She shut her eyes. Okay. If this is it, at least it will be fast. Just like Ted and Brittany. They never saw the truck. Just one minute they were alive and laughing and having a fine time, and then they were dead. Maybe it will be like that for me, too. So okay, Big Bad Wolf. Just shoot me right now!
She pulled the door open savagely and stood framed in the space. Take your damn shot!
She closed her eyes. Waited.
Nothing.
She could feel the evening’s chill descending. It cooled her, and she realized that she was sweating, hot, as if she’d been exercising.
She blinked. Her street was as it always was. Quiet. Empty. She took a deep breath and stepped out. Maybe there’s a bomb attached to my car and when I start it up, it will explode just like in some Hollywood gangster movie.
She slid behind the wheel and, without hesitating, turned the key over. The engine fired up and hummed like a cat being stroked.
Well, maybe the Big Bad Wolf will slam some truck into me, and I can die like Ted and Brittany did.
She steered the car into the street and stopped. Again she closed her eyes. Broadside. Forty, maybe fifty miles an hour. Just like the oil truck. Come on. I’m waiting. I’m ready.
Sarah’s eyes again were squeezed tight. Any second now, she thought.
The car horn seemed to blast inches away from her left ear. The sound sliced the air like an explosion. She gasped and involuntarily held up her arm, as if to shield herself from impact. Her eyes flew open and she cried out some half-scream, half-sob.
The horn beeped again. Only this time, it seemed childlike, like a toy noise.
She half-turned in her seat, and saw that she was obstructing a couple in a small Japanese compact car. The man behind the wheel, who looked to be in his early sixties, and his wife, who was still dark-haired and appeared a little younger, were waving at her, but not in an impatient, unfriendly fashion. It was more like they were concerned and confused. Sarah stared at the couple, and then haphazardly pieced things together in her head. I’m blocking the road. They want to get past me.
The woman in the passenger seat rolled down her window. From perhaps ten feet away, she called out in a questioning tone, “Is everything okay?”
Yes. No. Yes. No. Sarah didn’t respond other than to wave her hand as if to say Sorry without an explanation. She fumbled to get the car into forward gear. Then she quickly thrust her foot down on the accelerator and without looking back drove rapidly down the street. She did not know exactly where she was going, but wherever it was, she went in a hurry, breathing hard, almost hyperventilating, like a swimmer preparing for a dive into uncertain waters or waiting for the starter’s gun to sound the start of a race.
“Odd,” said Mrs. Big Bad Wolf.
“Maybe the young lady got a cell phone call, or remembered that she’d forgotten something. But you shouldn’t just stop in the middle of the road,” the Big Bad Wolf replied. “That’s really dangerous.”
“It’s a good thing you were paying attention,” his wife said. “People just certainly are strange.”
“Indeed they are,” he answered as he drove slowly forward. “Don’t want to be late.” He smiled. “Shall we listen to the radio?” he asked, pleasantly enough, fiddling with the dial until he found the classical music station. He hated classical music, although he had always told his wife he loved it. Little dishonesties, he thought, were good practice for the necessary larger ones.
Karen Jayson sat at her desk, an electronic medical notebook on the flat wooden surface in front of her, her head in her hands. The day was crawling toward an end. It had been long, but not crazily so, and she should not have felt as exhausted as she did.
She was a woman accustomed to being if not exactly certain about matters, at least confident, and the letter from the Big Bad Wolf had scoured her emotions. After speaking with Detective Clark, she had set the letter aside and told herself, Forget it. Then she had picked it up again and told herself, You need to act. But precisely how eluded her. She had the sensation that she needed to be actively doing something but had very little idea what that something was. She had done everything Detective Clark had told her. She had called a security company-they were scheduled to install an alarm system in her house the next day. She had gone over patient files, looking for some error that might have led to a threat. She had racked her memory for any slight, real or imagined, that might translate into “You have been selected to die.” She had even checked out the website of the local animal shelter to see if they had some big mean dog for adoption. She had looked up the numbers of some private detectives, checked with various consumer ratings programs to see who received the best reviews, and written down the telephone numbers of two different men. She had half-dialed one number only to stop and hang up her telephone.
Above all, Karen despised panic. Or even the appearance of panic.
In medical school, doing her internship rotations, she had seriously considered a career as an emergency room physician, because even with blood spurting, cries of agony, and the need to move quickly to save a life she had always found herself preternaturally calm. The more things were disintegrating around her, the more her own pulse would slow. She thought that her response to the threatening letter should have been precisely the same as when some accident victim arrived in front of her, ravaged and in imminent danger of dying.
She liked to think of herself as a completely rational person, even with her comedy half occasionally surfacing. But since she’d opened the letter, she had been unable to even consider a comedy routine. Not a single joke, no sarcasm, no play on words or clever political observation-nothing that was the usual stuff of her routines had leapt into her thoughts. Her nighttime dreams had been tortured, which made her tired and angry.
She leaned back and rocked in her desk chair. She was shaking her head back and forth, as if disagreeing with something she’d told herself, when the door to her office opened.
“I’m sorry, Doctor, I didn’t want to disturb you…”
“No, no, it’s okay. I was just a little lost in thought.”
Karen looked over at her nurse. Only two other people worked in her small practice: a young nurse two years out of a college program who had only recently, and hesitantly, asked Karen how to have the tattoo of a sun rising on the back of her neck removed, and her longtime receptionist, an older woman who knew many of the patients and their ailments far better than Karen did.
“Last patient of the day,” the nurse said. “She’s been waiting in exam room 2 for a couple of minutes and…”
She let her voice trail off before any sort of rebuke passed her lips. Karen understood two things: The nurse wanted to get home to her EMT boyfriend and Karen shouldn’t keep the last patient of the day waiting no matter how unsettled she felt. She took a deep breath and jumped out of her chair, launching herself into her attentive doctor mode.
“It’s just a routine follow-up exam,” the nurse said, “She’s already been checked by her cardiologist. His report is in her file. She’s doing fine. This is just a follow-up physical. Nothing too important.”
She handed Karen a clipboard with a file folder attached. Karen didn’t even look at it, feeling suddenly a bit guilty for making a patient wait unnecessarily. She adjusted her white lab coat and hurried down the hallway into the exam room.