I sink back down to the floor. I grab some padding and press it into my wound. Thank God my stomach is still feeling okay, but I’m concerned that it’s not, that my body has other issues to deal with right now and is giving me a break on that one for a moment.
“My bag,” Melissa shouts, and she glances over her shoulder at me.
“What?”
“My bag. Hand me my bag.”
“What bag?”
She glances back over her shoulder, and this time her eyes move around the floor. “There,” she says, “next to the woman’s foot. The black bag.”
There’s a small black bag right where she said it’d be.
“Hand it to me,” she says.
“What’s in it?”
“Hurry up, Joe,” she says. “Schroder is going to be right behind us.”
I reach out and grab the bag. I hand it to her. She opens it up with one hand while keeping the other hand on the wheel. She pulls out a small box with a plastic top on it, and she lifts the top to reveal a trigger. It’s a remote. She puts it between her legs so it doesn’t fall on the floor, and then she puts both hands back onto the wheel. She keeps looking into her mirrors.
“It’s all about timing,” she says.
“I’ve missed you,” I tell her.
“This confusion and chaos,” she says, “it’s just how I saw it. This is about to get easy for us, Joe, and about a hundred different types of messy for everybody else,” she says, and she keeps watching her mirrors and then hovers one hand over the remote.
Chapter Sixty-Four
Raphael thought he would have been caught. He thought he would have been cornered in the stairwell by cops armed if not with guns, then with batons and fists and pepper spray. He was prepared to give a description of the man he was chasing, something like White uniform covered in paint, a hat on backward.
None of that happens. On the street people are running in every direction. They bounce against Raphael and he lets himself get lost in them. They’re running for their lives. None of them are hurt but many are acting as if they’ve just been shot. Suddenly he’s not sure he’s even going to be able to drive out of here. He can see the ambulance two blocks away. Its sirens are on, but the people around it keep it moving slower than Melissa would have liked. He reaches his car and at the same time Detective Schroder’s car hits the street just ahead of him and turns the same way as the ambulance. It’s all happening just ahead of him. He can hear other sirens far in the distance.
He begins to follow them. Did Melissa sabotage the gun? If so, then why give him a uniform? Why help him avoid arrest? He doesn’t know. It’s something to think about once he’s gotten the hell out of here. There’ll be a simple explanation, but he can’t search for it right now.
Melissa keeps going south. Schroder follows, and Schroder is surrounded by the same crowd of people, though that crowd is starting to disperse. Raphael slows down. He’ll go left. He’ll start putting distance between him and the courthouse. The entire thing has been a disaster.
He hopes like hell both Joe and Melissa are gunned down in a hail of bullets. He hopes Joe is already dead. He extends those hopes and prays he won’t be arrested, but only time will tell. He puts on his signal and waits for the people to get out of the way so he can turn into the intersection.
Chapter Sixty-Five
Schroder is gripping the steering wheel so tight his knuckles have gone white. They are thirty yards behind the ambulance. There are people everywhere—many between them and Melissa, most though are on the sidewalks.
“There’s no way she can get away,” Kent says, looking around her, and Schroder can hear the message she isn’t saying: There’s no way she can get away, so no reason for us to keep trying to close the distance, no reason we can’t just stay hanging back so we don’t kill anybody.
“Maybe she has a plan,” Schroder says, “or maybe she knows there’s nowhere to go and doesn’t care. That could be part of her plan too. But we’re not hanging back. I’m not risking losing her.”
“I agree she has a plan,” Kent says, “but it doesn’t make sense—how did she know she was going to be asked inside?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Middleton was sick, so we got one of the paramedics to come in. She was waiting for it.”
“And you believed him?”
“He wasn’t faking, and even if he was there’s no way she could have known she’d be asked to come inside.”
“I don’t know then,” he says, annoyed at this new information. If he’d still been a cop he’d have been involved, and he’d never have fallen for that crap. He has to brake slightly as a guy in a wheelchair starts to drift from the sidewalk out in front of him, and he wonders if the guy genuinely can’t walk or if it’s just a costume. He loses a few yards on the ambulance in his effort not to run him over and make the costume permanent.
“Well it had to be something,” she says, “and it would have worked if somebody hadn’t shot him. How’s that for bad timing for Melissa, huh? Freeing her boyfriend and then another shooter trying to pick him off. I guess her plan was just to drive away without being chased.”
Schroder claims back the few yards he lost, then a few more. “I saw her. A few days ago.”
“What?”
“At the prison. When I went out to see Joe, I ran into her in the parking lot.”
“Why didn’t you—”
“Tell you? I had no idea it was her,” he says. “But it was. Shit,” he says. “My keys. When I came out of the prison I couldn’t find my keys. Then I found them on the ground.”
“She took your keys?”
“She was pretending to be pregnant. She had the bump and everything. I helped her out of her car. Oh my God she’s good. I had no idea.” He slowly shakes his head. “She must have swiped my keys then. She must have been in my car. . . . Oh shit, that’s why I couldn’t find the photograph of her.”
“What?”
“When we were talking to Raphael. Remember I went back to grab a photograph of her?”
“Why the hell would she risk breaking into your car just to steal a photograph?”
A young man dressed as a teapot with two spouts extends a hand to give Schroder the finger, probably annoyed at the speeding car without a siren that he almost stepped out in front of. This would be much easier if he had sirens. And a lot easier if people looked where they were going.