Assassin's Express

by Jerry Ahern

  As Frost exited the taxicab now, he stretched, and snapping up the collar on his denim jacket, he reached back inside the taxi for his luggage. He’d shifted the shoulder rig, still wrapped inside the old trousers, into the SWAT bag; the Browning High Power nestled in his trouser band slightly behind his left hip bone, butt forward.

  “You sure this is where you wanted to go, mister?”

  Frost looked back at the cabdriver. “Yeah—I think so.” He handed the man a twenty and, waiting for his change, looked down the narrow, dirt road ahead of him leading off the highway.

  “I can drive you in there if you want,” the driver volunteered.

  Frost absent-mindedly shook his head, saying, “No—thanks anyway.”

  He stood by the side of the highway, staring up the dirt road as the taxi moved off. The sign by the dirt road read BLUEBOY NURSERY. It had to be the right place, he thought. When Deacon had written the name of the place down on the matchbook, Frost hadn’t thought to ask anything about it—and Blueboy Nursery was definitely not the kind of nursery where they had little kids. On the last cab drive, Frost had mentally reviewed the only nursery rhyme he knew: Little Boy Blue, come blow your kazoo; The sheep’s in the meadow; The cow’s in there, too. Where’s the little boy who’s watching the sheep? Behind the haystack, kissin’ Bo-Peep.

  “All for nothing,” he smiled, whispering to himself. Blueboy Nursery didn’t raise children—it raised Christmas trees, or at least that was what the small print said on the sign.

  Frost shouldered his baggage and started walking up the dirt road, his sixty-five-dollar shoes still squishing and wet from the stream under the bridge near the hospital. He’d elected to walk up the road rather than use the taxicab. If somehow the information on where Jessica Pace was hiding had been pried out of Andy Deacon, Frost felt he stood a better chance in a trap if he could take to the woods rather than be stuck in a vehicle.

  More important than retrieving his clothes back at the hospital had been retrieving his gear—and now the Interdynamics KG-9 9-mm assault pistol, the bulk of the spare magazines for the Browning, and the big German MkII were secure. If he did successfully link up with Jessica Pace and they started the cross-country run for Washington, in light of the opposition he’d encountered so far, Frost decided he’d need all the firepower he could get. He wished for an assault rifle, but his CAR-15 was locked away back in Indiana and there was no way to obtain one legally in California—California was hardly contiguous to South Bend. He smiled. There were always ways of obtaining almost anything through other than legal means, but for the moment at least Frost had no desire to have a federal weapons charge against him so he’d content himself with his existing ordnance.

  He reached a small bend in the steep dirt road and turned it, then stopped. It reassured him to hear the sounds of birds in the trees flanking the road—had there been men in the woods waiting to ambush him, the birds would have gone and there’d be total silence. He remembered once in Vietnam laying an ambush for a high-ranking V.C. officer and the patrol escorting the man. It had been important to capture the officer alive and well for later interrogation. To avoid alerting the patrol Frost had borrowed a cassette tape recorder, and prior to going out into the jungle, left the machine running and recorded forty-five minutes’ worth of jungle animal and bird noises. In addition to the regular arms and equipment when Frost had led his men out on the ambush, he’d carried the recorder and two sets of stereo speakers a guy in the motor pool had rigged to work with a portable battery-operated recorder. The V.C. patrol had walked blissfully into the ambush, not suspecting men were hiding in the jungle because the jungle noises had been right. Frost smiled to himself, wondering if some clever FBI or CIA man was sitting off in the trees right now, playing a cassette recording. He hoped not.

  Frost started walking again, up the road and toward the small two-story house and wide, low garage beside it. Behind the house and garage Frost could see the nearest of several greenhouses, long, low, glass-enclosed structures. He knew little about plants he realized, but decided it was safe to assume the Blueboy Nursery people grew their trees from seedlings; hence the greenhouses.

  Frost walked to the base of the front-porch steps and then started up, leaving his cases on the front-porch floor and walking the few steps to the front door. He saw no doorbell, so he knocked, and lit a Camel in the blue-yellow flame of his battered Zippo, inhaling the smoke deeply into his lungs as he waited. He squinted skyward, despite his dark glasses. The sun was strong, and a pleasantly cool breeze blew against his face from the west.

  He turned back to the door, starting to knock again.

  His hand froze as the screen door opened outward toward him.

  Frost made a smile appear on his face, but held his cigarette cupped in his right hand between his first finger and thumb, ready to be snapped into the face of the person at the door if need be, to buy him a split second to get to his gun.

  “Yes—can I help you?”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” Frost told the housedress-clad woman. He guessed her age at somewhere in the middle to late fifties; she was somewhat on the chubby side, but not unpleasantly so, with short gray hair carefully combed framing her full face and dark-rimmed glasses balanced precariously on her nose. “I am a friend of Andy Deacon. You know he’s in the hospital.”

  “Yes—I’d read about it in the papers,” the old woman cooed.

  “Well, I understand Andy was supposed to come here and pick up some valuable old books he was interested in acquiring.” Frost always felt stupid using code phrases and recognition signals.

  “Books?”

  “Yes—a nineteenth-century Canadian imprint of one of Mark Twain’s works, I believe—the title escapes me.” Frost waited—now the woman was supposed to tell him the title.

  “Old Times on the Mississippi, wasn’t it?”

  Frost smiled at the woman, saying, “I’m glad that’s over.”

  “Andrew said that if he couldn’t make it he’d send someone and tell him what to say. Is Andrew going to be all right?”

  “Yes, ma’am—I think so,” Frost told her honestly.

  “He’s my nephew—a good boy, really.” She smiled.

  “Yes, ma’am—can I see Jessica Pace?”

  “She’s out back in the greenhouses—I think greenhouse B with the Georgia pines.”

  The woman smiled and as Frost started to turn away, he turned back, saying, “Can I just leave my things here?”

  “You can put them inside the door if you’d like.”

  “Fine,” Frost told her, as he caught up his baggage and started for the door.

  “Just inside here, young man,” the woman cooed.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Frost smiled back, stepping inside the small hallway, realizing as he did it that something was wrong, that he was being stupid. He started to let go of the baggage, to straighten up, to snatch at the Browning High Power in his trouser band, when he felt—heard—movement behind him and tried to spin around on the balls of his feet; his right hand touched the butt of the Browning.

  It wasn’t actually pain, but a dullness; then bright floaters over his eye and a burst of light. Frost could faintly make out the worn Oriental rug smashing up toward his face as the blackness washed over him....

  Frost opened his eye, but all he could see was diffused light, no images. There was a sack or maybe a pillowcase over his head—he couldn’t be sure. He tried to move, but his hands were bound together behind him at the wrists and he was naked—he could feel the coldness of a stone floor under him. He tried moving again, this time discovering his ankles were tied as well and that when he moved his ankles there was pressure around his neck—some sort of noose.

  “You awake?”

  It was a woman’s voice—he mentally bet with himself it was Jessica Pace.

  “I said, you awake?”

  “You get your butt over here and untie me—right now,” Frost snapped.

  “Shut up,” and Frost felt somet
hing hard and round pressing against the front of his forehead. “Know what that is?”

  “A gun—do I win the prize?” Frost rasped angrily.

  “Your gun—the Browning. Now you keep quiet and only answer the questions I ask—try moving, try telling me something I didn’t ask about and you get this,” the voice snarled—and the muzzle of the Browning ground into his forehead.

  “Now—Andy Deacon sent you—what’s your name?”

  “You read my wallet,” Frost snapped.

  “What’s your name?” The voice was rising, angry-sounding, and he could feel the muzzle of his gun twisting hard against his forehead.

  “Frost—Hank Frost—you know that, damn it!”

  “What did Deacon tell you?”

  “Who are you?” Frost asked.

  This time the muzzle of the pistol moved away from him. He could feel its absence, then feel it hammer into his stomach. His back arched and his legs stretched and he felt the noose tightening around his neck.

  “Now we’ll try again,” he heard the voice say, the words sounding as though they were being spit out between clenched teeth.

  “What?” Frost choked.

  “What did Deacon tell you?”

  Frost mentally shrugged, trying to ease the tension of the noose around his neck as he spoke, recounting what Deacon had told him in the hospital room, the recognition signal to the old woman—Deacon’s supposed aunt—everything. Finally, after what seemed to him like an eternity, the woman asked another question.

  “What are your plans?”

  “Are you Jessica Pace?” Frost asked back.

  The muzzle of the pistol left his forehead and he braced for another shot to the stomach. Instead, he felt something—a hand—at the top of his head, felt the sack or pillowcase moving; he almost choked as the thing caught in the noose around his neck. The thing covering his head—it was a pillowcase—was pulled up, and he squinted against the light.

  The woman had long, straight dark-red hair, brown eyes, and a pale complexion. She looked tall—at least from where Frost lay on the floor. Deacon had described her to him and as far as Frost could tell, this was the woman. His Browning was in her right fist and there was a smaller, medium-frame automatic shoved into the beltless waistband of the faded blue jeans she wore.

  “Jessica Pace?”

  “Yeah,” the woman answered emotionlessly.

  “Sorry about having to cold-cock you, pal,” she added.

  “Aww, listen—I can understand your wanting tobe on the cautious side.” Frost smiled.

  “Then no hard feelings?” The woman smiled.

  “Hey—listen, just get me untied, huh?” Frost told her.

  She bent down to his ankles, using a pair of household shears to cut the clothesline binding his feet together. Almost immediately, the pressure around his neck and throat eased, the tension on the noose around it relaxed.

  She pulled the pillowcase all the way off; then held the scissors close to his throat—too close, he thought—and snipped the noose. She turned him around on the floor and cut the ropes around his wrists. “There—why don’t you take a stretch?”

  “Good idea,” Frost said cheerfully. He noticed the Browning in her hand had the safety on, the hammer cocked. Frost swept his left leg around and up, catching Jessica Pace behind the knees, making them buckle. His hands reached up, grabbing for the High Power, his left thumb easing between the cocked hammer and the frame to prevent the pistol from going off. His right hand whipped down, snatching the blued medium-frame automatic from her pants as she started to fall face-first to the floor.

  The girl came out of it in a roll, starting for him, but Frost was already on his feet, one pistol in each hand. “Why the routine?” Frost snarled.

  “I had to be sure—”

  “Why the hell you take my clothes, tie me—”

  “I had to search you first, damn it. This is the big league, Captain Frost—you know that as well as I do. I heard about the hospital thing on a radio broadcast; then on the next broadcast there wasn’t a word about it—the government put the lid on it. They don’t want local cops arresting you or me—they want to get us and kill us!”

  “Where are my clothes?”

  “Over there in a heap in the corner,” the woman half-shouted, pointing with her right hand.

  Frost glanced down to the little medium-frame automatic—there was a movie-style silencer on it, long, thin, sausage-shaped. The gun was a Walther PPK 9-mm short; .380 in the U.S. Frost started across the room toward his clothes, setting the guns down on a workbench. The building they were in was apparently a garage.

  “You cool now, Captain Frost?” the woman went on, behind him.

  Frost pulled up his pants and zipped them. He looked down at his bare feet. Frost turned around toward her, his right hand sailing out ahead of him, the palm of his hand open, his knuckles backhanding into Jessica Pace’s right cheek. She screamed, a sharp, little scream, her head snapping back, her body collapsing away from him, landing in a heap on the floor by his feet. She pushed herself up on her hands, her legs splayed out, the right side of her face darkening and red.

  “Now I’m cool,” Frost told her. Not bothering with his socks, he stuck his feet into his sixty-five-dollar shoes, caught up his clothes and guns, and started for the side door.

  “You bastard,” he heard her muttering behind him.

  Frost turned and looked back at her, his hand on the knob, the door half-opened inward. “Yeah, well—if you make it to Washington alive, kid—it’s this bastard that’s gonna be gettin’ you there!”

  The one-eyed man walked through the doorway, slamming the door closed behind him—it was the only way not to hear her cursing at him....

  There was a healthy bruise where he’d backhanded her across the face and Frost studied it for a moment as Andrew Deacon’s aunt brought two cups of coffee and set them on the white wooden kitchen table on the screened-in back porch, then left. “We can’t leave right away, Frost,” the woman said flatly to him.

  “Why—we’ve—”

  “The car won’t be back until tomorrow morning—that’s why. If you want to haul that trailer with us because you think it’ll make us look less conspicuous, then we need the big Ford. Period!”

  “All right,” Frost acquiesced; “then we leave in the morning.” He looked past her, not liking her, watching the sunset.

  “And why the hell you wanna go south... we’d be better off—”

  “I know the southerly route pretty well,” Frost told her, his own voice sounding angry and tired to him. “If we get spotted-when we get spotted—I want to know my ground pretty well. You’re just the luggage on this trip—I’m the transporter. Remember that.”

  “Would you young people like to come in for dinner now?”

  Frost turned and stared toward the doorway. It was Andy Deacon’s aunt, standing there, smiling. “Sure,” he said, shrugging his shoulders and smiling at the woman. “Ahh,” and he looked at Jessica Pace. “What’s that expression about the condemned man and the hearty meal?”

  Frost didn’t wait for an answer.

  The second floor of the house was really an apartment separate from the first floor—the woman, Deacon’s aunt Beatrice, had mentioned at dinner that her daughter had lived upstairs until she’d married and moved out. Frost had met Deacon’s uncle, too—Morris Carruthers—who had joined them midway through the meal, and after introductions, had confirmed that the 1978 Ford LTD with the hitch would be back in service by midmorning. Finally, Frost could no longer bear the suspense and had asked Deacon’s aunt just how much she knew about Jessica Pace, and about what her nephew Andy had been up to. The woman was amazingly, almost ludicrously candid in her reply, Frost remembered. “Andy had told us Miss Pace was on the lam from the feds because some Commie moles had worked their way into the bureau and the company and were out to waste her.”

  Frost, standing under the shower spray, laughed thinking about the old woman; laughe
d in spite of himself, in spite of the fact that each second he spent anywhere near Jessica Pace upped immeasurably his chances of dying at an early age.

  He turned the water to straight cold and stood under it for a while. Each moment he spent near Jessica also made it that much more likely that he’d get into a shoot-out with CIA and FBI people. The thought of shooting it out with good men simply out to protect national security because they’d been told to do that made his skin crawl, despite the stinging cold spray under which he stood.

  “Damn it,” Frost muttered, then turned down the water and shut off the faucet, stepping out of the shower and staring at himself in the mirror. Frost looked at the scar where his left eye had been. Soon, almost a decade would have passed since he’d lost it: He laughed at the face that stared back at him—his own. He’d lost an eye, but compensated for it. Now he’d lost Bess—there was no compensating for that. While she’d been alive, it hadn’t bothered him—as much as it should have at any event—to be with other women. If their marriage had gone as planned, it would have been different, he told himself. And he knew that there’d be other women now—but it was still no compensation.

  Frost, still naked from the shower, walked across the bedroom floor and sat on the edge of the bed. When he strained, he could hear the night sounds through the half-open screened window. He stood up, walked to the window and stared out into the night. Somewhere out there, he thought—

  Frost wheeled, his left hand—closer—reaching out to the Metalifed Browning High Power on the dresser, thumbing back the hammer to full stand.

  “Relax—God, you’re jumpy.” Jessica Pace laughed.

  “You always walk in on people?” Frost rasped, lowering the Browning’s hammer and setting the gun on the dresser.

  “Seems like I always see you without your clothes on.”

  “That should be my line,” Frost told her.

  “You know, nobody’s socked me around—no man anyway—since I knew this guy in high school.”

  “I’m sorry,” Frost said emotionlessly. “You like being socked around?”