by Don Winslow
She did.
For the first time in his life, Frank felt this sense of freedom about sex, because it wasn’t a struggle or negotiation or an obligation. It was just pure pleasure, and when he woke up in the morning, he wanted to feel guilty, but the fact was, he didn’t. He just felt good.
It didn’t hurt that Mandy had already gotten up and left, leaving only a little note telling him that she felt “well and truly fucked,” with one of those little smiley faces above her signature.
Herbie came by to take him to breakfast.
“You should try some Jew food,” Herbie said when Frank went for the bacon and eggs.
He ordered Frank an onion bagel with lox, cream cheese, and a slice of red onion.
It was delicious, and the contrasts of tastes and textures—sharp, creamy, soft, and crispy—was a revelation to him. Herbie knew what he was talking about. When you really got talking with him, it turned out that Herbie knew a lot about a lot. He knew about food, wine, jewelry, and art. He had Frank over to his house to see his collection of Erté and his wine cellar. You would never call Herbie a cultured man by any means, but he had some surprises in him.
Take the crossword puzzles, for instance.
It was Herbie who turned Frank on to the puzzles, and Herbie could do the Sunday New York Times puzzle in ink. Sometimes, Frank wasn’t so sure Herbie needed to write anything down at all—he might have all the words in his head. And he was a walking dictionary, although the funny thing was, he didn’t use any of those words in his conversation, ever.
“I guess I’m what you would call an idiot savant,” he said one day when Frank asked him about it. Although, when Frank looked up the term idiot savant, he realized that no idiot savant would know the expression.
“You and Mandy got along, huh?” Herbie asked as they were walking out of his wine cellar the day after Frank had shattered his marriage vows with multiple, and creative, acts of adultery.
“I guess you could say that.”
“We have two different girls tonight,” Herbie said. “Very nice girls. Very nice.”
Frank left Vegas five days later in need of a vitamin E injection but otherwise feeling rested and satisfied. He went back a lot after that, mostly getting comped at the Paladin, sometimes staying somewhere else and paying his own way because he didn’t want to abuse the situation.
37
The wise guys were banging Vegas for everything it was worth.
And why not?
The skim was flowing.
The only problem was, the bosses wanted more and more of it, and other families were looking to get in on it, so the skimmers got to the point that they weren’t just skimming; they were tapping deeper and deeper into the well.
But there’s only so much water in a desert.
Sooner or later, it would have to end, but none of them saw then that it was going to be sooner. It was just one continuous party then, and Frank, after years of working his ass off, was partying with the best of them. What he’d do was, he’d put in sixteen-hour days in San Diego at his businesses all week, then leave Friday after lunch and drive to Vegas and spend the weekend. Most times, he’d make it back on Monday, but sometimes he wouldn’t.
Patty didn’t seem to care.
They’d pretty much given up on having a kid, pretty much given up on the marriage itself, so she seemed almost relieved to have him gone on weekends. He made a couple of halfhearted invitations for her to come with him, but she recognized them for what they were and turned them down.
“We’d be the same people in Vegas as we are here,” she said once.
“I don’t know,” Frank said. “Maybe we wouldn’t.”
He really tried one time.
“We’ll go for drinks, dinner, some nice shows,” he said. Maybe back to bed afterward—for more than turning over and going to sleep.
“Is this the routine you’ve got down with your bimbos?” she replied.
There weren’t any bimbos, not yet, but he didn’t bother to deny it. Let her think what she was going to think. What difference did it make, anyway?
So he went to Vegas by himself.
He was never alone for long.
While Frank enjoyed the solitude of the long drive, listening to his opera tapes on the car stereo, singing along without bothering anyone, he was ready for some companionship by the time he got there.
If you couldn’t find company in Las Vegas in those days, it was because you wanted to be alone.
So he’d check into his room, shower, change clothes, then go over to Herbie’s place.
Herbie had taken some of his shark money and bought a nondescript little club tucked away in a strip mall among a bunch of auto-body shops. It was far away from the Strip, the casinos, and the usual spots the feds had under surveillance, and that was the point. You didn’t know about Herbie’s unless you were supposed to, and if a tourist or a citizen waiting for his car to be fixed happened to wander in, he left in a hurry with a polite but firm “This place ain’t for you, friend.”
Herbie’s was for wise guys, period.
For some reason or another, Herbie’s became the hangout of choice for the California guys. They were all back from the joint now, and all in Vegas, living large off the skim.
Mike was back—he’d actually moved to Vegas, thinking it was going to be his big chance, and he was usually sitting at a table with Peter Martini, aka Mouse Senior, who had just been made boss. And Peter’s brother Carmen was usually there, and so was their nephew, Bobby, a nightclub singer.
And, of course, you had Herbie, sitting doing his crossword puzzles with Sherm Simon in the corner that became known as “Little Israel.”
So there were plenty of guys to hang out with, and sometimes Frank sat at one of the tables and listened to the bullshit sessions, but mostly he’d go back into the kitchen and cook.
Those were good times, standing at the stove, listening to the guys while whipping up the linguine con vongole and spaghetti all’ amatriciana, the baccalà alla Bolognese and polpo con limone e aglio. It was almost like the old days when he was a kid, back when San Diego’s Little Italy was still intact and people still made real meals.
Frank had really missed cooking as he spent more time at work and less time at home, and he and Patty had slipped into the routine of having their dinners separately. Herbie had a beautifully equipped kitchen and imported the best ingredients, so the cooking was a pleasure and a joy.
And listening to the guys—the conversations, the jokes, the ball busting.
Hanging out with mob guys, Frank thought, was like being frozen in some perpetual junior high school time warp. The conversations were always about sex, food, farts, smells, girls, small dicks, and homos.
And crime, of course.
The only thing at Herbie’s being cooked up more than pasta was crime. Most of the scores never came off, of course—they were just bullshit—but some of them did. There were plots to get in on the legal brothels north of the city, a plan to sell machine guns to motorcycle gangs, a very serious discussion on how to make counterfeit credit cards, and Frank’s personal favorite—Mike’s theft of three thousand T-shirts and two hundred twenty-inch TV sets from the convention center.
“What are you going to do with two hundred TV sets?” Frank asked Mike after the score had actually come off.
“What am I going to do with three thousand T-shirts?” Mike asked.
Frank was going to ask him why he’d stolen the T-shirts in the first place, but then he realized that it was a stupid question, akin to the “Why climb Mount Everest?” query—the answer was, of course, “Because it’s there.” The truth was that wise guys would steal anything, even stuff they didn’t want and couldn’t use, just because they could steal it.
Anyway, these things kept Frank amused.
And it wasn’t just the guys; it was also the women.
It had been tough that first time, cheating on Patty, but then Frank started seeing all kinds of women, a
t first in the gravitational orbit of babe magnet Herbie Goldstein, then on his own.
He saw models, showgirls, croupiers, dealers, and tourists who were in town for a good, uncomplicated time, which Frank gave them. He took them to nice dinners, to shows, always treated them like ladies, and was a generous, caring lover. Frank found out that he really liked women and that they returned the compliment.
Except Patty.
He treated her badly and she returned that compliment.
He talked about it with Sherm one night during a quiet moment at Herbie’s. “Why can’t you be with your wife the way you are with your girlfriends?”
“Different breed, my friend,” Sherm said. “Different species entirely.”
“Maybe we should marry the girlfriends.”
“I tried it,” Sherm says. “Twice.”
“And?”
“And they turn into wives,” Sherm said. “It starts to happen when they’re planning the wedding, this metamorphosis from sex kitten to house cat. It doesn’t work. You don’t believe me, ask my lawyer.”
“You are a lawyer.”
“Ask my divorce lawyer,” Sherm said. “Tell him I sent you—he has a boat named after me.”
“I don’t think it’s them,” Frank said. “I think it’s us. Once we stop trying to get them into bed—because now they’re always there—we stop making the effort. We turn them into wives.”
“I think it’s just the way of the world, my friend,” Sherm said. “The way of the world.”
I don’t think so, Frank thought.
He resolved to go home and give it a real try with Patty again. Treat her like a mistress instead of a wife and see what happened. But he didn’t—it was easier to go to bed with showgirls.
Or just hang out with Herbie.
It was always good spending time with Herbie, working the New York Times Sunday crossword over bagels and lox with an opera broadcast as a background, or drinking a wine that Herbie had discovered, or chuckling over the plots and plans of Mike Pella, the Martini Brothers, and the rest of the crew.
They were good times.
They all ended when he had to go kill Jay Voorhees.
38
Jay Voorhees was the security chief at the Paladin, in charge of making sure that the casino wasn’t being skimmed, so in the interest of efficiency, he was also in charge of the skim. He was good at it, the Harry Houdini of the counting room, the way he could make coins and bills escape from lockboxes.
Then the FBI got to him, started to put pressure on him, and he caved.
Ran to Mexico, where the feds couldn’t get to him. Fine as far as it went, but Chicago wasn’t looking to extradite him; they were looking to make Houdini disappear for good. Because Voorhees knew everything—he could give up Carmine, Donnie Garth, everybody. Then the whole house of cards, as it were, would come tumbling down. They had to find Voorhees and put him out.
People think it’s easy to disappear.
It isn’t.
It’s hard and it’s tiring and it’s expensive as hell. Money hemorrhages when you’re traveling, anyway, and when you’re on the move and trying not to leave any footprints, it bleeds all the faster. You’re trying to use cash everywhere, but you see it just flying out of your pocket, and you go to the plastic.
Unless you’re prepared to go off the radar, it’s a difficult trick to pull off, and Jay Voorhees wasn’t prepared. He had just panicked and run. And it was only a matter of time before he figured out that the feds would offer him a pretty good deal to trade up, and he’d get tired of running and come in from the cold.
Frank had to find him first.
“We can put a crew down there,” Carmine Antonucci said. “Anything you need.”
“I don’t want a crew,” Frank said.
Bunch of doofs tripping over one another’s feet. A pool of potential witnesses when the feds flipped them five years down the line. No, he didn’t want a crew, just operating expenses, in cash, because he didn’t want to leave any footprints, either.
And there were a lot of footsteps. Frank followed Voorhees from Mexico City to Guadalajara, then across to Mazatlán and Cozumel, then to Puerto Vallarta and all the way down the tip of Baja to Cabo.
A connection develops between hunter and prey. Guys deny it as airy-fairy bullshit, Frank thought, but they all know it happens. You track a guy long enough, you get to know him, you’re living his life, one step removed, and he becomes real to you. You try to get inside his head, think the way he thinks, and if you succeed at that, in a strange way you become him.
And he becomes you, for the same reason. If he has any instinct at all, he begins to feel you. As he runs, as he tries to outthink you, to anticipate your moves and counter them, he gets to know you, too.
You’re on the same road—by necessity, you go to the same places, eat the same food, see the same things, share the same experiences. You develop things in common. You connect.
Frank missed him by three days in Mexico City, talked to a cabbie who drove him to the airport, bribed a baggage agent who put him on a flight to Guadalajara. He wasn’t sure, but he might have glimpsed him on the Cross of Squares there, outside the cathedral. Going to pray? Frank wondered. Maybe he bought a little clay model—a milagro—from one of the street vendors and left it at the altar with a contribution and a request for a miracle. He missed him by one night at his hotel, found out he went to the train station. He might have lost the trail there, except that Voorhees used his AmEx to check into a hotel in Mazatlán. Frank went to the resort town and just walked the beach, asking everybody if they’d seen him, throwing around money. He didn’t expect to get an answer and he didn’t hide the fact that he was there—he wanted Voorhees to know.
“Flushing the bird,” is what Bap had called it. “The bird might be safe hiding in the bush, but it sees the hunter and flies, and that’s what kills it.”
Voorhees fled to Cozumel, Frank right after him. Voorhees checked in and out of second-rate hotels. One time, Frank missed him by an hour. He actually saw him in Cabo, at a cheap hotel on the Pacific side, drinking a beer and picking at a plate of camarones. He was gaunt and thin; his slacks were bunched up awkwardly around his waist.
Voorhees saw him, too; he definitely did. He made you, Frank thinks now. He looked at you with those scared, haunted eyes and knew. Voorhees paid his check and left the place, and Frank followed him. But there was no place to do it, so Frank let him get on a bus and go.
He knew Voorhees’s string was running out.
In every town he’d gone to, the hotels had gotten a little cheaper, the meals a little skimpier. He had started on jets, then had rented cars and taken trains, but now he was on a rundown rural bus, and a bad one at that. Frank checked the route—the bus was headed on the single road up the east coast of Baja.
Now his options weren’t radial; they were linear. He had trapped himself along this spine of coastline, with the ocean on one side and impenetrable desert on the other, and all he could do was make his way from one little fishing village to the next.
Frank enjoyed that trip, if enjoyment is a concept that can be hooked to hunting a man down in order to kill him. But he savored the leisure of the bus trip, with nothing to do but marvel at the stark countryside, or read, or watch the startlingly blue water of the Sea of Cortez. He liked playing with the kids on the bus, holding a baby that one time so the mother could get a break, and he reveled in the relentless sun and the baking, soothing heat.
Those were good days, those days following Jay Voorhees up Baja. Frank was almost sorry that it was about to end.
Voorhees went to ground in the little village of Santa Rosalía. He’d found himself a little fisherman’s shack on the rocky beach. It’s what he should have done in the first place, Frank thought, gone to a little town where he could have bought protection from the local comandante. We would have outbid him, of course, but it would have taken me longer to find him, and maybe I never would have.
But t
hat wasn’t what happened.
What happened was Frank spent the afternoon at a cantina in the village, sipping a couple of beers and doing crossword puzzles in a little English-language magazine that some tourist must have left behind. It was a long, slow crawl to sunset, the dusk muted and subtle on an eastern-facing coast. But when the blue went out of the water, he headed down to the beach, to the thatched shack that Voorhees had managed to procure with his dwindling bankroll.
The man was sitting on a rough-hewn chair outside, smoking a cigarette and staring out at the water.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” he said when he saw Frank.
Frank nodded.
“I mean, you’re the guy, aren’t you?” Voorhees said, only a slight quiver in his voice. “The guy they sent?”
“Yeah.”
Voorhees nodded.
He looked more worn out than scared. There was this look of resignation on his face, almost relief, not the hard edge of fear that Frank had expected. Yeah, Frank thought, or maybe it’s just the soft glow coming off the ocean at dusk that takes the edge off. Maybe it’s the fading light that makes Voorhees look tranquil.
Voorhees finished his cigarette, took the pack from the pocket of his faded denim shirt, and lit another one.
His hands were shaking.
Frank leaned over and helped him hold the match steady.
Voorhees nodded his thanks. After he’d gotten a couple of drags down, he said, “It’s the bullet I’m afraid of. The thought of it smashing in my head.”
“You won’t feel anything.”
“It’s just the thought—you know, my head blown away.”
“That doesn’t happen,” Frank said, lying. Do it now, he told himself. Do it before he knows it’s happening.
Voorhees started to cry. Frank watched the water well up in his eyes, saw the man bite his lip and try to hold it back, but the tears overflowed and rolled down his cheeks, and then Voorhees just lost it. His head slumped and his shoulders bobbed up and down as he sobbed.
