Red 1-2-3 (21 page)

At the floral displays she grabbed two cheap bunches of colorful flowers.

The checkout girl took Sarah’s credit card and ran it through the register, which gave Sarah a twinge of embarrassment, because she was sure it would be declined. When it was approved, Sarah was mildly astonished.

She steered her cart and groceries over to her car, keeping her eyes focused on loading, steeling herself against the desire to look about furtively. For the first time in her life she felt a little like a wild animal. The demands of caution and remaining alert to all threats nearly overcame her.

The Wolf won’t follow you on this next errand,
she thought.
And even if he
did, what would he learn?

Nothing he doesn’t already know.

Telling herself to ignore every creeping fear, Sarah stuffed the groceries into her trunk. Then she slid behind the wheel, took a deep breath, and pulled out of the parking lot into traffic.

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RED 1–2–3

End-of-the-day drivers ducked in and out of lanes and tailgated her.

There is a frustrated energy to commuting time; there’s so many people in a hurry to get home that they wind up slowing everyone down. She reminded herself that once she was the same way, at the end of the school day. She would pack up all her classroom items and get behind the wheel and drive rapidly home because that was where her real life was, or at least the part of it that she liked to think of as
real
. Picking up her daughter at day care, fixing dinner, waiting for her husband to come home from fire department headquarters.

Behind her a car honked. She punched down on her gas pedal, knowing that even moving faster wasn’t likely to make whoever it was who had decided to be rude any less so.

It took her nearly half an hour to drive to the cemetery. It was located near a large public park so that any city residue dropped away rapidly, giving the last few blocks an almost country feel.

The grave sites were set back on a small sloping plot of land. Streets meandered haphazardly amidst gray headstones. There were pathways that led up to ornate crypts and lurking statues of angels. There was little daylight remaining, and shadows seemed to drop from the oak trees that were scattered about the landscape. Nearly lost in one corner was a small building that Sarah knew housed a backhoe and shovels.

She was alone.

Some of the graves sported dying flowers. Several were adorned with well-worn, tattered American flags. A few had freshly turned dirt. Others were faded by years of weather, the grass around them browned by time.

Names, dates, quick sentiments—
beloved, devoted—
adorned some of the headstones. Decades of losses were arrayed quietly before her.

Sarah stopped her car and grasped the two bouquets of flowers.

It has been a long time since you came here,
she told herself.
Be brave.

When she formed this last word in her head, she was uncertain whether she was referring to the Wolf or to the two people who had been stolen from her life. She wished that her husband or daughter would whisper something to her, but there was nothing but cemetery silence in the air.

149

JOHN KATZENBACH

A little unsteadily, she walked down a pathway running through rows of simple gray monuments guarded by two cherub statues wielding trumpets that played no sound. She could hear her shoes clacking against the black macadam of the path. A part of her wished she were drunk, an equal part of her believed there was no amount of liquor in the world that could overcome her sobriety at that moment.

In her mind, she was working on what she was going to say to her slaughtered family. Words like
I’m sorry
or
I need you both to help me get
through this
filled her mouth, as if ready to burst forth. She clutched the bouquets, almost as she had the gun earlier.

Sarah knew how many steps she would walk. She kept her eyes down, head lowered, as if she was afraid to read the names on the gray marble headstone that awaited her. When she knew she was in front of it, she stopped, breathed in sharply, and raised her eyes.

As she did this, she started to speak, almost nonsensically. “I miss you both so much and now someone wants to kill me . . .”

Then, as if someone had drawn a razor blade across her tongue, the weak and flimsy message she had for her dead husband and daughter died in her mouth.

She stared through the encroaching darkness at the headstone. At first, she could only formulate,
There’s something wrong.

She peered at the granite-colored stone.
Graffiti,
she thought at first. A surge of outrage immediately filled her.
This is terrible,
she thought.
What
sort of creepy, thoughtless, goddamn stupid teenager would take a can of spray
paint and deface a grave? Don’t they know they’re breaking someone’s heart?

She took a step forward and looked closer.
That’s not right.
She realized that she was breathing shallow, quick bursts of air stripped from the rapidly falling darkness.

What should have been the angular “tags” of teenage gangs or the round, bulbous drawings of nicknames were nothing of the sort. Nor were these scratchy, misspelled obscenities hurriedly sprayed across the surface.

Sarah stepped forward, as if drawn to the shapes she saw.

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RED 1–2–3

They were painted white. They angled across the stone, bisecting each name and the death date. There were four of them.

Sarah had never seen a wolf ’s paw print before, but she suddenly knew that was precisely what she was staring at.

She dropped the flowers to the sidewalk and ran hard.

151

19

The stage manager began waving at Karen frantically, pointing at the tattered black curtain that concealed the entrance to the performance apron at Sir Laughs-A-Lot,
when he saw her hesitate upon hearing the cell phone in her satchel begin to ring insistently. Her first instinct was that there was some patient emergency that required immediate attention. She grabbed the pocketbook and ignored the manager, although he was urgently whispering, “Come on, Doc. Y’er up. Let’s break a leg. Knock ’em out.”

She hesitated when she saw that it wasn’t her regular cell phone that was ringing. It was the throwaway phone identical to those she had given Red Two and Red Three.

The caller ID read:
Sarah.

Karen half-reached for the phone as she heard the stage manager—he was usually the bartender at the comedy club—say, “That better be goddamn important. We’ve got a full house tonight and they are getting real restless.”

Karen looked up and saw he was holding back the curtain with one hand and urging her forward with the other. She could just see past him, to where the club owner was standing center stage, introducing her.

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RED 1–2–3

“Let’s please give a warm Laughs-A-Lot welcome to Doctor K!” the owner was saying as he stepped away from a standing microphone and pointed in her direction.

She took a quick glance down at the phone as it stopped ringing. The display read “
1 new message
.” Conflict collided within her. She could hear the stage manager, now in a stage whisper, urging her up and out. At the same time, the phone demanded her attention.

Caught between these two poles, she dropped the phone back into her satchel and grabbed a bottle of water from the stage manager’s hand.
The
show must go on,
she thought, although she knew perhaps this shoud have been an exception. Karen stepped forward into the floodlights.

She wore a wide, slightly goofy grin, black-framed glasses, and had frizzed out her hair comically. She waved at the audience. She had on her standard comedy-club outfit, which consisted of red high-top sneakers, a black turtleneck sweater, and jeans, topped off by a white clinician’s cotton coat and an old, no-longer-functional stethoscope wrapped around her neck like a noose.

A full house,
she knew, was actually only fifty or so people at the tiny off-the-beaten-path club. She couldn’t see past the glare, but she knew there were couples and foursomes spread about the shadows inside the cavelike interior. A hard-pressed waitstaff hurriedly delivered beer and burgers, trying to get each order filled before she took the stage. She could smell french fries and hear a distant sizzle from the small kitchen.

A smattering of applause greeted her, and she made an elaborate bow.

“You know what really bothers me,” she said, using a lilt to give her words energy, “is when you write a prescription and say ‘Take two of these every day,’ and patients immediately double everything . . . because if two are supposed to make them feel better, well, four will probably make them feel a
whole lot
better . . .”

She paused, looked out past the floodlights at the people she couldn’t see but knew were there, and smiled. “Of course, nobody here has ever done that . . .” A ripple of slightly self-conscious laugher flowed up toward her.

153

JOHN KATZENBACH

“I mean . . . does everyone want to become an addict?”

This small insult got a slightly larger response. She could hear a few

“
Yeah, why not?”
and
“No kidding!”
exclamations from the audience.

“Of course, that reminds me of an addict I used to know . . .” she continued. Riffing on drugs and acting a little befuddled about the needs of patients was an integral part of her shtick. Whenever she felt uncertain about her humor, she made fun of the things that were the least funny.

This invariably warmed the crowd to her. She remembered an old comic taking her aside once, years earlier when she was first trying out some of her routines, and telling her, “You know what isn’t funny? A guy on crutches with a cast on his leg. You know what’s really fuckin’ funny? A guy on crutches with a cast on his leg slipping on the ice and going ass over elbows into the air. That’ll get a laugh every time. Everybody loves someone else’s over-the-top misfortune. Keep that in mind every second you’re up there.”

So she did. Her routines made fun of heart attacks and cancer and Ebola virus. Most of the time, it worked.

“So this guy says to me, ‘Doc, what’s wrong with taking drugs?’ And I say back to him, ‘Yeah, but dog tranquilizers?’
And he kinda smiles and says, ‘Me and my dog, we’re pretty similar . . .”

Karen paused. “‘Yeah,’
I says to him,
‘keep snorting that stuff and you’ll be wagging your tail a lot
less
. . .’” When she said
tail,
she grabbed her crotch as if imitating a man masturbating.

There was a burst of laughter and some hand-clapping. This was just enough feedback to make Karen relax and feel like she had made enough of an inroad with the audience to be able to finish on a high note. She made a mental point to use that joke, a double entendre: a high note. Part of what she loved about performing was the way standing on stage in front of an audience made her slide thoughts into various compartments, as if her brain were an old apothecary’s desk with a hundred different drawers.

She went back to her imaginary addict. “And I tell him,
‘You know, you might just find yourself lifting your leg at inappropriate times . . .’”

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RED 1–2–3

Another round of laughter filled the room. Part of humor was making the people in that dark room
see
things—in this case a man turning himself into a dog.

“But of course, he says back to me, ‘Well, maybe I’ll be able to smell the bitches better, too.’” This line, she figured, would make the men in the room clap. It did.

Karen had warmed up, was suddenly feeling confident, had shunted the telephone message that had trailed her onto the stage into some distant, nearly forgotten place, and she took a moment to let the applause surround her. It was like being caressed, she thought.

And then a solitary whistle cut across the noise.

It was a loud, piercing sound. It was not unfamiliar to her. She had heard it before at other shows and ignored it, or joked about it. But this time—

the whistle rose steadily in pitch and then abruptly shifted downward—it stopped her cold, because she put a name to it.

Wolf whistle
.

She shifted her weight back and forth and took a long gulp from the bottle of water. Her imagination seized—she knew she had to find a joke, but suddenly felt crippled.

All women have heard a wolf whistle. It’s nothing more than a common
thoughtless way guys have of expressing attraction. It’s been around for decades.

Wolf
had never meant anything to her before. Now it did. She tried to regain composure.
It’s nothing out of the ordinary.
She could hear a part of her scream,
Liar!

Karen fumbled with the thread of her humor.

“Of course,” she said, “the drug companies spend all their time and money researching the wrong problems. I mean, they want to cure her-pes and the common cold. But what about a drug that helps women parallel-park?”

A burst of laughter erupted from the darkness.

“Or maybe a drug that cures men of their football addiction? Ladies, we could just slip it into the salsa and cheese nacho dip, and next thing 155

JOHN KATZENBACH

we’d know the game would be off the television and the channel turned to public broadcasting’s latest adaptation of
Pride and Prejudice . . .
”

More hoots and giggles.

Karen had started to relax again, to think that the wolf whistle wasn’t the Wolf ’s whistle, when she heard it a second time, blending into the general amusement.

It is, it isn’t,
she thought, once again trying to grasp hold of the sound.

She raised her hand to shade her eyes, trying to see past the floodlights into the audience. But it was just a darkened cavern, filled with indistinct shapes. And then she suddenly thought,
The call from Red Two. It was a
warning. He’s here. He’s just over there past the blinding lights. I could touch
him.