Paul Cleave - Joe Victim

“Abigail,” Joe finishes, adjusting the hat a little that she gave him so nobody will be able to clearly see his face once they leave.

“Did you mean before what you said that you’d rather go back to jail?”

“No. Of course not,” he says. “Where are we hiding out?”

“My place,” she says.

“You still live in the same place?”

“No,” she says. “I moved.”

“Before you started killing other people?” he asks.

“Something like that. Are you sure you don’t really mean what you said earlier about going back to jail?”

“Of course I’m sure. Did you have sex with those men you killed?” he asks.

“Of course not,” she says. And it’s true. But she’s not annoyed that he asked.

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. Did you fuck anybody in jail?”

“No. Of course not.”

“Did somebody fuck you?”

“It wasn’t like that. I wasn’t in general population, otherwise that would have happened. There’s been nobody since you,” he tells her.

She believes him. A guy like Joe-she imagines he’d rather kill himself than become somebody’s pet. “How’s the shoulder?”

“It hurts,” he says. “A lot. But I’ll make it.”

She helps him to his feet. They make their way out of the bedroom.

“We have to go and see my mother,” Joe says.

She throws him a Why the hell would we do that glance, then follows it up. “Why would we go and do that?”

So he tells her why and she keeps him propped up by the door and listens to him as he talks. At first she thinks he’s still delusional from the medication. It’s quite the story. Fifty thousand dollars. Detective Calhoun. Jonas Jones the asshole psychic she’s seen on TV. A trip into the woods. Joe’s confidence in what he is saying becomes infectious. Then she remembers the files she saw in Schroder’s car from the TV station. It all makes sense. And fifty thousand dollars is a lot of money. She’s done well with the forty she got from Sally three months ago, and another fifty would certainly help get their new lives under way.

They should just head back to her house. Relieve the babysitter. And stay inside for the next few months. Grow Joe’s hair out. Dye it. Get him to put on some weight. Get him to look about as different as she can with what she has to work with. Get him to bond with Abigail. Then work at getting some false identities and leave the country. Difficult, yes, but not impossible. Just wait for the manhunt to die down.

“So the money was transferred into your mother’s account,” Melissa says.

“Yes.”

“That means your mother will have to go into a bank and draw it out. We can’t risk her saying the wrong thing. Too problematic.”

Joe shakes his head. “You don’t know my mother,” he says. “She doesn’t trust banks. She has a bank account purely because you can’t really get by without one, but she hates them, hates them so much she goes in there every Monday morning and draws out her benefit in cash and takes it home and hides it under her mattress. She has done for years.”

“You think she’ll have gone there this morning and drawn out the fifty thousand dollars?” she asks, and she tries to imagine it, and for some reason she pictures an old lady with a sack slung over her back with big dollar signs on it. But of course that’s not the reality. Fifty thousand dollars in one hundred dollar bills is five hundred of them. That amount would fit into a handbag.

“Without a doubt,” Joe says. “It’ll be at her house under her bed just waiting for us to go and get it.”

“And you’re sure.”

“Yes,” he says.

Fifty thousand dollars-is it worth the risk?

She decides that it is.

Schroder and Hutton are leading the chase. He knows they are because when Hutton calls in the new information he’s told backup is ten minutes away. While Hutton is on the phone organizing that, Schroder is once again searching his pockets for his Wake-E pills. Nope. Definitely gone. He has a headache coming on.

“A team has just reached Raphael’s house,” Hutton says.

“And?”

“And the results are interesting. Nothing there to suggest he was working with Melissa. But plenty to suggest Raphael wasn’t exactly a Good Samaritan.”

“Yeah? What’d he do?”

“Joe’s lawyers,” Hutton says. “It looks like Raphael’s the guy who killed them.”

“Shit,” Schroder says.

“We’ve sent people to Joe’s mother’s house, hoping he’ll turn up there, or hoping she may offer something, but there’s no sign of her.”

They both revert to their own thoughts. Schroder starts thinking back to the last time he saw Sally. When was that? It was last year, not long after Joe was arrested. Within days of being given the reward money she quit her job. She went back to studying. She never stayed in touch with anybody from work, and why would she? The night they figured out who Joe was, they treated her like hell. They arrested her and put her in an interrogation room because they’d found her prints on a piece of evidence. She ended up being the reason they caught Joe. Not police work, not detective skills, but pure luck because Sally had picked up something she shouldn’t have.

“You should give me Kent’s gun,” Hutton says.

“You’re probably right.”

“I know I’m right. Come on, Carl. We’re almost there. If you end up shooting somebody we’ll probably both go to jail.”

“They’re armed,” Schroder says. “It’s only fair that I’m armed too.”

“You think she’s still alive?” Hutton asks. “Sally?”

“No.”

“Nothing I can say to get that gun back from you?”

“Nothing.”

“Just don’t fuck up. Promise me that, okay?”

“You have my word.”

“And don’t tell anybody I knew you had it.”

Town races by. The neighborhoods race by. Schroder doesn’t take any of it in. Six minutes later they’re pulling into her street. They watch the numbers on the letterboxes, but then stop watching when they see the blue van up a driveway six houses ahead, exactly where the numbers were going to line up. The houses are all pretty small and look like they’ve spent thirty years being blasted by bad weather and no love. Hutton does a U-turn and drives back to the start of the block. He takes out his cell phone and reports in. Backup is still four minutes away. He tells Schroder this when he hangs up.

“A lot can happen in four minutes,” Schroder says.

“And a lot can happen for the worse if we go in there.”

“We opened the ambulance before, right?” Schroder asks. This isn’t any different from that.”

“It’s a lot different,” Hutton says, and Schroder knows it. “We knew that thing was going to be empty. Whereas this time we know they’re in there. If only we had Jonas Jones along with us. He’d be able to tell us what’s going on inside.”

“Funny. Look, they wouldn’t have come here if Sally was dead,” Schroder says. “They’ve come here for her help. Most likely for her medical skills. I say we go in. We have to. We owe it to Sally.”

“We owe it to Sally to give her the best chance we can, and her best chance is if we wait for backup, and nobody from backup is going to have a busted arm. Three minutes, that’s all,” Hutton says, and Schroder knows he’s right, and in Hutton’s position he’d be making the same decision. So then why does the right thing to do feel so very, very wrong?

He opens the car door and steps outside.

“Jesus, Carl,” Hutton says, and he does the same. Schroder starts walking. “Have you forgotten you’re not even a cop anymore?”