Joe Victim: A Thriller

“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.





Chapter Seventy-Five


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—”

“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?”