He stopped writing and reminded himself: The Wolf will come at her from the woods. She will not see me coming.
The biggest problem, he thought, is really the length of time between murders.
He picked up where he had left off:
Red Three’s most vulnerable moment is in the evening as well, when she walks alone across campus. But her second most vulnerable time is on Tuesday mornings. She does not have a class until 9:45. The other members of her dormitory have first-period classes that begin an hour earlier. So Tuesdays, my little Red Three likes to sleep in a little later and does not realize she is alone in that old house, because Ms. Rodriguez, the dorm parent, has early morning faculty commitments those days.
Red Three gets up slowly and idly heads to the shower down the hallway with her toothbrush and some shampoo, not really awake, wiping the sleep from her eyes without any idea what might be waiting for her there.
He smiled and nodded. He said to himself, “So it will have to be a Tuesday: Red Three in the morning and Red One in the evening.”
The Big Bad Wolf liked that, even though it should have been morning, evening, and night. I would have gone for Red Two after midnight. But there was nothing he could do about that.
He saw the obvious problem: What if Red One learns of Red Three’s murder? Then she will know that this is her last day. She will know that she is only minutes away from her own death.
That space of time between murders-there’s the dilemma.
So, it must seem to the outside world that Red Three isn’t dead. Only strangely absent. From class. From basketball. From meals. Not absent from life, which is what will be accurate.
He picked up Strunk and White from his desktop. They always argue for brevity and directness. The same is true for killing.
The Big Bad Wolf turned back to his computer.
Red Three gets more beautiful every day. Her body becomes more lithe, more limber as she approaches womanhood. She is the one about to be cheated the very most.
Red One is the opposite. She ages just infinitesimally with each passing hour. She grays and knows her dying is right around the next minute and it wears on her figure, just as it gnaws on her heart.
The Wolf worked a little more before deciding to print out a few pages. He wished he were a poet, so he could more eloquently describe his two remaining victims. He was a little saddened when he thought of Red Two. This will be hard, he told himself, but you will have to write her epitaph in a chapter of its own. He nodded, quickly typed in some notes on a file he decided to call “Red Two’s Last Will and Testament,” and before shutting down the chapter he was working on wondered whether there was any need left to encrypt his files. He thought he no longer had anything to fear from Mrs. Big Bad Wolf. He imagined he’d never had anything to fear from her. She loved him. He loved her. The rest was all just part of life together.
While he was thinking these things, he idly flicked over to the Internet. He passed over the usual deluge of daily come-ons he received from Writer’s Digest and Script and other places urging him to sign up and spend some money, because through “webinars” or access to DVDs featuring all the tricks of the writing trade he could get published or optioned or taken step-by-step and dollar-by-dollar through all the elements necessary to create his own e-book. Instead the Big Bad Wolf went to the website of a local news station to try to get a seven-day weather forecast. He knew a steady and cold rain would be best for his Tuesday plan. But before he could check the weather, he saw a brief teaser headline on a news digest that caught his eye:
Memorial Service Planned for Teacher Saturday
35
Red Two asked herself, What should you say about your own death? Or, maybe, what would you like someone else to say? Was I a good person? Maybe not.
Sarah struggled with the ideas that flooded her head. She felt trapped between life and death. The muffled sounds of gunfire were like distant thunderclaps, penetrating the thick ear protectors she wore. In the booth next to her, the Safe Space director was banging out quick shots from a Glock 9 mm, filling the air with angry explosions. Sarah lifted her dead husband’s weapon, held it out steadily with both hands the way she had been shown, and aimed down the sight at the black cartoon of a fierce man grasping a large knife, wearing a snarl and a scar, and painted with a target in his chest. She pulled the trigger three times. She doubted if the target looked much like the Big Bad Wolf.
The recoil sent shock waves through her arms, but she was privately pleased that it didn’t make her stagger back or fall to the ground as she’d expected.
She looked up, squinting down the firing range. She could see that two shots had landed just outside the target, but a third had torn the paper dead center. She didn’t know whether this was the first shot or the last, but she was pleased that at least one would have proved fatal.
“Attagirl,” the director said, leaning around a small partition that separated the shooting galleries. “Try to get a handle on how the weapon will pull one way or the other when you’re rapid-firing. And, you know, empty the chamber. Fire all six rounds. You better your chances that way. We’ve got plenty of ammo and plenty of time.”
Plenty of ammo is right, Sarah thought. Plenty of time isn’t. She cracked open the cylinder to reload from a box on the shooting platform at her waist.
Sarah Locksley, born thirty-three years ago. Happy once. Not so much anymore. Dead in a river, killed by a psychopath who drove her to further despair by threatening to murder her, except she had nothing left to live for anyway because some goddamn out-of-control fuel truck driver ran through a stop sign.
She lifted the gun and aimed again.
That won’t work. This is a memorial service. A little sadness and mainly nice, safe things said about someone whose life was cut short by tragedy.
That’s me. I’m the someone. Or maybe, it’s the ex-me.
The target loomed in front of her. She narrowed her eyes and hummed to herself to block out the noise of other weapons being fired.
Not a word about the truth of Sarah Locksley.
She smiled. A part of her wished she could go to the service. It would certainly help for her say goodbye to herself. So long, Sarah. Hello, Cynthia Harrison. I’m pleased to make your acquaintance. And I’m delighted to take over your life.
She could hear the gunshots echoing around her, and the gun jumped in her hand. Cynthia Harrison, she thought, I wonder if you would be embarrassed or disappointed or angry to know that the very first thing I do with your name is kill a man. A very special man. A wolf who most assuredly deserves to die. After all, he’s killed me once already.
This time four of the six shots landed dead center, and the fifth tore a hole in the target’s forehead.
Twenty minutes before the service was to begin, Red Three took the video camera she’d obtained at the mall and placed it in a spot where it was trained on the people who would come through the doors, stop and sign a “remembrance” book, then take their seats in the small room. It was set to record two hours’ worth of video, which Karen had insisted to the funeral director be the length of the service.