Color Of Blood

by Keith Yocum

  After several seconds of screaming and twisting, Judy started to calm down as her right foot grew numb with pain.

  “Officer White, we’ve removed just the tip of your right baby toe. You don’t really need it, and you can hide it easily enough. We look forward to working with you in the future.”

  Judy was in the process of screaming a muted “You fucking bastard!” when she felt a cloth imbued with the anesthetic placed over her nose. This time she greedily took it in.

  ***

  The Japanese men stopped after leaving the Messeplatz and lit cigarettes; the two models sauntered by Dennis from right to left, followed by the Garder look-alike.

  Dennis followed fifty feet back as the young man walked past the shuttle-bus stop and down Clarastrasse. Dennis lingered and took to the other side of the street, feeling a little out of his element. Garder was the trained, street-wise agent; Dennis was the trained investigator—he did his best work looking at documents and interviewing subjects. Nevertheless, Dennis knew enough about clandestine operations to appreciate that surprise was the ultimate weapon. As clumsy as Dennis might be, Garder would not be expecting to be tailed in this charming little Swiss town.

  The man walked down the right side of the street in no hurry, stopping idly at a corner café, and then apparently changed his mind. Dennis did his best to keep a good distance back, and at one point the young man crossed to his side of the street, whereupon Dennis switched to the other side.

  The man walked down Clarastrasse until it became Claraplatz, and Dennis could finally see the river and a bridge several blocks ahead.

  The man stopped in front of a butcher shop and stared in the window for what seemed like five minutes. Dennis was forced to stop and fidget around a newspaper-vending box attached to a light post. A large bus spewing a thin cloud of diesel fumes lumbered down the street, momentarily blocking Dennis’s view of his prey. When the bus moved away, the man had vanished.

  Dennis took off at a loping run down the street, straining to look down Claraplatz to see if the man had simply continued ahead. He pulled up directly across from the butcher shop and looked inside; there was a single white-haired, elderly woman in a beige jacket talking to the butcher.

  Dennis continued at a trot until he came to a cross street and looked right, then left; a block down the tree-lined street to his left, he saw a man running. He took off down Rebgasse in pursuit and saw the runner take a right at the first street that would lead back to the river.

  “Shit,” he muttered. “I don’t even know if this is Garder.”

  Dennis found himself out of breath as he barreled past startled pedestrians. At one point he briefly got entangled in a leash tethering a small black poodle to a tall, angular elderly man. The owner yelled in alarm as Dennis briefly yanked the dog sideways.

  Dennis took a wide, lurching turn down Schafgusslein and came to a stop, trying to catch his breath. The street was nearly empty of pedestrians, and he strained to look for any movement. A man and a woman walked toward him on the opposite side of the street about fifty yards away. On the right side of the street, a single young man in a leather jacket walked toward him smoking a cigarette.

  Although he was out of breath, and a thick sheen of perspiration had settled on his forehead, Dennis took off running again, pounding heavily down the cement sidewalk.

  His heart sank when he got to the next cross street; it was a wide thoroughfare with numerous pedestrians plying both sides of Rheingasse. He looked right and left, hanging onto a lamppost to rest.

  If the man running away from him was Garder, his initial direction was down Claraplatz toward the river. Then the man took off running parallel to the river. If the man was trying to get as far from Dennis as possible, he would probably run west and away from the river; a river required a bridge to cross, where he could easily be seen and trapped.

  But what if he cut back to the river? Dennis thought. He would only do so because he left something important, that’s why. He’s going to pick up money, jewelry, hell, maybe a new watch worth thousands of dollars, who the hell knows? So where did he leave all the stuff he wants to collect?

  At a hotel or rooming house—no, not a rooming house, at a hotel. He’s too rich now to stay at a rooming house.

  Hell, Dennis thought, the hotel could be miles from here—or anywhere in the city, really.

  But wait, he was walking and could have taken a cab or a convention-center bus to his hotel if he had to. No, he chose to walk. His hotel is right around here, on this side of the bridge so he could easily saunter to the Messeplatz to ogle all his stupid watches, Dennis concluded.

  Dennis took off walking toward Claraplatz again, carefully scanning pedestrians and looking for hotels. He saw plenty of restaurants, cafes, and office buildings, but no hotels. He had long given up trying to pull his man out of the crowd; there were simply too many people.

  After nearly a half-hour of meandering through the wide intersection of Clarastrasse and Rheingasse, he finally stopped a young businessman.

  “Excuse me,” he said, “do you speak English?”

  “Yes, a little,” he said.

  “I’m lost, and I wonder if you could direct me to a hotel? Is there a nice hotel nearby?”

  “Let me think,” the man said with what seemed to Dennis to be a French accent. “Ah, yes. Of course: the Merian. You will like this hotel.” He gave Dennis precise directions that took him three blocks away to a six-story stone building. The building itself looked several hundred years old and was nestled into a group of similar buildings that Dennis took to be apartments and office buildings.

  He stood about fifty yards to the side of the entrance and debated whether to go inside and prowl the lobby. He looked up and down the street, hoping to see his prey sauntering by, but it was no use. Checking his watch, he estimated that fifty minutes had passed from when he had started tailing the young man.

  If Garder were a good agent, he would not have gone directly to his room; that would be too dangerous. He would wait to make sure he was clear of his tail, and then go “home.” Once back “home,” he would quickly organize his escape.

  Dennis walked up the stairs and into the small lobby; it was quaint and uncomfortably small, but he had no other choice than to hang out. He took off his jacket and sunglasses to make it more difficult for his young man to identify him.

  He sat in a small armchair facing the front door and picked up a French language newspaper that he could not read. A middle-aged couple sat in a couch across from him and consulted a street map, speaking German.

  After twenty minutes Dennis began to have second thoughts; the man he was chasing could have been running to catch a bus; or he could in fact have been Garder, but what’s to say he’s not on a train to Italy at this very moment? The more Dennis thought of the possibilities, the more depressed he became.

  His habit had always been to go with his instincts on these kinds of things, but perhaps he was losing his touch. He could sit in this hotel for the next month, and Garder could be sunning himself in Cannes or Atlantic City.

  He stood up and flung the newspaper down and found the men’s room. He took a long, steady piss that seemed to last five minutes. Washing his hands, he walked into the lobby and glanced idly at the elevators in the lobby.

  There stood the young man, his back to Dennis. The man was looking up at the old-fashioned brass dial showing the status of the elevator.

  Dennis was giddy with the self-satisfying spray of dopamine that showered the inside of his cerebellum like an aerosol can gone wild.

  Yes, he thought. There’s the little shit.

  Dennis walked quickly to the foyer and stood looking out the plate-glass entrance to the street below. He watched the mirrored reflection of the elevators thirty feet behind him. Dennis heard the elevator door open, and he saw the young man quickly scan the hotel lobby before getting in. Dennis was relieved to see the man was alone in the elevator.

  As soon as the door closed
, Dennis raced to the elevator and watched the long hand inch its way around the dial. It finally stopped at the fourth floor. The motor in the old elevator shaft whined loudly as it returned to the first floor.

  Without waiting for the languorous elevator car to return, he took off up the stairwell, feeling his ankle for the pistol strapped there. He had more bravado than energy, and he soon found himself struggling as his thighs burned with lactic acid.

  He knew he was in a gray area of engagement that Massey had given him. He was to find Garder and call in an extraction team; the team of professionals would do the rest. Dennis was to intervene and hold Garder only if he was in open flight.

  Dennis’s problem was that he still had to confirm that this was Garder, and he could do that by sitting in the lobby and looking for the small scar on his chin when he exited. But that would mean he’d need to keep following him and maintain a running commentary with the extraction team. That was messy and prone to error.

  Or Dennis could confront the man, perhaps in his room, and after confirming he had the right guy, he could keep him at gunpoint until the extraction team arrived. If he had the wrong person, then he’d fabricate a dumb tourist story and bolt. The worst thing he could do was call in a team to extract a watch dealer from Norway.

  He opened the fourth-floor stairwell door and peered down the hallway. A maid’s cart was stationed about forty feet away, overflowing with dirty towels and sheets. He heard a man’s voice from that direction. Stepping into the hall, he let the door close behind him quietly and tiptoed past the open hotel room door. He heard a man’s voice say in English: “No: all set. I don’t need any bottled water. Please go.”

  Dennis made a split-second decision that the man he had followed was Garder; he spoke with an American accent and sounded agitated, and he wanted the maid out of the room ASAP. That fit with an agent on the lam.

  Dennis walked slowly past the man’s door, keeping his back to the maid, who came out and pushed the cart down the hall in the opposite direction. He raced back several steps and stuck out his shoe to prevent the room door from closing.

  He stood there, his heart jumping wildly as the door stopped a quarter inch from the end of its run, and the maid continued away from him. Dennis wondered if the man inside had noticed that the door lock hadn’t set. Reaching down, he pulled out one of the Agency’s new wonder weapons.

  It was a black, plastic-composite .32-caliber pistol with a small silencer that could be transported in several parts inside a specially made roll-on suitcase. The six rounds were packed individually inside the roll-on handle of the suitcase during transit, and Dennis had painstakingly loaded the clip before strapping it to his leg. Dennis had convinced Massey to issue one of the airport security–proof weapons, and now he glowed with self-congratulation at his foresight.

  If he was right, he had just scored really, really big.

  Chapter 25

  He pushed the door with the toe of his shoe, and it opened enough so that he could see into the room. A small hallway led into an L-shaped room to the right. A clothes dresser with a flat-screen TV on top was placed against the wall to the left of the bedroom, about ten feet down the hallway; on the right he could see the bottom end of a double bed.

  A bank of draperied windows faced Dennis at the end of the room, with a small round table and two chairs in front of the windows.

  He guessed there was a bathroom to the right, behind the bed. He stepped into the hallway and waited. Sure enough, a toilet flushed, and he let the door close behind him, the sound of the door closing masked by the flush.

  Dennis had not spent his career arresting wayward agents at the point of a gun. Nearly all of his arrests had been done with backup, and in only one case had there been violence—a distraught Athens field agent was so despondent with the arrest that he tried to shoot himself before Dennis’s sidekick could wrestle the gun out of his hand.

  Still, as Dennis inched down the small hallway, he was confident he could handle Garder. A gun is a powerful motivational tool to encourage compliant behavior.

  At the end of the hallway he hugged the wall to the right side and waited, pistol raised to his chin. The gun felt foolishly light, and he wished he would have taken it to the Agency range for a practice run, but he did not think he would have to use it. He heard soft footsteps on the room’s carpet and flattened himself against the wall in the hallway.

  The man seemed to be talking to himself, and walked from the bathroom into the bedroom, moving alongside the bed toward the dresser on the left side of the room, diagonally across from Dennis.

  “Hold it there,” Dennis said, stepping out and pointing the pistol at the man’s chest.

  “Jesus!” the man said, jumping. “What the hell are you doing in my hotel room?” The man peered at the pistol and then back at Dennis’s face. They stared at each other for several seconds.

  “Take my wallet,” the man said, reaching into his back pocket. “No problem. Take it all.”

  “Hold it!” Dennis yelled. “Put your hands on top of your head. Now!”

  The man dropped his wallet onto the floor and put both palms on top of his head.

  “Take anything you want,” the man said, his voice shaking. “It’s all yours.”

  Dennis laughed. “You got the million dollars you stole from the Agency lying around here somewhere? We could use that back.”

  The man squinted. “You have the wrong guy, man,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter. Take anything. Just don’t hurt me.”

  Dennis took a step forward and looked intently at the man’s face. A small, horizontal scar sat between his bottom lip and the dimple of his chin.

  “Shut the fuck up, Garder,” he said. “Turn and put your hands on the wall. You know the drill: stand back and fall against the wall. Put your hands high up on the wall.”

  “You’re making a mistake, man,” he said, leaning at a severe angle against the wall to the left of the dresser. Dennis knelt behind him gingerly and felt for weapons. He could find nothing, and he stood back.

  “You got the wrong guy,” the man repeated.

  “Shut up.”

  “You’re an American.”

  “No shit.”

  “Why do you keep calling me Garder? You’ve got the wrong guy!”

  Dennis hit a preprogrammed speed dial on his cell phone.

  “Main terminal,” the voice said. “ID number?”

  “Delta 7622.”

  “Access Code?”

  “Forest Green.”

  “What can I do for you, Delta 7622?”

  “I need an extraction. It’s a code 5.” Dennis gave the address of the hotel and room number. “How long?”

  “Fifty minutes, maximum,” the voice said. “Has the subject been positively identified?”

  “Yes,” Dennis said. “He’s standing right in front of me.”

  “Rules of engagement say the subject was to be identified, but not alerted to your presence.”

  “He’s in danger of fleeing,” Dennis said. “Just get the team here soon. And remember: they knock three times on that door or I fire.”

  “Three knocks—confirmed Delta7622.”

  ***

  The hydrogen peroxide stung and fizzed as it dribbled down the bathtub drain. The bleeding had stopped, but the throbbing and fear had not.

  She was still groggy from the anesthesia. The after-effects made her movements slow and jerky. They had snipped off about a quarter-inch of the baby toe on her right foot, she guessed. The raw end of the toe was black with coagulated blood, and she was relieved to not see the white tip of the bone protruding through.

  While her foot throbbed with a dull pain, her mind fought its way through the pharmaceutical mental glue to replay what had just happened. Every now and then she stopped reconstructing the events with a rush of anxiety as she thought about Simon and her parents.

  What should she do? Who could she trust in the office? Could she trust Daniel, her partner? Or Miller?
Perhaps someone on the Crime Commission? She had to protect Simon and her parents above all else, but how could she do that without divulging what happened? She was hardly wealthy enough to whisk her family away to a new life. Besides, her parents wouldn’t believe her if the police weren’t involved. They’d think she’d gone off the deep end as a result of the divorce!

  A bolt of pain shot up her leg as the severed nerve endings reminded her of their displeasure.

  ***

  “Sit down. There,” Dennis said, pointing to one of the chairs at the small round table in Garder’s hotel room.

  The man walked slowly to the table and sat with his back to the drapes. Dennis pulled the table three feet away from the man and sat in the other chair, his back to the front door and a good distance from his prisoner, the table between them.

  “Put your hands flat on the table and keep them there,” he said.

  The man splayed his fingers on the table and stared at Dennis. The room was perfectly silent except for the faint sounds of a TV in the room next door.

  “Who are you?” the man asked.

  “Shut up.”

  “You just placed a call for an extraction team, didn’t you?”

  “Just a second ago you acted like a civilian telling me I’ve got the wrong guy, and now you’re talking about extraction teams. Just shut up.”

  The man sat back in his chair and sighed, looked absently at the unmade bed, and sighed again. After several seconds of silence, he said, “Do you have any idea what’s going on here?”

  “Shut up,” Dennis said.

  “You know they’re going to kill me, right?”

  Dennis rolled his eyes. “I’d like to think we execute thieves, but we don’t.”

  “Then you really don’t know what’s going on here. You said I was a thief. How much did they tell you I stole?”