Karen and Sarah were staring hard at her, and she smiled briefly. “I’ve been reading a lot about murders,” she said. “Not doing my regular homework. Just studying killers in the library.”
“What have you learned?” Sarah asked.
“That we don’t have a chance,” Jordan replied coldly, as if this were the simplest thing in the entire world and absolutely no big deal whatsoever.
Again the three Reds plummeted into silence. It fell to Karen to break the mood. “I just can’t up and leave anyway,” Karen said. “I have patients who’ve scheduled appointments months in advance and…”
She stopped. She realized how ridiculous this sounded. There were plenty of other doctors who could take over her practice. She could run. Never look back. The thought made her breathe in and out sharply.
Sarah closed her eyes and rocked back and forth just slightly. “I could go away. Maybe I should. Start over somewhere new. Change my name and find a job and just become someone different. Maybe I could run away and try to hide. It might work.”
It felt to her as if someone else was saying these things. Perhaps they made sense. But the idea that she could walk away forever from the two coffins buried so close by hurt her almost as much as the memory of her loss.
Karen must have seen some of this in Sarah’s eyes. “That’s what the cliché is,” she said. “Start over. But it’s not that easy. And you can’t really.”
Jordan added, “It’s no good anyway,” she said. “We like have no clue what the Wolf can and can’t do. So even if you managed to slip away and start over, maybe he can follow you. There’d be no way to ever know whether you were safe or not.”
She looked at the other two Reds. A quick thought came to her: We’re stronger together. Then a contradictory thought: Maybe that’s what he imagines we’ll think.
She felt herself shrugging her shoulders at the same time that her hands quivered slightly.
“I think we’re each locked here-we stick together, for better or for worse,” Jordan added. “I’m guessing the Wolf knows that, and took it into consideration when he chose us. So, really, there’s only one answer.”
“Which is?” Sarah asked.
“We have to misbehave.”
This word made the two older women stop in some confusion.
“What do you mean?”
“We have to not act normal.” Both Karen and Sarah started to interrupt, but Jordan held up her hand. “I know that’s what you said to do, but look, does it really help? No.”
She hesitated, and continued. “What are we?” she asked. Then she answered her own question. “We are products of our routines. What makes us feel a little safer? When we drive in circles and wear disguises and imagine that somehow we’re fooling the Wolf; and even when we know we’re not, it still makes us feel better. What I’m saying is that we each have to figure out how not to be ourselves, because the Wolf knows us and has followed us, and”-Jordan jabbed her index finger between her breasts, beating time to her words-“this fucking Little Red Riding Hood doesn’t want to just walk blindly into whatever trap he has set.”
Karen was astonished at the teenager’s muted fury. She was also taken aback by the intelligence of Jordan’s idea.
“If the Wolf is waiting for us in the forest, he knows…” she started, but Jordan finished.
“… Then we should be walking in a different forest on a different path.”
“Easier said than done,” Sarah said. “It’s like we’re locked into who we are. Jordan, are you going to suddenly skip a basketball game? Karen, you talked about all those patients. They’re scheduled. The Wolf has probably scheduled our deaths as well. How do you change who you are and what you do overnight?”
Karen nodded, then said, “Okay. I don’t know if it’ll work, but we can try. What else can we do?”
Jordan waved her arms around, pointing at the walls of the locker room. While they’d been speaking, the rest of the team had finished showering, dressed, and made their way out, so that now the three were alone in the rows of gray steel lockers. The heat from the showers was starting to dissipate in the humid air around them.
“What?” Sarah asked.
“Have you ever been to my school before?” Jordan asked.
“No.”
“What about you, Karen?”
“No.”
Jordan continued. “Well, I’ve never been to the school where you were a teacher, Sarah. And I don’t see a doctor in your building, Karen. It makes it all seem completely random, doesn’t it? As if the Wolf just picked out three redheads arbitrarily and began his plans. Look, if that’s the case, well, then I think we’re screwed; all we can do is buy more guns and wait. So that’s just crazy thinking. But maybe it isn’t random.” Jordan was going to continue, but suddenly didn’t know what to say.
Karen however, seemed to be trapped in some thought. Sarah started rocking back and forth again. They could hear a shower that some player hadn’t quite shut off dripping in the adjacent room.
“We’re a triangle,” Jordan said. “If we can find the right legs, we can see the connection. I think we’ve been going the wrong way on this,” Jordan said. “It’s the mistake everyone who gets stalked makes.”
Jordan waved her arms in front of her, slashing through the heavy locker room air. She opened her eyes and faced the other Reds. “We know the Wolf wants us. We have to make him want us so much that he hurries himself into a mistake.”
Again Jordan inspected the two other women. She thought they were mature, reasonable, intelligent, and accomplished, all the things that she expected to be someday. If she had a someday.
“If we were hunting a wolf, what would we do?”
“Get close enough to see him,” Karen said.
“Right, and then what?” Jordan asked. It seemed to her most curious: She was acting like the professor, while the others were responding like students. Neither Karen nor Sarah replied, so she answered her own question with a single word. “Ambush.”
Sarah quivered, then shrugged. Why not? she thought. I’m half-dead already. She did not know why, but she burst out in a shrill, humorless laugh, as if she alone had heard some slightly off-color joke that was both funny and offensive. She stood up and reached under her sweater and stripped off her fake pregnancy pillow, tossing all the packing tape she’d used to attach it to her stomach into a nearby wastebasket. Then she unpinned her wig and shook out her hair, so that it flowed freely, a little like lava running down the side of an active volcano.
At about the same moment, the Big Bad Wolf was standing beside his car, staring down at a tire that seemed partially flat. He was just outside of his house, carrying a briefcase with his tape recorder and his notepad and all the questions he’d painstakingly constructed for the Mystery Writers’ forensic experts’ evening lecture. Afternoon light was fading around him and his first thought was that he would miss the talk because of a bit of bad if not uncommon luck. He kicked at the tire angrily. He bent down and tried to see the nail that had created the slow leak, but he couldn’t. It was just as likely that he’d hit one of New England’s ever-present potholes and bent the inner tire rim. He knew he’d have to call road service, get them out to change the tire, and waste time the next day getting the damage repaired, and all this would tear him away from what he truly wanted to be doing, which was closing in on the three Reds.