Assassin's Express (6 page)

“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; laughed 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?”

“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. . . .

“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. . .