A Deadly Shade of Rose

by Douglas Hirt

  “I might let you bleed to death instead. You seem well on your way. Where are the rest of my men?”

  “Downstairs, but better not go looking for them unless you have a strong stomach.”

  He frowned. “That bad?”

  “You might say Louis gave his last drop for you, sir. I doubt it was worth the sacrifice.”

  “And your companions?”

  I looked up sharply. So, they had gotten away! I hid my surprise and said, “I don’t know. Hopefully as far away from here as they can get in this weather.” The frigid air helped settle my head a little, clearing my thinking.

  Stratterford gave a small frown. “You stayed behind as a decoy? How very noble of you, Mr. Granger. Or was it stupidity?”

  I saw no reason to correct him.

  He continued, “No matter. I have more men and it’s a very long and cold trek down to town. Few people live this far up the road. They will be apprehended before any further harm is done and your nobleness, Mr. Granger, will have been for no real cause.”

  I kept pressure on my wrist, the flow had stemmed somewhat, but I’d lost a lot and my head was feeling light, the hammering ache in my head worse now than earlier. I said, “I hadn’t planned for it to end quite like this.” Over the howl of wind came the raspy whine of the over-revving VW engine. “And frankly, I have no intention letting any nobleness go to waste.”

  Lines etched themselves worriedly in his sun-darkened face. “I have the gun, Mr. Granger, which puts you in a weak position to make predictions.”

  I forced my voice to speak calmly, casually. I pictured him a student sitting in the front row, all eager to learn something useful, or maybe just hoping to get a good enough grade to put Biology 101 behind him. “The barrel on that gun is four inches long. It’s loaded with standard velocity twenty-two long rifle solid point cartridges because that’s all I had on hand when I loaded it this morning. You have there the junior member of a very undernourished family of cartridges. The only thing smaller is the twenty-two short—well, there is a wee thing known as a CB Cap, but no one uses it much these days except for punching holes in paper targets in the basement.”

  It was all blather as I desperately tried to figure a way out of this situation.

  “Therefore,” I continued, “if you intend to stop me with that peashooter, I suggest you aim either between my eyes or at my heart. Any deviation from those two places will be fatal to you.” I was laying it on thick, but what did I have to lose?

  “You’re shoveling bullshit, Granger.” Stratterford wore a cocky smirk. “But I’m not buying it. The news is full of people killed by Saturday Night Specials just like this one. You’re not immune.”

  I laughed, my teeth chattering in the cold air. “You’re one dumb Democrat if you think a Smith & Wesson fits in that category, Senator. How did you ever get elected? Sure, a twenty-two will kill you just fine if you’re half trying. The problem is, it won’t kill fast enough to stop me from snapping enough vertebrae to short circuit every nerve signal to your body. And one more thing...

  The distant bark of a .45 caliber pistol cut off my words. I recognize the sound although I’m not sure Mr. Saturday Night Special had any notion what the caliber might be. Three quick bursts, and then a few moments of silence. Our eyes locked. I could see he was thinking. Had the gunshots come from his people? I was pretty sure they hadn’t.

  And then someone tromped a gas pedal.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “The speeder,” he replied worriedly.

  The raspy note of a four-cylinder air-cooled engine got louder. Stratterford’s eyes narrowed and his fingers tightened about the revolver’s grips. The speeder must have turned a corner for now the sound of its engine was louder and growing more so by the second. Stratterford had a wild look about him, his eyes darting. “We’ve talked enough,” he said and squeezed the trigger.

  The revolver was of the double action variety with a long trigger pull. There was a more accurate method of firing such a gun if one wasn’t used to the pull and still keeping the sights on target, but apparently he wasn’t familiar with single action shooting, or maybe it was the sound of the approaching speeder that had rattled him enough that he simply forgot.

  The .22 made a sharp crack. The next instant a bright red and yellow bathtub burst through the glass wall, its unmuffled engine roaring. Sherri and Brian were hanging onto their seats with terror written all over their faces as the odd-looking device careened across the tile floor, propeller churning up a tornado of flying glass. The speeder slid to a stop on the edge of the swimming pool. Behind the controls Marcie Rose stood and swung the government automatic over the top of the Plexiglas windscreen in a firm, two-handed grip...

  Tottering on the edge of the pool, the speeder picked that moment to slip sideways into the water. The propeller whipped a spray to the ceiling, and then the water drowned the engine.

  Stratterford fired at Marcie. He missed. Brian gave a sharp cry and fell overboard. I dove for the senator and took him to the floor. There was nothing soft about the Senator from Colorado. I was at least twenty years younger than him, but I fought under a mighty handicap having lost a considerable amount of blood and having just spent five freezing minutes dripping wet in front of a broken window with winter whistling in and around me.

  The room began spinning, my vision blurring as I fought to wrestle the gun from his hand. I struck a blow to his chin, and he got one in on me. I felt the impact, but it didn’t seem to have an effect. My body had become numb, my nerves reset to a slower speed, my brain flashing a collage of shapes and colors; a warning of impending shut down. Even so, my thinking sharpened as though attempting to compensate, shoving distractions aside to make room for the sole objective, and that was to dispatch Stratterford as speedily as possible before I lost consciousness.

  Somehow, I managed to twist the gun from his grip. Heeding my earlier advice, pushed the barrel between the Senator’s eyes.

  Chapter Twenty

  “Stop Granger. Don’t do it!”

  It wasn’t one of those cliché little voices in your head you read about. It sounded damn real and damn urgent, and like a damn fool I paused long enough to listen to it. That’s when a hand reached out of the blackness of and grabbed the revolver and shoved it aside. It fired and somewhere, I suppose, the bullet ruined another one of Stratterford’s tall windows. And I didn’t care. I didn’t have the strength or even the will to fight anymore. So in the end, Stratterford’s men had swooped in and the Senator had won and I...we’d lost.

  Someone was behind me holding my arms, another moving in front of me. I was vaguely aware of his wide, angular face and my revolver in his hand. No longer struggling, what was the use-?, my vision cleared a little; enough to see Marcie scrambling over the edge of the cockeyed speeder, half in and half out of the pool, coloring the blue water in an ugly, black oil slick. Sherri, I noted as if seeing a dream, was doing a labored sidestroke with Brian Landerfelt in a pretty professional looking cross-chest carry. A man in a dark trench coat holding a sawed-off shotgun waited for her at the chrome ladder.

  But that was all I could manage. My eyes gave up the fight, the scene became a soft blur and my hearing went haywire.

  A man’s voice said something; meaningless sounds merging with the ether of unconsciousness....

  Consciousness returned briefly some moments later. I was shivering violently beneath a thin blanket, laying on the hard, tile floor, Marcie’s blue eyes peering worriedly down at me. Nearby another humped blanket covered another prone body. Sherri was kneeling over it, tangled hair hanging like a wet mop about her shoulders.

  “It’s going to be all right, Paul,” Marcie said soothingly but not very convincingly. I was aware of men standing about, some pretty heavily armed. I tried to speak but only managed to exercise my jaws.

  “Don’t try to talk.”

  I had to. She had to know what Stratterford had done with the detonators. I tried again. The room shi
mmered and faded like a desert mirage.

  “He’s in shock,” someone said.

  “We need to move him someplace warm,” she snapped. “Where the hell is that ambulance?”

  “It’s on its way, Marcie. We’ve stopped the bleeding. Now we wait.”

  Marcie’s voice sounded a bit calmer. “I know, Frank. At least let’s move him out of this damn icebox.”

  “We shouldn’t move him at all. You know that. You’re not...” I drifted off again as if riding a nitrous oxide-like cloud.

  I returned once more during the bouncy ride down the mountainside. A dim light showed we were not all together. Marcie and Sherri were missing. Brian lay on a gurney with two men dressed in white working over him. Apparently, his situation was worse than mine, or maybe I’d been triaged and given a black check mark? I wanted to stay and watch but my body would have none of this foolishness. My brain headed for the exit again, closed the doors, and turned off the light.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “How are you feeling, Paul?” Marcie asked when I finally opened my eyes and saw her sitting on a comfy chair near my bed.

  “Awful,” I said, “as if that fact isn’t self-evident.” Sunlight brightening the curtains suggested morning or maybe late afternoon. I had no way of knowing the time, or where I was.

  She grinned. “You had that coming, you know.”

  “Never forget, do you?”

  “Like an elephant.”

  “In more ways than one.”

  “We can keep my politics out of this,” she said jubilantly. Something had gone right for her.

  “What are you all cheerful about?”

  A smile filled her face. “We did it, you and me. We cracked it open. Stratterford is squawking like a scared parrot, giving us more names than we know what to do with.”

  That reminded me. “Listen, he told me what he was up to—him and certain persons at STE. The detonators, they’ve been booby-trapped. They’re going to stop working halfway between here and the Soviet Union, or wherever they’re aimed. You’ve got let the military know.”

  She gave me a patient smile and patted my hand. “Old news, dear. We’ve known about the sabotage for months.”

  “You did?”

  “Really, Paul, we’re much more proficient than you give us credit.”

  Now I was confused, not that I hadn’t been so since that cold morning when she’d come upon my peaceful fishing camp with that old rifle and belligerent attitude. “What about Carl?”

  “Poor Carl. Not one of us. He found it out all on his own. He’d pilfered a couple of the components for a stereo receiver he’d designed and was building in his basement. When one of them suddenly stopped working, and a second one did so too. Knowing the implications, he panicked and told me and Alexander, but it was too late by then for me to arrange protection. They ran him down and then took after me because Alexander knew Carl had told me about the faulty components.

  I was having trouble putting it together, and still feeling the lingering effects of my concussion didn’t help either. “You knew about the switch and allowed it to continue?”

  Marcie stood from the chair and gave my shoulder a conciliatory pat. “Easy, Paul, don’t get so worked up. You’ll pop a vein. You do realize a very dedicated doctor spent his night shift filling you up with fresh blood and stitching you back together.”

  I remembered the hand. A white gauze bandage encircled it up to my wrist. An IV hose taped to my arm drooped from a bottle of clear fluid dangling on a shiny stand at my bedside. I looked around the room, amazed that I hadn’t realized until now that I was in a hospital. A television balanced upon a gooseneck stand sprouting from one wall. A door opened onto a john with a chrome handrail around its dark walls. Farther to the right was another door and a bright hallway beyond. A nurse pushing a cart passed by. Across the hall was another door and someone sitting up in bed watching television.

  “We had to maintain the illusion that we didn’t know anything,” she said sitting gently on the edge of the bed. “We knew Alexander was the inside man, and that Allister had no idea what was happening right under his nose, but we didn’t know who was the top dog pulling the strings. Alexander was our only good lead so we made him believe the sabotage hadn’t been discovered. All the faulty detonators were kept in a safe place until we could crack this case...and we did. You’re not a half-bad partner, partner.”

  Partner? I didn’t much care for the implication in that. I said, “Gee, thanks. Just what I always wanted to do, get back into the espionage game, you really are a spy, aren’t you, Marcie Rose. And a pretty deadly rose you are.

  “Moi?” She gave me a coy, little ol’ me-? look.

  “Cut the BS. This is me, Paul, remember? The guy you conned halfway across Colorado. I see can right through you now. You’re a windowpane, got that. W-I-N-D-O-...” A man’s voice interrupted the spelling lesson.

  “You are correct of course, Mr. Granger. Miss Rose is, as you put it, a spy, although we prefer to use a less melodramatic term since Mr. Bond and Helm have glamorized our profession. I call our people ‘team members, and never get too specific as to what they do.” He stopped by my bed; a tall man with dark, brown hair thinning in front, a sharp-featured face, and thin lips. They were smiling at the moment. Beneath his long, black trench coat he wore a plain brown suit and a gray tie. His hands held a pair of gloves between them.

  Marcie said, “Paul, this is Frank Lorring.”

  Lorring said, “I’m pleased to see you looking well. A big improvement over last night. The doctor indicated you’d lost a considerable amount of blood and scolded me for waiting so long to call an ambulance.”

  “Your explanation to the doctor was?” I asked.

  “You mean about how you managed to cut yourself on the broken skylight over the swimming pool you were attempting to repair? It was adequate to calm his suspicions. The other gentleman’s injury was more difficult to explain.”

  “I suspect it was,” I replied evenly.

  He went on, “You left us quite a mess to clean up and that will take a bit of creative explaining considering it happened in a prominent Senator’s home. Our team members are dealing with the problem now. We’ll keep your name out of it...for the moment.”

  “I appreciate that too. A story like that getting our could cause a stir with the University’s president and the board, not to mention the distraction in my classroom next semester.”

  He studied me a moment and said, “You intend to return to teaching when your sabbatical is over.” It was a statement hiding a question.

  “Of course,” I said seeing that there was something on his mind.

  “I’ve run a check on you. Excellent war record. Eighteen successful missions. Right training and experience, and an uncanny ability to survive. We can make a place in our organization for a man like yourself.”

  “Who’s we?”

  He shook his head, a thin smile on his angular face. “If you’re interested in joining the team, I’ll go into it in more detail. If not, then it’s best to let the subject die.”

  There was a time once, in my younger days, when I would have given the offer serious consideration. Today, I couldn’t seem to dredge up that old feeling of excitement, the exhilaration of the hunt like that brief moment on the staircase in an adrenaline spawn longing for 1967 again, another time, another place. That life was over. It had been buried for too long to dig up its corpse and try to breathe life back into it. There were other things that mattered today. I thought of peaceful mountain streams armed only with a good rod and reel, and a box of flies. I thought of teaching, of the smell of a college biology lab...and, curiously, I thought of Sherri too.

  I said, “Let it die.”

  He nodded. “I suspected that might be your answer.”

  “Will you answer me one question?”

  He thought a moment. “That depends on the question.”

  “How did you happen to show up at Stratterford’s plac
e at just the right moment?”

  Frank glanced at Marcie. “She called us, told us Stratterford might be the key we’ve been looking for. We learned his current location, put eyes on the ground, and waited. When you arrived on the plane our people got in touch and we poured every team member available into the area. Of course, that took a little time to organize; several hours. Sorry for the delay.”

  I looked back at Marcie, freshly scrubbed and combed. She wore a simple blue skirt and matching blue coat over a white blouse. She looked very prim, proper, very first-day-in-class schoolgirlish. She must have gone shopping this morning. I noted the touch of pale pink lipstick and some liner under her eyes. Her cheeks were faintly pink—not from last night’s cold air but from a recent encounter with some blush. Looking at her, it was difficult to recall the scraggly, half-frozen woman who only a few days ago stumbled into my fishing camp with a rifle and an attitude. That memory was rapidly fading.

  I said, “That was the telephone call you made from the restaurant.”

  “You see why I couldn’t tell you? I didn’t want to lie to you, Granger, but I had to. What you didn’t know, you couldn’t tell to anyone.

  A rift had come between us. No more Paul, no more darling. I was Granger again. A very professional, very deadly wall separated us and Marcie was retreating behind it. The gulf had begun to open the moment I’d refused Frank’s offer. Marcie had her life, her world, and it was plain my life, my world wasn’t going to interfere with it. That was best for both of us, I knew, but at the moment I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. At the very least it would be safer like this—for both of us.

  “Apology noted and accepted,” I said trying to sound light and happy.

  A smile fleetingly crossed her lips. “It wasn’t an apology, Granger. I just wanted you to know.”

  “I’d have done the same.”