Yes. He liked that.
He suddenly heard a quiet, cheery voice coming from right beside him. “Are you absolutely sure we shouldn’t stay for the boys’ game?”
He hesitated as he turned to Mrs. Big Bad Wolf. She, too, had pulled on a well-worn baseball cap with the school’s name on it.
“No, dear,” he replied, smiling. He reached out like a teenager in love for the first time and took his wife’s hand. “I think I’ve seen more than enough for one day.”
Walk out the door. Just turn the handle and walk out the door. You know you can do it.
Sarah Locksley twitched with tension as she stood in the small vestibule of her house. She was dressed in brown leather boots, tight jeans, and a long tan winter overcoat. She had showered and brushed her hair and even applied a small amount of makeup to her cheeks and eyes. She had her large multicolored pocketbook slung over her shoulder and she could feel the bricklike weight of the loaded .357 Magnum pulling it down.
She knew she appeared completely presentable and totally put together and that any stranger walking by would think that she was just another woman in her early thirties on her way out for groceries or on some other errand. Maybe a trip to the mall or to meet with some girlfriends for a ladies’ night out of shared appetizers and calorie-conscious salads followed by some inane romantic comedy at the multiplex.
That Sarah was crippled by despair was effectively hidden. All she had to do was open the door to her house, step outside into the wan afternoon light, make her way to her car, start the engine, put it into gear, and off she would go, just like any normal person with something to do on a weekend evening.
But she knew that she was not a normal person. She shivered as if she were cold. Not normal in the slightest way whatsoever. Not anymore.
Strange, conflicted thoughts crashed into Sarah’s mind: He’s right outside. He will kill me before I have a chance to pull out Ted’s gun. But at least I look nice. If I die in the next minute, at least the EMTs who arrive at my murder and the medical examiner who inspects my dead body will think I’m clean and organized and not like I really am. Why does that make a difference?
She wasn’t sure, but it did.
He’s not out there. Not yet. The Big Bad Wolf didn’t act swiftly. He stalked Little Red Riding Hood.
There was a part of her that wanted to wall herself into her home, build barricades and protect herself, waiting for the Big Bad Wolf to show up and try to blow her house down. Except, Sarah shook her head as she reminded herself, that’s the wrong damn fairy tale. I’m not one of the three little pigs. My house may be made of straw, but that’s the wrong story completely.
Again she hesitated, reaching her hand around the door handle. It was not as if she was scared—a significant part of her welcomed death. It was more the uncertainty of everything. She felt caught up in a vortex, like there was a maelstrom spinning her around, threatening to pull her under dark waves. She could hear her breathing coming in raspy, fast gasps—but she could not feel the shortness of breath. It was almost as if the sounds were coming from someone else.
She shut her eyes. Okay. If this is it, at least it will be fast. Just like Ted and Brittany. They never saw the truck. Just one minute they were alive and laughing and having a fine time, and then they were dead. Maybe it will be like that for me, too. So okay, Big Bad Wolf. Just shoot me right now!
She pulled the door open savagely and stood framed in the space. Take your damn shot!
She closed her eyes. Waited.
Nothing.
She could feel the evening’s chill descending. It cooled her, and she realized that she was sweating, hot, as if she’d been exercising.
She blinked. Her street was as it always was. Quiet. Empty. She took a deep breath and stepped out. Maybe there’s a bomb attached to my car and when I start it up, it will explode just like in some Hollywood gangster movie.
She slid behind the wheel and, without hesitating, turned the key over. The engine fired up and hummed like a cat being stroked.
Well, maybe the Big Bad Wolf will slam some truck into me, and I can die like Ted and Brittany did.
She steered the car into the street and stopped. Again she closed her eyes. Broadside. Forty, maybe fifty miles an hour. Just like the oil truck. Come on. I’m waiting. I’m ready.
Sarah’s eyes again were squeezed tight. Any second now, she thought.
The car horn seemed to blast inches away from her left ear. The sound sliced the air like an explosion. She gasped and involuntarily held up her arm, as if to shield herself from impact. Her eyes flew open and she cried out some half-scream, half-sob.
The horn beeped again. Only this time, it seemed childlike, like a toy noise.
She half-turned in her seat, and saw that she was obstructing a couple in a small Japanese compact car. The man behind the wheel, who looked to be in his early sixties, and his wife, who was still dark-haired and appeared a little younger, were waving at her, but not in an impatient, unfriendly fashion. It was more like they were concerned and confused. Sarah stared at the couple, and then haphazardly pieced things together in her head. I’m blocking the road. They want to get past me.
The woman in the passenger seat rolled down her window. From perhaps ten feet away, she called out in a questioning tone, “Is everything okay?”
Yes. No. Yes. No. Sarah didn’t respond other than to wave her hand as if to say Sorry without an explanation. She fumbled to get the car into forward gear. Then she quickly thrust her foot down on the accelerator and without looking back drove rapidly down the street. She did not know exactly where she was going, but wherever it was, she went in a hurry, breathing hard, almost hyperventilating, like a swimmer preparing for a dive into uncertain waters or waiting for the starter’s gun to sound the start of a race.
“Odd,” said Mrs. Big Bad Wolf.
“Maybe the young lady got a cell phone call, or remembered that she’d forgotten something. But you shouldn’t just stop in the middle of the road,” the Big Bad Wolf replied. “That’s really dangerous.”
“It’s a good thing you were paying attention,” his wife said. “People just certainly are strange.”
“Indeed they are,” he answered as he drove slowly forward. “Don’t want to be late.” He smiled. “Shall we listen to the radio?” he asked, pleasantly enough, fiddling with the dial until he found the classical music station. He hated classical music, although he had always told his wife he loved it. Little dishonesties, he thought, were good practice for the necessary larger ones.
Karen Jayson sat at her desk, an electronic medical notebook on the flat wooden surface in front of her, her head in her hands. The day was crawling toward an end. It had been long, but not crazily so, and she should not have felt as exhausted as she did.
She was a woman accustomed to being if not exactly certain about matters, at least confident, and the letter from the Big Bad Wolf had scoured her emotions. After speaking with Detective Clark, she had set the letter aside and told herself, Forget it. Then she had picked it up again and told herself, You need to act. But precisely how eluded her. She had the sensation that she needed to be actively doing something but had very little idea what that something was. She had done everything Detective Clark had told her. She had called a security company—they were scheduled to install an alarm system in her house the next day. She had gone over patient files, looking for some error that might have led to a threat. She had racked her memory for any slight, real or imagined, that might translate into “You have been selected to die.” She had even checked out the website of the local animal shelter to see if they had some big mean dog for adoption. She had looked up the numbers of some private detectives, checked with various consumer ratings programs to see who received the best reviews, and written down the telephone numbers of two different men. She had half-dialed one number onl
y to stop and hang up her telephone.
Above all, Karen despised panic. Or even the appearance of panic.
In medical school, doing her internship rotations, she had seriously considered a career as an emergency room physician, because even with blood spurting, cries of agony, and the need to move quickly to save a life she had always found herself preternaturally calm. The more things were disintegrating around her, the more her own pulse would slow. She thought that her response to the threatening letter should have been precisely the same as when some accident victim arrived in front of her, ravaged and in imminent danger of dying.
She liked to think of herself as a completely rational person, even with her comedy half occasionally surfacing. But since she’d opened the letter, she had been unable to even consider a comedy routine. Not a single joke, no sarcasm, no play on words or clever political observation—nothing that was the usual stuff of her routines had leapt into her thoughts. Her nighttime dreams had been tortured, which made her tired and angry.
She leaned back and rocked in her desk chair. She was shaking her head back and forth, as if disagreeing with something she’d told herself, when the door to her office opened.
“I’m sorry, Doctor, I didn’t want to disturb you . . .”
“No, no, it’s okay. I was just a little lost in thought.”
Karen looked over at her nurse. Only two other people worked in her small practice: a young nurse two years out of a college program who had only recently, and hesitantly, asked Karen how to have the tattoo of a sun rising on the back of her neck removed, and her longtime receptionist, an older woman who knew many of the patients and their ailments far better than Karen did.
“Last patient of the day,” the nurse said. “She’s been waiting in exam room 2 for a couple of minutes and . . .”
She let her voice trail off before any sort of rebuke passed her lips. Karen understood two things: The nurse wanted to get home to her EMT boyfriend and Karen shouldn’t keep the last patient of the day waiting no matter how unsettled she felt. She took a deep breath and jumped out of her chair, launching herself into her attentive doctor mode.
“It’s just a routine follow-up exam,” the nurse said, “She’s already been checked by her cardiologist. His report is in her file. She’s doing fine. This is just a follow-up physical. Nothing too important.”
She handed Karen a clipboard with a file folder attached. Karen didn’t even look at it, feeling suddenly a bit guilty for making a patient wait unnecessarily. She adjusted her white lab coat and hurried down the hallway into the exam room.
The patient was seated on the exam table, wearing a johnny-gown and a smile. “Hello, Doctor,” she said.
“Hello, Mrs . . .” Karen glanced quickly at the folder to grab the woman’s name. She hurriedly said it, trying to cover up her failure to greet her as she did all her patients: with a familiarity that implied that she had spent the entire day studying whatever medical issues the patient had. Ordinarily she had no trouble remembering the names of her patients, and inwardly she berated herself for the lapse. She knew that stress sometimes caused blanks in the memory. That an anonymous threat could intrude on her day-to-day life seemed horribly wrong.
She had absolutely no idea that her greeting that day actually should have been: “Hello, Mrs. Big Bad Wolf . . .”
Nor had she any inkling that sitting patiently in her small waiting room, reading an out-of-date copy of the New Yorker, was the man who secretly longed to catch a glimpse of the doctor whom he’d dubbed Red One.
6
Death is the big game and one that everyone plays and everyone loses at the final whistle. But murder is slightly different, because it is far more like that moment within each game when the outcome is decided. We sit in the stands, never knowing when that precise second will arrive. Will it be this goal, or that free throw, or the base hit with the man on second, or the defensive back failing to make a tackle? Perhaps it’s the moment when the referee blows his whistle and points to the penalty spot. Murder is more like sport than anyone knows. Murder has its own clock and its own rules. Like sport, it’s about preparation and determination. It’s about overcoming obstacles. Someone wants to live. Someone wants to kill. That is the playing field.
He looked at the words on the computer screen. Good, he thought, People reading this will start to understand.
Karen awakened exhausted from a night of restless dreams at 6 a.m., her customary time in the morning, a few moments before her alarm clock would have rung. She had always had an inner clock that would wake her up shortly before the hotel wake-up call or her alarm. Her habit was to roll over and punch the off button on the alarm, thrust herself up from beneath a handmade quilt she’d acquired at a local crafts show many years earlier, and make her way to a pink exercise pad set up in a corner of the bedroom, where she would indulge herself with exactly fifteen minutes of yoga stretches and exercises before heading to the shower. In the kitchen, the automatic coffeepot was already percolating. The clothes she had selected for that day’s work were set out the night before, after she checked the weather report. Routine, she insisted, set her free, although there were mornings when it was hard to persuade herself this statement was true.
She sometimes thought her entire world was constructed upside down, or perhaps back to front. She devoted all her organizational energies to her medical work, and thought of her comedy as liberating. Two Karens, she told herself, who might not even recognize each other if they met on the street. Comic Karen was creative, spontaneous, and quick-witted. Internist Karen was dedicated to her work and patients, steady, organized, and always as precise as illness allowed. Her two sides seemed to share little, but had managed to accommodate each other over the years.
This morning, she wondered if perhaps she needed to create a third.
She glanced over toward the alarm system pad that had been installed on the bedroom wall two days after the letter from the Big Bad Wolf had arrived. It blinked red—letting her know that it was on and functioning. She felt an odd discomfort. She had to get up, turn it off so that the motion detectors mounted in corners throughout the house would not catch her instead of the fictional bad guys they were designed to raise alarm about. She needed to get the day started. But she lingered.
Predictability is my enemy, she thought.
Someone unknown sends me a threatening letter, and I do exactly what every book, manual, or website says to protect myself. That was what made sense. A checklist. Call the police. Inform the neighbors to be on the lookout for any strange activity. Her isolation made that difficult, but she had still dutifully called the families that lived closest to her.
Simple, straightforward calls: “Hi, this is Karen Jayson down the block. I just wanted to tell you that I’ve received some anonymous threat. No . . . No . . . the police don’t think it means anything much, but I just wanted to ask some of the neighbors to keep an eye out for anything unusual. Like strange cars parked on the road or something. Thanks . . .”
The responses had been solicitous, concerned. Of course everyone would keep eyes peeled for any suspicious behavior. The families with small children had reacted strongly—wondering whether they should keep the kids indoors until this formless threat had dissipated, as if it were some oil slick on the surface of the ocean. The weather being what it was, which was lousy, Karen thought it unlikely the kids would be outside anyway.
Her next call had been to the alarm company, which had promptly sent out an overly enthusiastic workman to install the system, all the time happily and ominously opining about how you can’t be safe enough and people don’t understand how much danger is lurking out there before managing to sell Karen an enhanced security package with a monthly charge deducted from her credit card.
She had subsequently gone through the entirety of the policeman’s recommendations: Get a dog. No, she hadn’t done that, bu
t she was considering it. Get a gun. No, she hadn’t done that, not yet, but she would consider it. Call a private detective. No, she hadn’t done that, but she was considering it. In fact, she realized, she was considering everything and nothing all at the same time.
How is any of this going to keep me alive? Wouldn’t the Big Bad Wolf have visited all the same online advice pages, read all the same words, and figured out all the same things?
Wouldn’t he know precisely what all the experts suggested she do? How smart is he?
Martin and Lewis had already set off the system twice in the two days it had been functioning. This meant that either she had to get rid of them or figure out some way to make it work in concert with cats. This seemed an insurmountable problem. It dogged her as for the first time in years she ignored the exercise pad and made her way into the shower.
Warm water and suds cascaded over her body.
She scrubbed herself vigorously, soaping every spot she could reach once, then twice, and finally a third time, as if soap could erase the lingering sense of exhaustion from her unsettled night. She held out a hand against the tile wall, steadying herself against the flow of water. She felt dizzy.
Her eyes were closed when she heard a sound.
It was not a recognizable noise, nothing clear-cut like a car door slamming, or a radio being switched on. It wasn’t loud—not a crash! or a clang! It was more like the first second of a hissing kettle, or a stiff breeze rustling through nearby tree branches.
She froze in position. A sudden burst of adrenaline coursed through her body so that she felt like she was abruptly spinning a million miles per hour, though she was immobile. Steam surrounded her like a fog, clouding her comprehension. The noisy flow of water obscured recognition.
What was that? What did you hear?
She was abruptly aware of her nakedness. Dripping. Vulnerable. She sharpened her hearing, trying to determine what the sound was.
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