The Winter of Frankie Machine Page 7

  Now what? Frank thinks.

  You have to go off the radar for a while, until you can find out who wants you dead, and why, and what to do about it. You can’t just take the blood-soaked boat back to the slip and walk away, because you don’t know who might be waiting for you back there. The best option would be the cops, and that’s no option at all. No one’s going to believe that “Frankie Machine” gunned down two mob guys in self-defense.

  So…

  He goes back into the cabin and looks around. He gets lucky in a storage locker, where he finds scuba gear, tanks, and, underneath that, a piece of gold in the form of a wet suit that he can fit into. He undresses, wriggles into the wet suit, which is very tight. But better tight than loose, Frank thinks. Then he shoves his clothes, a towel, the envelope with the ten K, and Vince’s gun into a wet bag. He wipes his own gun down, then reluctantly throws it over the side. He’ll miss the .38, but it’s a murder weapon, at least in the jaundiced eye of the law.

  Frank steers toward shore, running the boat in about five hundred yards off the coast, then stops the engine. He cranks the wheel out again toward the open ocean, clamps a wheel lock onto it, starts the engine again, ties the wet bag to his ankle, and goes over the side.

  The water is cold, even with the wet suit on, and a definite shock to his uncovered head. Five hundred yards is a long swim in these conditions, and his plan is to start slowly and then taper off. He knows right where he is, though, and gets himself into a current that will pull him to the tip of Ocean Beach down by Rockslide. The trick is going to be getting through the break without getting slammed against the rocks, so he swims slowly and lets the current do the work for him.

  Frank’s a strong swimmer, more than comfortable in the ocean, even in frigid water at night. He stays in the current, aims himself toward the lights of shore, and only starts swimming hard when he hears the waves breaking.

  It’s going to be tough, and he can’t let himself be pulled south of Rockslide, because the next stop is Mexico. So he pulls himself out of the current, puts his head down, and starts doing a hard Australian crawl straight into the break. He feels a wave lift him and push him toward shore, which is a good thing, but then it starts to pick up speed and take him right toward the rocks, and there’s nothing he can do about it except hope his luck holds out.

  It does.

  The wave breaks a good twenty yards from the rocks, and he manages to get to his feet and wade the rest of the way in. He gets down on all fours and crawls across the slippery rocks onto shore.

  The air feels colder than the water, what with the wind and the rain, and he hurriedly wriggles out of the wet suit, dries off, and gets back into his clothes. Then he stuffs the wet suit into the bag and starts walking.

  But not home.

  Whoever tried to clip him is going to try again, going to have to try again, and his only advantage is Mouse Junior and his little friend running back and saying, inevitably, “Frankie Machine sleeps with the fishes.”

  Good, that will buy me a little time. A few hours, max, because when they don’t get the phone call from Vena that “it’s done,” they’re going to start wondering. If they have any brains—and you have to stop underestimating them—they’re going to assume the worst.

  Still, it gives me a narrow window of time to go off the radar.

  Every prudent professional hit man has a spider hole, and Frank is nothing if not prudent. His is a vacant apartment on Narragansett Street, a little efficiency unit on the second floor of a house that’s a ten-minute walk away. It has a separate entrance up a back stairway. He bought it twenty years ago, when property was still pretty cheap, put it up for rent, and never rented it. Only went there every few months to check up on it, and then only stayed a few minutes after making sure that he wasn’t being followed.

  No one else knows about the existence of this place—not Patty, not Donna, not Jill.

  Not even Mike Pella.

  He walks there and lets himself in.

  First thing he does is take a shower.

  He stands under the spray for a long time, shivering at first, until the hot water finally warms him up. It takes a while, because he’s chilled to the bone. He reluctantly gets out, vigorously rubs himself dry, then puts on a heavy terry-cloth robe and walks back into the bedroom/living room/kitchen, where he opens up the bottom drawer of a dresser and takes out a heavy sweatshirt and sweatpants and puts them on. Then he goes into the closet and opens up a little safe bolted to the floor behind some coats and jackets.

  Inside the safe is his “parachute pack”—an Arizona driver’s license, an American Express Gold card and a Visa Gold card, all under the name Jerry Sabellico. Every month or so, he makes a phone purchase with cards to keep them current, and pays them with checks from his Sabellico account. There’s also ten thousand in cash in used, mixed bills.

  And a new, clean .38 Smith & Wesson with extra ammunition.

  He reaches up to a trapdoor that opens to an attic crawl space. He feels around and quickly finds what he’s looking for, a case that holds a Beretta SL-2 twelve-gauge pump shotgun with the barrel sawed off to fourteen inches.

  Now what you need is sleep, he thinks.

  A tired body and a fatigue-foggy head will get you killed. You need to think and act sharp, so the next thing is to get in bed and sleep. It’s a matter of will, turning off the paranoia, thinking rationally, and knowing that you’re safe here. An amateur would lie awake all night, starting at every noise, making up sounds when there aren’t any.

  He’s hunted enough guys to know that their own heads can be their worst enemies. They start seeing things that aren’t there, then, worse, not seeing things that are. They worry and worry, and chew on their own insides, until, when you do track them down, they’re almost grateful. By this time, they’ve been killed so many times in their minds that the real thing is a relief.

  So he gets into bed, closes his eyes, and is asleep in about ten seconds.

  It isn’t hard—he’s exhausted.

  He sleeps for eleven full hours and wakes up feeling rested, although his arms are a little sore from the long swim. He makes himself some coffee—just cheap grind from an automatic maker—and breakfasts on a couple of granola bars he stored away like a Mormon.

  The apartment has one small window, facing west, and rain is pounding on the glass. Frank sits at the small, cheap table and starts to work on the problem.

  Who wants me dead?

  Mike, where are you? You could tell me what’s going on.

  But Mike isn’t around—maybe Mike is dead, too, because he and Frank did a lot of work together. Together, they put a lot of guys in the dirt.

  Frank starts at the beginning.

  10

  His first hit was on a guy who was already dead.

  That was the weird thing about it. Well, the whole thing was weird, Frank thinks now, looking at the rain coming down outside.

  The whole thing with Momo’s wife.

  Marie Anselmo was a hot little number.

  That’s what we would have called her back in 1963, Frank thinks. Nowadays the kids have shortened it to just “hottie,” but the idea is the same.

  Marie Anselmo was hot and she was little. Petite, but with a nice rack tightly packed in that blouse, and a pair of shapely legs that led Frank’s nineteen-year-old eyes up to an ass that would give him an instant woody. Not that that was so tough, Frank remembers. When you were nineteen, anything would get you hard.

  “I used to get a chubby riding to school in the morning,” he once told Donna, “just bouncing in the car. For two years, I had an affair with a ’57 Buick.”

  Yeah, but Marie Anselmo was no Buick. She was pure Thunderbird, with that body, and those dark eyes, and the bee-stung lips. And that voice, that smoky come-do-me voice that would drive Frank up the wall, even if she was just telling him where to turn.

  Which was mostly all Marie ever said to Frank, whose job it was in those days to drive her around in
Momo’s car, Momo being too busy collecting the money he had out on the street or running his gambling wire to take his wife grocery shopping, or to the hairdresser’s or the dentist’s or wherever.

  Marie did not like to stay home.

  “I’m not one of your standard guinea wives,” she said to Frank one day after he’d been chauffeuring her for a couple of months, “who’s going to stay home, crank out babies, and make the pasta. I like to get out.”

  Frank didn’t answer.

  For one thing, he had a hard-on that could cut stone, so most of the blood in his body wasn’t concentrated in the part responsible for speech. And two, he wanted to keep the blood in his body, which could be an issue if he started to discuss anything of a personal nature with a made man’s wife.

  That was not something that was done, even in the more than casual mob culture of San Diego, where there was barely a mob at all.

  Instead, he said, “Are we going to Ralph’s, Mrs. A.?”

  He knew they were, although Marie wasn’t dressed like most women dress when they are going to the supermarket. That day, Marie had on a tight dress with the top three buttons undone, and black stockings, and a string of pearls around her neck that drew your eye right to her cleavage. Like her cleavage couldn’t have done that all on its own, Frank thought as he sneaked a glance and wondered if she was wearing a black bra under that dress. When he pulled into a parking spot in Ralph’s lot and stopped the car, her skirt rode up as she got out and he got a peek at those white thighs against the black hose.

  She pulled her skirt down and smiled at him.

  “Watch for me,” she ordered.

  It’s going to be a long struggle with Patty tonight in the Ocean Beach parking lot, that’s for sure, he thought. He’d been dating Patty almost a year by then, and the most he could get was a little tit on the outside of her blouse if he pretended it was an accidental brush. Patty had a set on her, too, but her bra was built like a fort, and as for going downstairs, forget about it, it wasn’t going to happen.

  Patty was a good Italian girl, a good Catholic, so she’d steam up the windows French kissing with him because they’d been going steady a year, but that was it, even though she said she’d like to give him the hand job he’d been begging for.

  “I got blue balls,” he told her. “They hurt.”

  “When we’re engaged,” she told him, “I’ll jerk you off.”

  But it’s going to be a long night tonight, Frank thought as he watched Mrs. A.’s ass switch across the parking lot. How a guy as ugly as Momo Anselmo had nailed that was a question for the ages.

  Momo was this skinny, kind of hunched-over guy with a face like a hound. So Marie sure as hell hadn’t fallen for his looks. And it couldn’t have been the money—Momo did well, but he didn’t do great. He had a nice little house and all, and the required wise-guy Cadillac, and enough cash to flash around, but Momo wasn’t no Johnny Roselli or even Jimmy Forliano. Momo was a big deal in San Diego, but everyone knew that San Diego was really run from L.A., and Momo had to kick up heavy to Jack Drina, even though the word was that the L.A. boss was dying of cancer.

  But Frank liked Momo a lot, which is why he felt a little bad lusting after the man’s wife. Momo was giving him his shot, letting him break in, even if it was as an errand boy, but that’s how most guys broke in. So Frank didn’t mind going out for the coffee and doughnuts, or the cigarettes, or washing Momo’s Caddy, or even driving his wife to the supermarket. At least he didn’t have to go in with her and push the cart around—even an apprentice wise guy wasn’t expected to do that—so he got to hang out and wait in the car and listen to the radio. Even though Momo bitched that it ran down the battery, Momo didn’t have to know about it.

  Which beat the hell out of busting his ass working on the tuna boats, which was what he would have been doing if Momo hadn’t given him a shot. That was what Frank’s old man did, and what his old man had done, and what his old man had done. The Italians had come to San Diego and taken over the tuna-fishing business from the Chinese, and that was what most of them still did, and what Frank had done from the time he was big enough to shovel bait.

  Out there on a tuna boat before the sun came up, cold and wet, ass-deep in a smelly bait pit, or, worse, cleaning out the scuppers. When he got bigger, he’d graduated to working the net, and then when his old man figured he could wield a knife without cutting his own hand off, he’d gotten to clean the fish, and when he complained about how disgusting and filthy it was, the old man had told him that was why he should finish high school.

  So Frank did. He got his diploma, but then what was he supposed to do? His choices seemed to be the Marines or the tuna fleet. He didn’t want to stay on the tuna boats or get his head shaved at boot camp. What he really wanted to do was hang out on the beach, surf, drive up and down the PCH, try to lose his cherry, and surf some more.

  And why the hell not. That was what you did when you were a young guy in San Diego in those days. You surfed with your buddies, you cruised the strip, and you chased girls.

  Just one of the guys trying to find a way to keep up the sweet life.

  Which wasn’t the tuna boat or the Marines.

  It was Momo.

  The old man didn’t like it.

  Of course he didn’t. The old man was old-school. You get a job, you work hard, you get married, and you support your family, end of story. And even though there weren’t a lot of wise guys in San Diego, the old man didn’t especially like the ones who were there, Momo included.

  “They give us a bad name,” he said.

  And that was about all he’d say, because what could he say? Frank knew full well why the old man got a fair price from the fish buyers, how his catch got unloaded while it was still fresh, and why the truckers took it straight to the markets. If it weren’t for the Momos of the world, then the good, honest, hardworking civilians of the business community would have screwed the Italian fishermen like a two-dollar whore in a Tijuana donkey show. You ask what happened to the longshoremen in this town when they tried to get a decent wage and organize a union and they didn’t have the wise guys backing them up. The cops beat them and shot them until blood ran down Twelfth Street like a river to the sea, that’s what. And that didn’t happen to the Italians, and it wasn’t because they worked so hard (which they did) to support their families.

  So when Frank started to spend less time on the boat, and didn’t go into the Marines, but signed on with Momo instead, the old man griped a little bit but mostly kept his mouth shut. Frank was making money, he was paying room and board, and the old man didn’t really want to know the details.

  Actually, the details were pretty boring.

  Until the thing happened with Momo’s wife.

  It started out okay.

  Frank was hanging out one day when Momo came out and told him to wash the Caddy and wax it, ’cause they were going to the train station to pick up a special visitor.

  “Who, the Pope?” Frank asked, because he thought he was a funny guy in those days.

  “Better,” Momo said. “The boss.”

  “DeSanto?”

  Old Jack Drina had finally died and the new boss, Al DeSanto, had taken over in L.A.

  “Mr. DeSanto to you,” Momo said, “if you open your mouth at all, which you shouldn’t unless he directly asks you something. But yeah, the new king is coming down to visit the provinces.”

  Frank wasn’t quite sure what Momo meant by that, but he picked up this tone, and he wasn’t sure what that was, either.

  “Jesus, I’m gonna drive the boss?”

  “You’re going to wax the car for me to drive the boss,” Momo said. “I’m gonna bring him to the restaurant; you’re going to go pick up Marie, bring her over after.”

  After they’ve discussed business, Frank knew.

  “And dress decent,” Momo added, “not like a surf bum.”

  Frank dressed up. First he polished that car until it shined like a black diamond; then he wen
t home, showered, scrubbed his skin until it hurt, shaved again, combed his hair, and changed into his one suit.

  “Look at you,” Marie said when she answered the door.

  Look at me? Look at you, Frank thought. Her black cocktail dress was cut low, practically down to the nipple, her full breasts pushed up by what had to be a strapless bra. He couldn’t help but stare at them.

  “You like the dress, Frank?”

  “It’s pretty.”

  She laughed, then went to her dressing table, took a drag on her cigarette and another swallow of the martini that was sweating on the table. Something in her manner told Frank that it wasn’t her first drink of the night. She wasn’t drunk, but she wasn’t exactly sober, either. She turned back to Frank and gave him the whole view, then patted her frosted hair to place it perfectly on her neck, picked up her little black bag, and said, “So you think they’re done with their business now?”

  “I don’t know about that, Mrs. A.”

  “You can call me Marie.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  She laughed again. “Do you have a girl, Frank?”

  “Yes, Mrs. A.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “That little Garafalo girl. She’s pretty.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You had nothing to do with it,” she said. “Does she put out?”

  Frank didn’t know what to say. If a girl put out, you didn’t tell, and if she didn’t, you didn’t tell that, either. Anyway, it wasn’t any of Mrs. A.’s business. And why was she asking, anyway?

  “We better get to the club, Mrs. A.”

  “There’s no hurry, Frank.”

  Yes, there is, Frank thought.

  “Can’t a girl finish her drink?” she asked, setting those bee-stung lips into a pretty pout. She reached back and picked up her drink and sipped on it, never taking her eyes off his, and it was like she was giving him a blow job, which Frank had never had but which he’d heard about. In fact, this was just like a scene from one of those dirty books he’d read, except reading one of those books wouldn’t get him killed and this could.