The window glass shatters.
Joey blinks.
Frankie ain’t in there.
And his own Mustang is pulling onto the highway, with Frankie behind the wheel.
This isn’t good, Joey thinks.
It isn’t going to be any fun explaining to Pete how he shot Junior’s Hummer to shit and got his own car stolen.
And let Frankie Machine get away.
20
Idiots, Frank thinks.
These are what pass for soldiers these days.
Mouse Senior was right: He is the boss of shit, if these clowns are the best he can send out now. Back in the day, it would have been guys like Bap, Jimmy Forliano, Chris Panno, Mike Pella, and, well, me.
Now it’s Rocco and Joey.
Frank could have gunned them down where they stood, easily, but what would have been the point? You’re younger, maybe you kill them because your blood is up and you have this macho thing, but at his age, you know that the less killing, the better.
Besides, he didn’t want to create any more vendettas than he already had.
And apparently, he thinks, I have one I don’t even know about.
John Heaney? Frank thinks as he drives the Mustang back toward Dolphin Girl’s condo to pick up his own car. What did I ever do to John?
21
John Heaney goes out for a cigarette break. Out by the Dumpster in back of Hunnybear’s.
It’s been a bitch of a night; the place is jammed with both the usual pack of locals and a swarm of tourists—some convention in from Omaha. Anyway, the girls are making money and the bar register’s ringing like a twenty-alarm fire.
John takes the pack of Marlboros from his shirt pocket and his lighter from his pants pocket, lights up, and leans back against the Dumpster. Suddenly, he’s choking as an arm comes across his throat and he feels himself being lifted off his feet.
Just an inch or so, but it’s enough. He can’t breathe and he can’t get traction to move.
“I thought we were friends, John,” he hears Frank Machianno say.
Frankie Machine is standing in the Dumpster, calf-deep in garbage, his strong left forearm locked across Heaney’s neck.
“Oh shit,” John says.
“Mouse Junior gave you up,” Frank says. “What was it, John? Did I give you a delivery of bad tuna, or what?”
“Oh shit,” John repeats.
“You’ll have to do better than that,” Frank says.
The club’s back door opens and a wedge of yellow light spills out into the back. John feels himself being jerked up like a fish into a boat, and then he’s lying in garbage, Frank’s heavy body on top of him.
And a gun barrel pressed against his left temple.
“Go ahead and yell,” Frank whispers.
John shakes his head.
“Good decision,” Frank says. “Now make it two in a row—tell me who sent you to Mouse Junior.”
“Nobody,” John whispers.
“John, you’re a mediocre cook and a night manager at a titty joint,” Frank says. “You don’t have the swag to order a hit. And the next lie you tell me, I swear, I’ll pop you and leave your body here in the garbage, where it belongs.”
“I didn’t want to, Frank,” John whines. “They said they could help me.”
“Who, Johnny? Who came to you?”
“Teddy Migliore.”
Teddy Migliore, Frank thinks. Owner of Callahan’s and scion of the Combination. It’s not good news.
“Help you with what?”
“I’ve been indicted, Frank.”
“Indicted?”
“On this G-Sting shit,” John says. “I was the bagman. I brought cash to a cop. He was undercover.”
John blurts out the rest of the story. He was being squeezed from both sides, the feds offering him a deal to flip, the wise guys threatening to whack him to keep him from talking.
“I was totally fucked, Frank.”
Then Teddy Migliore offered him a way out: If John went to Mouse Junior and made him a deal, he could walk. The mob wouldn’t clip him and they’d get him off the indictment, or at least get him a pardon.
“And you believed this crap?” Frank asks him, knowing it’s a useless question. A condemned man will believe anything that will give him even a little hope.
He cocks the hammer of the pistol and feels John flinch underneath him.
“Don’t, Frank, please,” John says. “I’m sorry.”
Frank eases the hammer back down; then John’s body lurches into sobs.
“I’m going to leave now, Johnny,” Frank whispers. “You lie here for five minutes before you get out. If you feel bad about what you did to me, you’ll wait an hour before you call Teddy. If you don’t, well, there’s nothing I can do about it.”
Frank climbs out of the Dumpster and brushes the garbage off. It’ll be good to get someplace where he can take a shower and get a change of clothes, but right now he has something else to do.
He walks to his car and opens the trunk.
22
Frank stands across the street from Callahan’s, waiting for it to close.
It’s a long, cold wait at two in the morning.
Finally, the trendy young crowd starts to pour out and, a few minutes later, the bouncer goes to lock the door.
That’s when Frank steps in.
The bouncer takes a swing at him.
Frank ducks underneath the punch, pulls the softball bat from under his coat and Tony Gwynns the bouncer’s shin bones. The resulting crack, and the bouncer toppling to the sidewalk, gets some attention from the after-hours crowd inside the bar.
One of the boys rushes Frank.
Frank butts him in the solar plexus with the blunt end of the bat, then swings the handle up in an arc and catches the man under the chin. He takes a step back to let the guy fall, then sees the next man reach in his jacket into shoulder-holster territory. Frank swings the bat and breaks the guy’s wrist against the gun butt.
The bartender vaults the bar with a nightstick in his hand and swings it down toward the back of Frank’s head. Frank turns, raises the bat horizontally to block the nightstick, pulls his arms back in, and then thrusts the bat back into the bartender’s nose, which breaks with a splatter of blood. Then Frank crosses his right foot over his left, whirls, and delivers a home-run swing into the bartender’s floating ribs.
Three guys down.
Teddy Migliore stands there like his feet are rooted to the spot.
Then he turns and runs.
Frank lofts the bat low across the floor. It bounces and catches Teddy in the back of the knees, sending him sprawling to the floor. Frank’s on top of him before he can start to get up. He puts his right knee into the small of Teddy’s back, grabs him by the back of the collar, and smashes his face into the expensive tile until he can see blood trickle into the grouting.
“What,” Frank yells, “did I ever do to you? Huh? What did I ever do to you?”
Frank leans down, slips one hand under Teddy’s chin, and lifts as his other arm forms a bar across the top of Teddy’s neck. He can either snap Teddy’s spinal cord or choke him out, or both.
“Nothing,” Teddy gasps. “I just got the word is all.”
“Who gave the word?” Frank asked.
Frank hears police sirens start to wail. Some citizen must have spotted the bartender writhing on the sidewalk and called the cops. Frank puts more pressure on Teddy’s neck.
“Vince,” Teddy says.
“Why? Why did Vince want me clipped?”
“I don’t know,” Teddy groans. “I swear, Frankie, I don’t know. He just told me to deliver you.”
Deliver me, Frank thinks. Like a pizza. And Teddy’s lying. He knows exactly why Vince wanted to kill me, or else he’s just laying it all on a dead man.
“Police! Come out with your hands where we can see them!”
Frank lets go of Teddy, steps over him into the office, and lets himself out the back door. As he?
??s leaving, he hears a voice on the answering machine. “Teddy? It’s me, John….”
Frank steps out in the alley and runs.
Teddy Migliore sits in his office and rubs his throat. He looks up at the uniformed cops and says, “You sure took your time…the fucking money we pay…”
The cops don’t look too eaten up with sympathy. They’ve stopped taking the money anyway. You’d have to be a fucking idiot to take an envelope from Teddy Migliore these days, what with everything going on.
Operation G-Sting.
“Do you know who did this?” one of the cops asks.
“Do you want to file a report?” asks the other.
“Get the fuck out of here,” Teddy tells them.
He’s going to file a report all right, but not with these two losers. He waits until they’ve left, though, to pick up the phone.
Frank jogs out of the alley and back onto the street.
You had it exactly backward, dummy, he tells himself. It wasn’t L.A. who contracted with Vince to take you out; it was Vince who used L.A., or at least Mouse Junior, to set you up.
But why?
He can’t think of a thing he ever did to Vince Vena or the Migliores. He can only think of something he did for them.
23
It was the summer of ’68.
The summer Frank came back from Vietnam.
The truth of the matter is, Frank thinks now as he watches the rain splatter against the window of his safe house, the truth is that I killed more men for the feds than I ever did for the mob.
And they gave me a medal and an honorable discharge.
Frank punched out a lot of VC and NVA during his stint in-country. That was his job—sniper—and he was damned good at it. Sometimes he felt bad about it, but he never felt guilt over it. They were soldiers, he was a soldier, and in a war, soldiers kill soldiers.
Frank never bought into any of that Apocalypse Now crap. He never shot any women or children, or massacred any villages, or even saw anyone who did. He just killed enemy soldiers.
The Tet Offensive was made for guys like Frank, because the enemy came out to be shot. Before that, it had been frustrating patrols in the jungle that usually turned up nothing, except when you walked into a VC ambush and lost a couple of guys and still never saw the enemy.
But in Tet, they came out en masse and got gunned down en masse. Frank was a one-man wrecking machine in the city of Hue. The urban house-to-house fighting was a perfect match for his skills, and Frank found himself in mano-a-mano duels with NVA snipers that sometimes went on for days.
Those were battles of wit and skill.
Frank always won.
He came back from Nam to find that the country he’d left didn’t exist anymore. Race riots, “peace riots,” hippies, LSD. The surf scene was just about dead because a lot of the guys were in Nam, or were screwed up because of it, or they went the hippie route and were living in communes in Oregon.
Frank put his uniform away and went to the beach. Spent long weeks surfing mostly by himself, holding his own small bonfires and cookouts, trying to reclaim the past.
But it wasn’t the same.
Patty was.
She’d written him every day he was in-country. Long, chatty letters about what was going on at home, who was dating who, who had broken up, about her secretary work, her parents, his parents, whatever. And love stuff—passionate passages about how she felt about him, how she couldn’t wait for him to come home.
And she couldn’t. The former “good Catholic girl” walked him up to her room the second her parents left the house and pulled him down on the bed. Not that I took much pulling, Frank remembers.
God, the first time with Patty…
They got to the brink, like they had so many times in the backseat of his car, except this time she didn’t clamp her legs tight or push him off. Instead, she guided him inside her. He was surprised, but he certainly didn’t object, and when it came time to pull out—all too quickly, he remembers ruefully—she whispered, “Don’t. I’m on the Pill.”
Which was a shock.
She had gone to the doctor and then went on the Pill in anticipation of his homecoming, she told him as they lay on her bed afterward, her head snuggled into the crook of his arm.
“I wanted to be ready for you,” she said. Then, shyly, added, “Was I okay?”
“You were terrific.”
And then he was hard again—God, to be young, Frank thinks—and they did it again, and this time she climaxed and said that if she’d known what she was missing, she would have done it a lot sooner.
Patty was good in bed—warm, willing, passionate. Sex was never their problem.
So Frank got back with Patty and they began the long, inevitable march toward matrimony.
What wasn’t inevitable was Frank’s future.
What was he going to do now, with his Marine tour winding down? He thought about re-upping, maybe making the Corps a career, but Patty didn’t want him going back to Vietnam, and he didn’t like being away from San Diego that much. His father wanted him to go into the fishing business, but that didn’t sound all that appealing, either. He could have gone to college on the GI bill, but there was nothing he was that interested in studying.
So it was a gimme putt he’d end up back with the guys.
It was nothing dramatic, nothing sudden.
Frank just ran into Mike Pella one day, and they had a beer, and then they started hanging out. Mike told him about his past, how he grew up in New York with the Profaci family and had a little hassle there and then was sent out west to work for Bap until things straightened out.
But he liked California, he liked Bap, and so he’d decided to stay.
“Who needs the fucking snow, right?” Mike asked.
Not me, Frank thought.
He started to go with Mike to the clubs where the guys spent their days, and this hadn’t changed. This had stayed the same, like it was in a time warp. It was comforting, familiar. Familial, I guess, Frank thinks now.
It was all the same guys—Bap, Chris Panno, and Mike, of course. Jimmy Forliano had a trucking business out in East County, and he’d come around sometimes, but that was really about it.
They were a small, tight little group in what was, back then, still a small town. That was the thing about San Diego in those days, Frank thinks now. We weren’t really even a “mob,” or an obvious family like they had in the big East Coast cities.
And there wasn’t a hell of a lot going on.
The normally free and easy San Diego had a new federal prosecutor who was busting everyone’s balls. He’d worked up a twenty-eight-count indictment against Jimmy and Bap for some bullshit about the truckers’ union and was generally making life difficult for whatever organized crime there was in the city.
Bap also had a silent piece of a local taxi company, and he set Frank up with a job driving cabs.
Washing machines on wheels is what they really were, the guys laundered so much money through those taxis. Gambling money, loan shark money, prostitution money—it all went on cab rides.
And political money.
To city councilmen, congressmen, judges, cops, you name it. The chief of police got a new car every year, courtesy of the cab company.
Then there was Richard Nixon.
He was running for president and needed a war chest, and it just wouldn’t have looked good—mobbed-up guys in San Diego writing checks to the Nixon campaign. So the money went through the cab company in chunks “donated” by the owners and the drivers. Frank never would have found out about it except that he saw one of the checks on the office desk one night.
“I’m giving money to Nixon?” he asked Mike.
“We all are.”
“I’m a Democrat,” Frank said.
“Not this year, you ain’t,” Mike said. “What, you want Bobby fucking Kennedy in the White House? Guy’s got a hard-on for us you could cut glass with. Besides, it ain’t really your money, is it? So re
lax.”
Frank was sitting in the office of the cab company with Mike, drinking coffee and talking shit, when the call came.
“Are you boys ready to take a step up?” Bap asked.
He was calling from a phone booth.
Bap never called from home, because Bap wasn’t stupid. What he’d do is, he’d put rolls of quarters in his pocket and he’d walk four blocks to this phone booth on Mission Boulevard at night and conduct his business from there, like it was his office.
Usually, they’d meet Bap on the boardwalk in Pacific Beach, just a few blocks from the boss’s house.
You wouldn’t have figured a guy like Bap to have loved the ocean so much.
Something he and Frank had in common, although, of course, Bap never got out on a board, or even went for a swim, as far as Frank ever knew. No, Bap just liked looking at the ocean; he and Marie used to go for sunset walks together on the boardwalk or stroll on Crystal Pier. Their condo had a nice oceanfront view, too, and Bap used to stand at the window and do watercolors.
Bad watercolors.
He had dozens of them, scores of them, probably, and he used to give them out as presents all the time; otherwise, Marie would bitch about him clogging up their whole place with the paintings.
Bap would give them for Christmas, birthdays, anniversaries, Groundhog Day, anything. All the guys had them—what were you going to say, no? Frank had one on the wall of his little apartment on India Street—it was a sailboat heading out into the sunset, because Bap knew that Frank liked boats.
Which was true, Frank did like boats, which made this watercolor all the more painful, because no vessel should have to suffer what Bap did to this boat. But Frank kept it on his wall, because you never knew when Bap might drop by, and Frank didn’t want to hurt his feelings.
This worked because he wasn’t married yet. The married guys’ wives usually made them put Bap’s paintings in a closet or something, because the married guys were usually made men and protocol, even in casual San Diego, dictated that even a boss didn’t just drop by without a phone call. But there had been some frantic replacements of paintings on walls when the phone call came, with guys scrambling to get one of Bap’s hideous watercolors up in the living room before the doorbell rang.