Red 1-2-3

17

The three Reds drove in Karen’s car to the largest local enclosed mall, where she dropped Jordan at the east entrance by Sears, then drove around and delivered Sarah to the west entrance near Best Buy. After waiting a few minutes, Karen steered her way to the top floor of the parking garage adjacent to the mall. She turned her car around so that she could see if any car had followed her up. She shut off the engine and switched off the headlights and waited exactly seventeen minutes. The advantage of this parking garage was that it had separate ramps for heading up and heading down. At the seventeenth minute, she fired up the engine and raced down the circular drive, tires squealing against the pavement. She accelerated across the expanses of vacant parking to the mall’s north exit. “Follow that,” she muttered to herself. I don’t care how damn clever you imagine yourself to be, Mister Wolf.

As before, when she had first met with Red Three, she had a distinct sensation that it was important to not allow herself to be followed, although she was unsure precisely why. A part of her felt completely ridiculous. She had adopted evasive steps when she returned home in the evening and when she went to work in the morning. She had driven like a crazy person when she had picked up Red Three. Now she was repeating the same erratic formula-and she was pretty certain that the other two Reds were doing the same thing-and she could not answer the essential question: Why are you doing this?

She answered herself: So he doesn’t kill you in a parking garage.

Then she hesitated, gasping out loud as if there were no air in the car, realizing, Anything is possible. You don’t know how he’s going to kill you.

The physician within her recognized paranoia. Except there’s nothing made up about this. No delusions. It’s real. She tried to think back to her brief rotation as a medical student in a psychiatric wing of a large state hospital, but whatever lessons she had learned in those weeks had dissipated through years of internal medicine. All my-no, all our-behavior is being defined by fear.

She closed her eyes tightly.

Put a name to it, she told herself. This was impossible. She tried to think: Fear of heights. That was acrophobia. Fear of spiders? That was arachnophobia. Fear of dying?

Thanatophobia.

What she felt seemed like a combination of those and every other fear she could draw from her heart.

Put a name to it, she repeated to herself.

Easier said than done.

Karen tried to clear her mind of various deadly images that began to intrude wildly on her imagination, and tried to concentrate on watching for the other Reds. Guns. Knives. Poisons. Choking. All she could see were dozens of murders, all spread out like a bloody buffet before her, and as if caught in a nightmare, she was being forced to choose one.

She wiped her hand across her face. She could feel sweat beneath her arms. Her breath was short and raspy. She looked around. There was no obvious reason to be on the verge of panic. There was no lurking figure in a shadow staring at her. There was no man racing toward her brandishing a weapon. There was no set of auto headlights burrowing into her from behind.

But all these things were there, even if they weren’t there.

Her eyes swept around the empty spaces of the shopping mall. “Come on,” she whispered out loud, speaking to the other two Reds. “I want to get the hell out of here.”

Within seconds of her arrival, Red Two and Red Three emerged through the wide mall doors, walking swiftly toward her. They had each traveled haphazard routes through the shops, hurrying down aisles, ducking in and out of toilets, backtracking, riding escalators up and then down, crossing paths twice before joining up and exiting. Trailing them would have been difficult, even with the smaller-than-usual crowds of people inside the cavernous building.

“Think that will work?” Sarah asked breathlessly as she launched herself into the car.

“Sure,” Jordan replied confidently from the backseat.

The others both nodded, although Red One and Red Two secretly thought, I don’t know about that.

Karen saw that Jordan wore a small grin, and the doctor within her wondered whether the teenager was enjoying the situation. Then she saw Red Three turn in her seat and peer out the back window, as if checking once again to make certain they weren’t being followed. Nervous energy, she thought. No, it’s fear. It’s just a little different for each of us.

It was Red Two who asked next: “Where are we going now?”

Karen smiled wryly, although she knew there was little to smile about. “Yesterday, Jordan told me to come up with absolutely fucking safe places where we can talk. I know a good one.”

The Moan and Dove was an old-fashioned, college-town, dark-wood, shadowy bar that featured single malt whiskeys and more than seventy varieties of beer, served from a polished long wooden counter that ended abruptly before giving way to a space for a small stage with a tattered black curtain as a backdrop. There was room inside for two dozen small tables. On most nights it was crowded with university students, loud and overly boisterous. But Tuesdays it featured local folk singers-Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan wannabes-and occasionally it scheduled Saturday night open-mike comedy shows. This was how Karen had come to know it.

But on Thursday evenings, which this was, it catered to the local gay women’s groups by having a “Ladies Only” night. So, when the three Reds came through the front door, they were greeted by a loud and packed bar with not a single man in sight. Even the bartenders-usually weight lifters with the muscles to handle unruly college students-were women: thin, young, nose-pierced, purple-haired punk-rock-type women, all of whom seemed to be aping Lisbeth Salander from the books and movies. The crowd ranged from tough-looking types wearing tight black jeans and leather jackets and knocking back shots to flower-children types who favored sweet mixed drinks with the occasional decorative paper umbrella and spoke in high-pitched enthusiastic bursts.

Red Two and Red Three joined Karen in the doorway, taking it all in. Karen grinned a bit, and said, “I’d like to see the Wolf come walking into this crowd. I don’t think he’d last long.”

Sarah laughed out loud. It seemed crazily ironic, which seemed to capture the flavor of her existence. That would be great, she thought. The Wolf walks into a gay women’s bar and all I have to do is stand up and point him out saying “Here’s a man who kills women!” and like modern-day maenads, these ladies will immediately rip him to shreds and we can happily go on with what little remains of our lives.

Jordan seemed a little distracted. “I’m underage,” she whispered to Karen. “If my school finds out I was here, I’ll get kicked out.”

“So, we’ll make sure they don’t find out,” Karen replied. Jordan nodded, then looked around and grinned. “You know, the field hockey coach might be here…” and then she stopped, shrugged, and said, “Maybe we could just sit in the corner.”

They found an empty table near the stage, which had the added advantage of being positioned so they could keep an eye on the front door, although none of the three Reds thought that any wolf would be brave or stupid enough to follow them inside. A tattooed waitress in a tight black T-shirt came to take their order, looked askance at Jordan, and seemed about to ask her for an ID when Karen said, “My daughter will have a soda.” Jordan nodded and added, “Ginger ale.” Karen ordered a beer and Sarah first ordered vodka straight on the rocks, but then was overcome by the idea that somehow this might be wrong, and she, too, asked for a ginger ale.

The Goth waitress rolled her eyes. “This is a bar,” she said unpleasantly.

“Okay,” Sarah replied. “Put a little twist of lemon in the glass, so it looks like a real drink.”

This made the other two Reds smile and drove the waitress away sour-faced. It wasn’t much of a joke, Sarah thought, but at least it was an attempt at humor, which was more than she had managed in months.

The three were quiet for a moment, waiting for the waitress to return with their drinks. The youngest spoke first. “Well, here we are. What do we do now?”

After a moment Karen asked the practical question: “Does anyone think that it’s just someone fucking with us? You know, it’s all a game, like we’re the butt of some not-very-funny joke and that nothing will really happen?”

Both Sarah and Jordan knew that this question had been considered and dismissed by each separately, but neither wanted to blurt this out. It was Sarah who reached just beyond all the pain she felt within and said, “I don’t think I’m that lucky.”

Again, quiet afflicted them. None of them felt that lucky.

“So…” Karen started, then stopped. She felt herself choking, as if she had stage fright. When she continued, her words came out as cracked as dry leather. “We need to make some kind of sense of this.”

Jordan responded, feeling like someone else was speaking. “What do you mean, make sense? Some crazy guy wants to kill us because we’ve got red hair and he’s all obsessed with Little Red Riding Hood and we’ve got to figure out what we’re going to do about it. I mean, what sense is there to make? And, while we’re trying to make sense of it all, maybe he’s stalking us and lining us up like targets on a firing range and getting ready to pull the trigger. Bang bang bang, y’er all dead.”

Jordan’s voice had picked up momentum with each word until it was racing, even as she dropped it to barely a whisper.

“Beat him to the punch, beat him to the punch, beat him to the punch,” the teenager repeated three times, once for each of them.

Karen reeled back. She had ignored the teenager’s homicidal suggestion the first time she’d offered it. But with the three of them gathered around the table, it wasn’t so easily dismissed. She did not know why she didn’t think this was a viable approach. She heard herself saying, “Look, Jordan, we’re not killers. We wouldn’t know what to do. And we can’t stoop…”

She stopped, because she thought she sounded foolish and she could see the youngest of them shaking her head violently in disagreement. She shifted in her seat. Be logical! a voice within her fairly screamed. But obeying this command took a great effort on her part. She could feel her throat closing up and her mouth drying. She licked her lips and took a swig of beer. “Look, the first thing,” she said. “Something locks us together.” She spoke as slowly as possible. “We need to figure that out.”

“Yeah, red hair,” Jordan said.

“No. It has to be something more than that.”

“What do you mean?” Sarah asked. She felt a little intimidated, as if the other two were more in control and had far greater resources than she did, although with the talk having shifted to killing, she remembered that she seemed to be the only one who actually owned a weapon.

“He had to find us,” Karen said. “So, something links us. It can’t just be random.”

“Why not?” Jordan asked.

The three women looked at one another. Each imagined that the other two were as different from her as possible. Other than their hair, nothing rang out loudly. No alarms, bells, or sirens sounded that announced a similarity.

Again, the three women were silenced by their thoughts. And again, it was the youngest who broke the quiet. “Yeah, but even if we can figure it out, what then? Call the cops?”

“I already tried that,” Karen said. “Of course, if we figure out who’s stalking us and we can take that name to the police, maybe they’ll be able to do something…” She hesitated. This most logical path seemed utterly unreasonable. When you’re tossed into insanity, she thought, what makes you think logic will help you?

She slumped in her seat. All her training and all her adult life had been devoted to reason, to making a diagnosis: Run this test and that test, take into account this symptom and that symptom, put it all together into the mix of education and experience, and come up with an answer. A reasonable answer. Maybe it wouldn’t be a happy answer, but it would be an answer nevertheless. She shook her head.

Jordan looked at the older woman. Karen Jayson was completely respectable-educated, responsible, and mature and Jordan had expected that she would know exactly what to do because she was the type of woman who always knew exactly what to do. She was the type of woman that teenagers like herself were urged to grow up and become. And so, when she saw the same confusion and doubt on Red One’s face that she imagined was on her own, it frightened her. She half-turned, to see if she saw the same look in Sarah’s eyes, but the third member of the trio was leaning back, staring at the ceiling, as if hoping for some thunderbolt of guidance from the heavens to penetrate the walls and strike her with a clear path forward. Jordan thought, It’s like being cast adrift at sea with two strangers.

She did not say this. Instead, she blurted out, “There’s only one way to protect ourselves.”

“How is that?” Sarah asked, as if sliding slowly down a ladder to earth.

“The Wolf has all the advantages over Little Red Riding Hood,” she said, “except one.”

“What’s that?”

“He’s a prisoner,” she said.

“What?” Karen grunted.

“Of what he wants.”

“I don’t follow,” Sarah said.

“What trips him up? His own desires.”

Sarah and Karen looked at Jordan.

“I’ve read the fairy tale,” she said swiftly. “I went to the library the other night. I’ve read all the versions.”

“Yes,” Karen said, discouraged. “But that’s a fairy tale…”

Jordan persisted, leaning forward and talking quickly, as if the speed of her words would overcome the noisy buzz of the bar. She ignored Karen’s interruption. “And the only version where Little Red Riding Hood gets saved in the end is the phony, politically safe one that mothers tell their daughters. Sort of the sanitized Disney version. In the real story…”

She stopped. She saw doubt in front of her.

Jordan nodded her head. She imagined she sounded young, but she had youthful determination. “That’s our only chance. Turn the old story into the new one. The story where we all get eaten alive needs to change into the safe one where we get rescued.”

“Sounds nice,” Sarah said, bitterness that she did not want or think was helpful creeping into her voice. “I’m sure there’s a helpful strong woodsman just waiting to come running with his trusty axe…”

Jordan held up her hand. “We have to rescue ourselves,” she said. “It’s our only chance.”

Karen jumped in. “Okay,” she said, “but how do we do that?”

“I don’t know exactly,” Jordan said. “But it seems to me that we won’t be doing any good for any of us if we all just sit around waiting for the Wolf to kill us. I mean, if he can stalk us, why can’t we stalk him right back?”

“A nice idea, but how?” Sarah asked.

Jordan didn’t know how to answer that question, but Karen did. “The way we started this. We find out what links us. And what I mean is, no one do anything that’s out of the ordinary. Do whatever it is you do on schedule and at appropriate times. Don’t let the Wolf know anything different.”

“I don’t get it,” Sarah asked.

Karen shut her eyes for an instant. She couldn’t believe what she was about to say. “At some point,” she said slowly, “we’re going to have to draw him in. Close enough so that we can see who he is.”

She almost gasped. This thought was too terrifying. She placed her hands beneath the tabletop, because she was afraid the others might see them quivering.

Jordan, however, smiled. “‘What big teeth you have, Grandmother,’” she said. “Makes sense.”

The three Reds were quiet for a moment. “How much time do you think we have?” Sarah asked.

This question went straight to the pit of each Red’s stomach. A day. A week. A month. A year. There was no way of telling.

The three women stared at one another. A physician with a secret life as a comic in a world where nothing was funny anymore, a widow lost in relentless grief, a teenager trapped by circumstances and failure.

“I don’t want to die,” Sarah said abruptly. The words surprised her, because up until that moment she had believed that this was all she really wanted to do.