to get her head around it and even then it didn’t feel real until she was lying on Sally’s bed with a baby turning her vagina into something that resembled a gutted rabbit. So she knows he needs to come around a bit-she was just hoping he’d be a little happier along the way. “Her name is-”