A Deadly Shade of Rose

by Douglas Hirt

  I had the truck rolling in third gear. In the rearview the Porsche was just turning out of the parking lot in no great hurry. He could afford to take it easy. No way was this old Ford going to outrun him.

  “I’m waiting,” I prodded.

  She exhaled sharply. “What I told you was the truth. I am a reporter. I’m working undercover. That’s all there is, and I don’t know why you’re making a Federal case out of it.”

  “Do newspapers really insert reporters into large organizations with false identifies? I’ll be first to admit that I know next to nothing about the newspaper business, but it sounds to me like an invite for a big lawsuit.”

  Her lips tightened in exasperation. “Why do you think I hesitated telling you anything about myself? When I asked you if you did any writing did it even occur to you that I was trying to protect my story? No, suspicious you only thought I was stalling, hiding some deep secret.” She shot a hot glare my direction. “I wasn’t about to pass along a tip if I thought there was the slightest chance you might run with it and scoop me. A reporter’s story is damn near the most sacred thing a reporter has and even you should realize that.”

  It was a good story. I was almost convinced, but not quite. There was more she wasn’t telling. I’d heard one yarn after another, and none of them had been true. “You’re really very good but you’ll have to do better than hurtful looks and a tale about protecting your precious story. And you’ve managed to nicely tap-dance around my first question.”

  She began to say something in protest then stopped herself, the anger melting into a smirk. “I’m on to you, Granger. You’re playing the consummate fisherman now, aren’t you? Playing out the line nice and easy, just enough at a time to keep me talking. Don’t want to reel her in too quickly now, do we? Give the lady a little more slack, let her fight the hook, wear herself out while you enjoy the sport of it. Is that the game you’re playing? You were pretty good just now. You got something I didn’t want to give. Well, Mr. Angler this fish is heading for deep water where all the snags hang out.”

  I laughed. “That was pretty good. Maybe you really are a writer.” I glanced at the man in the mirror four cars behind us. “Whether or not you care to admit it, we’ve got real trouble with real men who carry real guns. They—whomever they are—are closing in on you and me and unless you start telling me what’s going on, you and me, we’re going down, as they say in the movies. And don’t give me that woeful look and say you don’t know what I’m talking about. You’re no reporter, at least not for any legitimate newspaper. You fight like Bruce Lee, you handle a gun like Roy Rogers, and you carry enough bullet wounds on your lily-white body to qualify for a handful of Purple Hearts and probably a Congressional Medal of Honor depending on what side of the fence you got them on.”

  We were coming to a stoplight. I swung into a fast food parking lot near the corner and pulled into a space facing the street. The Porsche stopped at the light, the plaid-capped gent behind the wheel keeping his eyes straight ahead, the binoculars no longer on the dash. Probably on the seat beside him.

  “Before you say anything, take a good look at the driver in that red car.”

  She did. I said, “Do you recognize either the car or the driver?” The light changed and he moved off with the traffic.

  “I don’t,” she said looking at me. “Should I?”

  I said, “I don’t know. We picked him up in Woodland Park just before the highway divided. He’s been tailing us ever since. He waited in the lot down below STE with a pair of binoculars, 10x50 judging from what I was able to see of them. He’s got a two-way radio, probably a FM if I’m reading that short second antenna on the left fender correctly.”

  I could tell that had shaken her, but Marcie’s voice remained remarkably calm and professional. “They’ve found us.” I had the impression tight fixes and sudden changes in plans were not an uncommon thing for her.”

  “It would appear so, but they don’t seem to be in any hurry to do anything about it. Any ideas why?” I’m certain she had a few, but I didn’t expect getting the information out of her was going to be so easy. It wasn’t.

  “No. And wipe that suspicious look off your face. I’m telling you the truth. I have no idea who that man is or why he’s playing cat and mouse with us.” Her view darted back to the spot by the light but the Porsche had already moved off. She looked at me a little uncertainly. “You sure about all this or are your nerves getting the better of you?”

  Marcie was right, of course. Given the right combination of nervous stimulus and imagination a person could take a string of coincidences and build a pretty good case out of them, but not this time. I grimaced. It had been a lot of years since I’d played a game like this. Back then I’d been a pawn on an international chess board. Today, well I didn’t know what it was all about, but once you spend a few youthful years weaving and dodging the other pawn’s moves, it sort of becomes like riding a bike. No, I hadn’t forgotten what it felt like to know I was being followed. I might have been a little unsteady in the beginning, but I was getting my balance back. And I hadn’t forgotten that queer itch between my shoulder blades that won’t go away when scratched.

  I said, “What do you want to bet that there’ll be a very expensive tail in my mirror if they haven’t changed cars. They should. I don’t understand why they haven’t already. I get the feeling this is all pretty new to them.”

  “But not to you?” She looked at me accusingly. “You seem to know a lot about being followed.”

  I said, “I played this game once before—well, several times before. It was a different part of the world, but the same game. The game never changes, only players and location.” I got the truck moving again trying not to remember like I do sometimes at night, when dreams turn ugly. “I didn’t like it back then and I don’t like it now. It’s not my past I’m interested in. It’s yours, Miss Rose. Not the whole thing, of course, just the parts that relate to why you and I are here and why we are of enough interest to anyone to latch a tail onto us.” I glanced over. She was staring straight ahead. I continued, “That was pretty fancy, the way you took out that gent last night. Taekwondo? Is that what they’re teaching in journalism school these days?”

  “Taekkyeon. My parents lived and worked in South Korea for the first twelve years of my life. I was interested in martial arts. They paid for the lessons, but we moved back to the States before I was very competent. I got the rest of my training at the taxpayer’s expense in the army.”

  There was a certain triumph in her voice that I was learning was characteristic of Marcie whenever she felt she’d pulled a trump card on me. I shifted into third and rolled through the green light at Nevada Avenue, bouncing across the highway while traffic piled up on the north and south bound lanes. We were going east and I realized that the Garden of the Gods Road had vanished and this was a new street. Well, it hadn’t really gone away. It was the same strip of concrete, only the name changed when we’d crossed Nevada. The street sign informed me we were now on Austin Bluffs Parkway, thank you very much. I’d come this way before, but this was the first time I’d noticed the name change. It’s an easy thing to overlook when you’re not paying attention, when all your senses aren’t tuned finer than an Indy 500 race car.

  It was not so easy, however, to overlook the red Porsche that pulled slowly into view and settled two cars behind us in the same comfortable spot where it had been since leaving Woodland Park. I grimaced at a thought. Maybe he didn’t want to go unnoticed? Maybe keeping my attention on what was behind us instead of what was ahead had been his plan all along?

  Marcie was saying, “While in the employ of our esteemed uncle with the white beard, I lucked into an assignment with the Stars and Stripes. It’s a-”

  “I know what the Stars and Strips is,” I said cutting short her glib patter. “You’re doing a lot of talking but you aren’t saying much.”

  “After I was discharged,” she went on, a touch of annoyance in her voice, “I
went to work for a little newspaper in Virginia called the Old Dominion.”

  I glanced at her.

  “Honest, that was its name. Virginia is close to DC, don’t you know?”

  I rolled my eyes. She smirked and continued, “I quite often covered the political scene, but unfortunately, the Dominion was a small rag with an even smaller budget, and that meant low-rent lodging in the seedier parts of the District for staff on assignments. If you’ve ever been to DC, you know what I’m talking about. Most of the time I was alone. I felt particularly vulnerable every time I stepped out of the cab and walked those long, dark steps up to my motel room. I fell back on my army training, and on the side earned a black belt in Aikido.”

  “I thought you said it was Taekkyeon?”

  She laughed. “Try to find someone in the States who teaches Taekkyeon, let alone is a master in the art.”

  It made sense, so I let the discrepancy ride.

  “I still take lessons on and off when I feel I need to brush up. I don’t fight competition anymore. I know my capabilities and I don’t enjoy being knocked around by someone who can do it better than me.”

  We were passing the university—UCCS to the locals—and I cranked the steering wheel hard and beat a yellow light into the university parking lot. The Porsche hit the red and stopped. I drove slowly toward the little machine at the curb. I didn’t want to lose him now. The machine demanded an offering of quarters in exchange for a parking stub. I didn’t have any quarters to sacrifice and I drove on through into the sparsely populated lot and pulled into a slot under some trees at the far end.

  Marcie had suspended her story when I’d nearly put the truck on its side making the turn. She glanced around at the brown lawn and leafless trees scattered amongst the green firs and said, “What are you up to, Granger?” She looked over her shoulder out the rear window.

  “Our friend in the Porsche is persistent. It’s time we find out who he is and what he wants.” That brought a smile to Marcie’s face. “Figured that might satisfy your blood lust for a while.”

  She said, “He’s taken the bait.”

  ‘Don’t appear too interested. I see him in the outside mirror. He’s feeding the money-gulping machine. Got a ticket.”

  “At least he’s legal,” Marcie said.

  “And we know he travels with a pocketful of change.”

  Marcie frowned. “Somehow I didn’t picture him as the legal sort.”

  I shrugged. “Never can tell how some folks arrange their morals. Here he comes. He’s driving around to the far end of the lot, pulling under that stand of old blue spruce.” The trees looked old enough to have been some of the original plantings way back before this had been a university, back when all this had been a tuberculosis sanitarium in the thirties. “We’ll give him a few minutes to wonder what we’re up to. In the meantime, I’d like to hear about the time Roy Rogers gave you shooting lessons?”

  She scowled. “You just don’t give up, do you?”

  “And you’re about one lie away from being booted out of here so that I can go back to the mountains and find a nice, quiet fishing hole to drown worms in until whatever it is that’s brewing here blows over, so better make it good.”

  “I see no reason why I have to explain my life to you.”

  I nodded. “You’re right. No reason at all. There’s the handle. Give it a good tug and the door opens.”

  Her lips came together practically turning blue. Lockjaw, I decided, was a reoccurring condition with Marcie, sort of like malarial fevers.

  “I was born on a ranch in northern Arizona, about thirty miles from Mesa,” she blurted all at once, inhaled sharply and glared at me. “I had three brothers who could and could shoot like...like Roy Rogers, all right? They looked after grandpa’s cattle and I had two choices. Either learn to ride and shoot well enough to keep up with them or stay home with my mother and little sister and learn to sew and cook and put up vegetables. I opted for riding and shooting.”

  “Was that before or after you lived in South Korea?” I inquired giving her a skeptical look. She had so many stories they were beginning to trip over each other.”

  “Anyone ever tell you how annoying you can be?”

  “I think you may have—once or twice.”

  Her lips got tight again, and she stared out the windshield at the old, white, sanitarium building framed in naked tree branches. It was an attractive piece of early Colorado Springs architecture with pink tiled triangular projections on the roof like miniature great pyramids. The building once housed the main tubercular hospital way back when this architectural style had been in vogue. Today it looked sadly out of place among the newer, less inspired classrooms sprouting like weeds across the campus, all angles and no imagination, no beauty.

  She looked back at me and there was a sheen in her eyes. “Both, if you must know. I was born in Arizona, and then moved with my parents to Seoul when I was two. My father was a civil engineer and had been hired to oversee a railroad being built through some pretty rough countryside. He was away a lot.” She grimaced. “Alicia was born in Korea. That was a hard pregnancy for Mom. She never could get use to the heat and humidity, and the culture, so we moved back to Arizona. My brothers were all older than me and were a big help around the ranch. Grandpa Saavadra was in his eighties and couldn’t work like he used to.”

  Marcie went quiet for a moment with her memories. “What I remember best were the warm summer evenings camping out under the stars—there were so many were we lived, away from city lights. I would curl up on my sleeping bag reading a Victoria Holt novel in the light of a Coleman lantern while my brothers sat around the campfire quietly telling dirty jokes and lying about the horses they’d ridden and the girls they’d loved.” A smile lingered on Marcie’s lips, slowly sagging into a frown. “Grandpa lost the ranch to the land bank over a loan he’d taken out a decade before. The place had been part of a Spanish land grant and had been in our family for over two hundred years. Mom grew up there and Dad had come to love it as if he had too. We had to move into the city. I think the heartbreak of that is what killed Grandpa the next year. A couple years after that Mom got cancer. Curt got drunk and drove his pickup into an irrigation ditch and life just sort of went to hell.

  “I was twenty-one. Dad took a job with the Santa Fe Railway, and just like in Korea, he was gone a lot. Mom died on Christmas Eve while Dad was somewhere between Chicago and La Junta. With Mom gone there was nothing left for me—for any of us—in Mesa. Alicia was eighteen and away at college. Rodney had gone to work for a local grain and feed distributor. Mark got married and now sells hardware at a Handy Dan in California. And me-?, I joined the army.”

  I said, “Is that where you got shot up?”

  Marcie shook her head, and then grinned at me. “It wasn’t those bullet wounds you were looking at, Granger. You can’t tell me that.”

  “I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t notice the rest of the assets.”

  “Like what you saw?”

  I shrugged. “You’re sort on the skinny side, but then I like women on the skinny side. You might have stirred up a certain amount of lust within my wicked soul.”

  “Regretting not taking me up on my offer last night?”

  If she was playing a game to distract me from my suspicious questions, she was doing a pretty good job of it. “There’ll be other opportunities,” I said with proper male hubris.

  Her eyebrows arched. “Think so?”

  I grinned. “One can hope.” In the outside mirror I glimpsed a flash of light from inside the Porsche.

  Marcie said, “The wounds are more recent than my army days. I was covering a story in Nicaragua two summers ago. The bus I was riding on was stopped by Sandinistas. The driver got out and was having what appeared to be a cordial conversation with one of the men I assumed was the leader. For some reason that I’ve never been able to determine, they opened fire on the bus with machine pistols. I was one of the lucky ones. I awoke in a hospital in
Puerto Cabezas, on the Caribbean coast.” She grimaced. “Like I said, I was lucky. Several of my compadres were not.” Marcie paused seeing my attention suddenly fixed on the door mirror. “What is it?”

  “He’s getting curious. Just put those binoculars on us.” I looked away from the mirror. “All right, I believe you...halfway. I still have questions, but they’ll have to wait. I suppose you know how to drive a pickup truck?”

  “Granger, you weren’t listening. I was practically born in a pickup truck, and there’s more truth to that than just a tired old cliché.”

  “Just testing you.” I grinned. “Don’t get your pretty, skinny self in a tizzy. I’m going to go into the administration building, that place with the pyramids on its roof. It doubles as classrooms too. I want you to slide over here behind the wheel and keep an eye on the mirror but try not to act interested. Pretend you’re bored, or napping. When I give you the signal, drive over and pull behind the Porsche in case he decides to try something tricky. Got it?”

  “Aye, aye, captain.” She gave a mock salute.

  I opened the squeaky door and left her sitting there. Maybe putting her in charge of the truck was my way of showing her I really did believe the story she’d told, or maybe I was trying to convince myself it was all true. Whatever the deep psychological reasons were, it was a mistake. I should have said to hell with Marcie Rose’s feelings and driven away from there just as far and as fast as the old truck would go. I suppose my first mistake was going fishing when I should have been working. This was my second mistake, or maybe it was my third, or fourth. I hadn’t been keeping a tab on the number, but they seemed to be piling up quickly.

  Chapter Eleven

  The morning was pretty much history by time I entered the administration building. A clock visible through an open office door said it was five to twelve. Marcie was going to have to settle for lunch, I mused as I hurried along the long, low-ceiling corridor. The place looked as old on the inside as it did from the outside. Overhead, the building’s plumbing hung naked from the ceiling. Utilities were simpler back when they built the place. Open the windows on hot summer days, close them in the winter. Rap on the pipes and you got steam, if you were lucky. And air conditioning? Hey, this was Colorado at 6000 feet elevation. Who needed air conditioning? It was only much later that man became more season conscious. Maybe the weather was milder fifty years ago?