She paused for an instant, before continuing: “You see, from now on, we’re watching you.”
Karen took a deep breath. She was unsure how much of what she said was a bluff and how much wasn’t. But neither did the Wolf. She stared at him and thought she detected a twitch in his lip. She thought that to fall so fast from Wolf grandiosity to less than zero might be fatal. She hoped so. Humiliation, she thought, is a dangerous weapon. “I’ll ask you again: Can you kill someone with uncertainty?”
There was silence in the room.
Karen turned to the other Reds. “Ladies,” she said. “Time to leave.” She took the serrated bread knife she’d lifted in the kitchen and placed it on top of the television set. “Here,” she said. “I sure hope it doesn’t take you too long to make your way to this, get it into your hands, and figure out how to cut yourselves free.”
She couldn’t resist a final sardonic joke. “It’s almost morning. Hey, don’t be late for work.”
They picked up everything. As they started to exit, Jordan also couldn’t help herself. She whispered to the other two Reds, “You know something? I’ve learned that I absolutely hate fucking fairy tales.” She cackled with an unrestrained enthusiasm. Then she turned to the Big Bad Wolf as they were heading out the door, waved the manuscript pages tauntingly at him, and said, “I guess there’s gonna be a different last chapter than the one you expected, huh?”
The cold air outside hit all of them at once. At first they remained silent as they carried the items robbed from the Big Bad Wolf toward their car.
Sarah spoke before the others. “Are we really safe now?” she asked quietly.
“Yes,” Jordan said.
“No,” Karen replied.
“Maybe,” Sarah answered her own question. “So what do we do now?”
“Everything,” Jordan said.
“Nothing,” Karen muttered.
Sarah paused again. They had reached the car, and Karen opened the trunk for the stolen materials.
“Something,” Sarah said.
8 a.m.
Jordan made a point of jamming every inch of her breakfast tray, with bowls of cereal and milk, a plate of toast and eggs, fruit, coffee, and orange juice. She waited at the end of the line for a hulking linebacker on the school team to move in front of her as he headed toward the breakfast bar, and then she swung the tray into his path. It fell to the floor with a clatter of breaking dishes, an instant disgusting mess. There were close to seventy-five students and faculty in the dining hall that morning. The students-as was typical when a tray was dropped-broke into applause. The faculty-equally typically-immediately moved to get a janitor to clean up the debris and to silence the cheering students. All Jordan could think of was that everyone would remember her that morning, and the idea that she had spent the better part of the night facing down a killer would seem crazily irrational, like some completely made-up teenage fantasy that no one in their right mind would ever believe. She knelt down and began to wipe away at the mess on the floor. Goodbye, Red Three, she thought.
Sarah slid into the group of women getting a gaggle of children ready for the school bus outside of the women’s shelter. Even with all the stress of threats from estranged men, the kids still had to go to school. It was always a time of tension, with the scary idea that one of the men might arrive on the scene suddenly mingled with utter don’t be late for school normalcy. It was a bit of a melee, and the other women staying at the shelter appreciated the extra set of hands and eyes as they tried to maintain some sense of order in lives that had been completely disrupted by domestic violence. None noticed that Sarah had joined the pack not from inside the shelter, but from outside. They knew only that the single woman named Cynthia was being really helpful, double-checking with children that they had their lunches packed and their homework done, teasing and laughing with the kids in a friendly fashion, while simultaneously keeping a wary eye out for any of the threats the women knew might show up at any moment. They did not realize that for the first time in days, Sarah, who became Red Two and was now Cynthia, was imagining that she just might actually be free.
Karen greeted her first patient of the day with a cheeriness that might have seemed inappropriate for dealing with someone suffering from a painful case of shingles. She kept up a warm banter as she did a physical examination and then prescribed medications. She was careful to make certain that all her notes were time-stamped on the electronic medical records sheet for that patient. When the appointment was over, she walked the patient out to the main waiting room so that all the other people scheduled for that morning could see her on this incredibly typical, nothing-in-the-slightest-out-of-the-ordinary day. But before she went to see her second patient of the morning, Karen turned to her receptionist.
“Oh,” she said idly to the woman behind a small partition, as if this were the most unremarkable thing in the world. The doctor with the secret love of comedy handed the receptionist Mrs. Big Bad Wolf’s chart. “I’d like you to call this patient this afternoon and schedule an appointment for sometime in the next few weeks. I’m just really concerned about her heart.”
Epilogue: The First Chapter
He took the gun and cracked open the cylinder. It was a snub-nosed.38-caliber Smith & Wesson type favored by fictional police detectives in the noir books popular in the ’40s and ’50s because it fit snugly into a shoulder holster that could easily be concealed beneath a suit coat. A zoot suit, the Big Bad Wolf thought. Detectives who wore snappy fedoras on their heads and said things like “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” The Wolf knew that it was an inaccurate weapon, although singularly deadly at very short range. It was no longer in common use. In this modern era real cops preferred heavier semiautomatic arsenals that carried more bullets and delivered more impact. He had purchased this weapon from a private gun dealer in nearby Vermont and had paid a premium price for it because of its slightly antique and romantic qualities. The dealer had asked few questions when he’d seen cash.
The Wolf removed five of the six bullets from the cylinder and placed them upright in a row in front of him. He had performed this procedure every morning for more than a month. They were directly adjacent to a new passport and a fake social security card. Run and become someone new. Die. Two choices. Neither good.
He closed up the weapon with a satisfying click!
Holding the weapon out in front of him, he paused.
Hemingway. Mishima. Kosinski. Brautigan. Thompson. Plath. Sexton. He pictured them and many others.
An abrupt shaft of tension creased through his chest. He could hear a distant siren somewhere in his neighborhood. Police, fire, or ambulance-he could not tell the difference. He hardly breathed as he listened. The siren grew louder, closer; then, to his immense relief, it began to fade away, and finally disappeared.
The Wolf walked across the bedroom and stared into a large mirror. He lifted the gun and placed the barrel by the side of his forehead, thumbed back the hammer, and teased the trigger with his index finger. He wondered just how many pounds of pressure it would take to fire. One pound? Two? Three? A real tug or only a slight caress? He held that position for a good thirty seconds. Then he shifted the gun, so that the barrel was now in his mouth. He could taste the harsh metal resting on his tongue. Another thirty seconds passed. Then he moved the gun a final time in a ritual as familiar to him now as brushing his teeth or combing his hair, so that the barrel was pointed up, prodding the flesh beneath his chin. Again, he remained frozen until he was no longer aware whether it had been seconds, minutes, or even hours. One more murder, he thought. When he slowly lowered the gun, he could see a reddish indentation where the barrel cylinder had been pressed against his skin.