“Chinga tu madre!” Jordan blurted out, pointing at the boy’s chest.
“Jordan, that’s enough!” Mrs. Garcia had slipped into furious English. She rarely did this.
Jordan could feel every eye in the room on her. She threw her head back, defiant, and was about to direct another insult at the class. She remembered an old insult from one of the books they had read earlier in the semester: El burro sabe más que tu… The donkey knows more than you. She was about to shout this one out, but hesitated.
“You can either leave or stay-your choice, Jordan,” Mrs. Garcia said in a slow, furious tone. “But either way, you will immediately cease what you are doing.”
The command demanded silence in the class. Whispers, undercover laughter, muffled obscenities all stopped.
Jordan reached down and started to collect her things. She had this vision of giving the finger to all the kids in the class, walking out, and finding some isolated, bucolic spot where she could be alone and patiently wait for her killer to find her and put an end to everything. But partway through this dramatic exit, she stopped. She looked up at Mrs. Garcia, whose red face had dimmed, and who now looked merely sad.
Jordan took a deep breath. “No,” she said suddenly. “Ésta es mi clase favorita.” She sat down abruptly.
Another silence riveted the classroom. After a long pause, Mrs. Garcia cleared her throat, looked sadly again at Jordan, and muttered, “Bueno,” before continuing with the day’s lesson.
Jordan sat back down in her seat and resumed staring out the window. She didn’t want to make eye contact with any of her fellow students. Instead she thought:
Big-that was grande.
Bad-that was malo.
Wolf-that was lobo.
She put them together in her head. Grande malo lobo. It had a nice rhythm to it. Spanish was like that, she thought. Every phrase sounded like it belonged in a song. Jordan sighed and stiffened, still refusing to turn and have any contact with her classmates. She felt like a piece of radioactive waste. She was glowing, dangerous, and no one could touch her.
When the class ended, Jordan waited for the others to leave. Mrs. Garcia had taken a seat behind her desk at the front. She gestured for Jordan to approach.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. G,” Jordan said.
The woman nodded. “I know you’re having a tough time, Jordan. Is there any way I can help?”
Do you have a gun? Can you shoot straight? “No. But thank you.”
The teacher looked disappointed, but managed a small smile. “You will let me know if you think I can. Even if it’s just to talk things over. Any time. Any day. Any reason. Okay?”
Are you a killer or just a Spanish teacher? Can you kill a man who wants to kill me? “Okay, Mrs. G. Thanks.”
Jordan slung her backpack over her shoulder and left the classroom. She hadn’t gone far when she heard a buzzing noise, which she recognized as the throwaway phone that Red One had given her. She ducked into a women’s toilet and found an empty stall before removing the phone and staring at the screen.
It was a text from Red Two.
Meet tonite. Talk. Important.
She was about to reply to this, when a second text came in, from Red One.
Pickup pizza place 7.
She texted both back: OK.
She wanted to add If we’re still alive at 7 tonight. She didn’t.
Then Jordan headed off to English class. The assignment that day was Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-lighted Place.” She had read the story through twice, but decided that if her teacher asked her about it, she would pretend she hadn’t even looked at it.
What she had liked most was the Spanish waiter in the story. The older one who was willing to keep the bar open for the lonely ancient man, not the young one in a hurry to get home to his wife.
Nada y pues nada y pues nada.
She knew exactly what the waiter meant with every word, and it didn’t need any translation.
25
“This was the best idea I could come up with on short notice,” Red One said. “It seems like a safe place.”
A safe place was a concept that seemed alien, except that when they were together, somehow the threat they all shared seemed diminished by division: Terror divided by three equals what?
The three Reds were standing on a dark and narrow side street in a cone of wan light just outside the door of the Goddess Bookshop, away from the more frequented parts of the small city. Mainly women-various ages, varied shapes, including a few hand in hand with toddlers or pushing strollers-were entering the small store. The bookshop featured shelves filled with new-age novels, works on necromancy and female health issues, along with the occasional how-to volume on tarot card reading or predicting by astrological sign.
This night an out-of-town author was coming in for a discussion of her latest novel and rows of folding chairs had been set up throughout the modest space, close to a small podium. There was a large poster of the woman: She was between Red One and Red Two in age and wore her long black hair in what Jordan considered vampire style-straight down, obscuring some of her features to give herself a mysterious although not particularly subtle look. The writer also sported an all-black outfit-boots, slacks, silk shirt, and thick woolen cape-distinguished only by a single large necklace that featured some heavy mystical sign encrusted with sparkling stones. Copies of her book were displayed in tall stacks right inside the doors. The poster indicated that it was part of an ongoing series. This particular novel was titled The Return of the She-Killer and featured an exaggerated cartoonlike drawing of a Valkyrie warrior maiden on the jacket, gleaming sword drawn and battling against a squad of overmuscled yet clearly overmatched horned, helmeted Viking types. Dragons flew in the jacket background.
Karen led the other two Reds inside and steered them to some seats off to the side of the makeshift podium, where they would be able to see both the speaker and anyone entering the store. They settled into the uncomfortable steel chairs and each, without saying anything to the others, began to assess the face of everyone joining the gathering.
There were only four men in the crowd. Each looked slightly uncomfortable in a different way. The three Reds watched them furtively, looking for some telltale sign that might suggest they were looking at the Big Bad Wolf.
One man was small, wiry, with a mouselike furtiveness-but he had come in with a woman twice his size and a young daughter, whom he spent much time trying to keep from squirming in her seat. Another was a burly, bearded sort, not unlike the men on the author’s book jacket. He had a lumberjack’s build and sported a red-checked woolen jacket. But he had entered accompanied by a pink-haired, multiple-pierced young woman wearing exaggerated clothing similar to the author’s, and she had dutifully filled the man’s arms with copies of what appeared to be other books in the series and apparently tasked him with getting signatures on each. He had a beaten-dog look to him. The other two men looked more academic-thick glasses, tweed suit coats, and corduroy trousers-and both displayed their discomfort at being dragged along to the reading in their body language. Each man sat with his arms folded, slouched in a seat, bored look on his face beside a woman perched on the edge of her chair, eyes glowing, pitched forward, eagerly hanging on every word.
None of these men seemed even moderately murderous in any fashion.