Red 1-2-3 (9780802192844)

by Katzenbach, John

  A little unsteadily, she walked down a pathway running through rows of simple gray monuments guarded by two cherub statues wielding trumpets that played no sound. She could hear her shoes clacking against the black macadam of the path. A part of her wished she were drunk, an equal part of her believed there was no amount of liquor in the world that could overcome her sobriety at that moment.

  In her mind, she was working on what she was going to say to her slaughtered family. Words like I’m sorry or I need you both to help me get through this filled her mouth, as if ready to burst forth. She clutched the bouquets, almost as she had the gun earlier.

  Sarah knew how many steps she would walk. She kept her eyes down, head lowered, as if she was afraid to read the names on the gray marble headstone that awaited her. When she knew she was in front of it, she stopped, breathed in sharply, and raised her eyes.

  As she did this, she started to speak, almost nonsensically. “I miss you both so much and now someone wants to kill me . . .”

  Then, as if someone had drawn a razor blade across her tongue, the weak and flimsy message she had for her dead husband and daughter died in her mouth.

  She stared through the encroaching darkness at the headstone. At first, she could only formulate, There’s something wrong.

  She peered at the granite-colored stone. Graffiti, she thought at first. A surge of outrage immediately filled her. This is terrible, she thought. What sort of creepy, thoughtless, goddamn stupid teenager would take a can of spray paint and deface a grave? Don’t they know they’re breaking someone’s heart?

  She took a step forward and looked closer. That’s not right. She realized that she was breathing shallow, quick bursts of air stripped from the rapidly falling darkness.

  What should have been the angular “tags” of teenage gangs or the round, bulbous drawings of nicknames were nothing of the sort. Nor were these scratchy, misspelled obscenities hurriedly sprayed across the surface. Sarah stepped forward, as if drawn to the shapes she saw.

  They were painted white. They angled across the stone, bisecting each name and the death date. There were four of them.

  Sarah had never seen a wolf’s paw print before, but she suddenly knew that was precisely what she was staring at.

  She dropped the flowers to the sidewalk and ran hard.

  19

  The stage manager began waving at Karen frantically, pointing at the tattered black curtain that concealed the entrance to the performance apron at Sir Laughs-A-Lot, when he saw her hesitate upon hearing the cell phone in her satchel begin to ring insistently. Her first instinct was that there was some patient emergency that required immediate attention. She grabbed the pocketbook and ignored the manager, although he was urgently whispering, “Come on, Doc. Y’er up. Let’s break a leg. Knock ’em out.”

  She hesitated when she saw that it wasn’t her regular cell phone that was ringing. It was the throwaway phone identical to those she had given Red Two and Red Three.

  The caller ID read: Sarah.

  Karen half-reached for the phone as she heard the stage manager—he was usually the bartender at the comedy club—say, “That better be goddamn important. We’ve got a full house tonight and they are getting real restless.”

  Karen looked up and saw he was holding back the curtain with one hand and urging her forward with the other. She could just see past him, to where the club owner was standing center stage, introducing her.

  “Let’s please give a warm Laughs-A-Lot welcome to Doctor K!” the owner was saying as he stepped away from a standing microphone and pointed in her direction.

  She took a quick glance down at the phone as it stopped ringing. The display read “1 new message.” Conflict collided within her. She could hear the stage manager, now in a stage whisper, urging her up and out. At the same time, the phone demanded her attention.

  Caught between these two poles, she dropped the phone back into her satchel and grabbed a bottle of water from the stage manager’s hand. The show must go on, she thought, although she knew perhaps this shoud have been an exception. Karen stepped forward into the floodlights.

  She wore a wide, slightly goofy grin, black-framed glasses, and had frizzed out her hair comically. She waved at the audience. She had on her standard comedy-club outfit, which consisted of red high-top sneakers, a black turtleneck sweater, and jeans, topped off by a white clinician’s cotton coat and an old, no-longer-functional stethoscope wrapped around her neck like a noose.

  A full house, she knew, was actually only fifty or so people at the tiny off-the-beaten-path club. She couldn’t see past the glare, but she knew there were couples and foursomes spread about the shadows inside the cavelike interior. A hard-pressed waitstaff hurriedly delivered beer and burgers, trying to get each order filled before she took the stage. She could smell french fries and hear a distant sizzle from the small kitchen.

  A smattering of applause greeted her, and she made an elaborate bow. “You know what really bothers me,” she said, using a lilt to give her words energy, “is when you write a prescription and say ‘Take two of these every day,’ and patients immediately double everything . . . because if two are supposed to make them feel better, well, four will probably make them feel a whole lot better . . .”

  She paused, looked out past the floodlights at the people she couldn’t see but knew were there, and smiled. “Of course, nobody here has ever done that . . .” A ripple of slightly self-conscious laugher flowed up toward her.

  “I mean . . . does everyone want to become an addict?”

  This small insult got a slightly larger response. She could hear a few “Yeah, why not?” and “No kidding!” exclamations from the audience.

  “Of course, that reminds me of an addict I used to know . . .” she continued. Riffing on drugs and acting a little befuddled about the needs of patients was an integral part of her shtick. Whenever she felt uncertain about her humor, she made fun of the things that were the least funny. This invariably warmed the crowd to her. She remembered an old comic taking her aside once, years earlier when she was first trying out some of her routines, and telling her, “You know what isn’t funny? A guy on crutches with a cast on his leg. You know what’s really fuckin’ funny? A guy on crutches with a cast on his leg slipping on the ice and going ass over elbows into the air. That’ll get a laugh every time. Everybody loves someone else’s over-the-top misfortune. Keep that in mind every second you’re up there.”

  So she did. Her routines made fun of heart attacks and cancer and Ebola virus. Most of the time, it worked.

  “So this guy says to me, ‘Doc, what’s wrong with taking drugs?’ And I say back to him, ‘Yeah, but dog tranquilizers?’ And he kinda smiles and says, ‘Me and my dog, we’re pretty similar . . .”

  Karen paused. “‘Yeah,’ I says to him, ‘keep snorting that stuff and you’ll be wagging your tail a lot less . . .’” When she said tail, she grabbed her crotch as if imitating a man masturbating.

  There was a burst of laughter and some hand-clapping. This was just enough feedback to make Karen relax and feel like she had made enough of an inroad with the audience to be able to finish on a high note. She made a mental point to use that joke, a double entendre: a high note. Part of what she loved about performing was the way standing on stage in front of an audience made her slide thoughts into various compartments, as if her brain were an old apothecary’s desk with a hundred different drawers.

  She went back to her imaginary addict. “And I tell him, ‘You know, you might just find yourself lifting your leg at inappropriate times . . .’”

  Another round of laughter filled the room. Part of humor was making the people in that dark room see things—in this case a man turning himself into a dog.

  “But of course, he says back to me, ‘Well, maybe I’ll be able to smell the bitches better, too.’” This line, she figured, wo
uld make the men in the room clap. It did.

  Karen had warmed up, was suddenly feeling confident, had shunted the telephone message that had trailed her onto the stage into some distant, nearly forgotten place, and she took a moment to let the applause surround her. It was like being caressed, she thought.

  And then a solitary whistle cut across the noise.

  It was a loud, piercing sound. It was not unfamiliar to her. She had heard it before at other shows and ignored it, or joked about it. But this time—the whistle rose steadily in pitch and then abruptly shifted ­downward—it stopped her cold, because she put a name to it.

  Wolf whistle.

  She shifted her weight back and forth and took a long gulp from the bottle of water. Her imagination seized—she knew she had to find a joke, but suddenly felt crippled.

  All women have heard a wolf whistle. It’s nothing more than a common thoughtless way guys have of expressing attraction. It’s been around for decades.

  Wolf had never meant anything to her before. Now it did. She tried to regain composure. It’s nothing out of the ordinary. She could hear a part of her scream, Liar!

  Karen fumbled with the thread of her humor.

  “Of course,” she said, “the drug companies spend all their time and money researching the wrong problems. I mean, they want to cure herpes and the common cold. But what about a drug that helps women parallel-park?”

  A burst of laughter erupted from the darkness.

  “Or maybe a drug that cures men of their football addiction? Ladies, we could just slip it into the salsa and cheese nacho dip, and next thing we’d know the game would be off the television and the channel turned to public broadcasting’s latest adaptation of Pride and Prejudice . . .”

  More hoots and giggles.

  Karen had started to relax again, to think that the wolf whistle wasn’t the Wolf’s whistle, when she heard it a second time, blending into the general amusement.

  It is, it isn’t, she thought, once again trying to grasp hold of the sound. She raised her hand to shade her eyes, trying to see past the floodlights into the audience. But it was just a darkened cavern, filled with indistinct shapes. And then she suddenly thought, The call from Red Two. It was a warning. He’s here. He’s just over there past the blinding lights. I could touch him.

  He can touch me.

  Karen fought panic. She struggled to keep herself centered and keep up with the comedy patter. She thought, Make a joke. Say, “Someone must be falling in love . . .” or some such silliness. Make that whistle into something ordinary and benign.

  She couldn’t make herself do this. Instead murder overcame her imagination. Is it happening? Right now? Is he going to kill me in front of all these people?

  Her hands twitched. She gulped again at the water bottle, but it was empty. She was on stage. She had nowhere to hide. A spotlight followed her every move. She wanted to say something that would extricate herself gracefully from the dais. “Well, I’ll be heading back to the ER now.” Then she thought that might trigger the Wolf. If she tried to flee, would he shoot her right then and there? Would he leap up onto the stage like some deranged John Wilkes Booth waving a knife or brandishing a pistol?

  She closed her eyes. She was trapped between irrational fears. There was the fear of humiliating herself in front of an audience and the Wolf fear. She swallowed hard. She wondered if she only had seconds left to live.

  “Well,” she said to the audience, forcing a grin, “that’s it for me tonight. Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.”

  The applause would conceal the shot. So would the darkened room. There would be confusion and panic. Someone would scream, “Get a doctor!” But of course, she was the only doctor in the club, and she would be dying on the stage. And in all the tangle of irony, death, and surprise, the Wolf would slip away. She knew this, even if it made no sense. She knew that he had already made his escape plans, and he would be fast on his way to Red Two or Red Three.

  Unless they were already killed.

  Maybe that was the call, Karen thought. It said “1 New Message” but maybe the message was, “I’m dead.”

  Karen could suddenly see two bodies. Red Two and Red Three, twisted, bloodstained, discarded. It was almost as if she had to step over them to leave the stage.

  She stumbled toward the curtain. She knew she should wave at the crowd, which was continuing to applaud, but turning back was impossible. Each stride she took she imagined was her last. Her legs felt weak and unsteady. She expected to hear the sound of a gun firing and she knew that it would be the last sound she ever heard.

  When she reached the curtain and let it close behind her, she felt she had never before in her entire life walked as great a distance. For an instant, she gulped at the stale backstage air. She wanted to shrink down and cower in some darkened corner. Then almost as quickly she told herself, You’ve got to see!

  Tossing her fake glasses and stethoscope toward her bag, stripping off her white coat, she pushed past the surprised stage manager, the equally astonished owner, and a college-aged man in a tweed jacket and khaki pants who was scheduled to follow her onto the stage. She raced to the side door of the club, which led out to the tables. It had a sign that stated if opened alarm will sound, but the security system had been disconnected.

  Karen burst through the door.

  A few lights in the club had come up—just enough so that she could search the faces in the audience. She did not know what she was looking for. A single man? Bared wolf’s teeth? Look at a crowd of people and pluck the killer out from all of them?

  What she saw was insistently ordinary. More burgers and bottles of beer being distributed. Tables filled with couples. What she heard was a great deal of loud laughter and happily raised voices.

  Her eyes swept right and left. She wanted to scream: “Where are you?”

  “Hey, Doc, you okay?”

  She almost jumped into the air. The question had come from the club owner. Karen breathed in slowly. “Yes, yes,” she replied.

  “I mean, you look like you seen a ghost.”

  Maybe I did, she thought. Or maybe I just heard one.

  “No, I’m okay,” she said. “I just thought I recognized someone.”

  “Looks like someone you didn’t want to see,” the owner said. “You want, I’ll get Sam to walk you out to your car after the next guy wraps up.” Sam was the burly bartender and stage manager. The assumption behind the offer was a spurned lover or an ex-husband with a grudge.

  “I’d like that,” she said. She didn’t add an explanation.

  “Cool. How about a drink to settle those nerves? And hey, your set, it went great tonight. The folks really seemed to like it.” The owner gestured toward a waitress.

  “Thanks,” Karen replied. The waitress hovered near. “Scotch,” Karen said. “Neat. And make it a double, with a beer chaser.”

  “On the house,” said the owner as he steered Karen backstage.

  It took a few minutes for Karen to be left alone. The stage manager was at the curtain, the owner back on the dais introducing the next act, and the college kid poised to go on. The waitress came and delivered her drinks with the rapidity of someone who knows the tips are somewhere else.

  Karen gulped the liquor down, feeling it burn her throat. For a moment she felt dizzy, and she rocked back and forth as if she were already drunk. It took a surge of energy and an inner mantra of I’m safe now, I’m safe now before she was able to pluck the cell phone from her satchel. For a few seconds, she stared at the display. Behind her, she could hear the college kid making ribald jokes and the audience hooting in response. He’s good, she thought. Better than me.

  She punched buttons on the keypad and held the phone up to her ear. Words tumbled and jolted, skidded, crashed, and screamed. Karen could understand grave and paw
prints, but that was it.

  Except for the hysteria. Sobs, groans, panic, and runaway fear. Those came through absolutely clearly.

  20

  At first Sarah searched the crowd, hoping to spot Karen, but she stopped almost as quickly as she began, because she formulated some crazy notion in her head that if she was able to spot Red One, then so could the Wolf, as if he were seated next to her and would merely follow her gaze and know they were both in the stands and somehow manage to kill them simultaneously in front of everyone. So instead, she concentrated on the floor, trying to avoid spending too many moments eyeing Red Three. She picked out a player on the opposing team, gathered her name from the mimeographed programs scattered about the bleachers, and tried to act as if she was connected to some gangly teenager whom she had never seen before.

  Once again, she had prepared carefully to go out in public. But this time she had made significant changes.

  She had found a cheap jet-black wig left over from a Halloween costume party during happier times, when she’d dressed up as the Uma Thurman character in Pulp Fiction and her husband had adopted a black suit and thin tie like John Travolta playing Vincent the hired killer. She remembered the fun they’d had when they had taken to the dance floor and copied the almost painfully slow, exaggerated, slinky motions the movie couple had used to mesmerize audiences. She stuck one of her dead husband’s frayed baseball caps on top of the wig.

  She hunted around until she found some of her old pregnancy clothing in an old cardboard box, and fastening a small throw pillow around her midsection with shipping tape, she created the appearance of someone perhaps five months along. Some dark sunglasses and an old brown oversized and out-of-style overcoat that she hadn’t used in years completed her disguise. She thought she looked as little like herself as she could manage on short notice.

  Sarah did not consider it particularly good, as far as disguises went. She had no idea whether the Wolf would be able to recognize her, especially in a crowd, but she guessed he would, no matter how she altered her appearance. He’ll just smell me, she thought. She attributed unbelievable powers of detection to the Wolf. She assumed he’d seen her emerge from her house, although she had exited the rear door, scooted around the side, hunched over like a soldier dodging enemy fire to hide her fake pregnancy, and flung herself into her car. She had even carried her overcoat in a plastic garbage bag, so that the style and color were hidden until she put it on when she reached the game. She hadn’t been able to spot any out-of-the ordinary cars up and down her street as she peeled out, tires squealing. She had taken the usual elusive steps to avoid being followed.