Red 1-2-3 (9780802192844)

by Katzenbach, John

  She waited, half-hungry in that way that teenagers are; she could easily have stuffed herself with hot pizza. Except every time she thought about the Wolf, her hunger fled, replaced with a gnawing sensation in her stomach. Fear versus food. An unfair fight.

  A cold breeze rattled an awning above the sidewalk in front of an antique store that was shut down for the night. Jordan was about to glance at her watch when the spire that rose above the small town’s offices chimed seven times.

  She looked up and saw a small station wagon pull up in front of the pizza place. She hunched back, once again seeking a shadow to conceal herself in, and waited. Right on time, she thought. She didn’t know whether this was good or bad.

  The car put on its flashers. Yellow lights painted the sidewalk. She could see the driver leaning across the front seat, staring into the restaurant, searching hard.

  That was where Jordan had said she would be.

  But instead, she was just down the street, in a vantage spot between two buildings where she could see without being seen.

  She waited, holding her breath.

  Jordan watched the figure in the station wagon sit upright and undo the seat belt. Then the figure opened the car door, stepped out and stood close to the car, continuing to stare at the group of teenagers inside the restaurant.

  It was dark and the bright neon lights from the few stores open threw odd rainbow colors across the street, reflecting off glistening black macadam. Yellow sodium vapor streetlights tossed sickly shades down on the cement. It was a confusion of color; blacks and reds and greens and whites all mingled together, making lies of realities: A green car looked blue. A scarlet parka seemed brown.

  She could not tell with certainty that the person’s hair was red. She bit down on her lip and decided that she had no choice but to chance it.

  Jordan stepped from the shadow and walked quickly forward to the car. She saw the woman turn in surprise toward her. She had a sudden look of shock, as if Jordan were holding a knife. “Red One?” Jordan asked. She wanted her voice to be firm and confident, but she could hear a crack, like ice fracturing under too much weight on a frigid day.

  The woman nodded. Her face seemed to relax.

  “Hi. I’m Red Three.”

  “Jump in,” Karen replied, gesturing toward the passenger side. She was trying to sound as if this were the most natural meeting in the world.

  When Jordan hesitated, Karen said, “I’m not him. I promise.” She watched the younger woman seem to assess the validity of her statement, then cautiously slide into the car. Karen only had a few seconds to measure Jordan, especially the few strands of her red hair that escaped from beneath the tight-knit hat. She’s so young, the older woman thought as she got behind the wheel of her car.

  “I’m Jordan,” Jordan said quietly.

  “And I’m Karen,” the older woman replied. Jordan nodded. “Where shall we go?” Karen asked.

  “Anywhere,” Jordan replied as she shrunk down in her seat, as if by lowering her profile she could avoid being seen. “Anywhere you think it’s safe.”

  She paused, then said in a low voice, “No. Anywhere you are absolutely fucking certain it’s safe.”

  Karen unwittingly mimicked Jordan’s evasive path as soon as she put her car in gear. She accelerated hard one instant, turned down a side street, squealing her tires with the sudden turn, then backed into an alleyway and made a U-turn. A mile outside the town there was a modest strip mall, where Karen turned in to a McDonald’s and drove through the take-out window before exiting in yet a different direction. She steered the car onto the interstate highway, drove fast for a few miles, then pulled into a scenic rest area and waited, her eyes constantly scanning the rearview mirror to make sure no one was following them. Finally, when she had seen nothing but darkness for a few minutes, she once again drove fast, heading toward a spot she knew that fit Red Three’s standard of being safe and fucking certain.

  Jordan said nothing during the trip. Not even when she was thrown sideways and jerked forward as Karen pushed the car wildly around a corner. Karen imagined that the teenager was probably accustomed to wild, aimless rides.

  “This is getting to be my regular driving style,” Karen said briskly. She half-hoped that a little light talk might help them to connect. But her passenger remained quiet, as if lost in thought. Karen glanced from time to time at the younger woman. She thought Red Three preternaturally calm.

  The hospital complex was lit up with security lights, especially near the emergency room access. There was a small white kiosk with a bored rent-a-cop guarding the doctors’ parking lot. Karen pulled in there, giving the sullen security guard her name and a five number code, which he checked on his computer before waving her in wordlessly.

  Karen found a spot near the back, hidden from view.

  “Let’s go inside,” Karen said. “Follow me.”

  Again without speaking, Jordan complied.

  The two women marched across the parking area. They passed from shadows into the cones of wan light dropped from above by high-intensity lamps. The light made their skin seem sallow, sickly. Each thought the same thing: that even if they had been followed at the start, their precautions had to have done enough to lose any wolf on their trail.

  Neither of the two really believed this.

  Shoulder to shoulder, they hurried out of the night into the hospital. There was a triage nurse at a desk in a brightly lit waiting room outside the emergency room. She looked up at the two of them with a world-weary look. There was a water fountain in a corner, and two state policemen in gray-blue outfits and three navy-blue jumpsuited EMTs were sharing a joke nearby. There was a burst of laughter from the three men and two women. Jordan glanced at the people waiting on uncomfortable molded plastic chairs. An old man buried under winter coats. A young Hispanic couple with a child in a pink parka seated between them, and a baby in the woman’s arms. A pair of college-aged boys, one of whom looked both sick and drunk and was, somehow, sitting unsteadily.

  No Wolf, she thought, waiting for us.

  Karen dug around in her large, oversized leather purse, found an ID card, and waved it toward the triage nurse, who in turn hit a buzzer entrance. Karen gestured as the automatic doors swung open. Inside the emergency-room treatment suites, she waited for the doors to slam shut with an electronic locking thud.

  With Jordan in tow, she passed the curtained exam rooms, pausing only to wave at a physician she seemed to know, before exiting through another set of doors and then traveling down a long sterile corridor that opened up into a cafeteria.

  “Do you want something to eat?” She asked. “Or coffee?”

  “Just coffee,” Jordan replied. “Cream and sugar.”

  She sat at a corner table away from white-jacketed or green-surgical-gowned groups of interns and residents as Karen went to the counter and fashioned two steaming cups of coffee. Jordan nodded to herself and thought, This is a good place. If the Wolf came in he’d stand out unless he was in scrubs. She half-smiled when Karen returned to their table.

  The young woman and the older woman sat across from each other, sipping the coffee, not saying anything for a few moments. It was Jordan who broke the silence.

  ‘So,” she said, “I gather you’re a doctor.”

  “Internal medicine.”

  Jordan shook her head. “I was hoping you were a shrink.”

  “Why?” Karen asked.

  “Because then maybe you’d know something about abnormal psychology, and that might help us,” Jordan answered. “I’m just a student,” she continued. “And not a real good one lately, either.”

  Karen nodded, and then said, “But we’re both something else, now. Or, at least, it sure seems that way.”

  “Yeah,” the teenager responded with a sudden burst of bitterness. “Now we’re targets.
It’s like we’ve got bull’s-eyes painted on our backs. Or maybe we’re just soon-to-be-dead victims. Or some combination of the two.”

  Karen shook her head. “We don’t know that. We can’t . . .” Her voice trailed off. She looked up into the harsh ceiling lights of the cafeteria, trying to think of something reassuring to say. And then she gave up. She took a deep breath. “What do we know?” she asked.

  Jordan paused before answering. “Not too fucking much.”

  The obscenity rolled freely off her tongue. Ordinarily she would never have used that sort of language with an older person. It gave her a sense of freedom to be so rude with Karen.

  “No,” Karen corrected her softly, “we know a few things. Like there are three of us. And one of him—”

  “We don’t know that,” Jordan interrupted instantly. She had a queasy feeling in her stomach, because her next thought—the one she was about to speak out loud—had just struck her. Lone wolf? How do we know? “We only know that it feels like there’s just the one guy out there hunting all three of us. That’s because in the fairy tale there’s just the one Big Bad Wolf. But we don’t know for certain that there aren’t two or three guys out there, like a little club. Maybe they’re like the Knights of Columbus or some fantasy football team, except they’re all about killing. And maybe they’re lounging around some nice rec room in somebody’s basement drinking beers and eating pretzels, giggling and guffawing and thinking this is just the damn funniest thing ever, before they get their acts together and come kill us.”

  Karen hadn’t considered this. She felt cold, almost iced over inside. The two messages from the Wolf just automatically led her to certain assumptions. She looked up at Jordan. It took a child to make her understand that nothing was clear.

  Karen gripped her coffee tightly to hold the cup steady. “You’re right,” she said slowly. “We can’t assume anything.”

  The two women watched each other, letting a small silence fit into the table space between them. After a moment, Jordan shook her head and smiled weakly. “No,” she replied. “I think we have to. I think we’ve got to make some decisions. Otherwise, we’re just walking alone through the forest, just like he told us we were.”

  “Okay,” Karen said, slowly elongating each syllable. “What do you think . . .”

  “I think we need Red Two,” Jordan said briskly. “That’s the first thing. We have to find Red Two.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “Unless, of course, Red Two is the Wolf,” Jordan said.

  Karen’s head spun. This thought seemed impossible, but at the same time eerily accurate. There was no way of telling.

  She saw the teenager shrug. “We shouldn’t guess. Find her and then the three of us can start to plan.”

  Karen nodded, although she was surprised. She had thought that it would be her leading the teenager, not the other way around, even though she had no real idea where to lead anyone, given their situation.

  “Okay, how . . .”

  “I can find her,” Jordan said. “I’ll do it.”

  Karen breathed out slowly. Leave it to the teenager, she thought. If there’s anything a teenager knows, it’s computers. She reached down and brought up her purse from the floor. “Here,” she said. She opened it up and removed three disposable cell phones. “I bought these this morning: One for you, and one for Red Two when we find her, and one for me. This way, at least, we can communicate privately.”

  Jordan smiled. “That’s smart.” She took the phones and immediately started to program them with all three numbers.

  “I’m not a complete idiot,” Karen said, although she felt a little like one. “I’ll try to figure out some safe places, like this”—she gestured around the cafeteria—“where we can all meet if we need to.”

  “Okay. That’s a good idea, too.”

  “Yes,” Karen said, “But that’s pretty much the end of my good ideas.”

  “Well.” Jordan shook her head. “I’ve been thinking. And I think it’s pretty simple.”

  “Simple?”

  “Yes. We have to find him before he finds us.”

  “And what do we do . . .” Karen said slowly. The teenager in front of her seemed both intimately familiar and a total stranger simultaneously.

  “You know what we do then,” Jordan said.

  “No, I don’t,” Karen replied. But she did, even before Jordan filled in the silence.

  “We kill him first,” Jordan said matter-of-factly, just like she was slapping away a stray mosquito that had landed on her arm. The teenager leaned back in her seat. She was a little astonished at what she’d said. She did not know precisely where the idea had come from, but she thought it must have been hiding behind all her fears, just waiting for the brightly lit, oppressively clean place she was seated in to emerge. But just as quickly, she was pleased. For the first time in days, maybe even months, she thought, she liked the direction she was suddenly going in. Cold-blooded and determined. She could feel her pulse quicken. It was a little like jumping up toward the basket and releasing the ball and realizing that her fingertips had scraped the bottom of the rim. Boys, she thought, dream of high-flying slam dunks, so they can pound their chest with look-what-I-did bravado. I’m more modest. I just want to be able to reach the goal and touch it.

  15

  Red Two stared from the questionable safety of her house at the car parked across the street. She had first noticed it perhaps fifteen minutes earlier, as she had staggered aimlessly about her living room, pistol in one hand, some pills in the other, unsure which to use first. Ordinarily she would have paid no attention to a nondescript car pulled to the side of the road just beyond the reach of a streetlamp’s glow. Someone in search of an address. Someone stopped to make a cell phone call. Someone momentarily lost, seeking their bearings. This last possibility made Sarah think, Maybe someone like me.

  But Sarah Locksley suspected that nothing was ordinary in her life any longer, and despite the gray-black gloom of rapidly falling night, she could just make out the shape of a person seated in the car. Man? Woman? The shape was indistinct. For a moment or two she watched through her window, waiting for whoever this was to exit the car and walk up to one of her neighbors’ front doors. A light would go on, a door would swing open, there would be voices raised in greeting and maybe a handshake or a hug.

  That would have been my life not so long ago. No more.

  She continued to wait, counting seconds as her mind blanked to everything except the steady accumulation of numbers.

  The expected scenario didn’t materialize. And when she reached 60 with the figure remaining obscured inside the vehicle, her pulse quickened. Like a picture slowly coming into focus, some sort of off-kilter algorithm coalesced in her mind: I’m alone waiting for a killer. It’s almost dark. There’s a car parked across the street. Someone’s inside, watching me. They’re not just visiting the neighbors. They’re here for me. She slammed herself to the side as the formula took shape within her, dodging out of the sight of the person she suddenly absolutely 100 percent knew was staring back at her with murderous intent. Sarah hugged against the wall, breathing hard, then crept sideways to where she could just tug a small amount of worn chintz curtain away, and peered out at the vehicle.

  Evening sliced away her ability to see clearly. Shadows slipped like razor blades across her sight line. She ducked backward, as if she could hide. She had an impossible thought: He can see me, but I can’t see him.

  Sarah twitched. She quivered. She thought This is it and thumbed back the hammer on her weapon. It clicked into position with an evil sound.

  A hidden part of her—the reasonable part—understood that this couldn’t be the way a killer would work. He would be cautious, prepared, and precise. The first moment she would be aware he was beside her would be her last. The Wolf wouldn’t simply park
out in front of her house and then after a suitable wait, giving her enough time to get fully ready, march up to her front door and announce, Hi! I’m the Big Bad Wolf and I’m here to kill you.

  But logic seemed slippery and elusive, and it took tense muscles and a sweaty grip to grab any away from her imagination.

  Wait, she abruptly insisted to herself, that’s exactly what he does in the fairy tale. He comes right up close to Little Red Riding Hood and she can only recognize that his eyes, his ears, his nose, and finally his teeth aren’t quite right.

  She craned her head forward once again and stole another glance at the car.

  It was empty.

  She shrank back again, trying to imagine how she could make herself seem small, feeling the wall closing in on her almost like it was pushing her into the light. A panicky voice within her—she knew it was the drugs and the booze and the despair—screamed at her, Run! Run now! And she looked around wildly for an exit, although she knew there was none. For a single instant she had a vision:

  Sarah flings open the back door.

  Sarah dashes across the lawn in back, vaults the old wooden fence.

  Sarah flees down the space between houses. Dogs bark. Neighbors hear her urgent footsteps and cry out in alarm. The police are summoned. They arrive, sirens blaring, just in the nick of time.

  Sarah is saved!

  She sucked in air and held her breath. The vision faded. She knew: There is no escape. Not out the back. Not out the front. I can’t fly away through the ceiling. I can’t bury myself in the basement. I can’t become invisible. Her mouth was dry and she had trouble making her eyes focus, as if they both had suddenly decided to betray her. The hand with the pills dropped them all to the floor, where they rattled and bounced away from her. The hand holding the gun seemed to be dragging her down, as if the weight of her husband’s pistol had suddenly increased tenfold. As fears and doubts sparked through her body like so many explosions, she was unsure whether she would be able to lift the weapon and whether she would be able to summon the strength to pull the trigger when the time arrived and she faced the Wolf.