Red 1-2-3 (17 page)

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.

119

JOHN KATZENBACH

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.

And then, just as abruptly, she saw the weapon raised up in front of her, gripped in both hands, and she realized she had bent into a shooter’s crouch.

For a moment Sarah wondered whether it was some other person steering the weapon. It was as if she was only peripherally connected to the gun.

She wondered when she had last taken a breath. Her lungs demanded air and she gasped out like a swimmer breaking the surface.

Bizarre, contradictory thoughts like
I’m ready for anything
or
I’m dying
now
raced through her.

120

RED 1–2–3

She wanted to speak out loud, say something strong and brave, but when she tried the words “C’mon, damn it, I’m waiting,” they croaked and shattered and were only barely comprehensible.

The doorbell rang.

It was a cheery chime, three notes that made absolutely no sense to her.

A killer rings the doorbell?

She found herself half-hopping, moving almost crablike as she crossed the living room, gun still raised. She paused in front of her door.

The bell rang again.

Why
wouldn’t
he ring the bell? Or knock on the door? Or just call out her
name to announce he was there? Hello-o-o, Sarah! It’s the Big Bad Wolf. I’m
here to kill you . . .

She suddenly had no idea what a wolf would do. Nothing happening made any sense to her. It was all Alice in Wonderland: Up was down, front was back, high was low.

She could feel her finger tightening on the trigger. It occurred to her to simply fire.
The bullet will go straight through the wood and kill him where
he stands.
It seemed like a good idea. A really good idea. Almost sensible.

A part of her stifled a laugh from bursting out.
What a joke,
she thought.

What a great slap-your-knees and wet-your-pants joke. I’ll just shoot him right
through the door.

She aimed the pistol, leveling it right at the spot where she imagined the Wolf ’s chest would be. It was like doing measurements in her head:
Is
he tall? Short? Don’t want to miss.

The gun quivered, yawing back and forth like a small ship being slammed by storm waves. She saw her left hand reach out and seize the doorknob, defeating what seemed like an eminently fine plan and replac-ing it with something completely foolish. She imagined that she was opening the door to death.

With a single, mighty lurch, she flung the door wide. In the same motion, she released the knob and reached back with her left hand and steadied the pistol. She was bent slightly, leaning forward and ready to fire.

Silence stopped her finger on the trigger.

121

JOHN KATZENBACH

Two women stared across the threshold at her. Their faces seemed shocked beneath the wan porch light. Someone inhaled sharply, but Sarah was unsure whether it was one of the two women or herself.

The two of them seemed frozen. Looking into the gaping barrel of a pistol with the hammer cocked has a way of discouraging most ordinary conversation.

They can’t be the Wolf,
Sarah thought.
Two Wolves?
But her finger caressed the trigger. Somewhere deep in her understanding, she knew that the slightest pressure would fire the weapon.

After a heartbeat in which Sarah fully expected to hear the thunderous roar of the gun as she killed whoever it was standing in front of her, she watched completely dumbstruck as one of the women slowly pulled a woolen knit navy watch cap from her head and carefully shook free great waving locks of strawberry-red hair, never taking her eyes off Sarah and her gun.

Then, as if following suit in a card game, the other woman—older, face lined with concerns—lifted her hands and unpinned her hair, which fell like a dull sheet of fading embers to her shoulders.

“Hello, Red Two,” the older woman said. “Please don’t kill us.”

Sarah was ashamed of the way the house looked.

For the first time in days, she was aware of the trash and debris—the empty liquor bottles and prepared-food containers, candy bar wrappings, and potato chip bags that were littered around the space. She was also embarrassed by the
Home Alone
defense system spread beneath windows and across doorways. She wanted to apologize to the two women and explain that this really wasn’t like her, except that it would have been a lie and she thought it would be unwise to start her dealings with Red One and Red Three with such an obvious falsehood. So she kept her mouth shut and watched the reactions of the two others as they surveyed the landscape of despair.

It was Red Three who spoke first.

122

RED 1–2–3

“I’m Jordan,” she said. “Do you have a picture of your husband and your daughter? The ones who died?”

Sarah was taken aback by the question. It seemed incredibly intimate, as if she were being asked to remove her clothes and stand naked.

She stammered her reply. “Of course, but . . .”

And then her words faded away. She went to a bookcase in the corner and brought out a framed picture of the three of them, taken shortly before the accident. Wordlessly, she handed it to Jordan, who looked at it carefully and then passed it over to Karen. She, too, examined the photo carefully.

There was a small silence. Sarah thought that usually someone examining a photograph like the one of herself, her child, and her husband taken on a summer day at the beach would say,
Isn’t that cute
or
They’re sure beautiful.
But she realized those responses were meant for the living. She was suddenly not exactly angry, but upset, or uncomfortable, and she reached out for the picture.

“What are you looking for?” Sarah asked.

“A reason,” Karen replied.

It took Sarah a few seconds to understand that Red One wasn’t searching for the reason why Red Two’s husband and daughter had been killed.

She didn’t want to hear about a runaway fuel oil truck and the capriciousness of fate.

“Or maybe an explanation,” Jordan said. She wasn’t talking about the accident, either.

“How did you find me?” Sarah started.

Karen looked over at Jordan, who shrugged. “Your video on YouTube.

It ended with a picture of a headstone. I fired up the computer and then worked backward from those names.

“It didn’t take me that long,” Jordan continued. “The local paper had a story about the memorial service at the fire station. They had a color picture. You were there. With this . . .”

Jordan pointed at Sarah’s red hair. She remembered how bright Red Two’s hair had looked spread across mourning black.

123

JOHN KATZENBACH

Sarah thought she should say something, but fell into silence. After an uncomfortable moment, Karen spoke up. “We shouldn’t stay here,” she said. “We need to go to a safe place to talk.” Sarah seemed about to say something, so Karen spoke quickly, stopping her before she spoke. “Look, when Jordan and I first met yesterday, one thing we realized is that if and when the three of us are together, it increases our vulnerability. All of us being in the same spot, at the same time, makes us all into a much simpler target.”

“It’s kinda like us getting together is what he really wants and he throws a hand grenade at us,” Jordan said. “
Boom!
Red One, Red Two, and Red Three all disappear at once.” Cynicism mingled freely with anxiety in her voice. Karen didn’t bother to expand on the hand grenade
concept, although a part of her thought,
It makes as much sense as anything. Because
none of it makes sense. Or all of it does.

“But we’ve still got to talk, to figure out what we’re going to do . . .”

“I know what we’re going to do,” Jordan muttered beneath her breath.

Karen didn’t turn toward the youngest of the trio. Instead she kept her eyes fixed on Sarah. “So, we need to go someplace where we know we can plan without being watched.” Her eyes flicked over to the large living room window. “We don’t know,” she said, “we can’t be sure he’s not right out there . . .” Her voice trailed off.

Sarah felt dizzy. She thought there were a hundred things she needed to say, but all of them escaped her tongue. What she managed was, “Let me get my coat.”

“Hey,” Jordan said briskly. “Bring the gun.”

124

16

There are three stages to a killing,
the Wolf wrote when he finally got back to his office after his lengthy interview with the police detective and was able to lock the door and revel for a moment in quiet concentration.

Planning. Execution. Aftermath.

Neglect any of these three phases, and failure is inevitable. The key is
demanding more of oneself. It’s crucial to recognize that at the conclusion
of the second stage, as profoundly emotional and satisfying as that might be,
and as much as one has built to that moment, there are still critical steps that
need to be taken. Simply put, it’s not over. It’s just begun. I believe it’s a little
like the soldier coming home from the war trying to negotiate a fast-food restaurant after months spent in deprivation and fear, or perhaps the astronaut
returning from a lengthy stay in space confronting the motor vehicles registry.

There is decompression necessary before returning to ordinary life, a stepping-back time, where the killer needs to slide out from beneath the excitement and
passion of the hunt and the murder and let it flow into sweetened memory.

Creating the emotional context for enjoyment requires as much careful plotting
125

JOHN KATZENBACH

as does the actual killing. It’s where the clumsy amateurs and the unprepared
wannabes fail. After they accomplish the death they’ve invented, they then
don’t know how to savor that moment. And it’s important to be aware that not
anticipating the needs of this final stage engenders frustration and dismay—

and leads to mistakes in the first two stages. There is great danger in not fully
preparing for post-death enjoyment.

When you’ve accomplished something special, it takes great nerve and focus
and strength of character to allow yourself to become outwardly ordinary once
again even when you know that the persona others see is a complete lie.

As always the words came in a rush to the Wolf. His fingers seemed to dance above the computer keyboard, his concentration entirely on the entry that was taking shape in front of him. He felt a kind of ease, as if he were an athlete settling into the routine of a workout, where the miles he stamped beneath his feet or the water that flowed underneath him with every overhand stroke were like so many familiar pushes from behind.

He paused briefly to steal a thought about each Red and believed that he was fast approaching the time when he would have to begin the hands-on process of each specific death.
Red One is special because she has faced death
so frequently with consummate professionalism, but now she must confront a
death that has no diagnosis. Red Two is unique because she’s so eager to die,
and now is confronted by her very secret wishes coming true, just not how she
expected them to. And Red Three is exceptional because she has done so much
to toss her future away, and now must face someone else stealing from her
what little remains of that future.
He shook his head and grunted out loud.