by Don Winslow
“I might consider selling you forty-nine percent,” Mike said.
“But I wouldn’t consider buying it,” Mac replied. “I would consider an eighty percent share. Believe me, you’ll make more with that twenty points than with your current one hundred.”
He waved his hand as if to encompass his estate, and Frank got what he was trying to say: Boys, look at my home and then look at yours. He’s right, Frank thought. It was the move to make—take a profit from the sale of the eighty points, then let Big Mac make money for them.
“What would we have to do with the club if we sold you this interest?” Mike asked.
“Nothing,” Mac said. “Go to the mailbox, pick up your checks.”
And that was the problem, Frank saw. Mike loved the club. He loved playing owner, being the man. This was the flaw in the plan that Mac couldn’t see. He hadn’t correctly gauged Mike Pella’s real interest.
“I’d want to maintain some kind of managerial voice in the operation,” Mike said.
“You mean sell coke to the girls and shylock them the money?” Mac asked, smiling. “No, that has to stop. The business is growing up, Mike Pella. You’d better grow up with it.”
“Or what?”
“Or I’ll drive you out of business.”
“Not if you’re dead, you won’t.”
“Is that really the road we want to walk down?” Mac asked.
“You tell me.”
Mac nodded. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, as if he was meditating. Then he exhaled, opened his eyes, smiled, and said, “I’ve made you a business offer, Mike Pella. I encourage you to consider it in a businesslike fashion, and get back to me in a timely manner. In the meantime, I sincerely hope that you enjoy the rest of your afternoon. If you’d like, Amber can introduce you to some friends of hers who are unattached.”
Mike liked.
He hooked up with one of Amber’s friends and they found their way to a bedroom in the guest house.
Frank went back outside and enjoyed the food, the wine, and the beautiful people. Mac’s “associates” were there, of course. John Stone was in the full swing of the party, frolicking in the pool with a couple of young ladies while Danny “Chokemaster” Sherrell played his faithful wingman.
Porter wasn’t in the pool.
He was in his same dark suit, sucking on a cigarette, and every time that Frank glanced his way, Porter was checking him out from behind a whirl of smoke. Either the guy is queer for me, Frank thought, which is very doubtful, or he has an agenda. Either way, Frank wasn’t going to let it ruin his enjoyment of the party food, which was excellent.
He was munching on a shrimp satay when Mac approached him.
“You’re too smart for those people,” Mac said. “You’re wasting yourself. Come work with me—make some real money in a classy environment.”
“I’m flattered,” Frank said. “But Mike and I have been together a long time.”
“Every additional day is a waste.”
“Thanks for the offer,” Frank said. “But no thanks. Mike’s my guy. I’ll stick with him.”
“I respect that,” Mac said. “No offense.”
“None taken.”
“But try to get him to do the smart thing, will you?” Mac said. “The smart thing is always good for everybody.”
But Mike didn’t see it that way.
Later that night, even as he was relating the marvels of sex with a future Penthouse model, he was saying, “You know, we’re going to have to kill that moolie.”
“No, I don’t know that,” Frank said. “As a matter of fact, I think you should sell him the eighty points.”
“You’re fucking kidding me, right?”
“I’m serious as a heart attack.”
“No fucking way, Frankie,” Mike said. “No fucking way.”
“He’s a cop, Mike.”
“He’s an ex-cop,” Mike said, “and an ex-con.”
“Once a cop, always a cop,” Frank said. “They stick tighter than we do. And he’s got a cop partner, so it’s the same thing.”
“I ain’t selling the Pinto,” Mike said.
He called Mac to tell him so.
The next week, inspectors started coming around the place—fire inspectors, health inspectors, water inspectors. They all found something wrong, and none of them took the usual C note. Instead, they wrote the place up.
The following week, CHP cars started parking across the street. Customers would pull out of the lot and get stopped for DUI. Jerked out of the car, made to walk the line, blow into the tube, the whole nine yards. Even if they weren’t legally drunk, it was a hassle.
Undercover cops started coming into the place—sniffing around the men’s room for dope, pretending they were johns looking for working girls, trying to buy coke from the bartenders.
Customers started to be afraid to come in.
It hurt business.
“Something’s gotta be done,” Mike said to Frank, and Frank knew what that something was.
“You want to start a shooting war with the CHP?” he asked Mike.
Mac called and upped his offer by ten grand, as a peace gesture.
Mike told him to go fuck himself.
The next week, two girls were busted for prostitution, and another for possession. The following morning, Pat got a call from the liquor commissioner, who was threatening to yank the club’s license.
Mac upped his offer again.
Mike told him to fuck himself in the ass.
Privately, he wasn’t so confident.
“What the fuck are we going to do?” he asked Frank. “What the fuck are we going to do?”
“Sell him the club.”
Mike had a different answer—more of a traditional wise-guy response.
He firebombed the Cheetah Lounge.
He was very careful to do it after closing, even making sure that the janitor was out; then he and Angie Basso launched two very well-built Molotov cocktails through the window.
The joint didn’t burn to the ground, but it was going to be a long time before it opened again. Just to make sure Mac got the point, Mike phoned him with condolences. “Gee,” he said, “it’s too bad the fire inspectors weren’t out there.”
Mac got the point.
He got it so well that Angie Basso got jumped coming out of his dry-cleaning business late at night. Pat Porter and Chokemaster Sherrell dragged him to the edge of the sidewalk, held his hands over the edge, and jumped on his forearms, snapping both his wrists.
“You shouldn’t play with fire,” Porter told him.
“What am I going to do?” Angie asked Mike the next night. “I can’t even take a piss by myself.”
“Don’t look at me,” Mike said.
But he responded. He had to, or give it all up.
So, three nights later, Frank waited in the backseat of a car parked across the street from Bare Elegance, waiting for the Chokemaster to lock up. Mike was in the driver’s seat, because Frank didn’t trust him to make a good shot.
“I’m just going to shoot him in the leg,” Mike had said.
“You’d screw up and hit the femoral artery,” Frank had told him. “Then Sherrell would bleed out and we’d be in a full-scale war.”
“I’d aim for his dick,” Mike’d said. “Couldn’t miss that target.”
Mike had rented a couple of Sherrell’s old porn videos and shown them in the back room of the club. Frank was half-convinced that Mike had picked the Chokemaster for a target out of phallic jealousy.
Anyway, now he sat low in the backseat of a work car and watched while Sherrell came out, said good night to the bartender, pulled the metal screen down, and started to set the padlock.
Frank stuck the .22 rifle through the car’s open window, sighted in on the fleshy part of Sherrell’s right calf, and fired. Sherrell went down, Mike hit the gas, and that was it. Frank knew that the bartender would come back and get Sherrell to the hospital. The Chokemaster would be on crutc
hes for a couple of weeks, if that.
All in all, it was a very tempered response to the assault on Angie Basso, whose wrists would take months to heal. If anything it was a deescalation of the war, but instead, the other side kicked it up a notch.
Frank saw it happening—literally.
He was at the airport waiting for a pickup when he saw Pat Porter walk into the terminal. Frank gave him a little space and then followed him in, where Porter met a direct flight from Heathrow and warmly greeted two men as they got off the plane.
They were what the Brits would call “hard men.” Frank could see that by the way they walked and carried themselves. Heavily muscled, but graceful, like athletes. One was barrel thick and wore a rugby shirt over jeans and tennis shoes. The other was thin and a little taller, sporting an Arsenal football club jersey.
Porter had brought in a crew.
They showed up at the Pinto Club two days later.
It was late afternoon on a Tuesday, just when the after-work construction crowd would start to come in. Pretty quiet, not dead. Frank was sitting in his regular booth, grabbing a quick cheeseburger and a Coke before the evening rush started and he’d have to leave to make pickups.
He spotted the British crew as they came through the door. So did Georgie Y, who left the bar, where he was sitting with Myrna, and started toward the Englishmen. They smiled like he was a meal walking their way.
Frank waved Georgie over to the booth instead.
“Frank,” Georgie said. “I don’t like them coming in here.”
“Did I ask what you like?” Frank said. “Myrna’s up. Go watch her dance, think about what she’ll be doing later tonight with you.”
“Frank—”
“What did I say, Georgie? I have to repeat myself now?”
Georgie gave Porter a bad look, then took a seat ringside and watched Myrna gyrate her little body in a bad imitation of eroticism.
Porter walked over to Frank’s booth, his two boys, still decked out in their sporting gear, on either shoulder.
Frank didn’t ask them to sit.
Porter was in his uniform—dark suit, buttoned collar, skinny black tie. He looked at Frank and said, “You know, in the end it’s going to come down to me and you.”
“What is this, Shane?” Frank asked, laughing. Looking at Porter’s face, he knew one thing for sure about him: Pat Porter didn’t like being laughed at.
“Me and you,” Porter repeated.
Frank looked over Porter’s shoulder. “Then what are they here for?”
“To make sure no one else steps in,” Porter said. “I know how you guineas are.”
Frank went back to eating his cheeseburger. “I’m on a clock, Sam Spade,” he said, chewing. “If you have a point, make it. Otherwise…”
Frank jutted his chin toward the door.
“I’m going to kill you, Frankie Machine,” Porter said. “Or make you kill me.”
“I’ll take door number two,” Frank said.
Porter didn’t get the joke. He just stood there, like he was waiting for something. What, Frank thought, am I supposed to jump up and “draw”? We’re going to do B Westerns, 1988 on Kettner Boulevard?
Frank finished the last bite of his burger, took a swallow of the Coke, then stood up and slammed the heavy glass into the side of Porter’s face. Rugby Shirt started in, but suddenly Frank had a pistol out. He cocked it, pointed it at the two sidekicks, and said, “Really?”
Apparently not.
Rugby Shirt and Arsenal stood there, frozen.
Keeping the gun on them, he reached down to where Porter was now kneeling with blood pouring down the side of his face, grabbed the man’s tie, wrapped it around his neck, and, with his gun on the other two Brits, dragged Porter across the floor, up the stairs to the landing, and out the door.
He waved the pistol at Rugby Shirt and Arsenal and said, “Out.”
“You’re dead, mate,” Arsenal said.
“Yeah. Out.”
They walked out the door. Frank came back into the room, stepped carefully over the broken glass and blood, and sat back down in the booth.
He signaled to the waitress for the check.
Everyone was staring at him—the waitress, the bartender, the three construction workers sitting at a table, Myrna and Georgie Y. They were all wide-eyed.
“What?” Frank asked. “What?”
I’m in a bad mood, all right? he thought. I haven’t seen my kid awake in three weeks, my wife is threatening to call a lawyer, I’m trying to eat a burger before I work all night, and some Brit has to come in and hassle me with bad movie dialogue? I shouldn’t have to explain myself to you people.
“Get me some club soda and a few bar towels,” he said.
“I’ll clean it up, Frank,” the waitress said.
“Thank you, Angela,” Frank said, “but I made the mess. I’ll clean it up.”
“We have cheesecake today, Frank.”
“That’s okay, honey. I’m watching my figure.”
He cleaned up the blood and broken glass, and was more than normally alert when he went out in the parking lot to start making his pickups. When he got back with his first customer, Mike was waiting for him, laughing. “Don’t you ever fucking lecture me about my temper again.”
“The blood came out of the carpet okay.”
Mike looked at Frank, then grabbed him by the cheeks and said, “I love you. I just fucking love you, all right?”
He turned to the whole bar. “I just love this fucking guy!”
Two weeks later, it happened.
It shouldn’t have, wouldn’t have, except that Mike suddenly had a group of Japanese businessmen who wanted to party, and he needed both limos to take care of them. So Frank would be driving instead of doing what he had planned to do, which was make a pickup of some shy money. It was supposed to have been a very simple, no-sweat errand—this junkie boyfriend of one of the dancers had borrowed some money and was going to make his first payment on the vig.
“Have Georgie do it,” Mike said. “He can swing by the guy’s place on his way in.”
So Frank called Georgie, and he was happy to do it. Frank and Mike went out and drove the Japanese around, and when they got back to the club, it was one in the morning and Myrna was sitting at the bar, two other strippers holding her shoulders as she sobbed hysterically.
It took Frank thirty minutes to get the story out of her.
She had gone with Georgie to make the pickup. The junkie lived in an apartment building in the Lamp. They were going to pick up the money on the way in to work, so that’s why she was with him. They pulled into the parking lot and Georgie told her to wait in the car. She said that was fine, because she needed to get her makeup on.
When Georgie got out of his car, three guys got out of another.
“Did you recognize them?” Frank asked.
Myrna nodded, then broke into another fresh bout of sobs. When she recovered, she said, “Frankie, one of them was that guy you beat up the other day. He had bandages on his face, but I recognized him. The other two were the guys who were with him.”
Frank felt sick as Myrna told the rest of the story. Georgie tried to fight them, but there were three of them. One of them kicked Georgie in the head and his legs buckled under him. She got out of the car and tried to help him, but one of the guys wrapped his arms around her and held her.
Then the guy with the bandages took something out of his pocket and hit Georgie in the face with it. The other guys grabbed Georgie and held him and this guy just kept hitting him and hitting him, mostly in the stomach, but sometimes in the head, too, and when they let Georgie loose, he just fell to the ground. Then the guy with the bandages on his face kicked him over and over and over again, in the ribs and in the crotch and in the head.
“He kicked Georgie one last time in the head,” Myrna said, “and Georgie’s neck kind of snapped back and then the guy with the bandages came over and said—”
She broke down
again.
“What did he say, Myrna?” Frank asked.
“He said…tell you…” She took a deep breath and looked him in the eyes. “It was supposed to be you, Frank.”
It was supposed to be me, Frank thought. Porter got this junkie to set me up, but poor dumb Georgie walked into it instead. If it had been me, there’d be three dead Brits lying in that parking lot now, instead of Georgie….
“Where’s Georgie now?” Frank asked.
“In the hospital,” Myrna sobbed. “He’s unconscious. They said he isn’t going to wake up. He has a sister…. I’ve been trying to get her number.”
Frank and Mike were bedside fifteen minutes later. Georgie Y was all tubes and needles; a respirator was doing his breathing for him. They sat there for three hours, until the sister arrived from L.A.
She gave the okay to pull the plug.
Frank and Mike went to the junkie’s apartment. He’d split, of course, but the dancer was home at her place.
“Where’s your fucking boyfriend?” Mike asked her after he kicked the door in.
“I don’t know. I haven’t—”
Mike punched her in the mouth, then stuck the gun barrel through her broken teeth. “Where’s your fucking junkie boyfriend, bitch? You lie to me again—”
The little shit was hiding in the bedroom closet.
Junkies aren’t smart.
Mike ripped the door off its runners, yanked him out, and punched him in the gut. Frank took a pair of the girl’s panty hose out of her chest of drawers and shoved them into his mouth. Then he ripped the phone out of the wall and tied the guy’s hands behind his back with the cord.
They walked him out to the car. Frank drove while Mike held the junkie down on the floor in the back.
They drove out to the river floodway and pushed him over the edge. The floodway was dry and the junkie was pretty beat-up by the time he landed on the bottom. Mike and Frank slid down and pulled him up to his knees. The junkie was puking and starting to choke because the vomit was going back down his throat.
Frank pulled the panty hose out of his mouth and the junkie puked. Then he gasped, “I swear I didn’t—”
