“Here, let me take a look,” Melissa says, and she crouches in front of me and puts one hand on my good shoulder and uses her other hand to start undoing my shirt. Despite everything I’m suddenly aroused and I put a hand around the back of her neck and pull her in for a kiss that she resists. “Not now, Joe.”
“I’ve missed you,” I tell her.
“I know. You’ve said already,” she says.
She closes the ambulance doors and moves back into the cab. She starts the ambulance and turns on the sirens. The streets are still full of people, but they’ve dispersed somewhat—the big groups breaking up into smaller groups, the smaller groups breaking up into pairs.
We take the same route as before. We drive south. Then we turn right. I keep expecting a hundred police cars to cut us off—men with guns, that Sunday morning a year ago taking place all over, only this time me without a gun or a Fat Sally. It doesn’t happen. We follow another ambulance. We stay in a straight line all the way to the hospital. Only we’re not going to the hospital because that doesn’t make sense. Except that’s exactly what we are doing. Instead of taking the ambulance entrance, she takes the public one. She turns off the sirens. We drive around the back into the parking lot. It’s full. She double-parks near a white van. I’m sick of vans. She kills the engine. She comes around and opens the back door and helps me outside. Sunlight floods us. Cars and trees and a machine to pay for parking, a picnic bench with a bucket full of sand next to it full of cigarette butts, a few empty coffee cups on the bench, but no people anywhere. Coffee break is over for everybody in the hospital thanks to Melissa.
Melissa fills up her rucksack with medical supplies. We start walking. Our target is the white van. I’m leaving a blood trail. She grabs keys out of her pocket and swings the back doors of the van open. She helps me climb inside.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “You were supposed to have help.”
“I don’t want to die,” I tell her.
“You’re not going to,” she says. “Just stay calm.”
She gets into the front seat. She looks over her shoulders at me.
“I’ve missed you too,” she says.
“I knew you’d come for me,” I tell her.
“I was pregnant,” she tells me. “From our weekend together. I had the baby. It’s a girl. It’s your girl. Our girl. Her name is Abigail. She’s beautiful.”
It’s too much information to absorb. Me, a father? “Take me back to jail,” I say, and finally I pass out.
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Schroder can see the sky. It’s blue in all directions, a few clouds, one of them looks like a palm tree. One looks like a face. There’s a dark gray cloud forming close by. It’s smoke. From the car. He tries to move his head, but can’t. He can move his eyes. That’s a start, but a frightening one.
He can remember every detail. It’s strange. A thing like that has every chance of wiping a few seconds’, a few minutes’, even a few days’ worth of memories. But not for him. For some reason he wonders if that’s because last year he died for a few minutes and then came back, as if that experience means his mind is hardwired a little differently now, immune to forgetting things, then he dismisses the idea for what it really is—a stupid one.
He’s too frightened to try moving his arms and legs. He has to know they work, but what if they don’t? What if he’s never going to walk again? By not trying to move them, he can put that fate off for another time. His ears are ringing. He can feel the cold ground beneath him. He can feel one of his arms pinned under his back. His right. That makes him happy. If his back was broken he wouldn’t be able to feel that, would he? His left arm, he can’t feel. He can taste blood. He can feel more of it on his face. Over the ringing in his ears he can hear screaming.
He closes his eyes and he prays, he actually prays for the first time since he was a kid, back when he figured out that praying didn’t get you anywhere in this world, that praying and misery went hand in hand just like peanut butter and jelly. But he prays now for his legs to move and they do, they move a little and without pain and he knows his prayer wasn’t answered, that he’s been lucky, that’s all it is. He was lucky and others probably won’t have been. Like Kent. He manages to tilt slightly onto his side, the blue sky disappearing, replaced with rooftops, then office windows and walls, then the street. His car has been lifted and has turned a quarter circle and come back down. There are no flames. It’s all twisted to shit and there is glass everywhere. There are other people lying on the ground, some tilting onto their sides and viewing the world the same way as him, some not moving at all.
There is a death toll here. He prays it’s a low one.
He prays God is listening to him.
He rests on his back. He doesn’t want to, but he has no choice. He closes his eyes. His chest feels tight. Somebody puts a hand on his shoulder and he opens his eyes and Detective Wilson Hutton is crouching over him. People have stopped screaming and started sobbing instead.
“Hang on,” Hutton says.
“Kent,” Schroder says.
“It’s . . . it’s bad,” Hutton says.
He can hear sirens. He can see ambulances. He didn’t see them arrive.
“How long have I been out?”
“Three, maybe four minutes.”
“Joe?” he asks.
Hutton shrugs, which sets off a chain reaction of rolling flesh down his chin and into his chest. “Gone,” he says.
Schroder closes his eyes and for a few moments the chaos disappears, even the sobs and sirens. He opens them back up. “What about Kent?”
Hutton shakes his head. “She’s not going to make it,” he says.
“No,” Schroder says. His neck is too sore to shake his head, but his eyes aren’t too sore to tear up. He tries to get up. If he can just get up, then she’ll be okay. Somehow. He’s sure of it. “Help me up.”
“That’s not a good idea,” Hutton says.
“Goddamn it, help me up.”
“Listen to me. Carl. It’s not a good idea. You’re in bad shape. Okay?”
His breath catches in his throat. “How bad?”
“Multiple cuts. Your left arm is broken. Could be a broken leg. Could even be a broken neck.”
“My neck is fine,” Schroder says. He moves his head. Yep. Fine. He can move both feet so his legs are fine, but Hutton is right about the arm. He doesn’t care. He wants to see Kent. If he’d pulled over a few seconds earlier, if he’d yelled at her to get away from the car louder, would she be okay?
It’s none of that. The fuckup happened at the prison. When he didn’t figure out he was talking to Melissa. Or for that matter, why not backtrack a year to when Melissa came into the station? Or go back even further to when Joe first started working for them. That’s where they could have made a difference.
“Help me up,” he says, then uses his good arm to start getting to his feet. Hutton shakes his head, then sighs, then helps him. When he’s up he puts an arm around Hutton for support. His broken arm hangs by his side, all the pain flowing into it along with the blood, and it hurts, but he knows it’s going to hurt even more soon because that pain is only getting warmed up. His legs feel fine. He can take his own weight. He’s a little light-headed, but okay. He lifts his hand to his forehead and his fingers come away with blood on them. He focuses on them, then they fade as he focuses on what’s behind them. On the view.
“Oh my God,” he says. There are people lying in the street. A few near him, but most further down by the other blown-to-shit car. Some burns. Lots of blood coming from people who have friends and strangers trying to comfort them. There are five, six, no, maybe ten ambulances. Metal and plastic and glass have been shredded from the bombed car and thrown about like confetti, going further than he can see, the sun glinting off a thousand pieces of wreckage.
“Where’s Kent?” he asks.
“This way,” Hutton says.