by Jerry Ahern
“It depends on who and why—you had it coming.”
“No,” Frost started to laugh. “You had it coming.”
“Anyway,” she said, her fingers drifting up to the front of the white blouse she wore, starting to unbutton it. “I figured I’d come and make a peace offering.”
“Is that a double entendre?” Frost asked her.
“If you want it to be. I mean, sooner or later, traveling across the country together and all, I guess I figure it’s inevitable. Don’t you?”
“Well,” Frost began, “if you want an honest answer—”
“Did I say that?” She smiled, the blouse all the way open now. She shrugged it off and onto the floor. She started walking toward him, across the few yards that separated them, her hands behind her back; then the bra she wore slipped forward, the straps coming from her shoulders. She tossed it onto the floor.
“I know,” she smiled. “They’re little.”
“I’ll get out the calipers,” Frost cracked. “Have you tried acne medicine?”
“You don’t like me, do you?”
“Did I say that?” Frost smiled.
“Well—do you want me?”
Frost looked at her a moment. “Will it hurt your feelings?”
“I’ll be crushed.”
“No—this way you’ll be—” Frost took her in his arms, his mouth going down on hers. Somehow, he found himself having gotten her near enough to the bed that they fell onto it, the woman—Jessica Pace—still holding him, her arms around his neck. Maybe it was because it was inevitable, Frost reflected for a moment, looking at her. Maybe, then again, it was because of a lot of things. . . .
Chapter Five
“Aagh!” Frost looked at the trailer hitch and decided that if he kicked it with his left foot the next time, he’d probably hurt his left big toe. “What—you gotta be an engineer to put this thing together with the car or what?”
He stepped back, staring alternately at the trailer tongue and the grease on his hands, trying to figure out how you got the little ball on the car’s trailer hitch to get inside the little socket on the trailer tongue. He was mentally debating if it would be better to trust to staying in motels after all. “If God had meant man to drag his house behind him wherever he went, he would have—”
“What are you talking about?” Jessica Pace asked, suddenly there besides him.
“Ohh,” Frost said, turning to look at her, “nothing at all—just trying to remember the words of an old song, that’s all.” He smiled.
“Ahh—an old song, hmm? Why are you standing here staring at the trailer rather than hitching it?”
“Admiring the workmanship,” he told her. “All the wonderful craftsmanship that goes into these things—golly, whiz!”
“Bullshit!”
“Tsk, tsk,” Frost told her. “I would never have thought a lady such as yourself would have even known such a word.”
“So—go hitch the trailer then.”
“Do you know how to hitch a trailer?” Frost asked brightly.
“I haven’t done it in years,” she told him.
“Well—listen,” Frost began. “Just in case something happens and you should need to know how to do it, I think it’d be wise for you to try it now—you know, rather than do it in an emergency and mess it up.”
“You’re puttin’ me on!”
“Naw,” Frost drawled.
“You serious?”
“Yeah,” Frost said, keeping his face as straight as he could. “I think you need the practice. I’ll watch and if you’re starting to do anything wrong, I’ll help you out. Then we’ll both be competent in trailer-hitching just in case the need arises for you to do it. Go on.”
“You wanna jockey the car around?”
“Well, I would,” Frost told her, “but I think even though it might be simpler if we did it together, you know—better you learn how to do it yourself, you know—relearn, so to speak.”
“Frost—are you—”
“Now go on—do it. I wanna make sure you can do it as well as I can. Never know what might happen,” and Frost gestured dramatically to his side, “out there on the trail.”
She reached up and gently swung his arm in the other direction. “Out there, Frost, is west—if we take the trailer out there, we sink. It’s out there that the trail is—east.”
“Just testing,” he told her. It wasn’t his fault, he reassured himself, that he’d missed the sunrise that morning.
He watched as Jessica—disgust written all over her face—climbed behind the wheel of the LTD and—expertly, Frost thought—jockeyed the full-sized car to within two inches of the trailer tongue and slightly off center from it. She got out, sneering at him, then worked something that he decided was a jack of some sort. The front of the trailer miraculously seemed to be rising. She took something that he instantly identified as a big cotter pin out of the socket on the trailer tongue, worked some kind of lever and got back into the car, inching it forward, then back, then getting out again, checking the spacing between the hitch and the receptacle on the trailer tongue. “You know, Hank, you could help me.”
“Hey—listen, you’re doin’ just great. I’m impressed.” He wasn’t lying, he decided.
Another turn at the wheel got the ball under the socket, then with ridiculous ease, she lowered the trailer tongue down over the ball on the car hitch—and the two mated perfectly!
Frost thought, They must teach you a great many mysteries in spy school!
Satisfied that he’d never be able to hitch a trailer in a thousand years, he applauded Jessica’s efforts, telling her that he thought that the next few times they hitched and unhitched, she should do it—she could use the practice, he thought. Before she could answer him, he started back up to the house to wash his hands—and heal his pride, he realized....
Frost had never seen the inside of a trailer before, either. He had been amazed. There was a shower, a stove, an oven, beds, tables, a kitchen sink, even—he decided it was vastly better than his apartment. There were even windows.
He pondered this as he stood for the last time on the front porch of Deacon’s aunt and uncle’s house. Trailering would be a new experience for him. Bess had once told him—
He burned his fingers on the stub of the cigarette in his hand and snapped it down into the dirt driveway. He started down the steps, shooting a final wave to Deacon’s aunt and uncle, heading toward the car. Jessica was already standing beside it.
“Are you ready—finally?”
“What do you mean—‘finally’?”
“I mean finally—if we take this long every time we—”
“You’re a nag—you know that?” Frost told the girl.
“Are you going to drive?”
Frost stopped in midstride, feeling his face brightening. “Now that you mention it, I think it wouldn’t be a bad idea—”
She cut him off. “... For me to get the practice—just in case?”
“Right.” Frost smiled. Before she could say anything, he walked around the front of the car and let himself in on the passenger side. As soon as she touched her foot to the gas pedal, he knew he’d made a mistake.
“Harrowing.” Frost stared out the window, watching the mountains disappear in the distance behind them in the reflection of the big west-coast mirror on the right fender.
“What did you say?”
“Harrowing,” Frost answered calmly, looking at Jessica Pace, then looking away—he realized she was looking at him instead of the road.
“What do you mean harrowing? I mean, what a chicken shit you are!”
“You should have been sitting where I was sitting,” Frost said, keeping his voice calm, trying to light a cigarette despite his shaking hands.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean—lady, did you see how close you were to those drops back there? And that trailer swinging and swaying after the car—God!”
“If you don’t like the way I drive—�
� She stopped talking as she cut the wheel left pulling the moving car off the shoulder, the trailer swaying behind the car again. “—Then you can—” Frost turned and looked at her, saw her looking at him, then saw that they were crossing over into the oncoming lanes.
“Look out!”
She cut the wheel right, the trailer swaying again; Frost started to get a sick feeling in his stomach. “All right—stop the car. Now!”
She did, and Frost almost smacked his head against the dashboard. “God, woman!”
He ran around to the front of the car, thinking better of it—what if she hadn’t set the parking brake? He climbed in behind the wheel, almost injuring himself, forgetting she had the seat forward.
Frost adjusted the seat, released the emergency brake, and started to move the selector into drive. “Sucker,” she snapped.
Frost looked at her. “What?”
“I suckered you good, Hank—ha!”
“You—”
“I not only went through CIA’s counterterrorist driving course, I went through the same thing for the KGB—and I taught regular driving when I was working my way through graduate school. It supported my habit out at the drag strip. I used to race class—”
Frost cracked, “You—”
“Ha!”
“What the hell is this thing?” Frost pointed to a brown box with a blinking red light mounted near the base of the steering wheel.
“It’s an electric trailer brake—expert.”
“Ohh.” Frost lit a cigarette and rolled down the window, staring into the rear-view mirror—all he could see was the trailer behind him. It was, he decided, going to be a long drive to Phoenix....
Frost sat at the larger of the two tables in the trailer, the one forward by the awninged front window. Jessica Pace was cooking something that the one-eyed man grudgingly admitted smelled good. But most of his attention was on the small, black-and-white portable television they’d brought along. The news was almost over. He stood up, shut off the set, and walked the few steps to the screen door, feeling the evening cool, listening to the night noises. There had been nothing on the news about the manhunt for himself and the girl, nothing about the affair at the hospital. The absence of coverage confirmed for him the broadness of the conspiracy which they were up against—news blackouts weren’t easy to come by.
“Did you say something?”
Frost turned around, looking at Jessica Pace for a long moment, then only shook his head, no. She turned back to the stove and he studied her back. She had changed from the blue jeans she’d worn—changed into something that was apparently a sun dress, but wore a heavy coat sweater over it. She was pretty, he decided, watching her move her head. The red hair undulated as she did, almost like a living thing pressed against her back. He felt a smile raise the corners of his mouth. With the size and caliber of the opposition, he wondered just how long either of them would remain a living thing. . .
Chapter Six
“Pull over at the rest area—I can use the john in the trailer,” Jessica Pace said. Frost was not watching her, his fists were wrapped so tightly around the Ford’s steering wheel that his knuckles were white. He’d decided that in another day or so of driving he might get the hang of hauling a trailer—at least not feel so terribly nervous about it.
“What did you say?” Frost asked her, having only half-registered her comment.
“I said I wanna go to the bathroom, Hank. Pull over into the rest area up there before we miss it, so I can use the—”
“Ohh,” Frost began. “Right—yeah,” and he craned his neck far to the right trying to get a better look in the right-hand west-coast mirror—just in case anything was coming up along the shoulder, he told himself.
“Maybe it’s because you only got one eye, Hank,” Jessica told him.
“What is?”
“The problems you’re having with the trailer.”
“What’s one eye got to do with it?”
“Cuts down your field of vision—right?”
“So?” Frost snapped, by now tired of the conversation.
“So—you feel less secure with the trailer behind you because you subconsciously think you’re missing something you should be able to see but can’t see.”
“Nuts,” he told her, putting on the directional signal and starting to edge slightly into the right-hand lane; the exit for the rest area was coming up.
“No—we’re subject to a great many subconscious stresses. I didn’t know if you knew that or not.”
“You into horoscopes, too?”
“I’m serious,” she insisted.
Frost shot a glance toward her, almost losing the trailer, he thought, then riveted his stare ahead of the car again. “I know you’re serious—that’s the problem. Why don’t you look at the map or something?”
“No—I told you, I gotta go to the bathroom.”
“You can’t read when you gotta—?”
“No. I know where we are—you’re just trying to tell me to shut up.”
“You got it, kid.” Frost smiled. He almost lost the trailer again, he felt, cutting the wheel ever so slightly right and aiming the car and the trailer up into the exit.
“We’re in New Mexico—and if we could go a little faster than that lousy fifty-five you’ve been doin’, we’d get into El Paso before the owls go to sleep, too.”
“Well—if you don’t like the way I’m drivin’, then I can fix that really easy,” Frost told her.
“No—you just drive away and meander along—I’ll go to sleep.”
“Like hell you will,” Frost answered.
Frost eyed the sign telling cars pulling trailers to pull right in the rest-area parking lot. He was pleased to find the lot relatively empty with a clear path to a drive-through space. He started cutting the wheel—on time for once—and eased the big LTD through the space.
There was a loud sigh from Jessica Pace on the seat beside him. “ ’Bout time—the old kidneys were about to scream, baby.” She laughed.
She started to get out of the car, but Frost reached across and grabbed her left arm. “I don’t know how to tell you this,” he began, “but there’s kidding and then there’s kidding. I like a girl with a sense of humor—I really do. But I don’t like grossness in a man, let alone a woman—why don’t you stop trying to be a bad caricature of one of the boys, huh?”
Her eyes bored into his but Frost’s right eye never wavered. His voice low, he said, “We’ve got a long way to go yet. I know that what you’ve got under all that red hair is really important, that you’re under a lot of pressure—the whole nine yards. But a couple thousand miles more of the way it is now and I promise you, after you spill what you know to the President, I’m gonna clip ya right in the teeth.” She didn’t say anything, just shook his hand off her left forearm and started out through the passenger door.
Frost cut the ignition and dropped the keys into his pocket. He got a Camel from a half-crushed packet in his jeans jacket, and lit it with his battered Zippo. Then he stared at the half-transparent reflection of his face in the tinted glass of the windshield. He decided he missed Bess even more than he’d realized, talking the way he had to Jessica Pace. If she wanted to be the way she was, she had every right to be. He wondered then, for the billionth time, he decided, if Bess had died just because violence seemed to be attracted to him and she had gotten caught up in it? He’d heard or seen the phrase in countless movies and books, but somehow, despite its triteness, it seemed to capture the essence of the thing—wallowing in self-pity. He’d been doing that. Jessica Pace would never have cold-cocked him that day back at Deacon’s aunt’s house; he would have handled the thing at the hospital less sloppily.... He promised himself something. There had been no leads, no way to trace out the killers, the terrorists, the bombers—whatever you called them. But as soon as the thing with Jessica Pace was over, he would go back to Europe and spend the rest of his life—and every dime he had if need be—to find the person most directl
y responsible for Bess being killed. He felt the Camel burning the flesh of his fingers, looked at it a moment, then snapped it out the open car window. To find that person was the only way he’d ever exorcise what was in him. The feelings for Bess, the grief that she was gone from him—all of that would never leave, he knew. But at least if he got her—
“Hank!”
Frost turned and stared across the front seat. Jessica Pace, standing by the open passenger door, looked back at him.
“What—what do you want?” he asked her, his voice sounding lifeless to him.
“You see those guys—that car over there?”
“What—?” Frost followed her stare, past him and out the open window at his side.
It was a green sedan that seemed identical to the one that had followed him from the airport in Los Angeles, the one he’d forced the FBI man/cabdriver to lose. There were two men, one inside it and the other walking from it, but from the distance Frost couldn’t see faces. He realized, too, that there was no reason to suppose he would have recognized the faces anyway. “Jessica,” he snapped, “reach over into the rear seat—that small black case. Take the Bushnells out of it and try to see if you recognize any faces.”
“They’ll see!” she blurted out. “They’ll know we’re watching them.”
“You let me worry about that. If they’re straight, they’ll just think we’re rude. If they’re after our tails, they’ll at least know we’re onto them. Just do as I say, huh?” Frost lit another cigarette. He snatched the map from the glove compartment, checking the road ahead as well as the standard gas-station map allowed. The way the road wound, there were either mountains or canyons, he assumed.
“It’s Boronovitch—he’s a KGB man,” Jessica half-gasped.
Frost glanced at the girl, then back through the window, tossing the map onto the back seat. “Boronovitch, huh? With a name like that I’d have sworn he was Irish. Get all the way in and get that door closed,” he snapped.
“What are you going to—?”
“The one guy’s out over at that phone now, right? Trying to call—shaking the coin return? Probably out of order. If he’s using a phone, means he doesn’t have a radio, so let’s ditch them before he finds a phone that works.”