“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.
The officers who helped me earlier help me again. I sway a little even though I’m still feeling much better. The officers get me out into the corridor, Kent and Jack behind me, the security guard and Melissa leading the way to the exit and back outside to the chanting crowds and placards and the occasional person dressed as Jesus.
Chapter Sixty-One
Something is happening.
Five minutes ago Raphael watched the security guard come up to the ambulance, knock on the window, then Melissa followed him back inside. The second woman who was in the ambulance didn’t get out. It didn’t make sense. But then suddenly it did—Melissa has done something to her. She wouldn’t have killed her. Since Melissa isn’t really a paramedic, then she’s going to need to keep the paramedic alive. Melissa wants to keep Joe alive. He’s sure of it. So that explained the second paramedic, but it didn’t explain what the security guard wanted. Something to do with Joe being sick? He sure as hell looked sick.
Raphael rests his finger on the trigger guard. His hands are still steady. There are no nerves now. That’s a sign that he’s doing the right thing. Like every fiber of his being is in on the decision, every cell is in harmony—they’re all getting along and are going to make this happen. He’s not going to shoot Joe in the shoulder like they talked about. Now he’s going to shoot him in the head. It was meant to be about wounding him, not killing him. Raphael would do the wounding, and Melissa would pick Joe up in the ambulance.
Raphael was the shooter.
Melissa was the collector.
And together they were going to make Joe suffer.
Now Raphael is the shooter, and he’s going to shoot to kill. Of course he’s upset he can’t torture Joe. But this will at least give him some satisfaction.
He watches the back of the courthouse. He keeps the sights on the door. Then the door opens. Melissa and the security guard step outside, followed by Joe with the same two officers who helped him earlier helping him now, followed by louder screams from the crowd, followed by Kent and the guy who drove the van earlier. Whatever was wrong with Joe before is still wrong with him now. His skin is pale. He looks to be in a lot of pain. Good.
Melissa looks up at Raphael. He can see her face in the scope. She slowly shakes her head and he slowly smiles, he can’t help it. She doesn’t want him to take the shot. There is no need to. Something happened and she’s gotten Joe out of there, but not in the way they planned. Something to do with Joe being sick. Has to be. Joe’s sick, and of course everybody down there thinks Melissa is a genuine paramedic.
He moves the scope back onto Joe.
Joe, the man who took away his daughter.
Joe, the man who took away his life.
He thinks about Vivian wanting to be a pop-singing ballerina. He thinks about Adelaide wanting to go to a Harry Potter school and learn magic. He thinks about how he never gets to see them, how much he misses his daughter, how Vivian and Adelaide will grow up without a mother.
Hello, Red Rage. Nice to have you back.
He holds his breath.
He puts the crosshairs over Joe’s face.
He pulls the trigger.
The result is instant. Of course it is—yet somehow he was expecting it to take a second, maybe a second and a half for the physics to catch up. The sound of the shot is muffled by the earmuffs, but it’s louder than out at the forest, loud enough to make his ears ring. It echoes around the office and out into the street and as one everybody out there looks up in his direction.
Except Joe.
Because Joe is losing balance. The problem—and of course there were always going to be problems and he was a fool to think it could be otherwise—is that the shot has taken Joe in the chest, maybe in the shoulder, and certainly not in the head like he wanted. Maybe it was the dynamics of the bullet, or the nerves—he doesn’t know. What he does know is that the Red Rage is screaming at him to take another shot, and of course he’s going to. He still has time.
The two officers holding Joe up don’t seem to feel any responsibility to him. They let him go and run for cover. Joe, without the aid of his human crutches, falls into a very similar pile to the one he started in when exiting the van earlier. Detective Kent hides behind Schroder’s car. Everybody is hiding—all except Joe and Melissa.
Melissa. And why would she hide? He shot Joe in the shoulder just the way she always wanted him to. She starts dragging Joe toward the ambulance. The whole shooting and collecting part of the plan must still be going through her mind. He puts the crosshairs in the middle of her body. It may not be a kill shot, but at the very least the police will figure out who she is. The Red Rage is pleased by the idea.