Assassin's Express by Jerry Ahern

“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.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œAll 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