She waited, holding her breath.
Jordan watched the figure in the station wagon sit upright and undo the seat belt. Then the figure opened the car door, stepped out and stood close to the car, continuing to stare at the group of teenagers inside the restaurant.
It was dark and the bright neon lights from the few stores open threw odd rainbow colors across the street, reflecting off glistening black macadam. Yellow sodium vapor streetlights tossed sickly shades down on the cement. It was a confusion of color; blacks and reds and greens and whites all mingled together, making lies of realities: A green car looked blue. A scarlet parka seemed brown.
She could not tell with certainty that the person’s hair was red. She bit down on her lip and decided that she had no choice but to chance it.
Jordan stepped from the shadow and walked quickly forward to the car. She saw the woman turn in surprise toward her. She had a sudden look of shock, as if Jordan were holding a knife. “Red One?” Jordan asked. She wanted her voice to be firm and confident, but she could hear a crack, like ice fracturing under too much weight on a frigid day.
The woman nodded. Her face seemed to relax.
“Hi. I’m Red Three.”
“Jump in,” Karen replied, gesturing toward the passenger side. She was trying to sound as if this were the most natural meeting in the world.
When Jordan hesitated, Karen said, “I’m not him. I promise.” She watched the younger woman seem to assess the validity of her statement, then cautiously slide into the car. Karen only had a few seconds to measure Jordan, especially the few strands of her red hair that escaped from beneath the tight-knit hat. She’s so young, the older woman thought as she got behind the wheel of her car.
“I’m Jordan,” Jordan said quietly.
“And I’m Karen,” the older woman replied. Jordan nodded. “Where shall we go?” Karen asked.
“Anywhere,” Jordan replied as she shrunk down in her seat, as if by lowering her profile she could avoid being seen. “Anywhere you think it’s safe.”
She paused, then said in a low voice, “No. Anywhere you are absolutely fucking certain it’s safe.”
Karen unwittingly mimicked Jordan’s evasive path as soon as she put her car in gear. She accelerated hard one instant, turned down a side street, squealing her tires with the sudden turn, then backed into an alleyway and made a U-turn. A mile outside the town there was a modest strip mall, where Karen turned in to a McDonald’s and drove through the take-out window before exiting in yet a different direction. She steered the car onto the interstate highway, drove fast for a few miles, then pulled into a scenic rest area and waited, her eyes constantly scanning the rearview mirror to make sure no one was following them. Finally, when she had seen nothing but darkness for a few minutes, she once again drove fast, heading toward a spot she knew that fit Red Three’s standard of being safe and fucking certain.
Jordan said nothing during the trip. Not even when she was thrown sideways and jerked forward as Karen pushed the car wildly around a corner. Karen imagined that the teenager was probably accustomed to wild, aimless rides.
“This is getting to be my regular driving style,” Karen said briskly. She half-hoped that a little light talk might help them to connect. But her passenger remained quiet, as if lost in thought. Karen glanced from time to time at the younger woman. She thought Red Three preternaturally calm.
The hospital complex was lit up with security lights, especially near the emergency room access. There was a small white kiosk with a bored rent-a-cop guarding the doctors’ parking lot. Karen pulled in there, giving the sullen security guard her name and a five number code, which he checked on his computer before waving her in wordlessly.
Karen found a spot near the back, hidden from view.
“Let’s go inside,” Karen said. “Follow me.”
Again without speaking, Jordan complied.
The two women marched across the parking area. They passed from shadows into the cones of wan light dropped from above by high-intensity lamps. The light made their skin seem sallow, sickly. Each thought the same thing: that even if they had been followed at the start, their precautions had to have done enough to lose any wolf on their trail.
Neither of the two really believed this.
Shoulder to shoulder, they hurried out of the night into the hospital. There was a triage nurse at a desk in a brightly lit waiting room outside the emergency room. She looked up at the two of them with a world-weary look. There was a water fountain in a corner, and two state policemen in gray-blue outfits and three navy-blue jumpsuited EMTs were sharing a joke nearby. There was a burst of laughter from the three men and two women. Jordan glanced at the people waiting on uncomfortable molded plastic chairs. An old man buried under winter coats. A young Hispanic couple with a child in a pink parka seated between them, and a baby in the woman’s arms. A pair of college-aged boys, one of whom looked both sick and drunk and was, somehow, sitting unsteadily.
No Wolf, she thought, waiting for us.
Karen dug around in her large, oversized leather purse, found an ID card, and waved it toward the triage nurse, who in turn hit a buzzer entrance. Karen gestured as the automatic doors swung open. Inside the emergency-room treatment suites, she waited for the doors to slam shut with an electronic locking thud.
With Jordan in tow, she passed the curtained exam rooms, pausing only to wave at a physician she seemed to know, before exiting through another set of doors and then traveling down a long sterile corridor that opened up into a cafeteria.
“Do you want something to eat?” She asked. “Or coffee?”
“Just coffee,” Jordan replied. “Cream and sugar.”
She sat at a corner table away from white-jacketed or green-surgical-gowned groups of interns and residents as Karen went to the counter and fashioned two steaming cups of coffee. Jordan nodded to herself and thought, This is a good place. If the Wolf came in he’d stand out unless he was in scrubs. She half-smiled when Karen returned to their table.
The young woman and the older woman sat across from each other, sipping the coffee, not saying anything for a few moments. It was Jordan who broke the silence.
‘So,” she said, “I gather you’re a doctor.”
“Internal medicine.”
Jordan shook her head. “I was hoping you were a shrink.”
“Why?” Karen asked.
“Because then maybe you’d know something about abnormal psychology, and that might help us,” Jordan answered. “I’m just a student,” she continued. “And not a real good one lately, either.”
Karen nodded, and then said, “But we’re both something else, now. Or, at least, it sure seems that way.”
“Yeah,” the teenager responded with a sudden burst of bitterness. “Now we’re targets. It’s like we’ve got bull’s-eyes painted on our backs. Or maybe we’re just soon-to-be-dead victims. Or some combination of the two.”
Karen shook her head. “We don’t know that. We can’t…” Her voice trailed off. She looked up into the harsh ceiling lights of the cafeteria, trying to think of something reassuring to say. And then she gave up. She took a deep breath. “What do we know?” she asked.
Jordan paused before answering. “Not too fucking much.”
The obscenity rolled freely off her tongue. Ordinarily she would never have used that sort of language with an older person. It gave her a sense of freedom to be so rude with Karen.
“No,” Karen corrected her softly, “we know a few things. Like there are three of us. And one of him-”
“We don’t know that,” Jordan interrupted instantly. She had a queasy feeling in her stomach, because her next thought-the one she was about to speak out loud-had just struck her. Lone wolf? How do we know? “We only know that it feels like there’s just the one guy out there hunting all three of us. That’s because in the fairy tale there’s just the one Big Bad Wolf. But we don’t know for certain that there aren’t two or three guys out there, like a little club. Maybe they’re like the Knights of Columbus or some fantasy football team, except they’re all about killing. And maybe they’re lounging around some nice rec room in somebody’s basement drinking beers and eating pretzels, giggling and guffawing and thinking this is just the damn funniest thing ever, before they get their acts together and come kill us.”