The Winter of Frankie Machine

by Don Winslow

  If that’s the case, maybe Mike is in the dirt instead of the wind.

  Frank pulls off the road.

  Tired.

  It hits him like a cold, hard wave.

  This fatigue, this…despair. This acknowledgment of reality—that he can run and fight, run and fight, and win every one, but that eventually, inevitably, he’s going to lose.

  Hell, Frank thinks, I’ve already lost.

  My life.

  The life I love, anyway. Frank the Bait Guy is already dead, even if Frankie Machine ekes out survival. That life is gone—my home, the early mornings on the pier, the bait shack, seeing my customers, sponsoring the kids.

  The Gentlemen’s Hour.

  All gone now, even if I “live.”

  And Patty.

  And Donna.

  And Jill.

  What’s left of them now for me? Brief, tense meetings in hotels somewhere? Hurried embraces in the thick air of fear? Maybe a quick kiss, a fast hug. “How are you?” “What’s new?” Maybe there’ll be grandkids someday. Jill will send pictures to some post office box. Or maybe I can check in on one of those Internet sites, watch my grandchildren grow up on a little laptop screen.

  If life is just running now, why bother?

  Why not just swallow the gun right here?

  Jesus, he thinks, you’ve become Jay Voorhees.

  This is what kills you, surer than a bullet.

  He makes a phone call.

  51

  The Nickel’s been expecting it.

  A call from Frank on the backup phone.

  Four in the morning, he’s in that surreal half sleep when the phone rings.

  “Frank, thank God.”

  “Sherm.”

  “Look, there’s a clean passport and airline tickets waiting for you in Tijuana,” Sherm says. “You can be in France tomorrow morning. The EU won’t extradite on a capital crime. Everything’s taken care of for Patty and Jill. Godspeed, my friend.”

  “Am I going to walk into another ambush, friend?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Sherm listens to Frank tell him about the ambush at the bank and the GPS monitor that led to the motel in Brawley.

  “Frank, you don’t think—”

  “What am I supposed to think, Sherm?” Frank asks. “Who knew about that bank? You and me.”

  “They came, Frankie,” Sherm says. “I gave them nothing, I swear.”

  “Who came?”

  “Some wise guys,” Sherm says. “And the feds.”

  “The feds?”

  “That buddy of yours,” Sherm says. “Hansen. They have warrants out for you, Frank. For Vince Vena and Tony Palumbo.”

  Tony Palumbo? Frank thinks. That must have been the guy with the garrote on the boat. “You know anything about this Palumbo, Sherm?”

  “Word on the street,” Sherm says, “is that he was an FBI undercover, an informant, the guy behind the G-Sting indictments.”

  G-Sting, Frank thinks.

  Strip clubs.

  Teddy Migliore.

  And Detroit.

  “Who were the wise guys?” Frank asked.

  “I don’t know,” Sherm says. “All I know is I gave them nothing. Frank, where are you?”

  “Yeah, right.”

  Sherm sounds legitimately hurt. “After all these years, Frank.”

  “What I’m thinking, Sherm.”

  “You have to trust somebody, Frank.”

  Is that right? Frank thinks. Who? There were three people who knew about the existence of that bank—me, Sherm, and Mike Pella. The only one I absolutely know didn’t flip on me is me.

  So I’d better find Mike, and I don’t know where he is. There’s somebody who might, though.

  Can I trust Dave?

  Because we’ve been friends for twenty years?

  And because he owes me one?

  52

  It was in 2002.

  Dave hadn’t made it to the Gentlemen’s Hour in two weeks.

  Frank knew why.

  Everyone in San Diego knew what was keeping the FBI busy—the disappearance of a seven-year-old girl from her upstairs bedroom in the suburbs. Carly Mack’s parents had put her to bed the night before, and when they went to wake her in the morning, she was gone.

  Just gone.

  Terrifying, Frank thought when he read about it in the paper. A parent’s worst nightmare. He couldn’t imagine how the Macks felt. He knew that moment of sheer panic when he lost sight of Jill at the mall for ten seconds. To wake up and find her gone? Right from your own house, her own bedroom?

  Unimaginable.

  So Frank didn’t expect to see Dave for a while. The FBI always drew kidnap cases, and he heard Dave on the radio, saying they were doing everything they could to find little Carly Mack and asking anyone with information to step forward. The media were all over this thing like gulls around a fishing trawler, demanding that the cops find little Carly. As if Dave needed the prodding—Frank knew he’d be working this one 24/7.

  That’s why he was a little surprised that morning to see Dave paddling out. The tall agent was making a beeline for the break, saw Frank, then jutted his chin toward the shoulder. Frank paddled over and met him there, in the spot away from the break where a lot of the older guys went to wait for a wave or just take a breather and talk story.

  Dave looked bad.

  Normally serene no matter what was going on or how much pressure he was under, that morning Dave had black circles under his eyes and a look on his face that Frank had never seen.

  Rage—that’s what it was, Frank decided.

  Dave’s face showed rage.

  “Talk to you?” Dave asked.

  “Sure.”

  Dave had quite a story to talk.

  Carly’s parents, Tim and Jenna Mack, were swingers. Jenna had been in a local bar with a girlfriend named Annette the night before, cruising for people to take home. She’d gotten hit on by a middle-aged guy named Harold Henkel, and shot him down.

  About ten o’clock, Jenna and Annette gave up on finding any fresh meat. Annette phoned her husband and he came over to the Macks’ for the same old foursome. A little disappointing, perhaps, but better than nothing.

  Jenna went upstairs to check on both kids—five-year-old Matthew and little Carly—and found they were both sleeping. She kissed them both on the cheek, shut their doors, then went to the “recreation room” they’d built in the garage and got on with the party.

  All four of them admitted to drinking some wine and smoking a little weed. Annette and her husband went home around 1:30 a.m.

  Neither Annette nor her husband had left the rec room before heading home. Tim and Jenna didn’t look in on the kids again before they went to bed.

  About nine o’clock the next morning, the brother, Matthew, went into Carly’s room to play with her. She wasn’t there. Matthew didn’t think anything of it and went downstairs to have a bowl of cereal. Tim asked him if Carly was awake and Matthew answered that he thought she was downstairs.

  Jenna was still asleep.

  Tim searched the house and didn’t find Carly. Getting scared, he went and looked around the neighborhood, then called the neighbors. By this time, Jenna was up, and she was starting to panic. Matthew was crying.

  They called the police within fifteen minutes.

  “Guess who lives a block and a half away?” Dave asked.

  “Harold Henkel,” Frank said.

  Dave nodded. “We brought him in. He owns an RV that he keeps parked out in the street. Said he was gone all that weekend, out in the desert near Glamis. The RV was spick-and-span, Frank. You could still smell the Pine-Sol.”

  “Jesus God.”

  “Monday morning, he took his jacket and some blankets to the dry cleaner’s,” Dave said. “I got a warrant, searched his house and his computer. The hard drive was full of kiddie porn. The son of a bitch did it, Frank. He took that little girl. But he’s shutting down on me and he’s about t
o lawyer up. If I charge him, he’ll never tell where Carly is. What if she’s still alive, Frank? What if he stuck her out in the desert someplace and the clock is running down?”

  Dave’s eyes were brimming with tears. The man was about to lose it. Frank had never seen him like this before, nothing even close.

  “How can I help you?” Frank asked.

  “We have to find out where she is, Frank,” Dave said. “And fast. If she’s alive, we have to find her before it’s too late. If she’s dead…then the evidence is deteriorating every second. If we ask him, Frank, we lose her. But if someone else could make Henkel talk…”

  “Why are you asking me, Dave?” Frank asked, already knowing the answer.

  “Because,” Dave answered, “you’re Frankie Machine.”

  Dave booked Henkel that night, without charging him. Warned him not to leave town, then drove him in a darkened van out the back exit of the federal building to protect him from the press, took him downtown, where he could get a cab to wherever he wanted.

  “You might not want to go home,” Dave warned him. “The media have your house under siege.”

  Henkel got into the first cab he saw.

  A block later, Frank stopped the cab, and Mike Pella came off the sidewalk, got into the backseat, and jammed a needle into Henkel’s arm before the man could react.

  When Henkel woke up, he was back out in the desert, naked and tied to a chair. A man about his own age, and just a little smaller, sat on a stool in front of him, whistling an aria as he meticulously ran the blade of a fish-skinning knife down two sharpening rods that were set at forty-five-degree angles from a board.

  First the right side, then the left.

  The right side, then the left.

  This was an expensive sharpening tool that Frank had bought to keep his even more expensive Global kitchen knives in top shape. There were few things in the world Frank despised more than a dull knife.

  One of them, however, was someone who would harm a child.

  That was the top of the list.

  He noticed that Henkel had come to.

  Small wonder that Jenna Mack hadn’t been interested. Henkel was a big man with a roll of fat around his middle. Balding on the top of his head, with a salt-and-pepper mustache and goatee around a full mouth. Pale blue eyes that were just now widening in confusion and fear.

  His RV was parked twenty feet away.

  In a ravine, in the desert.

  “Where am I?” he asked. “Who are you?”

  Frank didn’t say anything. He just kept running the blade down the two rods, enjoying the sound of steel on stone.

  “What the fuck is this?!” Henkel yelled. He strained against the ropes that held his arms tightly bound against the chair. Looked down and saw his ankles securely duct-taped to the legs of the chair.

  Frank just kept whistling an aria from Gianni Schicchi.

  “Are you a cop?!” Henkel demanded. A fine tone of panic had seeped into his voice. “Fucking answer me!”

  Frank slid the blade down one rod, then the other.

  One, then the other.

  Slowly, carefully.

  “My lawyers will crucify you!” Henkel yelled, stupidly.

  Frank looked at him now, then tested the blade against his thumb and winced as it cut him. He set the blade on his lap, removed the two stone rods, put them back in the case, and carefully replaced them with two titanium bars, then started the whole process all over again.

  The sun was just starting to come up, faint and pink.

  It was still cold out there, so Henkel was shivering anyway, but now he started to shake with fear. He started to scream, “Help! Help!” even though he must have known it was hopeless. A desert rat like Henkel would have known that they were out in the middle of the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, and that no one was going to hear him.

  He must know this, Frank thought, just the way he knew that no one was going to hear Carly Mack’s screams.

  Frank ran the bar down one rod, then the other.

  One, then the other.

  Henkel started to sob, then his bladder let go and urine ran down his leg onto the duct tape at his ankles. His chin dropped to his chest and his head bobbed up and down as he cried.

  Frank finished the Gianni Schicchi aria and switched to “Nessun dorma.” Ran the blade down one bar, then the other. One bar, then the other. He tested the blade again, nodded his satisfaction, and carefully stored the bars back in their case. He got up from his stool, laid the blade against the skin on Henkel’s chest, and said, “Harold, you have a decision to make—prison for life, maybe a lethal injection, or I skin you.”

  Henkel moaned.

  “I’m going to ask you once,” Frank said. “Harold, where’s the girl?”

  Henkel gave it up.

  He’d left Carly in an old mine shaft just eight miles from this spot.

  “Is she alive?” Frank asked, trying to keep the quiver out of his voice.

  “She was when I left her,” Henkel said.

  He didn’t have the guts to kill her after he’d raped her, so he’d just left her for dead. Frank set the knife down, took a cell phone from his pocket, called Dave, and gave him the location. Then he said to Henkel, “We’re going to sit here until it checks out. And if you’ve lied to me, you piece of crap, I’ll take five hours to kill you and God Himself will turn a deaf ear.”

  Henkel started to mutter an Act of Contrition.

  “While you’re praying?” Frank said. “Pray that that little girl is still alive.”

  She was.

  Barely—she was close to hypothermia and severely dehydrated, but she was alive. A weeping Dave Hansen called Frank as they were loading her on the chopper. “And Frank,” he said. “Thank you.”

  “Keep it out of the papers,” Frank said.

  Dave did, of course. So did Henkel. Frank untied him and left him out there with a warning that none of this had ever happened, that Henkel had confessed to the FBI, and that if any other story emerged, he wouldn’t last a day in prison.

  Mike drove in, whisked Frank away, and the feds arrived ten minutes later. That night, Frank sat in front of the television, watching the reunion of Carly with her mom and dad.

  He cried like a baby.

  Henkel never opened his mouth.

  He pled out, got 299 years, and survived two of them as the cell-block piñata, until some biker on a crank rush got carried away and ruptured his spleen.

  Henkel died before the EMTs ambled to the scene.

  Charges were dropped against the biker for lack of evidence, mostly because twenty other guys came forward to claim the honor and would have testified to it in court, and anyway, the prosecutors had better things to do.

  The Macks moved out of the city and quit “the lifestyle.”

  Frank and Dave never spoke about it, except for one time, during the first Gentlemen’s Hour after Carly Mack had been found alive.

  “I owe you one” was all Dave had said.

  Nothing about Frankie Machine, or what he knew about Frank’s other life, nothing about how Frank had gotten Henkel to give it up.

  Just, “I owe you one.”

  53

  Dave’s pushing his longboard into the back of his van when Frank comes up behind him.

  “Very sketchy, surfing in a rainstorm,” Frank says. “God only knows what toxic crap is pouring out of the storm drains. You’re just begging for hepatitis.”

  “You have the right to remain—”

  “You’re not arresting me, Dave.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you owe me one.”

  It’s the truth, and Dave knows it. “Let’s prove everyone wrong,” he says, “and get in out of the rain.”

  Frank gets into the passenger side of the van. The two men sit there looking at the ocean as raindrops splatter against the windshield.

  “You catch anything good?” Frank asks.

  “Mostly slop,” Dave says. “Where the he
ll have you been?”

  “Running.”

  “Did you run into a guy named Vince Vena, by any chance?”

  Frank stares at him.

  “He washed up in my jurisdiction,” Dave says. “Thanks a heap.”

  “Weird tides in weather like this,” Frank says.

  “Missed it by that much.”

  “If I were to say I killed him,” Frank says, “which I’m not, I’d say it was self-defense.”

  “How about Tony Palumbo?” Dave asks. “Was that self-defense, too?”

  “As a matter of fact.”

  “Bullshit, Frank,” Dave says, getting angry. “You’re taking out the G-Sting witnesses.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Palumbo was one of my guys,” Dave says, “an undercover. Had been for years. Who paid you? Teddy Migliore? Detroit?”

  “Here’s how they paid me, Dave.”

  Frank pulls the neck of his sweatshirt down to show Dave the scar, which is still angry and red. “Your boy tried to take me out, Dave. He had a garrote around my neck.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Dave says.

  “Palumbo wouldn’t be the first UC to work both sides of the fence,” Frank says. “Besides, was Vena one of your witnesses?”

  “I was hoping he would be after I indicted him,” Dave says. “But you took care of that.”

  “You have this backward, Dave. They tried to kill me. They didn’t get it done.”

  He tells Dave what Mouse Junior had to say, about his discussion with John Heaney and his confrontation with Teddy Migliore. About a crew from Detroit trying to take him out.

  Dave looks at his old friend. Two decades of Gentlemen’s Hours, you get to know a man. And then there was the Carly Mack case….

  “What’s G-Sting have to do with me?” Frank asks.

  “Nothing that I know of,” Dave says.

  “Tell me the truth!” Frank yells. “I’m trying to save my life here!”

  “I can help you, Frank.”

  “Yeah, like you helped me in Borrego?” Frank asks. “Like you helped me in Brawley? You had Sherm Simon wired, Dave. You had the GPS put in with the money. You tracked me and you gave me up to Detroit.”