Red 1-2-3 (37 page)

The school did not allow students to own weapons of any type, but Jordan knew she needed one. She had no intention of sending the sweater to her mother, whose birthday was many months distant anyway. But no junior faculty member would ask her to unwrap such a package, and even if he did, he would just glance at the sweater inside and not feel within its folds for anything else.

Jordan wondered whether the Wolf was as good a smuggler as she was.

She tried to create the sensation of driving the filleting knife between his ribs into his heart.
Drive it up under his chest bone,
she thought
. Be relentless.

Get all your weight behind it and every bit of strength you can summon and
don’t hesitate. Kill him before he kills you.
The idea of surprising the Big Bad Wolf with a weapon as deadly as the filleting knife gave her a sense of safety, although the Wolf was
always
ill-prepared and at her mercy when she pictured the confrontation in her head. And the Wolf never had a gun or a knife or any other weapon of his own when she envisioned their face-to-face meeting.

267

JOHN KATZENBACH

Jordan couldn’t quite piece together how she’d gain the upper hand. She just knew she had to find a way.

One of the first things Sarah noticed about Safe Space was that some of the laws that people commonly took for granted were wildly ignored there. She liked this. She fully expected to ignore some other laws in the days to come.

For example, when she hunched over the laptop computer and started to construct a new identity out of the Cynthia Harrison information that Red One had provided, she thought she would have to keep what she was doing secret—only to find out that the staff at the women’s center were experts at creating an entirely new person out of electronic vapors.

It was not the first time, the center’s director told her, that the easiest course of action for an abused and beaten woman was to simply become someone different. The local police knew about this sideline at the center, and did nothing to stop it. There was an agreement that as long as a woman was trying to avoid becoming a victim, the cops would look the other way.

Hiding was the center’s primary purpose.

Protection was the second.

In short order, they had helped her get a copy of the dead woman’s birth certificate from the small town where Cynthia Harrison was born, which they subsequently managed to get illegally notarized, making it wonderfully and magically official. A new social security card was applied for and a replacement driver’s license was put in process through a dizzying bit of computer legerdemain. A bank account at a large national bank—nothing local that might be traced—was established with some cash that Karen had given her.

Sarah was disappearing. In her place a new Cynthia was taking shape.

When Karen dropped her off, Sarah had been welcomed with hugs and encouragement. Before she was shown to a small, functional, and sunlit room on the third floor of the old Victorian house, the director asked her some pointed questions about how dangerous her husband might be.

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RED 1–2–3

Sarah said nothing about Red One, Red Two, and Red Three.
She made no mention of the Big Bad Wolf
.
She stuck to the outline of the story that Karen had invented: beaten and stalked. The director asked, “Are you armed?”

Her first instinct had been to lie about the gun in her bag. But she was lying about so many other things that this additional falsehood seemed distinctly wrong, and so she answered, “I stole a handgun.”

“Let me see it,” the director said.

Sarah had produced the weapon, handing it over butt-first. The director cracked the cylinder expertly and removed the bullets. She held these in her hand, caressing the burnished bronze of the shells before reloading the revolver, sighting once down the barrel, saying “Bang!” under her breath, and handing it back to Sarah.

“That’s quite a weapon, she said.

“I’ve never fired it,” Sarah responded.

“Well, we can do something about that,” the director continued. “But we’re always concerned about the children staying here with their mothers. Don’t want an accident. And the kids, the older ones—you know: eight, nine, ten—they might be tempted because they’re so scared of the men that might show up.”

Then she reached into her desk, removed a trigger lock, and gave this to Sarah. “The combination is seven-six-seven,” she told Sarah. “It’s easy to remember: It’s the numeric equivalent to SOS on a telephone.”

The director had smiled. “I’m going to teach you how to use that,” she said. “Far better to know what to do and not have to than to not know what to do when you absolutely need to.”

Sarah thought at that moment that for all the time she had remaining as Red Two, she would keep exactly that thought in mind.

269

33

Back door. Flowerpot. Spare key.

Karen had parked a block from Sarah’s empty house, waited for night to drop around her, and then walked two additional blocks in the wrong direction, frequently looking over her shoulder. She realized that merely by her being in Red Two’s neighborhood, her destination was patently obvious. Her feelings were typical of the crazy-making behavior that the Wolf had installed in all of them:
Walk the wrong direction. Imagine a killer
outside your window. Hear things. See things. Don’t trust anything, because
if you let your guard down you are going to die. And you might just get killed
anyway.

Karen stopped on the street and breathed in slowly. She had a small backpack on her shoulder. The scientific part of her considered the depth of fear and disruption in the lives of each of the three Reds.
I can’t be a doctor or a comic. Sarah can’t be a widow. Jordan can’t be a normal teenager, if
there is such a thing.
She was almost overcome by the notion that everyone faces some end someday, but it is the uncertainty of how it’ll arrive that keeps people chugging along. Change that equation—inject a fatal disease 270

RED 1–2–3

or a sudden accident or a faceless murderer into the algorithm of dying—

and nothing is exactly the same again.

She turned sharply and headed down the street that ran behind Sarah’s house.

“The neighbors in back have navy-blue shutters on their front windows and
a door painted bright red. The house is shiny white. It’s all very patriotic and
they light it up at night. There’s no fence in front—you can just walk into the
backyard. In the rear, over in the northeast corner, there’s a kid’s wooden jungle
gym. You climb halfway up the ladder and from there you’ll be able to jump
the chain-link barrier that separates my place from theirs. There’s a tree at the
edge of the property. Hide there for a minute and then head to the back stoop.

No one will see you.”

Sarah’s instructions were explicit, a schoolteacher’s organized, well-thought-out plan:
Do this. Do that. Class, pay attention!
Karen kept her head down, sneaking glances at the houses on the street, looking for the red, white, and blue. When she spotted it, she stuck close to the side of the house and ducked into the backyard.

She was moving as fast as she could. She saw the jungle gym and sprinted toward it. In the distance she could hear a dog bark—
At least it’s
not a wolf ’s howl,
she thought—and just as Sarah had told her, she climbed midway up the ladder. The structure swayed a little as she reached out with her right foot for the top of the chain-link fence, and then, with a push, launched herself over.

Karen landed, pitching forward awkwardly onto the damp grass behind Red Two’s dark home. She scrambled over to the base of the tree where Sarah had told her to hide and waited until her breathing slowed. The adrenaline rushing through her ears sounded like a waterfall, and it took a few minutes for her to be quiet enough to pick out night noises: A car several blocks away. A far distant siren. More dogs, but not enough sound to make anyone imagine they were truly alarmed.

Wait
.

She listened for muffled footsteps. She craned her ears toward any noise that might be a man following in her path.

271

JOHN KATZENBACH

Nothing.

What she needed from Red Two’s house was not complicated. If she had been thinking correctly, she would have told Sarah to bring some with her when she faked her suicide. But Karen hadn’t been that wise, and now she had to get them herself.

She had considered simply walking up to the front and letting herself in, not caring whether the Wolf saw her or not. But this bit of bravado had seemed wrong.
Secrecy is better,
she told herself, although
why
eluded her.

Back door. Flowerpot. Spare key.
Karen scrambled to her feet, hunched over, and ran forward.

At the steps leading into the house, she dug her hands into the cold dirt of the flowerpot. It took seconds to find the key, wipe it clean, and get to the door. In the darkness, she fumbled a bit thrusting it into the lock. She heard the dead bolt click open, and slipped inside.

Shadows filled the house. There was ambient light from a streetlamp outside, but this did little to make the scene anything less than minor variations on black. Karen had sensibly bought a small flashlight with her—she wasn’t turning on any lights—and like a burglar, she crept through the hallways, her small lamp making pinpricks of light when she swept it back and forth.

The house seemed stuffy with death. She could see the limp light from her flashlight quiver in her hand. Sarah had told her where to look, but she still felt like she was walking across some alien landscape and that if she made any noise at all, it would awaken the sleeping ghosts surrounding her.

Tugging the backpack from her shoulder, Karen began to collect the few items she needed. She moved from room to room, avoiding the dead husband’s study and the dead daughter’s bedroom, just as Sarah had instructed her. A framed portrait from a hallway, a photograph stuck to a refrigerator door with a magnet—Karen gathered pictures for a montage.

She has to seem dead. The pictures have to underscore a different time, when
Sarah was vibrant with hope. The contrast is important.

She was nearly finished, just looking for a final family photograph that Sarah had told her was on the wall in her bedroom, when she suddenly thought she heard a noise coming from the front.

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RED 1–2–3

She could not have said what the noise was. It might have been a scraping sound, perhaps a rustle of papers. Maybe the wind, but she couldn’t recall feeling any when she had approached the back. Her first, terrifying impression was that someone was now in the house with her.

Not someone. Him.

He will kill me here.

This didn’t make sense to Karen. Sarah
should die here. It’s
her
home.

This also didn’t make sense.

Karen froze as she clicked off her flashlight. She thought every short breath she stole from the night was loud, blaring. She listened.
Nothing.

Your ears are playing tricks on you.

Still, she seized the last portrait from the wall and stuffed it into the backpack as quickly as possible. She thought just the sound of the zipper closing the pack was loud and raucous.

She pivoted back to the door.
No, he’s out there. Waiting for me.
She tried to tell herself she was completely crazy:
So this is what insanity feels like.

It took an immense amount of strength for Karen to hurl herself through the door. She nearly stumbled and fell on the stairs. She raced for the back fence, expecting to fall at any point, and surprised herself that she was able to grab the top and scramble over. The chain link seemed to snatch at her, like so many desperate fingers clinging to her clothes.

A light went on in the red, white, and blue house.

She ignored it and ran into the welcoming night, heading toward her car.

For the second time that night, Karen’s hands shook. She fumbled the car keys to the floor and cursed loudly as she reached down and groped around before finding them.

It was several minutes, and several miles, before she could feel her racing heart slow down. She imagined herself to be like a deer that has outrun a pack of wild dogs. She wanted to huddle in some safe, dark spot until she regained her composure.

A car zipped past her. She fought off the impulse to swerve crazily, as if the other car had come too close. She shook her head, trying to dislodge every fear that choked her.

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JOHN KATZENBACH

She was letting thoughts just roll around wildly within her, when suddenly her cell phone rang. Again, she nearly swerved. The ringing clawed at her, and she reached out, almost losing her grip on the steering wheel.

It was not the special cell with the number only Jordan and Sarah had. It was her regular phone. She seized it from the passenger seat.

A medical emergency,
was her first and only thought.

“Doctor Jayson?” A crisp, authoritative voice.

“Speaking.”

‘This is Alpha Security. Are you at home?”

Karen was confused. Then she remembered the alarm system that she’d installed in her house after the Big Bad Wolf ’s first letter, and the expensive monitoring plan she’d purchased. “No. I’m on the road. What seems to be the problem?”

“Your system shows an intrusion. You are not at home currently?”

“No, damn it, I told you. What sort of intrusion?”

“Protocol requires me to tell you not to return to the home before I am able to contact the local police, so that they can meet you at your house.

If there is a burglary in progress, we do not want you surprising some criminal. That’s the police’s job.”

Karen tried to respond, but choked on each word.

A police car was waiting at the turn into her driveway. A young cop was standing beside the driver’s-side door, waiting for her. He was slouched against his vehicle, and didn’t give off any appearance of urgency.