Schroder is led past his car. It’s still smoking. He’s seen plenty of cars destroyed in accidents—he’s seen cars with roofs missing as they’ve jammed themselves beneath trucks, he’s seen cars cut in half by busses—but he’s never seen one detonated by an explosive. It’s charred and twisted metal, less of a car now than some weird modern-art exhibit. He carries his broken arm in his good arm.
Kent is lying on the other side of the exhibit and on the sidewalk. Nearby, Spider-Man is lying facedown in a gutter, a side mirror next to his head, a patch of blood on both of them from the impact. He doesn’t know if Kent somehow bounced out of the car she was thrown into, or if the paramedics pulled her out.
Kent looks up at him. She smiles. “Hey,” she says.
“Hey.”
“I should have been quicker,” she says.
“Yeah, you should have been,” he says, trying to smile, and she tries to smile too. It breaks his heart. Breaking her heart is a piece of metal embedded in her chest. Her limbs are twisted. Her hands are burned. One side of her face is covered in blood, and beneath it he can see overlapping skin, like somebody has lifted a piece of wallpaper and set it back down slightly off-center. “You’re going to be fine,” he tells her, and then the paramedics get her up onto a gurney and start moving her toward the ambulance.
“Joe,” Kent says.
“We’ll get him,” he says.
She reaches out and grabs his hand. The paramedics tell her to let go and she doesn’t. “Joe said Calhoun was a bad guy,” she says. “You always,” she says, then coughs up a little blood, “you always said—”
“Just rest,” he tells her.
“That somebody else killed Daniela Walker. Joe said it was Calhoun.”
“Joe’s a liar and a madman.”
“I believed him,” she says, and her eyes flicker closed and she lets go. The gurney starts moving again and he hobbles to stay with it. Her eyes open back up. She smiles. A sweet, bloody smile, what he thinks may be her last. “Should have been quicker,” she says again.
He says nothing.
“Do me a favor, Carl,” she says, and she reaches down and unclips the latch to her pistol. And then her arm falls away. “Promise me something,” she says, struggling with her remaining breaths, and she nods down toward her firearm.
He already knows what it’s going to be. He looks up. Hutton is looking back at the wreckage. He’s not watching. “I’ll get him,” he says, and he reaches down and takes her gun. Neither of the paramedics seem to mind. “I’ll get them both. I promise.”
Chapter Sixty-Nine
The roads aren’t as congested out past the hospital. Melissa is calm. No reason not to be. Joe has passed out in the back. She hopes it’s from the blood loss and the pain, and not from the news that he’s become a father. He’s still losing blood. She’s sure it’s a shoulder wound. She’s sure the bullet hasn’t hit his lung. If she starts freaking out he’s going to die. She needs to start helping him, but first she needs to put more distance between them and the hospital and the courthouse.
The plan may have started unraveling, but she saved it. The explosions were perfect. When she left her earmuffs in Raphael’s car on Saturday, that was no accident. When she went back she had placed C-four in the same place in his car that she did in Schroder’s. Raphael will have been blown into a dozen pieces. Probably more. He probably rained down over five city blocks in bite-sized pieces. She knows Schroder got out of his car. But not by much. She saw him flying through the air. As for the bystanders, well, she didn’t want them hurt, but there wasn’t much she could do about that except hope for the best. People had to take responsibility for their actions—and in this case all those victims were accountable for being at the courthouse when they should have been at work or at home or studying, and they were accountable for not getting out of the way in time.
She drives for two more minutes. Then she pulls over. She gets into the back of the van. She opens up her bag and pours the supplies out on the floor. She lays Joe out flat. The whole point of the van was so she could have a mobile operating space. There were supposed to be two paramedics back here—or at least one. She unbuttons his shirt, then uses a pair of scissors to cut away the part of his shirt and jacket getting in the way. Like she hoped, it looks like a clean wound. She doesn’t know what to do. She has the idea of getting the van cigarette lighter from the dashboard and using it to cauterize the wounds, but she doesn’t know if that really works. She wads up some gauze and stuffs it into the hole. She rolls him onto his side and stuffs more into the back of the wound too. Then she puts padding on both sides and uses bandaging to apply pressure. It’s the best she can do. For now. Until she gets help. And she knows where to get it.
She gets back behind the wheel. She turns on the radio and listens to unconfirmed reports that there are dozens dead and hundreds wounded and she knows it can’t be that many. She keeps driving. The unconfirmed reports stay unconfirmed, and the estimates drop a little, and the only thing they get right are the amount of explosions. And the stampede—people are fleeing the area. There are unconfirmed gunshots and no mention of Joe.
Fifteen minutes later she pulls into the same street she was in earlier this morning and pulls into the same driveway of the same house. She gets out and uses Sally’s keys to open Sally’s front door, and Sally is hog-tied and gagged just where she left her, still dressed in her pajamas and robe. The fatty looks sad. She also looks like she’s wet herself.
“Scream and I kill you. You understand?” Melissa asks.
Sally nods. Melissa takes off her gag.
“You help us, and you get to live. You understand?”
“Who’s us?” Sally asks.
“I have a patient out in a van. I need you to help me bring him inside. It’s Joe.”
“Joe? I . . . I don’t understand.”
“He’s been hurt, you Jesus-loving heffalump,” Melissa says, quickly losing patience. “I want you to help him. If you don’t, so help me, I’ll shoot those flappy breasts of yours and leave you for dead.”
“I—”
Melissa slaps her in the face. “Here’s how it’s going to work,” she says. “You’re going to help Joe and if he dies then you die and if he lives then you get to live. It really is that simple. You get it, right? You see how it works?”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“He’s been shot.”
“I thought—”
“You people, you Jesus freaks, you’re all about the forgiveness, right? It’s your job to forgive what he’s done,” Melissa says. “And now you’re a nurse so it’s your job to help people. You get to combine your love of God with your love of helping people. Think of this as the perfect storm.”
“I don’t have any supplies.”
“I have a bag full of them,” Melissa says, then she pulls out a knife and cuts the plastic binds around Sally’s arms and the binds from around her feet. Sally sits up and starts massaging her wrists. Melissa shows her the gun.
“One wrong move,” she says, “and it’s over.”
They head outside. To her credit Sally doesn’t try to run and to Melissa’s credit she doesn’t have any reason to shoot her in the back. They help Joe out and get him inside and the kitchen table is too small so they carry him down a very short corridor into the very small bedroom where Melissa slept last night. There are stuffed toys on the floor, thrown there last night when Melissa laid on the bed, and now those toys get stood on and stepped over. They get Joe laid down on the bed, then Melissa tips up the bag of medical supplies on the end of the bed near his feet.
“We need to cut away his clothes,” Sally says.
“Then cut,” Melissa says.
Sally runs the blade of the scissors all the way from Joe’s waist to his collar, then cuts the shoulder of the jacket, cutting the bandaging Melissa had put there earlier. She peels back the clothes and the padding and pulls out the gauze, exposing the wound, a hole big enough to poke a finger into, but no bigger. The whole time Melissa stays a few yards back, the gun lowered to her side.