Frank stood there and watched, aware that he was violating one of Bap’s key precepts. “You don’t need to give them last words or last rites,” Bap had lectured. “You ain’t a warden or a priest. Get in, do the job, get out.”
No, Bap wouldn’t have approved of this scene.
Voorhees finished crying, looked up at Frank, and said, “I’m sorry.”
Frank shook his head.
Then Voorhees said, “A doctor in Guadalajara wrote some scrip for me. Tranquilizers.”
Frank already knew this. The doctor had given it up to him for a couple of hundred in cash. So much for the Hippocratic oath.
“I still have most of them,” Voorhees said. “I mean, I think I have enough.”
Frank thought it over for a few seconds.
“I’ll have to stay with you,” he said.
“That would be okay.”
Voorhees got out of the chair and Frank followed him into the little shack. Frank went into a canvas bag that had once been Voorhees’s carry-on and now contained all his earthly goods. He took out a vial of pills—Valium, ten-milligram dosage—and a bottle of vodka, about two-thirds full.
They went back outside.
Frank sat down on the sand.
Voorhees sat back down in the chair, shook a handful of pills into his hand, and swallowed them with a swig of vodka. He waited a few minutes, then did it again, then a minute later took the last of the pills and sat sipping on the vodka bottle as he looked out at the ocean.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” he mumbled to Frank.
“Beautiful.”
A second later, he lurched back in the chair, then forward, and he slumped over onto the rocks.
Frank picked him up and put him back in the chair.
He went back to the village, found a working telephone, and made a call to let Donnie Garth know that he was safe.
Frank went home from that job to find that Patty had changed the locks on the doors. Tired, angry, and sad, he kicked the front door in. Called a locksmith buddy at two in the morning to put new locks in, then went upstairs, got into the shower, sat down under the steaming water, and cried.
The next night, he drove to Garth’s house—to do what exactly, he didn’t know. He parked across the street and sat in the car for a long time. Garth was having a party. He watched the expensive cars and the chauffeured limousines pull into the circular driveway and he looked at the beautiful people in their beautiful clothes get out and go to the door. It looked like a benefit, a fund-raiser for some charity—the men were in black tie, the women in evening dresses, their hair up, exposing long, graceful necks adorned with glittering jewels.
How many people, Frank asked himself, have to die so the beautiful people can stay beautiful?
Question for the ages.
The picture window was open and there was a golden glow inside. Frank could see Garth flitting around, playing the social butterfly, making jokes and glittering conversation, and Frank figured it had to be his imagination, but he thought he could hear the laughter of elegant women and the clinking of priceless crystal.
It would have been an easy shot, he knew, even through the glass. Use something fast and heavy like a .50 sniper rifle steadied against the car window, squeeze the trigger, and blow Donnie’s boy-wonder brains all over his lovely guests.
Now that would have been a benefit. To a lot of people, Frank thought.
If he had known then…but he didn’t.
Then he thought it might be fun just to walk in there. Stroll up to Garth in the middle of the glittering crowd and say, “Donnie, your tit’s out of the wringer. Again. I killed Jay Voorhees for you, same way I killed Marty Biancofiore.” See what your high-class friends would have to say to that.
But he thought, Probably nothing. They’d probably get off on it.
So he sat in the car and watched San Diego’s finest come and go. It was in the Union-Tribune the next morning, on the society page, how Donnie Garth had raised almost a million dollars for the new art museum.
Frank used the page to wrap fish.
When the news got out that the former chief of security of the Paladin had died of an overdose in Mexico, guys in the know just naturally assumed that Frankie Machine had forced him to take the pills. Frank never did anything to disabuse them of the notion.
It was just a technicality anyway, he thought.
You can’t slide on this one just because you didn’t hold the gun to his head, just because you gave him a choice, cut the guy a break. I don’t know—maybe it will mean a couple of centuries less in purgatory. More likely, a slightly nicer niche in hell.
Me and Donnie Garth, at the same party at last.
Garth flipped later, of course. The feds got him in a room and he gave up the whole thing.
Frank waited for the call to come, but it never did.
It took him years to figure out why Donnie Garth got a pass.
39
“He is one smart son of a bitch,” Carlo says.
They’re sitting in the parking lot of a Burger King in El Centro, sixty miles east of Borrego and hard by the Mexican border. Jimmy has the rest of his crew spread around the town. He took the Burger King, sent Jackie and Tony to Mickey D’s, Joey and Paulie to Jack in the Box.
“How come we get Jack in the Box?” Paulie had complained.
“What, you want Burger King?” Jimmy had asked.
“Yeah, okay.”
“Well, fuck you, I get Burger King,” Jimmy had said. Burger King’s got better french fries and the sodas aren’t so gassy. You’re cooped up in a car with another guy hours at a time, you don’t want gassy sodas. Now he looks at Carlo and says, “He didn’t get to be Frankie Machine by being stupid.”
“He got away,” Carlo says. “Now he’s got money, he’s got an open road. We don’t know where the fuck he is; he could be anywhere.”
“Chill,” Jimmy says. “One fucking phone call, I’ll know right where he is.”
Carlo looks at him, impressed and skeptical at the same time. “Who you gonna call?”
“Ghostbusters.”
40
Dave watches the little red light blink on the electronic map. The GPS device placed in the bank bag with the money is working perfectly.
“I thought he would have gone down to Mexico,” Troy says.
“Mexico is a dead end,” Dave answers. “Machianno knows that.” Hell yes, he does, Dave thinks; he sure made it a dead end for Jay Voorhees. The Bureau had always liked Frank for that piece of work but could never come close to pinning it on him.
Classic Frankie Machine.
Troy studies the map.
“It looks like he’s headed for Brawley,” he says.
They keep an eye on the screen into the evening.
The light stops in Brawley and beeps steadily in the same location. They run a cross-check and it comes up positive.
Frank’s gone to ground in the EZ Rest Motel two blocks off the 78.
41
“The EZ Rest Motel,” Jimmy says, punching off the phone. “Lock and load, rock and roll.”
Carlo starts the car.
Lock and load, rock and roll.
He loves Jimmy, but he’s kind of an asshole.
“The EZ Rest Motel where?” Carlo asks.
“Brawley, California.”
They look at the road atlas. Brawley is only about an hour away.
“‘Ladies and gentlemen,’” Jimmy intones in his best Michael Buffer imitation, “‘for the thousands in attendance and the millions watching around the world…let’s get ready to rumble!’ The Brawl in Brawley!”
The Brawl in Brawley. Carlo chuckles.
Asshole.
42
The town of Brawley is an oasis in the desert.
Back during the Depression, the WPA put thousands of guys to work digging a canal from the Colorado River west into the desert. The result is that the area around Brawley produces some of the best alfalfa in the world. It’s sta
rtling to fly over it—you’ve seen nothing but miles and miles of stark, bleached brown, and then suddenly there are these rectangles of emerald green.
Driving into it is less dramatic, but the town does come as a welcome relief to the desert. And it has everything a small agricultural town has to offer—a strip of fast-food places, a couple of banks, a big Agricorp grain elevator, and some motels.
Frank finds the place he’s looking for pretty quickly and settles in.
Lies down, stretches out, and closes his eyes.
43
Jimmy walks up the stairs to the second floor of the motel.
He isn’t doing any comedy bits now; he’s mainlining adrenaline, his asshole gripped tighter than a white-collar con at his first day in the showers.
What’s waiting up in that room, after all, is Frankie Machine. He might be an old dude, but there’s a reason he got to be an old dude. Jimmy knows all the stories, and if even half of them are true…Jimmy’s heard the story about how The Machine walked into that bar in San Diego and gunned down those Brits before they could even get their hands off their teacups. Nevertheless, if you want to be the Man, you got to be the man who beat the Man, so Jimmy is psyched for the opportunity.
And Jimmy has a plan.
The Machine probably has the chain lock hooked, so Carlo has one of those DEA warrant-service battering rams to smash the door in with. Then Jimmy will step in and put a few into Frankie M.’s head.
Hopefully, the old fuck is asleep anyway.
Jimmy the Kid nods and Carlo swings the battering ram.
The door isn’t exactly Fort Knox material anyway and caves like the Yankees against the Red Sox.
Jimmy goes in.
Frankie M. isn’t in bed.
He ain’t anywhere in the room.
Jimmy the Kid suppresses his adrenaline rush and swings his gun in a controlled arc, sweeping the room in precise vectors, left to right.
No Machine.
Then he hears water running.
The old bastard is in the shower, didn’t even hear the door cave in.
Now Jimmy can see the steam from under the bathroom door.
He grins.
This is going to be easy.
And clean.
Jimmy nudges the bathroom door open with his foot.
His hands are on the .38, out in front of him in the approved FBI shooting stance.
Except he don’t see nothing in the shower. No shape of a man through the thin shower curtain.
He yanks the curtain open with his left hand.
And sees a note—duct-taped on the shower wall with the little GPS monitor.
Jimmy grabs the note and reads: “Did you think you were playing with children?”
Jimmy hits the deck.
He belly-crawls out of the bathroom and back toward the front door.
Carlo is already down, sitting propped against the wall with his hand pressed against a wound in his shoulder, blood seeping between his fingers, his other hand limply holding his gun.
Paulie lies on the balcony floor, mewling and clutching his right lower leg, looking at Jimmy like a wounded soldier looks at a bad officer, like, What have you gotten us into, and how are you going to get us out?
It’s a good fuckin’ question, Jimmy thinks as he curls up as tight as he can against the door frame and tries to peer through the balcony rails. He can’t see where the shots have come from. He searches for a motion, a reflection, anything, but he can’t lamp a single thing that might help him. He only knows the next shot could smash into his head. On the other hand, if Frankie M. was shooting to kill, both Carlo and Paulie would already be dead.
Are Jackie and Tony hit, too? Jimmy looks down in the parking lot for their car and can just make them out, slumped down in the front seat, their hands on their guns, looking up at him. Jimmy makes a small gesture with his hand: Stay down, stay put.
“I need a doctor,” Paulie whines.
“Shut up,” Jimmy hisses.
“I’m bleeding out!” Paulie cries.
No you ain’t, Jimmy thinks, looking at his leg. The bullet didn’t hit an artery—it was precisely placed to stop but not to kill.
Frankie freaking Machine.
44
Frank lies on the roof of the grain warehouse across the road, his rifle barrel resting on the lower curve of the g in the big Agricorp sign.
He places the infrared sight squarely on the kid’s forehead. He doesn’t recognize this kid, the one who’s squeezed against the door, making himself as small as possible.
Not small enough, Frank thinks.
He doesn’t know Leg Wound, either, which makes sense. He’s too young for me to have ever worked with him, Frank thinks. Or maybe that’s just a process of getting older, that everyone looks young to you.
The kid crouching in my sights is no joke. He made a mistake, but he isn’t a clown. A clown would have come running out of that room. This guy had the sense to get low and crawl out of there. Even the way he’s holding himself now—looking around, not panicking, not overreacting about his wounded crew, controlling his men—says that the kid has something.
Frank can see it in the kid’s eyes.
He’s thinking.
Thinking men are dangerous.
So take him out, Frank thinks.
You can’t afford to have this guy on your tail.
He resettles his aim and squeezes the trigger.
45
The bullet smacks the wood a half inch above Jimmy the Kid’s head.
His whole body quivers and then he fights for control of himself and wins.
A dumber guy would have thought that Frankie Machine had missed, but Jimmy is smarter than that.
Frankie Machine doesn’t miss.
Frankie was sending a peace message: I could have killed you if I wanted, but I didn’t.
Jimmy the Kid waits five minutes, then starts cleaning up the wreck of the Wrecking Crew. Carlo’s gotten over the shock and can walk, so he and Jimmy haul Paulie down the stairs and into a car. Then they drive out on the highway a little ways, because even the cops have woken up in this sleepy town to the fact that something out of the ordinary has gone down at the EZ Rest.
Then Jimmy puts in the call he really doesn’t want to make.
Wakes Mouse Senior out of a sound sleep.
“I got two down,” Jimmy says.
“And?”
“And nothin’,” Jimmy says. “He slipped us.”
“Sounds like he did more than slip you,” Mouse Senior says, and Jimmy hears a trace of satisfaction in his voice.
“Listen,” he says, “what am I gonna do about my two guys?”
“Are you hot?”
“Fuck yes.”
“Okay,” Mouse Senior says, taking on this calming, fatherly-type voice, like he’s Jim fucking Backus in Rebel Without a Cause, which sends Jimmy up the freaking wall. “You’re about twenty-eight minutes from Mexico. Drive across the border to Mexicali. Hold on.”
Mouse Senior comes back on the phone about three minutes later and gives him an address. “Go there. The doctor will fix your guys up. You have health insurance?”
“What?”
“Just joking, kid.”
Yeah, you’re Open-Mike Night at the Comedy Store, Jimmy thinks, punching off. I hope you’re still yukking it up when I perform your colonoscopy with a Glock and hold the trigger down.
Then Jimmy makes the call he really doesn’t want to make.
This guy he doesn’t wake up.
This guy answers before the first ring stops; this guy has been obviously sitting by the phone waiting for the call.
But not this call.
This guy was waiting for the call that said Frankie Machine was at a family reunion with his ancestors. He definitely does not want to hear that Frankie M. is still in this world.
“This is a quid pro quo,” the guy says. “Tell your people they cannot expect the quid unless they deliver the quo.”
Whatever the fuck that means, Jimmy thinks. Not only does he not know what the guy is talking about; he doesn’t even know who he’s talking to. He just has a phone number, and he’s supposed to talk to whoever’s on the other end.
This very unhappy guy with his quids and quos.
“We’ll deliver,” Jimmy says, settling for that. He doesn’t want to get into it, and besides, Paulie is starting to bleed all over the place.
Jimmy has such a headache when he hangs up, he almost wishes Frankie M. had blown his brains out.
Well, you should have, Jimmy thinks.
You fucked up, Frankie M.
Let’s hope it’s the first of many.
Because I ain’t stoppin’ and I don’t think I “owe you one” either. Nobody fucking asked you for quarter, and nobody’s going to give it, either.
Not with what you know, old man.
46
Dave Hansen walks into the room at the EZ Rest Motel.
The local cops are all over the place, going nuts, because this is a thrill. The run-of-the-mill shootings in this part of the country usually involve drunk mojados on a Saturday night or white-trash tweekers any old time of the week, so a shoot-out in a motel is a big deal.
Dave examines the bullet mark on the door frame.
Unlike Frank to miss a shot.
He turns around and looks at the Agricorp sign. That’s pure Frank. Good shooting angle down, no shooting angle back up. Dave walks into the bathroom and sees the “Did you think you were playing with children?” note.
No, Frank, I didn’t. I should have known you’d suss out the GPS. I should have known you were smarter than that. Tired, worn down, on the run, you’d still keep your head.
Young Troy asks, “What happened?”
“What happened,” Dave says irritably, “is that he’s Frankie Machine.”
But, to be honest, it’s a good goddamn question.
What the hell did happen here?
Who came to hit Frank before we got here?
And how did they know where he was?
47