Red 1-2-3 (22 page)

He can touch me.

Karen fought panic. She struggled to keep herself centered and keep up with the comedy patter. She thought,
Make a joke. Say, “Someone must be
falling in love . . .” or some such silliness. Make that whistle into something
ordinary and benign.

She couldn’t make herself do this. Instead murder overcame her imagination.
Is it happening? Right now? Is he going to kill me in front of all these
people?

Her hands twitched. She gulped again at the water bottle, but it was empty. She was on stage. She had nowhere to hide. A spotlight followed her every move. She wanted to say something that would extricate herself gracefully from the dais. “
Well, I’ll be heading back to the ER now.
”

Then she thought that might trigger the Wolf. If she tried to flee, would he shoot her right then and there? Would he leap up onto the stage like some deranged John Wilkes Booth waving a knife or brandishing a pistol?

She closed her eyes. She was trapped between irrational fears. There was the fear of humiliating herself in front of an audience and the Wolf fear.

She swallowed hard. She wondered if she only had seconds left to live.

“Well,” she said to the audience, forcing a grin, “that’s it for me tonight.

Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.”

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The applause would conceal the shot. So would the darkened room.

There would be confusion and panic. Someone would scream, “
Get a doctor!
” But of course, she was the only doctor in the club, and she would be dying on the stage. And in all the tangle of irony, death, and surprise, the Wolf would slip away. She knew this, even if it made no sense. She knew that he had already made his escape plans, and he would be fast on his way to Red Two or Red Three.

Unless they were already killed.

Maybe that was the call,
Karen thought.
It said “1 New Message” but
maybe the message was, “I’m dead.”

Karen could suddenly see two bodies. Red Two and Red Three, twisted, bloodstained, discarded. It was almost as if she had to step over them to leave the stage.

She stumbled toward the curtain. She knew she should wave at the crowd, which was continuing to applaud, but turning back was impossible. Each stride she took she imagined was her last. Her legs felt weak and unsteady. She expected to hear the sound of a gun firing and she knew that it would be the last sound she ever heard.

When she reached the curtain and let it close behind her, she felt she had never before in her entire life walked as great a distance. For an instant, she gulped at the stale backstage air. She wanted to shrink down and cower in some darkened corner. Then almost as quickly she told herself,
You’ve got to see!

Tossing her fake glasses and stethoscope toward her bag, stripping off her white coat, she pushed past the surprised stage manager, the equally astonished owner, and a college-aged man in a tweed jacket and khaki pants who was scheduled to follow her onto the stage. She raced to the side door of the club, which led out to the tables. It had a sign that stated if opened alarm will sound, but the security system had been disconnected.

Karen burst through the door.

A few lights in the club had come up—just enough so that she could search the faces in the audience. She did not know what she was looking 157

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for.
A single man? Bared wolf ’s teeth? Look at a crowd of people and pluck the
killer out from all of them?

What she saw was insistently ordinary. More burgers and bottles of beer being distributed. Tables filled with couples. What she heard was a great deal of loud laughter and happily raised voices.

Her eyes swept right and left. She wanted to scream: “
Where are you?
”

“Hey, Doc, you okay?”

She almost jumped into the air. The question had come from the club owner. Karen breathed in slowly. “Yes, yes,” she replied.

“I mean, you look like you seen a ghost.”

Maybe I did,
she thought.
Or maybe I just heard one.

“No, I’m okay,” she said. “I just thought I recognized someone.”

“Looks like someone you didn’t want to see,” the owner said. “You want, I’ll get Sam to walk you out to your car after the next guy wraps up.”

Sam was the burly bartender and stage manager. The assumption behind the offer was a spurned lover or an ex-husband with a grudge.

“I’d like that,” she said. She didn’t add an explanation.

“Cool. How about a drink to settle those nerves? And hey, your set, it went great tonight. The folks really seemed to like it.” The owner gestured toward a waitress.

“Thanks,” Karen replied. The waitress hovered near. “Scotch,” Karen said. “Neat. And make it a double, with a beer chaser.”

“On the house,” said the owner as he steered Karen backstage.

It took a few minutes for Karen to be left alone. The stage manager was at the curtain, the owner back on the dais introducing the next act, and the college kid poised to go on. The waitress came and delivered her drinks with the rapidity of someone who knows the tips are somewhere else.

Karen gulped the liquor down, feeling it burn her throat. For a moment she felt dizzy, and she rocked back and forth as if she were already drunk.

It took a surge of energy and an inner mantra of
I’m safe now, I’m safe now
before she was able to pluck the cell phone from her satchel. For a few seconds, she stared at the display. Behind her, she could hear the college 158

RED 1–2–3

kid making ribald jokes and the audience hooting in response.
He’s good,
she thought.
Better than me.

She punched buttons on the keypad and held the phone up to her ear.

Words tumbled and jolted, skidded, crashed, and screamed. Karen could understand
grave
and
paw prints,
but that was it.

Except for the hysteria. Sobs, groans, panic, and runaway fear. Those came through absolutely clearly.

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20

At first Sarah searched the crowd, hoping to spot Karen, but she stopped almost as quickly as she began, because she formulated some crazy notion in her head that if
she
was able to spot Red One, then so could the Wolf, as if he were seated next to her and would merely follow her gaze and know they were both in the stands and somehow manage to kill them simultaneously in front of everyone. So instead, she concentrated on the floor, trying to avoid spending too many moments eyeing Red Three.

She picked out a player on the opposing team, gathered her name from the mimeographed programs scattered about the bleachers, and tried to act as if she was connected to some gangly teenager whom she had never seen before.

Once again, she had prepared carefully to go out in public. But this time she had made significant changes.

She had found a cheap jet-black wig left over from a Halloween costume party during happier times, when she’d dressed up as the Uma Thurman character in
Pulp Fiction
and her husband had adopted a black suit and thin tie like John Travolta playing Vincent the hired killer. She 160

RED 1–2–3

remembered the fun they’d had when they had taken to the dance floor and copied the almost painfully slow, exaggerated, slinky motions the movie couple had used to mesmerize audiences. She stuck one of her dead husband’s frayed baseball caps on top of the wig.

She hunted around until she found some of her old pregnancy clothing in an old cardboard box, and fastening a small throw pillow around her midsection with shipping tape, she created the appearance of someone perhaps five months along. Some dark sunglasses and an old brown oversized and out-of-style overcoat that she hadn’t used in years completed her disguise. She thought she looked as little like herself as she could manage on short notice.

Sarah did not consider it particularly good, as far as disguises went. She had no idea whether the Wolf would be able to recognize her, especially in a crowd, but she guessed he would, no matter how she altered her appearance.
He’ll just smell me,
she thought. She attributed unbelievable powers of detection to the Wolf. She assumed he’d seen her emerge from her house, although she had exited the rear door, scooted around the side, hunched over like a soldier dodging enemy fire to hide her fake pregnancy, and flung herself into her car. She had even carried her overcoat in a plastic garbage bag, so that the style and color were hidden until she put it on when she reached the game. She hadn’t been able to spot any out-of-the ordinary cars up and down her street as she peeled out, tires squealing. She had taken the usual elusive steps to avoid being followed.

A large part of her felt this was all foolishness. Trying to hide made no sense. The Wolf, she thought, was everywhere all at once.

Staring out at the basketball court, faking a cheer after a shot dropped through the net, all Sarah could actually see were wolf prints stenciled on the grave headstone. She had tried to examine those prints, but it was difficult for her. It seemed like the Wolf was lurking on the periphery of her existence, waiting for the right moment.
The right moment,
she thought.

What creates the right moment?

She wedged herself between two couples and tried hard to engage each with banter about the players and the game, so that anyone watching her 161

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might think they had all come together that evening to watch. This illusion wasn’t hard to create.

Sarah breathed in, waiting for the clock to tick down toward the final buzzer. She closed her eyes and went over what she was supposed to do. It was a haphazard plan, rapidly constructed after calls to Red One and Red Three. Urgency seemed to stalk them in the same way the Wolf did.

The crowd let out mixed sounds of success and failure. The horn sounded, ending the game. People stood, stretching. Sarah saw the two teams lining up to shake hands. It was the moment where the busy-ness of the court transfers into the stands. Each team gave a perfunctory cheer for the other, but Sarah didn’t hear this. She was already digging her way through clutches of fans and parents who were jamming the aisles and walkways leading from the bleachers. She kept her head down, dodging people who were putting on jackets and talking animatedly about the game. She hoped that somewhere close, Red One was doing more or less the same.

With a quick glance back over her shoulder, Sarah ducked down a stairwell that led to the locker rooms. A second glance let her know she was alone. She paused, listening for steps behind her, but heard none. There was a distant echo of teenage voices laughing, but they seemed benign and un-Wolf-like. Red Three had told her that down the corridor she would see a door marked ladies. That was where she was headed. She pushed inside.

Sarah sighed when she realized she was alone. She thought,
The Wolf
won’t follow me in here.
Again, she knew this was nonsense. A killer bent on murder wouldn’t really feel a sense of propriety about entering a women’s bathroom. Still, she felt oddly reassured.

There were three stalls to her right, across from some glistening sinks.

She went into the farthest. Sarah locked the door behind her and sat down on the toilet to wait.
Fifteen minutes,
Red Three had told her. She checked her wristwatch. Time seemed to pass erratically, as if each minute had some different, odd number of seconds that bore no relation to the regular sixty.

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* * *

Instead, she had arrived in the parking lot outside the gym and stepped out of her car and walked up and down each row of vehicles, staring in at each, making certain they were all empty. This had seemed to her to be just on the near side of crazy behavior, but she felt reassured when she slipped back into her own car.

She had rolled down her window so that she could keep track of the game’s progress by listening for the muted cheers from the crowd. She had heard the buzzer signaling the end and known she would have to wait for only a few moments.

The first people through the doors were students. They were laughing as they disappeared into the slippery evening darkness. Then a steadier flow of teenagers, adults, and even some small children began to emerge.

That was her signal to move.

Like a fish swimming against the current, she ducked her head and zigzagged through the exiting crowd. She was the only person battling to get in. That had been her only plan. If the Wolf was behind her, he would create the same commotion she did. She kept looking back over her shoulder to see if there was someone trying to follow her through the knots of people. It did not seem so.

Karen headed toward the same stairwell that Sarah had passed down moments earlier. A few students were walking either up or down, but no Wolf. She found the ladies’ room as easily as Sarah. Unconsciously mimicking Red Two’s movements, she looked right and left, making sure she was alone. Then she, too, ducked inside.

She let a second of two of silence fill the room before she stage-whispered, “Sarah?”

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“I’m right here,” came the reply from the stall. Sarah emerged from behind the door and the two women awkwardly embraced.

Karen stepped back and looked at the fake pregnancy outfit and the short black wig and managed a small smile before speaking. “You must have been . . .” Karen started, thinking about the paw prints on the headstones.

She stopped, not knowing what word to use.
Scared? Terrified? Upset?

“Totally freaked,” Sarah replied, grimly, even if her choice of words seemed easygoing. “When I called you, I was panicked. But I’ve gotten hold of myself. Sort of. Still a little shaky. How about you?”

Karen thought about describing being on stage and hearing the wolf whistle and thinking it was the Wolf ’s whistle, but didn’t. She believed that stirring up Sarah’s already unsteady emotions couldn’t possibly help.