Red 1-2-3 (23 page)

Be the strong one,
she insisted to herself. This admonition was part medical training and part the inability to see what else she could be.

“Have you been keeping time?” she asked.

Sarah nodded. “Maybe fifteen, right about now.”

“All right. Let’s go.”

The two women exited the toilet into the corridor. They were alone, but they could both hear loud teenage voices echoing from not too far away.

“Down and to the right,” Sarah said. “That’s what Jordan said.”

They waited another moment, both of them pivoting right and left.

Karen thought it odd, the way they had developed of making sure they weren’t being followed. The idea that they were alone in the well-lit cinder-block hallway wasn’t reassuring. But neither did they want to see the Wolf, because each knew what that would mean:
The end.

The girls’ locker room was just where Jordan had told them it would be.

There were two teenage girls standing outside, jawing with a pair of boys.

The girls’ hair was damp and their faces flushed, and Sarah recognized them from the game. They stood aside when the two women pushed past them and went into the locker room.

Heat and steam immediately surrounded them. The noise of running water splashed from a shower room. Laughter bounced off the white tile walls loudly.

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“Nothing like winning,” Sarah said. “Makes other problems disappear.”

“Not really,” Jordan said, startling the two women. “Or actually, it doesn’t make
our
problem disappear,” she quickly added, emphasizing the one word with a lowered voice and a shake of her head.

She was only partially dressed, in a skimpy white T-shirt and black bikini underwear. She had a hairbrush in her hand and like the other girls on the team her hair was damp from the shower. Both older women felt a twinge of envy at the easy fitness of the teenager’s figure: muscles, flat stomach, narrow hips, and long legs that glistened with a few stray drops of water. Jordan was right at that age where skinny was easy and sensuality seemed to redden her skin like a brisk rub with a towel.

She smiled at Sarah. “I like your costume. Pregnant, right?”

Sarah nodded, then pulled up her sweater to show the pillow taped to her midsection.

“Cool. Probably work on a subway. Help you get a seat,” Jordan said.

She slid past Sarah and Karen to her locker and tugged on a pair of faded jeans and a hooded blue sweatshirt from Middlebury College. She smiled and pointed at the school’s name. “Prestige school,” she said. “Before this past year, I would have gotten in for sure. Now, no way.”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” Karen said with a maternal smile.

“I’m not,” Jordan replied. “But I’m a realist.”

Karen thought:
No teenager is really a realist.
But she did not say this out loud.

The three women sat on a wooden bench as Jordan slipped on running socks and shoes. She carefully double-knotted the laces, and without looking up at the other two Reds she asked, “What are we supposed to do now?”

Sarah was the first to respond. She pointed at the wig and pillow.

“Hide?” she said, using the word as both a statement and a question.

“You mean run away,” Jordan replied.

“Yes. Exactly.”

Each woman was quiet for a moment, as if measuring the suggestion.

Jordan broke the silence.

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“If I just go home—and given the way things are at my house, that’s not really possible—what makes you think that the Wolf hasn’t anticipated that? I mean, we only know he’s been watching us for some time. Perhaps he’s followed me around my hometown, and that’s what he’s expecting me to do because it makes sense. Scare a kid . . .”—Jordan gestured to herself—“. . . and the kid runs home to mom and pop. Only I can’t do that, because my mom and pop are a mess.”

Karen shook her head, but answered in a contradictory way. “Maybe we could just each find some friend, visit them . . .”

“And how would we know for how long?” Jordan asked. “I mean, the Wolf doesn’t seem to be in any hurry. He probably has a schedule, but we don’t have a clue what it is. And eventually, we’re going to show up back here—I mean, this is where I go to school and you both live here—and bingo! It starts up all over again. Maybe he’s figured on that. Or maybe he
wants
us to run because the more we isolate ourselves the easier it is for him. Or maybe . . .” Jordan stopped.

Karen and Sarah were staring hard at her, and she smiled briefly. “I’ve been reading a lot about murders,” she said. “Not doing my regular homework. Just studying killers in the library.”

“What have you learned?” Sarah asked.

“That we don’t have a chance,” Jordan replied coldly, as if this were the simplest thing in the entire world and absolutely no big deal whatsoever.

Again the three Reds plummeted into silence. It fell to Karen to break the mood. “I just can’t up and leave anyway,” Karen said. “I have patients who’ve scheduled appointments months in advance and . . .”

She stopped. She realized how ridiculous this sounded. There were plenty of other doctors who could take over her practice. She could run.

Never look back. The thought made her breathe in and out sharply.

Sarah closed her eyes and rocked back and forth just slightly. “I could go away. Maybe I should. Start over somewhere new. Change my name and find a job and just become someone different. Maybe I could run away and try to hide. It might work.”

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It felt to her as if someone else was saying these things. Perhaps they made sense. But the idea that she could walk away forever from the two coffins buried so close by hurt her almost as much as the memory of her loss.

Karen must have seen some of this in Sarah’s eyes. “That’s what the cliché is,” she said. “
Start over
. But it’s not that easy. And you can’t really.”

Jordan added, “It’s no good anyway,” she said. “We like have no clue what the Wolf can and can’t do. So even if you managed to slip away and start over, maybe he can follow you. There’d be no way to ever know whether you were safe or not.”

She looked at the other two Reds. A quick thought came to her:
We’re
stronger together.
Then a contradictory thought:
Maybe that’s what he imagines we’ll think.

She felt herself shrugging her shoulders at the same time that her hands quivered slightly.

“I think we’re each locked here—we stick together, for better or for worse,” Jordan added. “I’m guessing the Wolf knows that, and took it into consideration when he chose us. So, really, there’s only one answer.”

“Which is?” Sarah asked.

“We have to misbehave.”

This word made the two older women stop in some confusion.

“What do you mean?”

“We have to
not
act normal.” Both Karen and Sarah started to interrupt, but Jordan held up her hand. “I know that’s what you said to do, but look, does it really help? No.”

She hesitated, and continued. “What are we?” she asked. Then she answered her own question. “We are products of our routines. What makes us feel a little safer? When we drive in circles and wear disguises and imagine that somehow we’re fooling the Wolf; and even when we know we’re not, it still makes us feel better. What I’m saying is that we each have to figure out how
not
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JOHN KATZENBACH

followed us, and”—Jordan jabbed her index finger between her breasts, beating time to her words—“this fucking Little Red Riding Hood doesn’t want to just walk blindly into whatever trap he has set.”

Karen was astonished at the teenager’s muted fury. She was also taken aback by the intelligence of Jordan’s idea.

“If the Wolf is waiting for us in the forest, he knows . . .” she started, but Jordan finished.

“. . . Then we should be walking in a different forest on a different path.”

“Easier said than done,” Sarah said. “It’s like we’re locked into who we are. Jordan, are you going to suddenly skip a basketball game? Karen, you talked about all those patients. They’re scheduled. The Wolf has probably scheduled our deaths as well. How do you change who you are and what you do overnight?”

Karen nodded, then said, “Okay. I don’t know if it’ll work, but we can try. What else can we do?”

Jordan waved her arms around, pointing at the walls of the locker room.

While they’d been speaking, the rest of the team had finished showering, dressed, and made their way out, so that now the three were alone in the rows of gray steel lockers. The heat from the showers was starting to dissipate in the humid air around them.

“What?” Sarah asked.

“Have you ever been to my school before?” Jordan asked.

“No.”

“What about you, Karen?”

“No.”

Jordan continued. “Well, I’ve never been to the school where you were a teacher, Sarah. And I don’t see a doctor in your building, Karen. It makes it all seem completely random, doesn’t it? As if the Wolf just picked out three redheads arbitrarily and began his plans. Look, if that’s the case, well, then I think we’re screwed; all we can do is buy more guns and wait. So that’s just crazy thinking. But maybe it isn’t random.” Jordan was going to continue, but suddenly didn’t know what to say.

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Karen however, seemed to be trapped in some thought. Sarah started rocking back and forth again. They could hear a shower that some player hadn’t quite shut off dripping in the adjacent room.

“We’re a triangle,” Jordan said. “If we can find the right legs, we can see the connection. I think we’ve been going the wrong way on this,” Jordan said. “It’s the mistake everyone who gets stalked makes.”

Jordan waved her arms in front of her, slashing through the heavy locker room air. She opened her eyes and faced the other Reds. “We know the Wolf wants us. We have to make him want us so much that he hurries himself into a mistake.”

Again Jordan inspected the two other women. She thought they were mature, reasonable, intelligent, and accomplished, all the things that she expected to be someday.
If
she had a
someday
.

“If we were hunting a wolf, what would we do?”

“Get close enough to see him,” Karen said.

“Right, and then what?” Jordan asked. It seemed to her most curious: She was acting like the professor, while the others were responding like students. Neither Karen nor Sarah replied, so she answered her own question with a single word. “Ambush.”

Sarah quivered, then shrugged.
Why not?
she thought.
I’m half-dead
already.
She did not know why, but she burst out in a shrill, humorless laugh, as if she alone had heard some slightly off-color joke that was both funny and offensive. She stood up and reached under her sweater and stripped off her fake pregnancy pillow, tossing all the packing tape she’d used to attach it to her stomach into a nearby wastebasket. Then she unpinned her wig and shook out her hair, so that it flowed freely, a little like lava running down the side of an active volcano.

At about the same moment, the Big Bad Wolf was standing beside his car, staring down at a tire that seemed partially flat. He was just outside of his house, carrying a briefcase with his tape recorder and his notepad and all the questions he’d painstakingly constructed for the Mystery Writers’

forensic experts’ evening lecture. Afternoon light was fading around him 169

JOHN KATZENBACH

and his first thought was that he would miss the talk because of a bit of bad if not uncommon luck. He kicked at the tire angrily. He bent down and tried to see the nail that had created the slow leak, but he couldn’t. It was just as likely that he’d hit one of New England’s ever-present potholes and bent the inner tire rim. He knew he’d have to call road service, get them out to change the tire, and waste time the next day getting the damage repaired, and all this would tear him away from what he truly wanted to be doing, which was closing in on the three Reds.

He turned to head back inside, and saw Mrs. Big Bad Wolf standing in the doorway.

“What’s the problem, dear?” she asked.

“Flat tire. I’ll have to call a garage and—”

She smiled and interrupted him. “Just take my car. I’ll call the auto club and wait for them. I don’t mind at all and you can still go to your research meeting.”

“You absolutely sure you don’t mind?” the Big Bad Wolf asked, bright-ening considerably at the offer. “It’s a total pain in the butt, I know . . .”

“Not in the slightest. I was just going to watch television while you were away anyway. I can easily wait for the service guy while I’m watching.” She handed him the keys to her car. “Now, take care of my little baby,” she said, joking. “You know she doesn’t like to go fast on the thruway.”

The Big Bad Wolf looked down at his watch. He still had plenty of time. “Well, honey,” he said cheerily, “thanks. I’ll see you late tonight. Just leave a light on inside and I won’t wake you up when I come in.”

“You can wake me up. It’s okay,” she replied.

This was the most routine and commonplace of exchanges, one that a million couples have in some variation every day. It sang of normalcy.

“Here,” the Big Bad Wolf added. “Take my keys in case the auto guy needs to start it up.” He handed them to his wife without thinking, and got behind the wheel of her little car. He gave her a jaunty wave as he pulled down the driveway.

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21

Mrs. Big Bad Wolf watched her car disappear down their little suburban side street. There was a flash of red brake lights at the corner before the vehicle disappeared into the evening. Just as it went out of sight she lifted her hand and made a small half-wave, although she knew her husband wouldn’t be looking back in her direction. She was happy to see him go and happier still that she had helped make it possible. Sighing, she stepped back inside their home, walked directly to the kitchen, and dutifully called the auto club, just as she had promised. The dispatcher told her it would be between thirty and forty-five minutes before a tow truck would arrive with someone to change the flat. She hung up the phone. In the living room the television was already playing. She could hear canned laughter and familiar sitcom voices. She put the car keys down on the kitchen countertop and was about to join the characters toiling at Dunder Mifflin or working on the Big Bang Theory when she stopped short.