Assassin's Express

by Jerry Ahern

  Frost had not believed that, but had been slightly amused at a woman trying to spare his more delicate sensibilities.

  When Frost reached the gravel driveway, he heard something, and started automatically to reach for the Browning High Power under his coat. Then he hopped back toward the steps. Three motorcycles raced down along the driveway, big kids driving them—not KGB people or anyone else he should have been wary of, he thought—but the nearest bike nearly ran him down. The guy on the motorcycle shouted something Frost couldn’t quite catch and Frost shouted something back—a reference to the biker’s affections toward his mother. Frost shook his head, started to laugh. It was obvious the biker hadn’t heard him or the young driver would have been back. “Kids,” he muttered. He’d held a strong dislike for high-school-age youth ever since his abortive career as an English teacher shortly after he’d been disability-discharged out of the army because of his eye. He tried to remember if he’d ever told Bess the real story behind the loss of his eye. He couldn’t remember. There would be no chance ever again, he realized. Jessica Pace seemed asleep in the passenger seat as Frost walked up to the car. He rapped on the glass with his knuckles; the muzzle of her Walther PPK/S .380 rose above the window level before she turned her eyes.

  “You do that real good,” Frost told her as she cranked down the window and the gun disappeared.

  “What was with those bikers—? Almost clipped you.”

  “You weren’t sleeping—just a bunch of rowdy kids though,” Frost said, dismissing the subject. “Come on—here’s the map. Help me find the campsite—up that way.” Frost pointed down the gravel drive into the darkness, then handed the milk and orange juice to the girl through the open window. He walked around the front of the car, standing by the door a minute before getting back in. When he opened it, Jessica looked at him. “I’m a little stiff, that’s all,” Frost answered to her unasked question.

  “Yeah—well, I’ll make you a good meal. Pull your shoes off—just take it easy once we get hooked up.”

  “Yeah—once we get hooked up,” Frost groaned.

  “Hey, don’t bother unhitching the trailer—we’re leaving in the morning, no need to. Just do the electrical plug.”

  “Terrific,” Frost agreed. He got the car going and meandered through the darkness down the gravel drive, looking for the numbers. The campground was half-empty and with so many of the campsite hookups unfilled, it was hard to determine which set of numbers belonged to which plot of earth. After missing the spot once and driving around the campground in a circle, they found the spot and Frost angled the trailer in. It was, mercifully he thought, a pull-through. He’d spotted more bikers, including the original three who’d almost run him down, but mentally dismissed their presence. There were a lot of bikers in the world, he thought, and most of them were fine people—or at least as fine as people usually could be expected to be.

  They stopped. He and Jessica climbed out, and Frost unplugged the electrical connection between the car and trailer. Having opened the door to the trailer, Jessica set the milk and juice on one of the tables then came out to help him hook up. She began working the electrical connection while Frost fumbled the hose connection into place; he had gotten a pressure valve in Phoenix on Jessica’s advice and he first connected this to the trailer intake, then the hose to the valve, then the other end of the hose to the water supply where they turned on the water. They’d used the camper for lunch. Both of them had used the camper bathroom several times, and as he secured the accordian-style sewer pipe under the trailer and then ran out the other end into the sewer outlet, Frost decided that he should open both the gray and brown water tanks. He did this, muttering, “Yuck!” He had soon discovered that the job he liked least in trailer hook-ups was working the sewer connection.

  “I’ve got the electricity—didn’t need the dogbone.”

  Frost stood up, looking at the girl. “The what?”

  “The dogbone—it’s the adaptor, but they’ve got the right size outlets.”

  ‘Ohh—good,” Frost told her.

  One more task remained as Jessica disappeared inside the camper to switch the refrigerator over from gas to electrical current and Frost raised the awning over the front window of the trailer—he had to light the hot-water pilot. At least, he thought, it wasn’t like Phoenix—windy. It took him three tries with a match—he mentally refused to destroy the wick on his Zippo. But he got the pilot lit, waited a few seconds, and turned the dial for the water temperature to hot. He closed the vented cover and walked over to the door, then up into the trailer.

  “I’ll have dinner in about twenty minutes,” Jessica said without turning around.

  “Thanks,” Frost grunted, crawling past her, going into the bathroom and turning on the sink to wash his hands—there was no water. “Hit the power switch, huh!”

  “Sorry,” she sang back. The water gurgled and sounded as though it were about to explode, then started through the pipe.

  Frost washed his hands, dried them, and studied his face in the bathroom vanity mirror. If he felt half as tired as he looked, he decided, he would be dead.

  He started out of the bathroom, sliding past Jessica and sitting down at the table by the front window. With only one light on in the trailer overhead, he was still able to see something of the outside when he peered closely through the glass.

  “Damn it!”

  “What’s the matter?” Jessica asked him.

  Without looking at her, Frost answered, “Those kids—about a dozen and a half of them out there—split up into two groups, over by the playground area it looks like.”

  “What are they up to, you think?”

  “Well, when I was a kid, I think they called it a rumble. God—that’s all I need!”

  Frost could feel Jessica behind him. He turned a little, and saw her peering through the window over his shoulder. “What do you want to do?”

  “Well—if they get a big, loud fight going, we’ve got cops all over the place—all over us, too.”

  “You wanna unhook and get out of here?”

  “We do that, we’ll have a good stiff drive ahead of us before we find another campground, feel like hell tomorrow morning.” Frost looked at his watch again, then added, “It’s already tomorrow morning anyway. We can’t afford to sit it out too late in a campground—settin’ ourselves up for the KGB people, the cops, anybody. We’re better moving.”

  “Want to just sleep in shifts tomorrow?” she asked.

  “I’ll go outside, see if I can scare them into thinking I’m a cop or something and get ’em to hold the festivities somewhere else—probably the best idea.”

  Frost started to push up from the bench-type seat, then felt her hands on his shoulders and looked up into her face. “You figure about eighteen of them, and one of you—what if they don’t buy your pitch?”

  “Well, maybe I knock a few heads together.” Frost smiled.

  “What if a few of them knock your heads together?”

  “I only had one head the last time I looked,” Frost told her, standing up, closing his jeans jacket and starting for the door.

  “Want me there as backup?”

  “No—just have dinner ready when I get back.” As soon as Frost stepped out the door, he realized that if he hadn’t been so tired he wouldn’t have made the decision to brace eighteen or so hotheaded kids all alone—it was dumb. But he was too tired, he realized, to do anything else. Maybe the kids would sense that and pull back, sense he was too tired to fool around, just pick up their chains and switchblades and go home-maybe.

  He listened to the crickets and night noises, the gravel crunching under his feet, turned once to look behind him, and saw the warm lights of the trailer behind him. Ahead, under the light of the playground, he could see the dark-clad figures, the voices already audible as laughter, murmuring, a few clear words shouted loudly. The words spelled a fight even if the presence of the two opposing knots of bikers hadn’t.

  Frost st
opped at the edge of the playground, by a rough wooden teeter-totter. The end nearest him was up off the ground and he stood beside it, his left hand resting lazily on it. He said nothing, waiting. After what seemed to him like a long minute, he saw one of the faces turning toward him. The side of that face toward the playground light was illuminated with almost a ghostly whiteness, the other side in deep shadow.

  “What you want?”

  “Peace and quiet,” Frost groaned, lighting a cigarette in the blue-yellow flame of his Zippo—“so go home and grab some sleep, knock off some Zs.”

  “Go bite my—”

  Frost decided, so much for trying to establish rapport with them!

  More of the kids were turning around, facing him, starting to walk toward him.

  The one who’d talked a moment earlier shouted across the gravel playyard, “What are you, some kind of martial arts expert? You gonna beat us all into the ground, maybe?”

  “Just a man who’s had a hard day and wants some sleep—you guys rumble and—”

  “Rumble? What—you get that outa some friggin’ movie?”

  Frost finished his sentence. “You guys fight, the cops’ll come, there’ll be a lot of noise, I’ll miss my beauty sleep.”

  “Ha—looks like you missed it all your life, Gringo!” someone shouted.

  Frost smiled, hoping his face was visible in the light. “I take it some of you are Mexican-Americans and some of you aren’t?”

  “So!” It was still another voice.

  “Well, racial and ethnic differences shouldn’t become the focal point of hostility—no shit!” Frost dragged heavily on the Camel, his right hand already under his coat, the bruised and aching fingers wrapped tight around the butt of the High Power—cocked and locked.

  “Hey, you some kinda clown, some weird social worker or somethin’?”

  “I told you,” Frost insisted, “I’m a man who needs his rest. Now—you guys gonna get out of here or are you going to cause trouble?”

  Finally—Frost breathed a sigh of relief—one of the ones who’d been talking was walking toward him. It was about time, Frost thought. The kid stopped—right in front of Frost and the seesaw. He was about six feet, lean but well-built-looking—the blond hair clued Frost immediately that this was likely not one of the Latinos. “We’re gonna cause trouble, mother—”

  Frost smashed the near end of the seesaw down hard with his left hand. His right hand ripped the 9-mm from the Alessi shoulder rig; the thumb of his right hand whipped off the safety. The far end of the seesaw shot up, just missing the biker. Frost’s left foot lashed out in a savage kick as Frost half-wheeled away, his foot catching the boy in the solar plexus. The loud rush of air was half like a shout, half a curse.

  Frost’s right fist with the gun in it shot forward, while his left hand grabbed the greasy blond hair, snapping the head back; the muzzle of the Browning High Power stopped just under the blond boy’s nose.

  The dozen and a half bikers that had started toward Frost in a rush suddenly stopped—it was the nice thing about a slightly shiny gun, Frost thought. It got attention. “Now,” Frost half-shouted, “I’m not saying one more word after this—you guys pile on your bikes and hike outa here—now! Otherwise, blondie gets this right up the old coke snorter, capiche?”

  No one spoke; none of the kids in the two rival gangs moved. Then the blond boy Frost held the gun on stammered, “Do what he says—this sucker’s crazy!”

  Frost laughed, low, near the blond boy’s ear so only he could hear it.

  “Come on—get out!” The blond boy’s voice was cracking. “Please!”

  Somehow—perhaps because the word was so little used among them, Frost surmised—the word “please” seemed to have some sort of magical effect. Some of the bikers started drifting back, still trying to save their egos, Frost thought, backing away as if still ready to go into action.

  Frost could see the sweep second hand on the Rolex in the playground light as the bikers left, the Rolex was close to Frost’s face as it was on the wrist of the hand he had clamped in the boy’s greasy blond hair.

  The last bike ripped out and into the darkness, only one machine remaining. Frost whispered into the blond boy’s right ear. “Now, I know what’s troubling you—revenge. Right now, your heart is hardening toward me—I’ve made you lose face. Well, I can sympathize with those primitive feelings. I really can. But . . .” And Frost paused for a long minute, listening to the fast breathing, smelling the sweat on the boy, the fear there. “If you guys come back tonight, or try following us out of here in the morning, who do you think the first person is that I’m going to kill? One of the other guys, or you? I make my living fighting people, sometimes killing people—I’m good at it. I’ll kill you if I ever see your face again. It can be here tonight, it can be on the road tomorrow, it can be in a pizza parlor five years from now. But if I ever see your face you are stone cold dead. No more bike riding, no more girls, no more beer, no more joints—nothin’ but dead and six feet under if somebody takes the time to plant you. Now, I want a one-word answer to this—nothin’ else. Am I ever going to see you or your friends again?”

  The kid sounded as though he were going to throw up when he said it, “No—you ain’t—”

  Frost pressed the muzzle of the pistol against the kid’s nose. “I said one word—no speech. Now—walk over to your bike. I could make you spit on the seat then sit on it; I could make you ride out of here stark naked and backwards. I won’t. I’ll just kill you if I ever see you again.” Frost shoved the boy away from him, leveling the gun out straight toward the boy’s face. “Now—ride!”

  The blond-haired gang member half-ran, half-stumbled to his motorcycle, jumped it, and started out of the campground. Frost lowered the Browning, stood there a moment until the engine sounds died off, then lowered the hammer on the pistol before shoving it up under his coat into the holster, snapping the trigger-guard shut, then closing his coat. He turned and started walking up the gravel path back toward the yellow light of the trailer.

  Afterward, inside, Jessica Pace cleaned his hand, damaged from the fight earlier that day with the KGB man. She rubbed his back for him to relax the muscles in his neck, and told him that she thought he was “O.K.—sort of.” Frost took her into his arms, then his hands pressed against the nipples of her breasts. Feeling her hands on him, on his chest, on his crotch, he rolled her over onto her back, slipped between her warm thighs, and told himself some things were better than sleep.

  Chapter Nine

  Frost snapped off the radio and turned the fan up one notch in speed to make the defrosters work better. It had been almost idiotically cold in the morning when he’d unhooked and they’d gotten ready to leave the campground. And the temperature had been dropping all day.

  “Don’t get mad at the radio,” Jessica told him.

  “I gotta get mad at something,” Frost countered.

  “It’s still not cold enough to snow—the guy’s gotta be wrong,” she reassured him.

  “The guy was reading a weather bulletin—an emergency weather bulletin. A freak storm coming down out of the panhandle—dumped twelve inches of wet snow north of here last night. I don’t think he was just trying to scare us.”

  “This is West Texas—it isn’t going to snow out here—no—”

  Frost glared angrily at the windshield, then flicked on the windshield wipers. “You’re right—at least so far. It isn’t snowing. It’s raining and the temperature is thirty-six degrees. I like freezing rain when I’m driving through the middle of nowhere even better than I like snow. Shut up, huh!”

  Frost lit a cigarette, already feeling his steering starting to get mushier—he wondered if it was his imagination. He had never been in a desert during a storm that involved precipitation—and the thought of it scared him. The gas gauge was down a quarter, the map didn’t show a town for some God-awful distance yet, and the radio had warned of a blizzard and given traveler’s advisories. “Wonderful,” he sighed
. “Just wonderful. I really like this.”

  “Are you talking to yourself?”

  “I gotta talk to somebody with common sense,” he snapped. “Yeah—I’m talking to myself, but now I’m talking to you. Wonderful—snow. God—”

  Frost hit the windshield-wiper switch to high speed—the rain, heavy and lemonade-looking, was coming faster now and making it hard to see.

  “What are you going to do?” Jessica asked him after a moment.

  “Panic!”

  Frost said nothing else for a long time and neither did Jessica Pace. Frost watched the rain turn to sleet, then could have almost sworn that he spotted the first snowflake as it fell—seemingly all by itself—and then was followed by more and more. He cut his speed below thirty miles per hour; his back was aching from constantly leaning down to manually brake the trailer to give himself drag and keep the car from skidding. He turned on the radio again—there was nothing but music. “Can’t that guy give a weather report?” Frost snapped.

  “Before, you were sore because the announcer told you the weather—now you’re sore because he doesn’t?”

  “Just shut up, will ya?”

  “Men,” Jessica snorted.

  Frost would have looked at her—glared at her he thought—but he didn’t want to take his eye off the road. “Snow—all I needed. Why snow?”

  “You talkin’ to me?”

  “No—I was talkin’ to the snowflakes. Of course I was talkin’ to you. Snow!”