“We can try confrontation,” Karen said. “See if that scares him off.”
“You mean,” Jordan interjected, “like knock on his door and say, ‘Hi. We’re the three Reds. One of us has already faked her death, but we’d really like it if you’d stop saying you’re going to kill us, pretty please.’ Now, that’s a plan that we can all really get behind.”
Sarah nodded. “Of course, we do that or something like that-let him know we know who he is-and it’s just as possible that it would force him to make a move. He might accelerate all his plans. Think of all the movies you’ve seen, where the kidnappers tell the victim’s family, ‘Don’t call the police,’ and either they do or they don’t, but neither answer is ever right because it sets everything in motion. It’s like we’ve been kidnapped.”
“One other thing,” Jordan added. “If we just confront him, we lose all our advantages. He just denies he’s the Wolf, slams the door in our faces, and we’re back at square one. Maybe we’re dead tomorrow or next week or next year. Maybe all he’ll do is decide to invent a new plan and put that into action.”
Karen put her head into her hands for an instant. She was trying to see clearly through a fog of possibilities. It was like sorting through symptoms belonging to a very sick patient. A misstep, a wrong diagnosis, and the patient might die.
“We don’t know for sure that he is the Wolf,” she said. “How can we act without being one hundred percent sure?” She was a little surprised at the hesitancy creeping into her words; she always tried to be aggressive, decisive. This was hard for her. She felt like she had just delivered a joke that fell flat, and she was being laughed at, not with.
Jordan shrugged. “So what? We’re not a court of law. We’re not going to the cops with some crazy-ass story about notes and a Wolf and sneaking around for all this time, just so a cop can think we’re complete nuts.” Jordan was speaking fast. Probably too fast, the other two Reds thought. “It’s all about maintaining the edge. Keeping control. There’s only one thing we can do.”
Karen knew what Jordan was going to say, but she let the teenager say it anyway.
“We outwolf him.”
“How do we do that?” Sarah asked. She already knew the answer to her question. It just scared her.
Karen, too, knew the answer. She leaned back and felt a ripple of muscle tension race through her entire body, as if she was quivering from head to toe. Her last remaining bit of reason forced some words out of her mouth. “We can’t just go kill him, just like that. Wait outside his front door and when he comes out to get the newspaper, shoot him and then try to disappear? Do our own little urban drive-by? That’s not who we are. And we’d all end up in prison, because that’s not self-defense, it’s murder, and the last time I checked, none of us are master criminals.”
“How do we make it into self-defense?” Sarah asked. “Like a trap? Do we wait for him to try to kill us first? Except, maybe he’s been doing that already.”
“I don’t know,” Karen replied. “None of us has ever done anything like this before.”
“Are you sure?” Sarah allowed frustration to creep into her voice. “We invented my death. We’ve all been manipulative, scheming, I don’t know what, at some point in our lives. Everyone has. Everyone lies. Everyone cheats. You grow up and you learn how. We just have to create something that the Wolf would never expect. Why can’t we do that?”
“What do you mean ‘create something’-” Karen started, but was interrupted by Sarah.
“Something he would never expect.”
“And what-”
“Don’t you feel like everything he’s done depends upon us acting like nice normal sensible friendly folks? We stop acting like all those things that make us who we are. Or, who we have been.”
The three Reds were quiet for a few moments.
“I want to kill him,” Jordan said slowly, breaking into a silence that seemed lethal. “I have since the very start. I want to be finished with the Wolf totally and completely. And I don’t care about anything anymore except that we move, and move fast. And prison is better than a grave.”
“You sure about that?” Karen asked.
Jordan didn’t reply. It’s a good question, she thought. This idea was immediately followed by the young person’s automatic answer to all huge doubts: Ahhh, fuck it.
“But how?” Sarah asked sharply. “What do we do?”
She couldn’t believe she was actually agreeing to a murder. She also couldn’t believe she would not agree to murder, in this case. She wasn’t even completely sure they were talking about murder, except that was what it sounded like. It was as if in the darkness of the science lab, any chance of rational thought was dissipating around them.
Karen was about to say something, but then stopped herself. Are you a killer? she suddenly demanded of herself. She did not know the right response, but she knew she was about to find out.
Jordan was nodding her head. She typed some numbers into the search engine on the computer.
A Google Earth image of a modest suburban home in an undistinguished neighborhood came up on the screen. Jordan hit street view and suddenly they were moving up and down the road where the writer and the secretary lived. It was not unlike Sarah’s old neighborhood: trim, white-sided houses with well-kept yards. It was a typical New England neighborhood, not the sort that end up on postcards or in travel brochures featuring farms or stately old houses. These were simply rows of homes built thirty years earlier, with a postwar feel, well maintained by generations of blue-collar workers and their families, who took pride in ownership as part of the American dream of upward mobility. It was a place where folks generally went to the local high school to cheer for the football team on Friday nights and ate a post-church meat loaf dinner on Sundays. People would be rabid supporters of the Red Sox and Patriots, but unable to afford the exaggerated ticket prices except maybe once a year. Their kids grew up hoping for a good job with a union contract, so they could repeat the same arc as their parents, only just a little bit better, just as their parents had done a little bit better than their parents.
It was the sort of place that encapsulated all that was both right and wrong with America, because hidden behind all the mowed lawns and freshly painted aluminum siding were more than a few alcohol or drug problems, domestic violence, and the other sorts of afflictions that commonly run beneath the fake surface of normalcy. The three Reds all looked at the images of the house and the street-from above, from in front, from behind-and tried to imagine how something as evil as the Wolf could flower in that sort of spot. That a killer lived there seemed impossible. Red One thought, These are the people who come to me for help when they are sick. Red Two thought, These people are just like me. I taught their children. Red Three thought, I have nothing in common with these people, and they would look at my private school, nice clothes, and money background and hate me instantly.
Sarah spoke first. “I don’t know if that’s the Wolf’s home,” she said hesitantly, “but we have no other leads. No other ideas. No one else seems like a possibility. So I think that’s where we should go.”
“I agree,” Karen said.
“You know,” Jordan said softly, “Little Red Riding Hood doesn’t exactly turn and run when the Wolf confronts her. She’s observant. She voices her doubt. ‘What big teeth you’ve got, grandmother.’ The others were silent. “We have to go ask this writer and his secretary wife some hard questions. We can’t wait. We can’t delay. Every minute we don’t act, we give the Wolf time to close in on us. We have to change the game around completely, from this moment on. We take control. If we wait one more second, it could kill us. It’s been like that from the very start, and we’ve probably pushed our luck to the damn edge. We have to be able to ask questions in such a way that he can’t possibly lie to us. Then we’ll know the truth. And we’ll know what to do, because right at that minute it will be fucking obvious.”