Red 1-2-3 (20 page)

It was to be an evening session—which he didn’t like. He no longer enjoyed driving at night. His eyesight was still good enough, but the creeping early winter darkness seemed to slow his reactions down, which made him tentative behind the wheel. This sensation of vulnerability or mortality—he hated it—reminded him he was steadily aging. This caused him, in turn, to feel more energized when he thought about the three Reds.

Killing,
he wrote,
brings out the youth inside.

Do you remember what it was like when you had your first kiss? The first
time you touched a girl’s breast? The first time you caressed a knife blade with
your thumb and drew a little line of blood? Do you remember that taste? Or
the first time you hefted a loaded pistol, and placed your index finger upon the
trigger, knowing that all the power in the world would be released with just
the gentlest tug?

Perfection.

Those are the passions that constantly need to be restored and renewed.

The Wolf reluctantly set aside his musings on murder and devoted some time to drearily writing down questions for the seminar speaker and trying to anticipate the scientist’s answers. He thought of himself as a dedicated graduate student preparing for an oral exam. This would be the final step before being awarded a doctorate. This idea made him grin.
A
higher degree in killing
. Still, he considered it necessary to be prepared for the seminar. He wanted to be able to display enough understanding that expert knowledge would flow back toward him. It was like knocking on the door to a sophisticated, exclusive club, demanding entrance.

He did make one more note in the chapter he was working on:
To be a
truly successful killer, you must always be eager to learn. Too many death-row
inmates stare out between iron bars waiting for that final bad word from the
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warden and wondering where exactly everything went so wrong. “I’m sorry. All
your court appeals have failed. Would you like a priest? And chicken or steak
for that last meal?” If you don’t educate yourself about death, death will decide
to educate you. And you don’t want that lesson.

This, he thought, was probably obvious to every reader but deserved being stated in clear, concise prose anyway.
Sometimes,
he told himself,
you have to be totally explicit. Pornographically clear. In words and in killing
.

Jordan counted quietly to herself. One step. Two. Twenty, twenty-five, and thirty. She angled across the open quadrangle, measuring carefully, ignoring the other students walking to late classes.

In her hand, she clutched a small video camera. She had borrowed it from one of her dorm mates, a slightly younger girl who seemed less intent than the others on either taunting her remorselessly or taking pains to avoid her. Jordan imagined that it was used mostly for out-of-bounds fun—maybe taking incriminating pictures of other girls making out with football team boys or breaking the school rules by drinking wildly at parties.

Moving across the campus, Jordan periodically lifted the camera and looked back through the lens. When the distance seemed right, she stopped and checked the viewfinder. Then she smiled and took a quick glance around.

“That’s where you were standing,” she whispered to herself. She half-lifted her hand to point, as if there were someone standing next to her.

Jordan had duplicated the first shot the Wolf had taken of her in her Red Three YouTube video. The distance was approximately the same. The angle was nearly identical. She had done her best to gauge the light to replicate the time of day.

She was stopped a few feet outside a small space between a science lab and a boys’ dormitory. It was a dead-end alleyway—no longer than eight or ten feet deep—that was blocked by a gray concrete wall at the back that connected the two buildings for no apparent purpose. There were several trash bins located at that end and the wall was scrawled with obscenities 143

JOHN KATZENBACH

and vaguely pornographic drawings, phone numbers, and protests of undying love or promises of oral sex. It was not unlike a typical bathroom stall wall in a bus station.

Both buildings were the ubiquitous redbrick so familiar to schools and colleges, covered with tangled ivy, although the cold weather had stripped all the branches of leaves. The space seemed almost cavelike. It was, Jordan thought, a bad place for trash containers, but a fine place to hide for a few moments while sneaking a video.

Had to be last
spring term.
Plenty of greenery,
she thought.
And the evening shadows would have made this spot dark, while the last bit of sunlight
hitting the quadrangle would have made it possible to see me clearly.

She bit down on her lip. It was a smart place to choose for a secret video taping. Jordan stepped back slightly, looking first right, then left.
No
one could see what you were doing unless they accidentally walked right past
and happened to look directly at you.

In her imagination, it was like she was conversing with the Wolf—

as if she wanted him to hear how much she had already figured out about him. She stared at the spot she believed he’d occupied. She wanted to whisper something defiant, but no words came to her. She pictured him—a lurking man’s dark form that seemed part animal, almost cartoonlike—lowering the camera, wide wolf ’s grin on his face, teeth bared. Again, she let her eyes travel the adjacent areas.
Plenty of parking
on the side street just twenty yards away. A few quick steps and you would
be gone. No one would know what you’d been up to. So, you must have felt
pretty damn safe.

Jordan worked hard to reconstruct every element of the filming moment in her head.

You couldn’t just wait here for hours, hoping eventually I would happen by
and you could take your pictures. That would be far too suspicious. Someone
might spot you and maybe call security. No one’s allowed to just hang out
around the school. So that’s a chance you wouldn’t take. Any smart wolf would
know to be far more cautious, right?

Her throat felt sore, her mouth dry.

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You had to know when I was going to pass by. Maybe not exactly, but damn
close. You had to have a sense of timing. My timing. You know my school. The
smart wolf knows exactly when he can spy on his prey in complete safety.

That observation told her something.

You must know the same things for Red One and Red Two.

She lifted the video camera up to her eye, but did not push the
record
button. She had already seen all she wanted.

Jordan could feel a rush of warmth, even though the air was chilly.
Here
is the first fight,
she told herself.
Don’t panic. He was standing right here,
right where you are right now. What else does it tell you?

One answer she already knew, and she reminded herself of it, speaking out loud to no one: “He’s been watching all of us for months.” The video was the culmination of many hours. It wasn’t some spur-of-the-moment picture.

This seemed completely unfair to her. It was like a surprise test in a classroom on material that she’d neglected to study. Only failure here meant much more than a lousy mark.

She reached out and idly ran her fingers over the pitted brick of the science building, as if the old stone could tell her something else.

Jordan had the sensation there was some reply to her touch to be found, but it seemed to elude her in the late afternoon gloom. Torn—a part of her wanted to flee, a part of her told her to keep looking because there might be other answers just lying about near the trash—she pivoted. For a moment, she stared at the gray concrete wall behind the trash containers, her eyes flowing over all the faded and misspelled messages. She took a couple of steps closer, reading.

Kathy gives good head. Call her 555-1729.

Fcuk the class of 2009. There assholes.

I Luv S. Forever.

She was about to turn when her eyes spotted a small hand-drawn heart shape scratched into the wall. Inside it were the letters RT
and
BW.
Jordan stared at the heart, as if her eyes could burn some truth out of it.

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RT,
she thought.
That can’t be
Red Three.

BW can’t be Bad Wolf.

She shook her head.
No, it would have to be BBW because that’s how he
signed his letters.
She scoured her memory.
Isn’t there a Robbie Townsend in
that boys’ dorm? Didn’t he have a crush on Betty Williams last semester?

That has to be it.

But trying to insist that nothing was wrong seemed like a complete lie.

She felt chilled, and she turned around and began to march toward her dormitory. She had the eerie sensation that the Wolf was suddenly right behind her, hidden in that location and once again filming her, materializing out of shadow as soon as she’d turned her back. The nape of her neck burned. A surge of frantic fear came over her and she nearly broke into a sprint. But instead, Jordan forced herself to slow down and walk steadily.

One foot in front of the other,
she told herself.
She wanted to sing out in some loud and raucously obscene cadence, like a soldier, but she couldn’t find the strength to raise her voice, so she began to whisper in a singsong,

“I don’t know but I’ve been told, Eskimo cocks are mighty cold. Left.

Right. Left. Right . . .” Her pace, she hoped, was every bit as defiant as the words she couldn’t find for herself earlier. But she doubted it was.

Act normal
.

Sarah Locksley had joked to herself that this should mean popping some pills and washing them down with warm vodka.
My new normal.

Not my old normal.

Instead, she had spent most of the day relentlessly straightening up her house. She collected debris and placed empty liquor bottles in recycling bins. She vacuumed carpets and washed floors. The laundry ran nearly nonstop for hours, each load carefully folded and placed in her drawers as it was finished. She cleaned every countertop and surface in the kitchen, and switched on the oven’s self-cleaning mechanism. The refrigerator was a challenge, but she scrubbed out every bit of spilled milk. Spoiled food was thrown into a trash bag and carted outside. She assaulted the bathrooms with brush, cleanser, and military precision, bending over until her 146

RED 1–2–3

back shouted with pain, but afterward the porcelain and stainless steel glistened. And, in what she truly believed was complete idiocy, she took two plastic garbage bags and went from window to window, door to door, disassembling her
Home Alone
security system. The broken glass spread beneath each entranceway clinked as she swept it up with dustpan and broom.

She couldn’t quite bring herself to open windows and air the house out—although she knew she needed to do that. An open window seemed like an invitation to cold air, trouble, and maybe worse.

Nor could Sarah take a feather duster into her husband’s study or her daughter’s bedroom. Those remained shut.
Normal
could only go so far.

When she’d restored her home to something approximating reasonable, Sarah stepped into her shower and let steaming-hot water run over her, the heat seeping into sore muscles. She stood beneath the stream almost like a statue, unable to move, but not frozen by fatigue as much as turmoil. When she soaped up her hair and body, she felt like her hands were running over the skin of a stranger. It seemed to her that nothing was familiar—not the shape of her breasts, the length of her legs, the tangles in her hair. When she emerged from the shower, she stood naked in front of a mirror, imagining that she was looking at some odd identical twin she had never known, from whom she’d been separated at birth, but who had just moments before suddenly reappeared in her life.

She dressed carefully, choosing a modest pants-and-sweater outfit from the rows of clothes that she’d once worn to work at the elementary school.

They were loose-fitting when she had a job, a husband, and a family.

Now, with none of those things, her body baggier from the weight loss of depression, they hung on her, and she wondered whether they would ever fit again.

She found her overcoat, brushed a few spots of dust from it, and searched around for her satchel. She double-checked to make sure that her husband’s revolver was snugly contained inside. Out loud, she said,

“Normal doesn’t include being stupid.”

She wasn’t sure that this statement was accurate.

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Sarah stepped outside into weak afternoon sunlight. She could feel her hands twitch, and knew that she was on an edge of fear. She desperately wanted to stop, search up and down the roadway with her eyes, inspect her small world for some telltale sign of the Wolf ’s presence.

Normal,
she thought,
doesn’t need to look around nervously and worry
about every step outside.

She felt a shaft of cold within her as she thought that if her husband had only looked in the right direction, perhaps . . .

She shut off that small bit of despair. Instead, she hastily moved to her car and slid behind the wheel, behaving like any person who had someplace to go.

She did. But this was not the sort of trip that would fit into anyone’s definition of routine. This trip was to combine the insistently ordinary with the deepest sadness.

Her first stop was the mundane: the local grocery store. She seized a cart from the rack and filled it up with salads, fruit, lean meats, and fish. She purchased bottled water and freshly squeezed juices. Sarah felt a little like a stranger walking through the aisles of healthy foodstuffs. It had been a long time since she’d bought anything to eat that had any nutritional value.