The night before, when she’d run through the growing nighttime to where she knew Red One was waiting for her, she’d imagined Red Three’s piercing scream. I bet it convinced everyone.
She curled up into a ball.
Sarah died last night, she thought. Suicide note and “Goodbye, I’m gone forever.” They will bury me beside my husband and my daughter. Except it won’t be me. It will be an empty coffin.
She knew she was destined to become someone new. She wasn’t at all certain she liked this. But until she was reborn, she would only be Red Two.
A deadly Red Two, she told herself. A homicidal Red Two. A cold chill of ferocity slid through her, surging up against uncontrollable rage.
But then she abruptly gave in to all the emotions reverberating within her and sobbed uncontrollably on the floor as she cradled not a picture of her dead family, but the.357 Colt Magnum.
30
The Big Bad Wolf gasped once, then shouted out an incomprehensible torrent of curses. He spun about and had to restrain himself from punching the kitchen wall. Instead, he crushed the local news section of the daily newspaper in his fists and closed his eyes as if someone were drawing fingernails across a blackboard making a scratching sound that assaulted every nerve end in his body. Beneath his fingers was a headline on a short article: Former Schoolteacher a Suspected Suicide.
“No, goddamnit! No!” he bellowed in sudden, uncontrollable rage.
Bright light reflected off the river surface. The rain had finally stopped and the weather had warmed slightly. The wind had dropped and the morning sun had risen into a wide, cloudless blue sky. A small crowd was gathered on the bridge, leaning up against the low concrete barrier and watching the activity below. A news crew seemed bored, their shoulder-held camera lying uselessly against the wheel of their panel truck. Cars on the bridge slowed down as they gawked at the activity before speeding away. Three Hispanic women, each pushing a baby-filled stroller, had paused and were talking rapidly and gesticulating toward the flat black water surface. One woman crossed herself three times rapidly. The Big Bad Wolf slid in beside a pair of men not much older than him. He knew they would both be observant and filled with opinions readily shared. They were smoking, letting wisps of cigarette smoke pungently fill the still air.
“I tell yah, they ain’t gonna find nothin’,” one man said confidently, although he hadn’t been asked a question. He wore a tattered gray overcoat and a crumpled brown felt fedora that was snugged down tight on a weather-beaten forehead. He shaded his eyes against the morning glare.
“Man, I wouldn’t go in there,” said his companion. “Not even with a safety line.”
“You know, they ought to post no-swimming signs all over the place.”
“Yeah, except they ain’t looking for no swimmer.”
The two men grunted in agreement.
Poised thirty yards from the bridge buttresses were two small aluminum outboards. A pair of policemen in black wet suits and wearing twin aluminum air tanks were taking turns slipping into the river, while others held ropes and maneuvered the boats against the strong currents.
The Wolf watched carefully. There was something hypnotizing in the way a diver would disappear, leaving a trail of air bubbles and a slight disturbance on the water surface, only to emerge within a few moments, struggling against the powerful flow of the river. He could see frustration and exhaustion as the divers were pulled from the water and the boats moved to a different position. A grid search, the Big Bad Wolf thought. Standard police technique: Divide the area into manageable segments and inspect each before moving to the next.
“Have they come up with anything at all?” he asked the two old men, who clearly had been watching all morning. He used a carefully chosen tone of idle curiosity.
“Some crap. Like a kid-sized jacket or something. That got ’em all excited for a while and both guys went under for maybe fifteen minutes. But nothing else. So now they’re moving back and forth. Maybe trying to get lucky.”
“I sometimes fish that stretch,” his companion said. “But no one is dumb enough to go near the river until after it comes down in the summer. At least no one who wants to live.” This old man was wearing a navy baseball cap adorned with the name of the USS Oriskany, a retired Vietnam-era carrier that had been sunk to make an artificial reef. The cap had a frayed peak. The Wolf noticed that his hands were scarred and gnarled, like the roots of an ancient oak.
“I tell yah, they ain’t gonna find nothin’,” the other man said again. “They’re just wasting our tax dollars out there. They buy up all that fancy diving equipment and never get much chance to use it.”
“They’ll give up soon enough,” Baseball Hat said to Fedora.
The Big Bad Wolf decided to keep watching. But he thought the old man was probably right.
They ain’t gonna find nothin’.
Maybe, he thought, because there’s nothing to find.
He just wasn’t sure, which irritated him no end. He knew certainty was the lifeblood of murder. Small details and accurate assessments. He sometimes considered himself to be an accountant of killing. This was one of those moments where attention to minutiae was critical. It’s like doing a tax return of death.
Maybe I have killed her, he thought. Certainly the intense pressure he’d brought to bear was enough to drive someone to take her own life. If you know you’re about to be murdered, wouldn’t you elect to kill yourself? That made a certain amount of sense. He thought of prisoners awaiting execution who hang themselves in their cells, or people who receive a diagnosis of a terminal illness. He had a vision of doomed financial brokers and office workers throwing themselves from the Twin Towers on 9/11. The uncertainty of awaiting death can be far worse than the pain of suicide. And he knew that Red Two was the weakest of the three Reds. If she had tossed herself into the river, well, that was almost as good as choking her to death himself. For a moment he could feel pressure in his hands, as if they were wrapped around Red Two’s neck and he was actually throttling her beneath him. Certainly worth putting a notch on the gun, he told himself, thinking like some old Western gunslinger.
Death is like the truth. It answers questions.
He made a mental note to put that in his next chapter. Perhaps he could legitimately claim her murder alongside the two others. He considered this possibility and realized that his earlier anger just might have been misplaced. Readers will be intrigued by the thought that I could drive her to take her own life. It will be shocking. Like all those people slowing down on the bridge to see if they can spot something, readers will need to see what happens next. It will make them more anxious for Red One and Red Three. And that will make the last days for the remaining Reds a little easier to manage, with one less stop along the road to death.