“It wasn’t Machianno,” Garth says. “It was the other one….”
“Pella?”
“Pella.”
“Then why the fuck were we trying to clip Frank?” Jimmy asks. “He doesn’t know anything.”
“He does now,” Garth says.
Yeah, Jimmy thinks, because you’re a limper dick than your politician buddy and you spilled it all to him. “I can take him.”
“It’s been decided.”
“Nothing has been decided until we talk to my uncle Tony,” Jimmy says.
“We’ve talked to your uncle Tony,” Garth says. “He gave the okay. He’s already put it into motion.”
Jimmy feels like his head is going to blow off. He can’t believe what he’s hearing. Uncle Tony, Tony freaking Jacks, signing on to a sleazy deal like this?
Uncle Tony is a man. Uncle Tony is old-school.
He digs his cell phone out of his pants pocket and punches in the number. It takes a few rings before the old man comes to the phone. “Uncle Tony, this guy is trying to tell me—”
“Easy, kid,” Tony says.
“I can take him, Uncle Tony!”
“You can’t, Jimmy!” The voice is harsh, clear, and decisive. “This deal has to be completed successfully. Frankie M. goes; then G-Sting gets shut down.”
“Fuck G-Sting!” Jimmy says. “Fuck the Migliores and their clubs. We can live without it.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Tony says. “You think this is just about a bunch of strippers grinding their naked twats on laps? Smarten up. This is just the down payment, nephew. Let the senator cunt make this deal and then he’s ours, all the way to the White House. Better than Kennedy, better than Nixon, because we got this son of a bitch by the balls. By the balls. Now hang up the phone and do what you got to do.”
Jimmy hangs up.
As always, Uncle Tony is right.
But it still sucks, what they’re going to do.
83
Jill Machianno balances her ski bag between her hip and the wall as she unlocks the front door of her apartment. She has the door open and is reaching for the ski bag when the tall redheaded woman comes up to her.
“Jill Machianno?”
“Yes?”
“I’m Donna, a friend of your father’s.”
Jill gives her a stare as cold as the snow she was skiing on. “I know who you are.”
“I don’t want to frighten you,” Donna says, “but your father’s had an accident.”
“Oh my God. Is he—”
“He’s going to be fine,” Donna says, “but he’s in the hospital.”
“Is my mother with him?”
“She’s out of town somewhere,” Donna says. “Your dad asked me to find you and take you to the hospital. I’m parked across the street.”
Jill sets her skis and luggage inside the door, shuts it, and follows Donna to her car.
84
Dave Hansen is at Shores.
Well, at least there’s plenty of parking, he thinks as he pulls into the public lot across the street from the little playground.
Donnie Garth is already out there, standing by the vacant lifeguard tower, looking out at the gray sea. He looks vaguely ghostlike in his hooded white slicker. Or, Dave thinks, like a hopelessly out of place Klansman.
Dave gets out of the car and steps over the low wall onto the beach.
“Are you wearing a wire?” Garth asks.
“No, are you?”
“I’m going to have to pat you down.”
Dave lifts his arms and lets Garth feel him for a wire. Satisfied, Garth says, “Let’s go for a walk.”
They head north, toward Scripps Pier.
“This Summer Lorensen nonsense,” Garth says, “I don’t know what you think you know, but you don’t know what you’re fooling with.”
“See, I think I do,” Dave says. “That’s the problem.”
“You’re damn right it’s a problem.” Garth turns to look at him. Rain drips off the edge of the hood onto his nose. “You’re a few months away from retirement. Take your pension and go fishing. Visit the grandkids. Forget about all this.”
“What if I don’t?”
“There are certain people who want you to know,” Garth says, “that if you persist with this crusade, you’ll leave with nothing. You’ll be a security guard on the night shift, if you’re not in jail, that is.”
“In jail for what?”
“Start with cooperation with a known organized crime figure, Frank Machianno,” Garth says. “You’ve been protecting him. Or how about your collusion in the torture of Harold Henkel? Or assaulting a federal agent. There’s plenty, Hansen. More than enough, trust me. And without friends to protect you…”
“Oh, you want to be my friend.”
“You need to decide who your friends are, Dave,” Garth says. “You choose wrong, you end up as a disgraced cop with nothing. Choose right, you can live a happy life. Christ, why would you sacrifice your future for some second-rate hit man, anyway?”
“He’s a first-rate hit man, Donnie,” Dave says. “As you, of all people, should know.”
Garth stops and turns around. “I’ll walk back by myself. If Frankie Machine contacts you, we expect you to do the right thing. Do you understand?”
Dave looks over the man’s shoulder at the waves.
I’d rather be out there, he thinks, in a wave, under a wave. Anything would be better than this.
“Do you understand?” Garth says.
“Yeah.”
I understand.
85
Frank sits in the little shack in the hills outside of Escondido. He’s known about the place for years—it sits up a dirt road in a canyon above the orange groves. It’s a place to hide mojados—they live up here away from the migra and go down just before dawn to pick the oranges, then return at dusk.
Except there are no mojados now.
You don’t pick oranges in the winter, in the rain.
Nevertheless, he can smell the tangy scent of the orange trees below. Makes him nostalgic, sad, that he won’t be around to taste the oranges in the spring.
He has one gun and four bullets.
It won’t be enough.
They’ll be coming with an army—so four bullets, or forty, or four hundred, or four thousand, it won’t make any difference, because there’s only one of you.
And you can’t win this battle.
All those clichés about life—they’re all true. If you could cook one more meal, ride one more wave, have a chat with a customer, smile at a friend, hug your lover, hold your child. If you had more time, you’d spend it differently.
If only you had more time.
Stop feeling sorry for yourself, he thinks. After all, you’ve got it coming. You’ve done a lot of bad things in this world. You’ve taken life, and that’s the worst thing there is. You can justify it all you want, but when you look back at your life with your eyes open, you know what you were.
All you can do—maybe, maybe—is get a small measure of justice for a dead woman.
Take the rocks from her mouth.
Maybe give her daughter a chance for a real future.
The way you’d like someone to give your daughter a chance.
Jill.
What’s she going to do?
You have to take care of your own daughter.
He calls Sherm.
“Frank, thank God, I thought—”
“Don’t thank him yet,” Frank says. “Look, I need to know—”
“It was the feds, Frank,” Sherm says. “They had me under. It was your buddy Dave Hansen—he had me wired. He passed the info along.”
“It doesn’t matter now,” Frank says. “All that matters is that Jill and Patty are taken care of. If you flipped on me, you flipped on me. I’m sure you had your reasons. It’s blood under the bridge—”
“Frank—”
“There are some properties,” Frank says. “You know how to dig them out. S
omething should happen to me, liquidate the assets, make sure Jill’s medical school is paid for.”
“You can count on it, Frank.”
“They have to let me take care of my family,” Frank says. “They can do what they want with me, but they have to let me take care of my family. That was always the way, back in the old times.”
“Patty and Jill will be taken care of,” Sherm says. “You have my word.”
It’s hard to hear the tone of a man’s voice over the telephone, especially these tinny cell phones, but Frank is satisfied by what he can hear. It’s all he can do anyway, trust The Nickel to do the right thing by the money, even if Sherm did betray him.
If there’s a trace of honor left in this thing, they’ll let a man go out knowing his family is taken care of.
“Hey, Sherm,” Frank says, “you remember that time down in Rosarito? You were wearing that big sombrero?”
“I remember, Frank.”
“Those were good times.”
“Hell yes, they were.”
“Good-bye, Sherm.”
“Go with God, my friend.”
Frank has set this up so they’ll have to come uphill and into the sun. He wants every little edge he can get, even though it won’t make any difference in the end. But take, say, Jimmy the Kid out with you, you’ve done a good thing.
Maybe it’ll count in my favor when I answer to the man.
Go with God.
He hears the car before he sees it.
Then the engine noise stops.
Smart, Frank thinks. They’re coming in on foot. They’ll give the cabin lots of room, work around it, and come in from all sides. He settles in, lays the pistol barrel on the windowsill, and gets ready to put one in the first head that comes into sight.
A head appears, but he doesn’t shoot.
Because it’s Donna.
86
“They have Jill,” she says.
“What?”
“I’m sorry, Frank,” she says. “They have Jill.”
Frank’s barely listening as she tells him the deal. He hears her words, he’s taking them in, but all that’s really running through his head are the words They have Jill. They have Jill. They have Jill. They have Jill. They have Jill.
Your faith.
Your trust.
Your love.
Your life.
Your child.
“Tomorrow morning,” she says. “Four a.m. Beneath Ocean Beach Pier. You come unarmed, but with a certain package they want. Do you know what they’re talking about, Frank?”
“Yes.”
“You give them the package, they’ll release Jill to me,” Donna says. “You go with them, Frank.”
He nods. “How long,” he asks, “have you been with them?”
“Forever,” she says. “Since I was fifteen years old. My father was a drunk. He used to beat me up. It wasn’t the worst thing he did. Tony Jacks stopped him; he took me out of there. He saved me, Frank.”
When he was done with her, he found her a job and a husband, she tells Frank.
“When Jay left,” Donna says, “I was sad, but I wasn’t heartbroken. I didn’t really love him. I never went back to Tony, but I still owed him, Frank. You have to understand that. I kept an eye on things in San Diego for him, that’s all.”
“You gave them my daughter.”
“I didn’t know,” Donna says, crying now. “I just thought they wanted to talk to her, Frank. I didn’t know they were going to do…this.”
“Tell them I’ll be there,” Frank says. “With the package. And I’ll go with them. If I see Jill, see her safe.”
He knows they won’t let her go. Knows that they’ll kill her. Please God, please let her not be dead already.
Please give me even a small chance to save her.
87
And now he knows that Fortunate Son is behind all this.
Because no wise guy in the world was ever low enough to kidnap someone’s daughter.
It would take a politician to do that.
But who do you trust?
Normally, if a family member is kidnapped, you go to the FBI, but you can’t do that, because the feds are the kidnappers.
Or a wise guy would go to other wise guys to get justice. That’s how this whole thing of ours started anyway, wasn’t it? Ma figlia, ma figlia—my daughter, my daughter. But you can’t do that, because the other wise guys all want to kill you.
Go ahead, kill me, but let my daughter go.
But they won’t do that, because the wise guys have been corrupted by the politicians.
Lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.
The irony is, I could have killed Mouse Senior’s kid and Billy Jacks’ kid—they were both in my sights and I let them walk. But I didn’t, because I’m a father, too, and it just isn’t done. It just isn’t done.
So who do you go to? Who do you trust?
You’ve always been able to trust yourself, but can you trust yourself to gun down the army they’re going to bring, and keep Jill safe in the process? Maybe, maybe in your prime you could have done it, but you’re twenty summers past your prime. You’re old, and you’re tired, and you’re hurt.
You can’t trust yourself to do this.
So where does that leave you?
More important, where does that leave Jill?
The answer is too awful to contemplate.
Face it, Frank says, there is only one chance, and it’s not even a very good one.
But it’s the only one.
Reluctantly, he sets down his gun and picks up the phone.
88
Dave Hansen remembers a breakfast he had with Frank Machianno at the OBP Café a few years back, some months after the Carly Mack case.
It was after an especially flat session at the Gentlemen’s Hour, and Frank was in a rare bad mood. It was something in the paper about a crackdown on organized crime, and Frank just went off on a rant.
“Nike pays twenty-nine cents to a child for making a basketball jersey, then turns around and sells it for one hundred and forty dollars,” Frank said. “And I’m the criminal?
“Wal-Mart sends half the mom-and-pop stores in the country the way of the buffalo while they pay the kids who make their cheap crap seven cents an hour. And I’m the criminal?
“Two million jobs have gone adios in the past two years, a working man can’t afford a down payment on a house anymore, and the IRS mugs us like drunks at an ATM, then sends our money to a defense contractor who closes down a factory, lays off workers, and pays himself a seven-figure bonus. And I’m the criminal? I’m the guy who should get life without parole?
“You could take the Crips, the Bloods, the Jamaican posses, the Mafia, the Russian mob, and the Mexican cartels, and all of them put together couldn’t rake in as much green in a good year as Congress does in a bad afternoon. You could take every gang banger selling crack on every corner in America, and they couldn’t generate as much ill-gotten cash as one senator rounding the back nine with a corporate CEO.
“My father told me that you can’t beat the house, and he was right. You can’t beat the White House, or the House of Representatives. They own the game and the game is fixed, and it isn’t fixed for us.
“Sure, every thirty-eighth blue moon, they’ll whack one of their own. Send a human sacrifice to some Club Fed for a couple of years as sop to the masses and an example to the others of what happens to a rich white guy stupid enough to let that fifth ace fall out of his sleeve in full view of the public. But let me slip on the cosmic banana peel, and I am going to the maximum hole with the rest of the losers for the rest of my life.
“You know why the government wants to shut down organized crime?
“We’re competition.
“That’s it. That’s what’s behind the OC Task Force, your FBI, RICO. RICO? Big government and big business? That is the working definition of ‘racketeering in conspiracy.’ A felony happens every time two suits take a piss together i
n the Senate men’s room.
“So the government wants to beat down organized crime.
“That’s hysterical.
“The government is organized crime.
“The only difference between them and us is they’re more organized.”
That was Frank’s rant on organized crime.
Dave didn’t believe it then, but he sure as shit believes it now.
Not that it matters, he thinks. I have to do what I have to do.
I have the rest of my life ahead of me.
The rest of the guys are coming along the beach, but Dave is coming in by boat, from the water.
It seems only fitting.
89
It’s cold and dark coming on four in the morning on a winter’s day in San Diego.
The famous sunshine doesn’t start for a few hours and the real sunny, warm days don’t start for a couple of months.
But the storm is over now.
The big swell has blown itself out, and the waves fall gently on the shore.
Frank walks along the beach toward the base of the pier. His body hurts, his chest so tight with anxiety, he can barely breathe.
First he sees the lights of the pier, then the faint glow of a flashlight; then he sees someone walking through the mist toward him.
A young man.
“Frankie Machine?” the man asks.
Frank nods.
“Jimmy Giacamone,” the man says, as if he expects Frank to recognize him. Frank just looks at him, so the man adds, “Jimmy ‘the Kid’ Giacamone.”
Frank doesn’t respond to it.
Jimmy the Kid says, “I could have taken you, Frankie Machine, I’d a had the chance.”
“Where’s my daughter?”
“She’s coming, don’t worry,” Jimmy the Kid says. “I gotta pat you down first, Frankie.”
Frank raises his arms.
Jimmy pats him down quickly and efficiently and finds the little tape cassette in Frank’s jacket pocket. “This is it?”
Frank nods. “Where’s my daughter?”
“Just so you know,” Jimmy says. “I don’t approve of any of this. This thing with your daughter. I’m old-school.”