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 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 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.
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 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 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.