Red 1-2-3 (39 page)
Authors: John Katzenbach
She has the whole house on a timer. Remember that detail. If I break that outside light to give myself extra cover, she will be suspicious. Perhaps she won’t get
out, she’ll turn her car around and flee. No, even though it lessens the numbers
of shadows I can hide in, I have to leave it shining brightly.
He stopped writing and reminded himself:
The Wolf will come at her
from the woods. She will not see me coming.
The biggest problem,
he thought,
is really the length of time between
murders.
He picked up where he had left off:
Red Three’s most vulnerable moment is in the evening as well, when she
walks alone across campus. But her second most vulnerable time is on Tuesday
mornings. She does not have a class until 9:45. The other members of her
dormitory have first-period classes that begin an hour earlier. So Tuesdays, my
little Red Three likes to sleep in a little later and does not realize she is alone
in that old house, because Ms. Rodriguez, the dorm parent, has early morning
faculty commitments those days.
Red Three gets up slowly and idly heads to the shower down the hallway
with her toothbrush and some shampoo, not really awake, wiping the sleep
from her eyes without any idea what might be waiting for her there.
He smiled and nodded. He said to himself, “So it will have to be a Tuesday: Red Three in the morning and Red One in the evening.”
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The Big Bad Wolf liked that, even though it should have been morning, evening, and night.
I would have gone for Red Two after midnight.
But there was nothing he could do about that.
He saw the obvious problem:
What if Red One learns of Red Three’s murder? Then she will know that this is her last day. She will know that she is only
minutes away from her own death.
That space of time between murders—there’s the dilemma.
So, it must seem to the outside world that Red Three isn’t dead. Only
strangely absent. From class. From basketball. From meals. Not absent from
life, which is what will be accurate.
He picked up Strunk and White from his desktop.
They always argue for
brevity and directness. The same is true for killing.
The Big Bad Wolf turned back to his computer.
Red Three gets more beautiful every day. Her body becomes more lithe, more
limber as she approaches womanhood. She is the one about to be cheated the
very most.
Red One is the opposite. She ages just infinitesimally with each passing
hour. She grays and knows her dying is right around the next minute and it
wears on her figure, just as it gnaws on her heart.
The Wolf worked a little more before deciding to print out a few pages.
He wished he were a poet, so he could more eloquently describe his two remaining victims. He was a little saddened when he thought of Red Two.
This will be hard,
he told himself,
but you will have to write her epitaph in
a chapter of its own.
He nodded, quickly typed in some notes on a file he decided to call “Red Two’s Last Will and Testament,” and before shutting down the chapter he was working on wondered whether there was any need left to encrypt his files. He thought he no longer had anything to fear from Mrs. Big Bad Wolf. He imagined he’d
never
had anything to fear from her. She loved him. He loved her. The rest was all just part of life together.
While he was thinking these things, he idly flicked over to the Internet.
He passed over the usual deluge of daily come-ons he received from
Writer’s Digest
and
Script
and other places urging him to sign up and spend 283
JOHN KATZENBACH
some money, because through “webinars” or access to DVDs featuring all the tricks of the writing trade he could get published or optioned or taken step-by-step and dollar-by-dollar through all the elements necessary to create his own e-book. Instead the Big Bad Wolf went to the website of a local news station to try to get a seven-day weather forecast. He knew a steady and cold rain would be best for his Tuesday plan. But before he could check the weather, he saw a brief teaser headline on a news digest that caught his eye:
Memorial Service Planned for Teacher Saturday
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Red Two asked herself,
What should you say about your own death? Or, maybe,
what would you like someone else to say? Was I a good person? Maybe not.
Sarah struggled with the ideas that flooded her head. She felt trapped between life and death. The muffled sounds of gunfire were like distant thunderclaps, penetrating the thick ear protectors she wore. In the booth next to her, the Safe Space director was banging out quick shots from a Glock 9 mm, filling the air with angry explosions. Sarah lifted her dead husband’s weapon, held it out steadily with both hands the way she had been shown, and aimed down the sight at the black cartoon of a fierce man grasping a large knife, wearing a snarl and a scar, and painted with a target in his chest. She pulled the trigger three times. She doubted if the target looked much like the Big Bad Wolf.
The recoil sent shock waves through her arms, but she was privately pleased that it didn’t make her stagger back or fall to the ground as she’d expected.
She looked up, squinting down the firing range. She could see that two shots had landed just outside the target, but a third had torn the paper 285
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dead center. She didn’t know whether this was the first shot or the last, but she was pleased that at least one would have proved fatal.
“Attagirl,” the director said, leaning around a small partition that separated the shooting galleries. “Try to get a handle on how the weapon will pull one way or the other when you’re rapid-firing. And, you know, empty the chamber. Fire all six rounds. You better your chances that way. We’ve got plenty of ammo and plenty of time.”
Plenty of ammo is right,
Sarah thought.
Plenty of time isn’t.
She cracked open the cylinder to reload from a box on the shooting platform at her waist.
Sarah Locksley, born thirty-three years ago. Happy once. Not so much anymore. Dead in a river, killed by a psychopath who drove her to further despair
by threatening to murder her, except she had nothing left to live for anyway
because some goddamn out-of-control fuel truck driver ran through a stop sign.
She lifted the gun and aimed again.
That won’t work. This is a memorial service. A little sadness and mainly
nice, safe things said about someone whose life was cut short by tragedy.
That’s me. I’m the someone. Or maybe, it’s the ex-me.
The target loomed in front of her. She narrowed her eyes and hummed to herself to block out the noise of other weapons being fired.
Not a word about the truth of Sarah Locksley.
She smiled. A part of her wished she could go to the service. It would certainly help for her say goodbye to herself.
So long, Sarah. Hello, Cynthia
Harrison. I’m pleased to make your acquaintance. And I’m delighted to take
over your life.
She could hear the gunshots echoing around her, and the gun jumped in her hand.
Cynthia Harrison,
she thought,
I wonder if you would be
embarrassed or disappointed or angry to know that the very first thing I do
with your name is kill a man. A very special man. A wolf who most assuredly
deserves to die. After all, he’s killed me once already.
This time four of the six shots landed dead center, and the fifth tore a hole in the target’s forehead.
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* * *
“remembrance” book, then take their seats in the small room. It was set to record two hours’ worth of video, which Karen had insisted to the funeral director be the length of the service.
She glanced toward the front of the room. Karen had put together a montage of photographs of Sarah and her dead family. There were bouquets of white lilies on either side of the pictures, which were mounted on a sheet of white poster board and placed on a tripod in front of the few chairs the funeral home had put out. There was a small podium with a microphone.
A part of Red Three wanted to stay. She imagined she could hide behind a curtain, remaining still, holding her breath. But she knew there was danger in staying behind, even if hidden. So instead she ducked out minutes before the first people pulled into the funeral home parking lot. She wore a dark hooded sweatshirt beneath her old parka, and she pulled this up over her head and walked away as quickly as she could from the funeral home toward a nearby bus stop.
For the first time in days, she knew she wasn’t being followed. This didn’t make sense to her, but Jordan wasn’t about to reject the sensation, because it made her feel like she was doing something that might just help save her life.
When the bus wheezed up beside her and its doors opened with a familiar hydraulic
whoosh,
she climbed in. Jordan was aware that she was breaking any number of school rules by being off campus on a Saturday without permission. She did not care. She imagined that breaking a few onerous regulations was the very least of the trouble she was racing toward.
Breaking rules is bad,
she thought.
Killing is worse.
This notion made her smile, and she had to fight to keep herself from bursting out in laughter.
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* * *
The words on the page streamed together. She felt like a dyslexic, every letter jumbling and tumbling across the paper willy-nilly, threatening to short-circuit everything she planned to say. Just as she did before going on stage with a new comedy routine, she did some breathing exercises. Slow in. Slow out. Settle the racing heartbeat.
“I know you’re here,” she whispered. One of the funeral directors, across the room from her, looked up with a practiced, hypocritically wistful look, and Karen realized that he thought she was speaking to her dead friend, not a killer.
“People are starting to arrive,” the funeral director said. He was significantly younger than the man she’d spoken to earlier in the week, but he already had down pat the solemn, sonorous tones of loss. She guessed he was a son or a nephew being shepherded into the family business, and this particular memorial service was definitely not a funeral home challenge.
No need for the boss to be there. No casket. No body. Few flowers. Just some random sentiments.
If he’s out there, it will be because he needs to know and he wants to see and
he wants to hear.
Karen could feel her pulse quickening at the thought that she was going to be standing up in front of the Wolf.
“I’ll go out now,”
she replied, weakly.
Earlier, she had placed a stiff-backed chair near the microphone. Smiling, nodding her head to people streaming in out of the parking lot, she went to it. She knew none of the faces that returned her smile. Each stride she took was walking deeper into a spotlight. As if speaking some oriental mantra, she kept telling herself that he wouldn’t kill her right there.
Not
now. Not now
. She had never heard of anyone murdering someone at a funeral home in front of assembled mourners. Bringing death to a place of 288
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death. This seemed so unreasonable that she tried to use its improbability as a reassurance.
Karen had never given a eulogy before, and certainly not for someone she barely knew and who actually wasn’t dead. She thought the whole thing would be comic if it weren’t the only thing she could think of doing that might keep her alive.
Don’t speak ill of the dead,
she thought. She wondered where that maxim had been coined.
Karen was pleased at the turnout. She had not known whether there would be five people or fifty. Zero had been a possibility, but the number was going to exceed her top guess. That was good. Perfect, even.
Large
numbers will make him feel safe. He will think he can blend in. If no one had
come, he probably would have shied away, not willing to risk standing out in
an empty room.
She could feel electricity, not unlike what she felt going on stage.
Be good. Be persuasive. Make Sarah seem dead.
She had given many performances, but none, she thought, had been nearly as important as this one.
Karen glanced over at a woman and a man. The woman was holding the hand of a small boy wearing a white shirt that was too tight and a red tie that had already come loose around his neck. The boy was leaning against an older sister, probably thirteen or fourteen, who was dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. The family paused in front of the photo display and spent a respectful few moments looking over the collection of pictures before taking seats.
A former elementary school student,
she realized,
and a younger brother who doesn’t want to be here at all.
Not a wolf.
The room began to fill up—a great variety of men and women of all ages, accompanied by a few children. The phony solemn music the funeral home piped in with hidden speakers flowed around her like smoke, almost as if the music could obscure her vision. She waited until the stream of people pausing to sign the remembrance book dwindled, and then she 289
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stood. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the young funeral director throw a small switch on the wall, and the music stopped in mid-note. She looked out over the gathered crowd briefly and launched into her speech.