A Deadly Shade of Rose

by Douglas Hirt

  We drove through Florissant and turned off the highway onto an unmarked gravel track. You’d miss it if you didn’t know the area. It wound darkly through a forest pricked with weak lights from cabins tucked into the trees. I swung onto a narrow track and bounced a few hundred feet and parked in front of a dark cabin, our headlights glaring on its door.

  Marcie threw open the door and piled out, apparently seeking solid ground. Gyrating over bumpy roads more suitable to jeeps than Japanese station wagons hadn’t made her happy. I’d left the key hidden under a rock and opened the place to her. She went inside while I went back to the car and killed the lights. Blackness thick enough to feel settled about the cabin. Past the tops of the tall pine trees the wide sweep of the Milky Way looked near enough to reach out and touch. The high-country stillness amplified the soft crunch of my boots on the dry pine needles as I walked to the cabin.

  Marcie stood in the doorway waiting. I said, “Here we are. Home sweet home.”

  “Quaint and isolated. I like that.”

  “You wouldn’t suspect it, but there’re maybe fifty cabins up here within a mile of us.” We went inside where the air was only marginally warmer. I’d left a small electric heater running to keep the plumbing from freezing. Marcie felt along the wall for the light switch. The blaze of a single sixty-watt bulb—at least to our dark accustomed eyes—lit the place. Marcie stopped in the middle of the small room, looked around, and headed for the refrigerator. Kitchen and living room were all one room. A bathroom was in back at the end of a hallway.

  I crumpled newspaper and built a fire in the iron stove. It took a few minutes to get a proper blaze on the kindling and stack some small logs. The toilet flushed; the door swung open. “It’s an ice cube in there, Granger.” Marcie turned her rear to the stove. “Not much in the fridge either.”

  “Hadn’t planned to be back here so soon if you recall. Groceries are still in the truck. Want to drive back and get them?”

  “No,” she said with conviction. “I’ll be okay for tonight.”

  “You can’t be hungry. Geeze, lady, you ate a twelve-dollar steak.”

  “I eat when I’m nervous.”

  “If you think it’ll help there’s a jar of peanut butter in one of those cabinets and some jelly in the refrigerator. Might even find some bread around here, if you don’t mind a dose of penicillin with your PB&J. If not, I have frozen waffles you can toast. Go for it.”

  She made a face. “I’d rather stay right here and starve where it’s nice and warm.”

  I laughed. “You’re a sight warmer than you were last night.” I looked her over. “Those clothes fit you like a tent.”

  She peered down at herself assessing the baggy garments and shrugged. “Next year the look might be all the rage on the runway.”

  “Considering feminine fashions these days, you might be right. I’ve noted recently that army boots appear to be making a comeback. The classroom keeps me on the leading edge of female fashion trends. When I started teaching, female students were skirted and coifed. Now they’re trousered and booted.”

  “And they burn their bras, too, I hear.”

  “Ahem. I wouldn’t know about that.”

  “Is that a blush I see, Mr. Granger?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  She lost interest in the discussion and looked around the sparse cabin, her view lingering on the Royal portable typewriter a moment, and then moved to the bookcase along the wall—the only item not sparsely furnished. “You got telephone here?”

  “We’re not connected yet. Maybe by the end of the decade. Hopefully before the turn of the century.” I grinned.

  She peered at the dark windowpane. “We’re pretty remote, aren’t we?”

  “It just appears that way.”

  She turned. “But there’s not much chance of anyone finding us, is there?”

  Whatever had scared her had burrowed itself deep in her psyche. I shrugged. “Not right off. Not tonight. If they have a good enough reason to find you and get serious about looking, they will eventually. You can’t stay here too long.”

  “They have good reasons.” She tightened her lips and thought a moment. “Where’d you say the peanut butter was?”

  “Nerves?”

  “Thinking about them does that to me.”

  “Maybe you’ll feel better if you talk it out.” It was a try, but I didn’t think it would get me very far.

  “I’d rather console myself with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, thank you.”

  “One of the cabinets. The one above the sink, I think.”

  She gathered the appropriate items—the bread still looked fit to eat—located a knife and went to work. “Maybe you’re right, Granger. Maybe I ought to tell you,” she said, busy at the counter. “You’ve proven trustworthy...so far.” Her shoulders lifted in a small shrug. “And frankly, you’re all I have at the moment.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I said dryly.

  She peered over her shoulder. “Did I scratch thin skin?” She looked back at the sandwich she was building. “You don’t write, do you?”

  “Well that’s out of left field. I guess it depends. Do you consider research papers writing?”

  “I was referring to the popular variety. The sort normal people read.”

  “Normal people read research papers.” I frowned, and then I knew where she was going. “Nice diversion, sweetheart. You’ll not change subject so easily with me.”

  She grinned, carried the sandwich to a chair near the stove, and bit off a corner. “The place is finally getting warm.”

  I said, “Who’s Cockran and what did you do to make him mad?”

  She studied the sandwich in her fingers. “Cockran is head of Developmental Testing. That’s his official title. More importantly Sten Cockran is buddy-buddy with Matthew Allister.”

  “And Matthew Allister is?”

  “Founder and president of STE. He and Cockran have been friends since the war.”

  “Which war? We seem to be having a lot of them lately.”

  She narrowed toward me. “You a passivist or something? The Vietnam War, of course,” she said as if there had never been any other. I reminded myself she’d only been a little girl when Vietnam ended, and suddenly I felt very old.

  Marcie said, “War tends to attract strange bed fellows, you know?”

  “When you’re taking live fire, you don’t ask the man covering your backside for a pedigree,” I said.

  “Maybe that’s all there is to it,” she agreed. “I’ve never met two different men than Matthew Allister and Sten Cockran. When Allister began the company, Cockran came knocking on his door looking for a job. This was all long before I started work there.”

  “Cockran takes his orders from Allister?”

  A distant look came to her eyes. “I don’t think so,” she said thoughtfully. “Yes, far as the chain of command goes, he does, but somehow I have the feeling Cockran’s loyalties extend beyond corporate.”

  “He’s taking two paychecks?”

  She made a face. “It’s a reasonable assumption.”

  “Something must have clued you in. Something you read, saw, heard? A secretary might come across a variety of privy items.”

  She appeared to be arranging her thoughts. “At first it was just a feeling.”

  “Feelings are about as reliable as a politician’s campaign promise.”

  “It’s not only that. There’s those three creeps he keeps around.”

  “Relatives? Good friends?”

  She shook her head. “Anything but friends. Cockran and Alexander are always at each other.”

  “What does that tell you?”

  She glared at me. “What does it tell you, smarty pants.”

  “They both get orders from someone—someone even Cockran has to answer to.”

  She considered that, eating the last of her sandwich. Out on the road at the end of the driveway a pair of headlights swung around the curve br
iefly torching the trees in front of the cabin. The car kept going, taillights bobbing around the next bend. I looked back at Marcie. “What do you have that’s important enough to warrant all these sinister creeps trying to get their paws on you?”

  “They think Carl told me something.”

  “Did he?”

  “Alexander made it pretty clear they thought so. That’s why they dragged me up to that cabin. It was an isolated place, and they could take their time with me.”

  After watching her impressive martial display earlier tonight, I had a hard time picturing anyone taking her to some isolated cabin against her will—at least not without acquiring a few broken bones along the way.

  “Naturally you know nothing.”

  “I know nothing, Colonel Klink!” She smiled. “Sorry. I couldn’t help myself. I do know some things, just not as much as they think I do.” She rubbed her hands together and held them near the stove. “You don’t happen to have anything to drink around here?”

  “We’re pretty modern ma’am. Maybe no telephone yet, but there is running water in the sink.”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “I went to the kitchen, rummaged around one of the cabinets and came out with a dusty bottle my brother had left the last time he’d used the place. “You drink Jack Daniel’s?”

  “Sure. Make it a double. Neat.”

  There were no proper tumblers amongst the mismatched glassware, so I splashed a couple fingers of the stuff into a water glass and carried it across the room to her.

  “Thanks.” She took a deep pull at the glass and made a pained face. “Whew. That burns.”

  I was beginning to admire Marcie’s stamina. When it came to alcohol, she was no lightweight. Just the same, she was hitting the stuff pretty hard tonight. Well, I wasn’t in charge of her liquor intake. Maybe she had good reasons. Another time or place I might have enforced limits, but here, tonight, I figured we were safe enough. At least I didn’t expect Alexander et al to find us so soon and burst in the door.

  “You were saying?”

  She glared at me over the rim of the glass. “Insistent, aren’t you? Okay, for the most part they questioned me about Carl. Not directly, more like probing around the edges without coming right out and asking. Know what I mean?”

  “Sure. If you really didn’t know anything, they didn’t want to show their hand. Neater that way. Less explaining afterward. That is if they intended to let you go.”

  She winced. “I never got the impression they were going to.” That thought appeared to weigh heavily on her. She drew in a breath. “So I kept evading their questions. Tried playing a little dumb, tried lying.”

  “Why?”

  Her head snapped around. “Why?”

  “If you hardly knew anything, what difference would it make if you gave honest answers to their questions?”

  “You putting me on, Granger or are you naturally naive?”

  I shrugged. “It comes naturally. Suppose you enlighten me?”

  “I better, before you get yourself in trouble.” She threw back more whiskey. “Soon as they learned all that they thought I knew; it would be over.” She dragged a finger across her neck in a meaningful way. “So long as they thought I knew something of value, I was worth keeping alive. I was buying time, Granger. If Carl had told me anything, I might have told someone else. They wanted names. Why do you think I’ve not told you anything? The less you know the safer you are.” She let go of a long sigh and peered unhappily into her whiskey glass. “Probably too late now. They’ll think you were in on it from the beginning.”

  “Gee, that makes me feel happy.”

  “Thrills me too.” She contemplated the glass, rolling it between her palms, and took another drink. “Carl was a thief,” she said not looking up. “It’s not what you think. He didn’t make a career of it. A resistor or a transistor now and then, a few capacitors if whatever pet project he was concocting at home needed them. He was an electronics engineer, and like most engineers was always building something on the side.”

  “All bashed together with company parts.”

  “Mostly, I guess.”

  “Did STE ever miss the stolen components?”

  “Inventory is never checked that closely, Granger. Besides, what’s a resistor to a billion-dollar company?” Marcie looked gloomily at her drink. “A lousy resistor not worth ten cents got Carl killed.”

  “And one of Sten Cockran’s three goons did it?”

  She nodded.

  “Why bounce Carl of the front bumper of a car just for pocketing a few resistors?” There was more to it that Marcie wasn’t telling me. She was playing the same game, making rabbit trails like she had with those men in the cabin.

  “I’m trying to figure it out. Carl came into work that morning plainly upset. He wanted to see Mr. Allister, but Allister wasn’t in his office yet. Later Carl called up from the lab asking for an appointment. I told him Allister’s schedule was full for the rest of the day and asked what was so urgent. He said he couldn’t talk about it over the phone and mumbled something about something blowing up. On my break I went down to the assembly room to find out what was going on.”

  Marcie frowned at her empty glass and held it out to me to refill. “Think you ought to?”

  “You’re not my mother.” Her words were beginning to slur again.

  I dutifully refilled it. If nothing else, the liquor seemed to be oiling her tongue. When I returned, she’d lit a cigarette. “Mind?”

  “I don’t. My brother might.”

  My brother’s opinion didn’t matter at the moment. She puffed and drank and said, “Carl was pacing his office when I got there. I asked what was going on. He pulled out a handful of components from his pocket and held them out in his hand. Their ends were all bent and covered in solder as if he just pulled them off a PC board. They were just old, used components as far as I could see.”

  “Ones that he’d pilfered from STE?”

  “How would I know? And he didn’t have time to tell me. Sten Cockran came in at that moment, said he wanted to talk to Carl. Alone. I left him standing there, stiff as a stone, his face drained of color.” She paused, drawing into herself, remembering. Her voice turned soft. “Later that morning, Carl was murdered while crossing the parking lot.”

  “You’re sure it was murder?”

  “The police said both pants pockets had been turned out. They were empty except one of the resistor component thingies that had got caught down in the lining.” Marcie took another hefty drink, as if the whiskey could change anything now.

  “And that’s all you have to go on?”

  “I have s’picion. No facts.” Her shoulders rolled briefly. “I think I’m getting tipsy.”

  It was about time all that alcohol began showing up, but I didn’t tell her that. “Then what happened?”

  “Next evening, walking out to my car, a car pulled up alongside and one of Cockran’s Neanderthals yanked me through an open door and sped out of the parking lot. That was two days ago. The beginning of this nightmare.” She blinked and dropped her view to the whiskey glass, watching the amber liquid rolling back and forth.

  “And that’s everything?” I asked. She didn’t seem to hear, curled up with her thoughts as she was. She suddenly lifted a hand and pointed a finger at me, sloshing whiskey on my brother’s floor in the process. “One more thing. I ‘member now. One of ‘em said the name Stratterford.”

  “Stratterford? What does it mean?”

  Marcie cocked her head to one side, wearing a befuddled look that comes when you cross the line from merely drunk to totally soused. “It could mean nothing or a slot, Ganger.” Her voice had fallen into a sing-songy rhythm. “What’s the name of Colorado’s Senator?” She tilted her head to the other side and blinked a couple times as if trying to focus.

  “I don’t know. I’m from New Mexico, remember?”

  She leaned far forward. “Lester A. Stratterford,” she said, over-pronouncing each sylla
ble, and tipping out of the chair.

  I moved to catch her, but she managed to right herself, pushing out a hand at me like a traffic cop. “I’m all right.”

  “You’re all wiped. I think you’ve had enough,” I said reaching for the glass. She pulled it away and guzzled the last of it, handing me the empty glass, flashing a crooked smile. I took it to the kitchen. When I got back, Marcie’s glazed stare focused somewhere in space. I waved a hand in front of her. “Hello. Still there?”

  She blinked up at me. I said, “Shall we continue?”

  “What?”

  “Carl mentioned something blowing up. Any idea what he meant?”

  She straightened in the chair and made an effort to act sober. “I don’t know, Ganger. Really don’t.” She shut her eyes hard and opened them. Maybe it helped to keep me in focus?

  “You said STE makes detonators for nuclear war heads.”

  “Just the electronics.”

  “Could it have something to do with that?”

  “I s’pose.”

  “Where does STE send the electronic package?”

  Marcie sucked on the cigarette and flicked a long gray ash onto the pine floor. I rubbed it out with the toe of my boot. She said, “A random selection sent to Rocky Flats to be evaluated. Rest go to other manufacturers, assembled into other parts.” Her words trailed off. She was making a valiant effort but losing the battle.

  I took the cigarette from her fingers. “What else can you tell me?” I didn’t expect much more from her tonight. “Anything about Stratterford?” Now that she’d mentioned him, I recalled reading something in the local newspaper about the Colorado Senator.

  Her eyes parted and her shoulders gave a slight lift. “Don’t know much ‘bout him except sometimes on TV news I see him skiing or hiking. Make good campaign ads.” Another lethargic shoulder lift.

  I said, “How does he feel about nuclear weapons?” It was a blind shot, but it must have hit something. Her blue eyes widened; a spark of renewed vigor in them.