Red 1-2-3

41

The three Reds waited in the rental car a hundred yards away from the house. They should have been going over the last details of their plan, such as it was, but mainly they were quiet with their own thoughts. It was shortly before three in the morning. Karen had simply pulled to the side of the road and parked beneath a large oak tree. Jordan was in the backseat, Sarah the passenger. Karen placed the car keys on the floor and made certain that the others knew where they were. Then she distributed three sets of surgical gloves, which they all shakily pulled on. All three sets of eyes swept up and down the block. Other than an occasional outdoor light left on by a forgetful home owner, the street was dark and asleep.

Language was at a bare minimum. None of the three Reds trusted their voices not to quaver, so they choked out words laconically. It was as if the closer they got to murder, the less there was to say.

“Two doors,” Karen said. “Sarah and me, in back, breaking in. Jordan, if the Wolf tries to get out the front, you’ve got to stop him. When we’ve made it inside, we’ll let you in.”

They all nodded.

None of them spoke the question-“If it is the Wolf”-although each of them had the same thought.

Nor did Jordan ask: “What do you mean ‘stop him?’” or “How exactly do I stop him?” or finally, “What happens if I can’t stop him and he gets away?” Uncertainty had bred with finality; all three Reds had entered into some odd sort of state that traveled well beyond reason. It was a fairy tale of their own making.

“Upstairs and to the right. Has to be the master bedroom. That’s where we’re going. Move fast. They will be asleep, so we will have the element of surprise, but breaking in will probably wake them.”

“Suppose…” Sarah started to ask, then stopped. She suddenly realized there were hundreds of supposes and that trying to anticipate all of them was impossible.

Jordan’s voice was stifled, weak.

“In In Cold Blood, once inside they separate the Clutter family. Are we going to…”

She, too, halted in mid-sentence.

None of the three said the words home invasion, although that was exactly what they were engaged in. This was the sort of crime that assaults some deep-seated American notion, that one should always be perfectly safe inside one’s home. Bank robberies, drive-by shootings, illicit drug turf wars, even estranged couples divorcing with gunfire-all made a kind of contextual, rational sense. A home invasion did not. It was usually driven by bizarre fantasies of rape or hidden riches that rarely materialized. It was the type of crime that Jordan had studied over the past days. Usually, though, in this type of crime, Jordan had learned, it was the psychopathic bad guys assaulting the safety of some complete innocents. This night was the reverse-it was the innocents attacking the home of a murderous Wolf. But while this seemed the case inside the car, she guessed that somewhere out in the cold all the roles would switch around 180 degrees.

“Anyone want to say anything?” Karen asked.

“Answers,” Sarah coughed in response. “Let’s go get some answers.”

The three Reds slipped from the car like spills of black ink creasing the nighttime. They tugged hoods down over their heads, adjusted their face masks, and moved swiftly toward the house. A dog barked from inside a neighbor’s place. All three Reds had the same frightening thought: Suppose he has a dog-a pit bull or a Doberman willing to defend their master. None voiced this concern. It seemed to Karen that every stride they took forward underscored how little they knew about committing a crime, especially one as profound as they were engaged in.

Each Red wanted to grab the others, stop in mid-attack, and say, “What the hell are we doing?” None actually said this; it was as if the three of them were tumbling headlong down a steep hill, and there was nothing to grab that might arrest their momentum.

Red One felt sick to her stomach.

Red Two was dizzy with doubt.

Red Three felt suddenly weak.

Each Red was nearly crippled with tension as they moved silently through the night. The cold air did little to dissipate the heat of anxiety. It seemed to them that all that had happened to them made each of them somehow smaller.

At the front of the house, Karen quickly gestured toward bushes adjacent to the main door. Jordan ducked in, concealing herself as best she could. The two other Reds slid seamlessly around the edge of the home, heading toward the back.

Suddenly being alone in the night nearly crushed Jordan. She listened for some sound, afraid that her own breathing was so loud it would wake the occupants, wake the neighbors, wake the police and fire departments. Any second she expected to be surrounded by sirens, flashing lights, and voices ordering her to stand with her hands up. Police or Wolf. She was trapped between the two.

She slowly worked the zipper on her duffel bag as quietly as she could. She removed her knife and gripped it tightly.

She no longer believed she had the strength to wield it. The ferocity that had come so easy and natural a few days earlier now felt impossibly difficult to achieve. It was as if the athlete Jordan, the faster-than-the-others Jordan, the Jordan stronger than anyone else on the team, the smarter, prettier, and roundly taunted and teased Jordan, all disappeared in that moment of waiting, replaced by some stranger Jordan couldn’t recognize and certainly didn’t trust. If she had known any prayers, she might have tried them. Instead, she hunkered down by the front steps, her black outfit fitting as perfectly as a jigsaw puzzle piece into the night, her muscles twitching and quivering, hoping that this new and unrecognizable Jordan would be able to summon the necessary fury when she needed it.

Break the window. Reach inside. Throw the dead-bolt lock. Attack.

Karen’s plan had little subtlety. In the movies, it always appears so simple: Actors are calm, intelligent, unhurried, and they make clever choices and behave with easy determination. Life isn’t so simple, she thought. Everything conspires to trip you up. Especially the person you are. And this is not who we are. I’m a doctor, for Christ’s sake. I’m not a break-in artist. And I’m not a killer. She held the rubber mallet in her hand, getting ready to smash her way into the house, and had just begun a fierce backswing when Sarah abruptly grabbed her arm. Karen heard the younger woman’s sharp snatch of breath from the cold night. She turned toward her, wondering what had made her act so precipitously.

Sarah said nothing, but pointed to their right. On the window in what they guessed was the kitchen was a sticker. It was a shield emblazoned with the words: protected by alpha security.

Karen’s head spun dizzily. A simple irony wasn’t lost on her: This was the same company that she had hired to install the system on her own house, after the Big Bad Wolf’s first letter. It had never occurred to her that a killer might hire the same home security company.

She hesitated. Then she whispered: “Okay, here’s what happens. We break in. It triggers a silent alarm at the company headquarters. They call the home owner, who has to respond with a predetermined signal that indicates they’re either okay, it’s all a mistake, or that there’s trouble, which makes the company call the cops, who are here in a couple of minutes.”

Sarah nodded. The two Reds were stymied for an instant. “What should we do?” Sarah asked.

“I don’t know,” Karen responded. She was suddenly becoming aware that every second they remained outside, every moment they left Jordan hanging at the front, their risks grew exponentially. It was like watching diseased cells on a laboratory slide join together, becoming larger, more complex with each passing instant.

“Make a decision,” Sarah said. “Either forward or back.”

A slow, burning anger took root inside Karen. If we run, we might be running into death. Maybe not tonight. Maybe tomorrow. Or the next day. Or next week. Or next month. We will never know when. She sucked in cold night air. “Got your gun?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Okay. You go for the upstairs bedroom on the right as soon as we break in. I’ll be behind you. I’ll let Jordan in. And Sarah…”

“If it is the bedroom. We don’t know for certain.”

Karen wanted to say “We don’t know anything for damn certain,” but instead she merely added, “Don’t hesitate.”

Sarah nodded. Easy to say. Hard to do.

Left unsaid was what she was supposed to not hesitate and do. Kill them both? Just start shooting? What if he’s not the Wolf?

Karen knew that if she waited one more second, panic would replace determination. She grabbed the mallet and swung it hard.

At the front, Jordan heard the tinkle of glass breaking. If seconds earlier she’d thought her breathing was thunderously loud, this noise seemed to her to be violently explosive. She shrunk back, clinging to shadow edges with a drowning person’s embrace.

A stray shard frayed the cloth of Karen’s sweatshirt. For an instant she believed she had sliced her arm open, and she choked out some guttural sound from deep inside her chest. She imagined dark arterial blood would pulse through the fabric, and she expected a sheet of pain to strike her. This did not happen, which surprised her. Her skin was not even scratched. She reached inside the broken window and threw the dead-bolt lock. Within a second, she had thrust the door open.

Sarah pushed past her. She raced forward, her flashlight in one hand and her gun in the other. The small beam of light swept back and forth crazily as she sprinted into the house. Up and to the right. Up and to the right. She grabbed at the banister and leapt up the stairway.

Karen ran to the front door and fumbled with the locks. It took her a second, and then she threw it open. “Jordan, now!” she whispered as fervently as she could.

Jordan was crouched by the side, hidden in the darkness. The night seemed like tendrils wrapping her so tightly she was immobilized. She could feel herself giving commands to muscles that wouldn’t answer. Then, as if she were floating above herself, looking down like some spectral figure, she saw the stranger Jordan rising, nearly tripping on the front steps, half-tumbling into the house, and grabbing at Karen to keep from falling.

Karen pushed the youngest of the three Reds to her feet, closed the front door behind them, and then jumped to the stairs and raced to catch up to Red Two.

It was not a lot of noise they were making.

But it was enough.

Ripped by the sounds of the break-in from the vaporous territory between dream and reality, the Big Bad Wolf felt a blistering bolt of fear slice through his core. He sat upright in the bed, his breath suddenly coming in shallow gasps, and swung a fist through the black air, punching at unknown and unseen terror, choking words off in some sort of animal cry, unsure whether he was striking out at a nightmare or at something real but ghostlike. At his side his wife coughed out a scream of her own that became more gurgle than shout. Mrs. Big Bad Wolf felt her throat close, as if someone were choking her.

The bedroom door burst wide, and a figure-in the dark they could not tell if it was human; it was just a shape that matched the night-thrust toward them. Wild blades of light sliced across the bedroom, as Sarah waved her flashlight back and forth.

She raised her gun, trying to remember everything she had been taught by the director of the women’s shelter.

Use two hands.

Flick off the safety.

Hold your breath.

Take careful aim.

Make every shot count.

She fumbled and dropped the flashlight to the floor as she tried to handle the gun as she had been shown, and the couple on the bed in front of her disappeared into crazy shadows. She thought she was screaming “Kill him! Kill him!” but again she couldn’t hear the words, or even feel her lips moving with sound. In that second of hesitation, a shock of orange and red exploded in her eyes as the man she wanted to shoot clubbed her across the face with a wild roundhouse punch. The Wolf, all battle instinct, had thrown himself at Sarah, knocking her sideways. Mrs. Big Bad Wolf had jerked forward, flailing crazily at the dark, viciously grabbing at any shape she could find.

Sarah staggered, and as she did, a second blow landed on her chest, knocking the wind from her lungs. She bounced off a bureau and was suddenly thrown sideways and fell across the bed. She felt a hand grabbing at her gun. She knew only that she had to fight back, but exactly how to do this slipped through her consciousness. The only thought she had was Don’t let go! Don’t let go! She was twisted about, spinning like a top, and she felt her feet slipping as she fell from the edge of the bed and slammed against the floor, a sudden immense weight pressing down on her and sharp nails clawing at her face as if trying to rip her mask free.

Behind her, two other black shapes barreled into the room. Karen had the billy club in her hand and was swinging it wildly, ineffectively. It smashed into a bedside lamp, shattering china. A second uncontrolled swing crashed into knickknacks on a drawer top, sending debris flying.

The darkness cheated them all.

The Big Bad Wolf and Mrs. Big Bad Wolf fought desperately. The two of them kicked, bit, punched, used teeth, fists, feet. Bedclothes landed in piles. The wooden frame of their bed groaned beneath their frenzy. It was Mrs. Big Bad Wolf who’d grabbed the gun in Sarah’s hands, holding it by the barrel, wrestling it back and forth, trying frantically to pull it free. She barely understood what it was-she knew only that it was something that could kill them and that she had to seize it, and not let go. Animal-like, aware only that they had plunged from sleep into a fight for their lives, they fought ferociously. Guttural grunts and sounds of battle filled the room.

The Wolf leapt through the black at Karen. He smashed a blow against her ear. Her head spun. Another blow slammed into Karen’s midsection and the doctor felt a rib crack and sheets of agony pummel her body. Gasping, she expected a third, something that would knock her unconscious, and she swung the billy club crazily, feeling it crunch against skin and bone. She heard a high-pitched cry of pain.

A second sudden howl pierced the room. Jordan had slashed at the Big Bad Wolf with her filleting knife, catching his arm just as he pulled it back to slam into Karen. With a roar, the Wolf grasped Karen and swung her savagely into Jordan, knocking the youngest Red to the wall, slamming her head into a framed picture that shattered with an explosion.

The Wolf battled, knowing now that there was a club, a knife, and a gun, which his wife seemed to have a grip on. The only light in the room came from the abandoned flashlight that had rolled uselessly into a corner, so the fight had little organization and no rationale; it was simply bleeding, gouging, kicking, and trying to survive in darkness and shadow.

He still did not know whom he was fighting. If he’d had an instant to reflect, he would have perceived three forms, all female, and perhaps this would have made the mathematics of the struggle clear. But the blows raining down, the pain from his sliced forearm, and the shock of going from sleep to a deadly attack all conspired to push clarity aside. All he could think of was getting to his hunting knife on the desk in his downstairs office, or seizing the gun he knew was somewhere in the room, and evening the odds.

He pushed Karen aside, tossing her against the same wall that Jordan lay slumped against. He threw himself on the two figures-his wife and a shadow-locked together in their struggle for the pistol. He smashed into the two of them not knowing which body was which, pummeling everything he could feel. In the confusion, the Wolf heard the distinct clatter of the weapon coming free and falling to the wood floor. He groped around for it, but could not find it.

And then, suddenly, a hand grasped his forehead and his head was jerked back savagely. He felt a blade at his throat.

Words seemed to come from oblivion. “I will kill you if you move again.”

Jordan was behind him, almost straddling his form, one hand holding his head, the other gripping the knife, like a farmer ready to slaughter some animal for dinner.

His first instinct was to burst forward. The pressure of the knife dissuaded him.

And then the telephone rang.