Red 1-2-3 by John Katzenbach Read Free Book Online

before he carefully strapped her into the car seat in the rear of their six-year-old Volvo. She had seen him fasten his own belt before giving a jaunty wave, grinning, and taking off.
    Nine blocks. Grocery store. Death.
    It was not an equation anyone would ever have imagined. There was no actuarial table, no sophisticated algorithm that could project the heating oil fuel delivery truck that ran the red light and slammed into them.
    She had always hated that detail madly. It was nearly summertime. The weather was mild and warm. No one in New England was still using an oil burner. There was no need for the truck to be on the road.
    They were properly belted. The air bags instantly deployed. The Volvo’s steel frame, designed to crumple protectively upon impact, had performed exactly as its engineers had designed.
    Except none of it worked, because they were both dead.
    Still hesitating in the doorway, Sarah said, “Look, Teddy, someone says they’re going to kill me. I promise I won’t get it and use it on myself. Even if I really want to, I promise, I won’t do that. Not yet, at least.”
    It was almost as if she needed his permission to find the ammunition box and get the gun. Both of them had been raised in devoutly Catholic households and there was that profound prohibition against committing suicide. A sin, she thought. The most reasonable and logical sin she could imagine, but a sin, nevertheless.
    34
    RED 1–2–3
    She thought she was a complete coward in so many different ways that she could hardly count them. If she were brave, she could have decided to kill herself. Or, if she were brave, she would have decided to go on with her life and not let it disintegrate around her. If she were brave, she would have dedicated herself to something meaningful, like teaching special education in the inner city or going on missions to help AIDS babies in the Sudan, as a way of honoring her dead husband and dead child.
    “But I’m not brave,” she said. It was sometimes hard for her to tell if she had been talking out loud or not. And sometimes she had entire conversations in her imagination that ended up with some sentence blurted out that made sense only to her. “Definitely not brave.”
    But, she thought, I still need the gun .
    It was, she guessed, some leftover frontier gene that lurked within her.
    Someone makes a threat, and like a cowboy in a Western, she would reach for her weapon.
    She paused in the doorway for another moment. Her eyes scanned the room—and then she launched herself inside, moving rapidly. It was as if by looking around she would be inviting the memory attached to each item to punish her further. She went directly to the bookcase, pushed aside the novels that hid the dust-covered ammunition box, seized it, and then retreated as fast as she could, slamming the office door shut behind her.
    “I’m sorry, Teddy, darling, but I just can’t stay in there.” She knew this was a half-thought, half-whisper.
    Holding the olive-drab ammo box under her right arm, she lifted her left hand to the side of her face, blocking the sight of her dead daughter’s room. She did not think she could handle another conversation with a ghost that day, and she hurried down the hallway back to her kitchen.
    She was still naked. But there was something about getting the weapon and the reverberating noise from the threatening letter that made her suddenly feel modest. She plucked her clothes from where she’d discarded them, and tugged them back on.
    Then she took the letter and put it next to the ammo box on a coffee table in her living room. She dialed the combination and reached inside.
    35
    JOHN KATZENBACH
    A cold black Colt Python .357 Magnum rested on the bottom, next to a box of hollow-point bullets. She removed the weapon, fiddled with it for an instant, and finally cracked open the chamber. Seeing it was unloaded, she carefully steered six live rounds into the cylinder.
    The gun seemed incredibly heavy in her