“I don’t know,” he says. “It doesn’t make . . . Wait, what were you saying earlier?”
“About the photograph?”
“No. About the plan to escape.”
“I don’t know,” she says. “I said something about how unlucky she was Joe was shot.”
“You said it was her plan to drive away without being chased.”
“Yeah. It must have been.”
He shakes his head. “No. There has to be more. She was always going to be chased, not chased exactly, but there was always going to be an escort if Joe was sick in the back of the ambulance.”
“Makes sense,” she says.
“So how was she going to escape the escort?”
“Oh Jesus,” she says, and he can tell she’s coming to the same conclusion as him. “You think the explosives?”
“Has to—” he starts, but doesn’t get to finish, because that’s when the car blows up.
Chapter Sixty-Six
The explosion is almost ear shattering. There is no fire, just smoke and glass and twisted pieces of metal. The car is picked up like a child’s toy, and just as casually dismissed like a child’s toy—it’s launched three feet high and a couple of feet to the left before landing back on its wheels. The shock wave blows all the windows out. Bits of flesh hit the interior like paintballs exploding across a wall. People start screaming. Some are running from the blast, others are caught in the shock wave and thrown outward, the explosion an epicenter. Cut faces and cut clothes and a few people aren’t running at all, a few of them are lying on the road surrounded by, and impaled by, shrapnel. The side mirrors go flying, bits of tire, nuts and bolts and screws, and engine components are tossed in all directions, along with pieces of bone and tenderized body parts.
Schroder’s shoulders climb up around his jaw in expectation of an impact. Kent twists in her seat and looks behind her. Schroder keeps driving, glancing into the mirror back at the explosion. It came from a car that was only twenty or thirty yards behind them. A decoy explosion. Something to shut down the intersection and fill the streets with scared and panicked people.
“Oh my God,” Kent says. “Somebody was driving that car.”
“Oh fuck,” Schroder says.
“I know, I know,” she says.
“She was in my car,” he says.
“What?”
“She was in my fucking car!” he shouts, and he slams on the brakes. “Get out, get out,” he yells, taking off his seat belt.
“What—”
“Get the fuck out,” he shouts, and he opens his door and so does Kent. People are running toward them. Away from them. In every direction. He slams the door closed behind him, hoping it will help contain the shock wave and blast that Melissa is going to use to help her escape.
“Get back,” he screams. “Everybody get back.”
“Carl—”
He looks back over the car. “Fire some shots in the air,” he shouts. “Get—”
His car explodes right in front of him. He sees Kent ride the shock wave ten yards through the air, where she is thrown into a parked car, where she smashes the windshield and enters it. Only it looks like twenty yards because he’s riding the shock wave in the opposite direction. A lot of people are. Twisted metal. Smoke. Flesh and blood.
Then darkness.
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Two explosions and Melissa tosses the second remote onto the floor. The padding against my wound is soaked with blood so I replace it with some fresh stuff, which will no doubt soak up just as quickly. I realize there are two holes, one in front and one in the back, right through the right-hand side of my chest. I can’t move that arm. I don’t know what’s been hit. I don’t even know really what’s in there. Bone and muscle and tendons, I guess, which means reconstructive surgery and physiotherapy or a future of having a gimpy limb. It seems too high and too far to the side to worry about lung damage, but I don’t know—I’m not a doctor, and nor is Melissa—so I worry anyway.
I get onto my knees and clutch the wall and the back of the driver’s seat and stare out the windshield as Melissa heads through the next intersection, then another, then turns right at the following one. Now we’re heading back toward the courthouse, only one or two streets over. Then she pulls over.
“Nobody is following us,” she says.
“Why are we stopping here?”
“Just wait a minute.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see.”
“Melissa—”
“Trust me,” she says. “I’ve gotten you this far, trust me to get you the rest of the way.”
“Who shot me?”
“It’s complicated,” she says, “but it was a clean shot.”
“How do you know that?”
“It was an armor-piercing bullet. It wouldn’t have broken apart on impact. It went through cleanly. Anything else would have made a small hole going in and a much bigger hole coming out.”
“Why are we waiting here?” I ask.
“We can’t be the only ambulance heading away right now,” she says, “because the police will be looking for us. We have to blend in.”
“What?”
“Trust me, babe, just stay patient. We’ll be out of here in a few moments,” she says.
“If you know it was an armor-piercing bullet, then you know who shot me,” I tell her.
“There was a plan,” she says. “It was the only way to get you out of there in an ambulance.”
“But you were getting me out because I was sick,” I tell her. “Did you know about the sandwiches?”
“What sandwiches?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I say.
“I was waiting there for you to get shot, but then that security guard came out and asked for my help because you were sick.”
I think about what she’s saying, but it still doesn’t make sense. “So you were working with somebody else, that same somebody who shot me. If you were getting me to the ambulance anyway, why did he still shoot me?”
“Like I said, babe, it’s complicated, but I’ll go through it all with you later.”
“But you knew what you were doing,” I tell her. “You said all that stuff to the nurse.”
“It’s the same stuff TV doctors say all the time. It was all showmanship.”
“You could have gotten arrested.”
A couple of ambulances speed through the intersection ahead of us, going left to right.
“It’s time to go,” she says.
She pulls away from the curb and we take another right and she pulls over again where the other ambulances are. We’ve circled our way around. There’s one blown-up car behind us now and one blown-up car ahead. She climbs out of the ambulance and makes her way around the back and climbs back in. She drags the dead woman across the floor, then reaches down for the man. She shakes him. “Come on,” she says, “what good are you to me asleep?”
He doesn’t respond. She checks his pulse. Then she shakes her head. “No,” she says, and I realize the guy has a good excuse for not responding. The best excuse, really. “He was going to help you,” she says.
“You killed them both?”
“I didn’t mean to. I guess I got the dosage wrong.”
“Who’s going to help me now?” I ask, pulling the padding away from my chest. It needs replacing again. “I’m going to die here,” I say, my voice getting higher.
One of the Grim Reapers I saw earlier, or perhaps a different one, is out there lying on the road. He’s not moving. His hood has been torn aside and half of his face looks gone, or it could be part of the makeup. I can’t tell.
“We need to go,” I tell her.
“Not yet,” she says. There are other ambulances pulling over in style with sirens going and with doors popping open before they’ve even rolled to a stop. People jump out and within seconds they’re working on people. Soon they’re going to be loading victims up into the back and taking off as well.