The Winter of Frankie Machine

by Don Winslow

“Don’t lie to me,” Frank said. He squatted down and spoke quietly in the junkie’s ear. “I know what you did. You have one chance to save yourself now. Tell me where they are.”

  “They hang out down in Carlsbad,” the junkie said. “Some English place.”

  “The White Hart,” Mike said.

  Frank nodded, pulled his gun, and fired into the junkie until the chambers were empty.

  Mike did the same.

  They got back in the car and drove to the White Hart.

  They both knew the place.

  The bar had warm beer, bangers and mash, and satellite feeds of soccer games, so a lot of the SoCal British expats hung out there. A pub-style sign with old-fashioned lettering and a painting of a white deer was hung over the door, and a Union Jack was stretched across the one window.

  “Wait here,” Frank said when they pulled into the parking lot. He reloaded the .38.

  “Fuck that,” Mike said. “I’m coming with you.”

  “This is my thing,” Frank said. “Just have the motor running and the car in gear, okay?”

  Mike nodded. He handed Frank his own pistol.

  Frank checked its load, then asked, “You got a kit in the trunk?”

  “Sure.”

  Mike popped the trunk open.

  “Clean?” Frank asked.

  “The fuck am I?” Mike asked. “Some beaner robbing a 7-Eleven?”

  Frank got out of the car, walked back to the trunk, and found what he expected—a twelve-gauge sawed-off shotgun, a bulletproof vest, a pair of gloves, and a black stocking. He took off his jacket, slipped on the gloves, then buttoned up the vest and put his jacket back on over it. Then he stuck both pistols into his belt, tucked the shotgun into the crook of his arm, and pulled the black stocking over his head.

  “See you in a minute,” Mike said. “Frankie Machine.”

  Frank stepped through the door.

  The place was nearly empty, just a couple of guys at the bar. The bartender and Rugby Shirt and Arsenal were all sitting at a table, drinking pints and looking up at a soccer match on a television set bolted high on the wall, near the ceiling.

  Arsenal turned when the door opened.

  The shotgun blast blew him out of his chair.

  Rugby Shirt tried to stand to pull his pistol from his waistband, but Frank unloaded the second barrel into his stomach and he crumpled onto the table.

  Where is Porter? Frank asked himself.

  The men’s room was at the back of the bar. Frank let the shotgun drop to the floor, took both pistols from his belt, and kicked the door in.

  Porter was braced against the sink, his pistol raised. He was wearing his usual black suit, but his fly was unzipped and his hands were dripping water. He fired and Frank felt the three shots thunk into the vest, right over his heart, knocking the air out of him, and then he saw the look of alarmed surprise in Porter’s eyes when he didn’t go down.

  Frank fired twice with the gun in his right hand.

  Porter’s head smashed back against the mirror, cracking it; then he slid down the sink and onto the floor.

  Blood pooled onto the yellowed tiles.

  They’ll never get that out of the grouting, Frank thought as he dropped the gun, turned, and walked out of the bar.

  Mike had the car in gear.

  Frank got in, and Mike drove slowly out of the parking lot, onto the street, and then pulled on the 5.

  Bap would have been proud.

  “Where to?” Mike asked.

  “Tara,” Frank said.

  Sometimes you just have to go in.

  Usually, you try to be careful. You set everything up. You’re patient and you wait until the moment is exactly right.

  But sometimes you just have to go in.

  They stopped off at Mike’s condo in Del Mar first. Mike had an arsenal tucked away in the guest bedroom closet. Frank picked out two .38 snubbies, a Wellington over and under .303 ten-gauge, an AR-15, and two hand grenades.

  When they got to Tara, there was no guard at the gate and it was open.

  “What do you think?” Mike asked.

  “I think they’re waiting for us inside,” Frank said. “I think we drive in and they ventilate the car.”

  “Sonny.”

  “What?”

  “Sonny Corleone,” Mike said.

  “You guys ever watch anything else?”

  “You guys?”

  They drove the car around the back, got out, and climbed over the wall. Frank knew they must have tripped off motion sensors, but nothing happened—no lights, no alarms. Still, he thought, Mac must have night-vision cameras linked to the sensors, and he’s probably watching us now, on the monitor. That’s okay, you knew when you came in that you were going to fight the battle on his terms.

  It was like being back in Vietnam.

  Charlie never fought except on his own terms.

  If you found him, it was because he wanted you to find him.

  Frank carried the AR-15 and had the shotgun slung over his back. He liked the automatic rifle for range—the shotgun wouldn’t be that useful until they got inside. If they got inside.

  They had to walk through the zoo to get to the house. It was weird, because the animals were awake at night. The birds started to squawk, and he could hear the cats pacing in their cages, see their eyes flash red.

  And, like Vietnam, Frank expected to see other flashes break up the night—the muzzle flashes of an ambush—then he realized that he and Mike were between the shooters and the animals, and Mac wouldn’t take a chance on one of his pets getting shot accidentally.

  The pool glittered a cool blue. It was lit up, but there was nobody out there, not anyone they could see anyway. They’re inside the house, Frank thought, or, better, on the roof, waiting for us to get in so close that they can’t miss.

  Any second, the night sky is going to light up like the Fourth of July.

  Frank edged around the pool, then flattened himself on the patio at the edge of the house and signaled Mike to do the same. Then he trained the rifle’s night scope on the roof and scanned it left to right. He didn’t see anything, but that didn’t mean they weren’t up there, lying flat against the dormers or behind the chimneys.

  It was about fifty feet of open lawn to the back of the house.

  “Cover me,” he whispered to Mike.

  Then, ducking as low as he could while still being able to run, he dashed toward the house and threw himself flat against the wall. He took one of the grenades out of his pocket, hooked his finger inside the pin, got ready to flip it up onto the roof, and then waved his hand to Mike.

  Mike lunged off the ground and raced to the house, and they stayed there for a few seconds, pressed flat against the wall, catching their breath.

  The sliding glass door was locked. Frank smashed the glass with the rifle butt, then reached in and pushed the door open. Mike pushed past him and went in with his shotgun at his cheek and swept the room.

  Nothing.

  Frank leapfrogged past him to the next wall and they made their way through the house like that.

  They found Mac in the dojo.

  Shirtless and barefoot, wearing only the pants of a black gi, he was slowly and rhythmically slamming roundhouse kicks into a heavy bag. The bag doubled up and popped toward the ceiling with every kick, the solid wham of the impact echoing through the empty room.

  A jazz flute played quietly on the sound system.

  A stick of incense burned in a holder on the floor.

  Frank stayed twenty feet back and kept the rifle trained on him. A man of Mac’s size and athletic ability could cover that distance in a stride and a half, and the kick would be lethal.

  Mac turned his head to glance at them but didn’t stop kicking.

  “I left the front door open for you,” he said. “You went to a lot of needless trouble, upset my animals, and you broke my slider.”

  “They beat the kid to death,” Frank said.

  Mac nodded and kick
ed the bag again. The motion looked both smooth and effortless, but the bag flew up toward the ceiling and then dropped again with a shudder. “I heard,” Mac said. “I didn’t authorize it. I don’t approve of it.”

  “Let’s just fucking shoot him, Frank!”

  “I’ve left myself vulnerable to you as a gesture of my sincerity,” Mac said, “and of my contrition. If you want to kill me, kill me. I’m at perfect peace.”

  He stopped kicking the bag.

  Frank backed off two more steps and kept the rifle trained, but Mac knelt on the floor, rested his haunches on his heels, took a deep breath of the incense, closed his eyes, and opened his arms with his palms held flat up.

  “The fuck is this?” Mike asked.

  Frank shook his head.

  But neither of them shot.

  A long minute went by; then Mac opened his eyes, looked around as if he was a little surprised, and said, “Then let’s discuss business. You should know that you are behind the information curve: Mr. Porter has decided to pursue his own agenda. His exact words were, ‘I’m tired of working for some jumped-up monkey,’ the monkey in question being myself. That being the case, I am willing to accept a fifty percent purchase of the Pinto Club. And if you want me to kill Pat Porter, I’ll kill him.”

  “That’s already been taken care of,” Frank said.

  Mac got to his feet and smiled. “That’s what I thought you’d say.”

  Life was really good for a while.

  They’d had to lay low in Mexico for a few weeks, with the cops and the media all over the Strip Club Wars like vultures. It had everything that the eleven o’clock news guys could want and more—sex, violence, gangsters, and more sex. Stripper after stripper gave on-air interviews, and one even held a press conference.

  Then some new horror took the pride of place and the media moved on.

  The cops had a longer attention span.

  Four murders in one night, apparently related, put a lot of heat on the homicide guys, and the FBI came in on the OC angle and started a turf battle. Everyone liked Mike Pella for the Georgie Yoznezensky murder, but for a change, Mike was actually innocent of that, so it never got any traction.

  Myrna kept her mouth shut and Mike got her a job at a club in Tampa. The stripper with the junkie boyfriend just split town, and Frank heard years later that she’d overdosed in East St. Louis.

  As for the three Brits gunned down in ninety seconds at the White Hart, nobody at the bar could identify the shooter and the guns had no prints and were untraceable. Eventually, the San Diego cops and the feds decided that it had been a London turf battle fought out in Mission Viejo and they put it in the cold file.

  So Mike and Frank took a vacation in Ensenada and then came back to the sweet life, because being partners with Big Mac McManus was cake.

  Mac had the golden touch.

  He was like this king, this magnificent emperor of an enchanted land where milk, honey, women, and money flowed in streams.

  But Frank didn’t get in on any of that. He turned down Mike’s offer of a piece of the Pinto, because the feds were all over it. He kept working the limo thing, plowing the money into his fish business or socking it away against the proverbial rainy day. He would go to the Sunday afternoon parties sometimes, though, to get in on the buffet.

  “You’re going to pick up whores,” Patty would say.

  “No, I’m not.”

  It was a tired old argument.

  “Sundays should be for your family,” Patty argued.

  “You’re right,” Frank said. “Let’s all go.”

  “Nice,” Patty said. “Now you want to bring your wife and daughter to an orgy.”

  She had a point there, Frank had to admit. Although he never took part in the sexual escapades. Mostly, he and Mac would repair to the dojo and work out. Mac taught him martial arts, taught him, in fact, the move that would save his life on the boat almost twenty years later.

  They’d work out hard—hitting and kicking the bag, then doing some sparring, then hitting the weight bench, where they’d spot for each other. Then they’d go and sip fruit juice and talk about life, business, music, philosophy. Mac taught Frank about jazz, and Frank got him into opera.

  They were good times.

  They couldn’t last.

  It was the coke.

  Frank never knew when Mac started doing it, but it seemed like all of a sudden that’s all he was doing. Mountains of coke would go up Mac’s nose, and he would take what seemed like a harem into his bedroom and disappear for days. After a while, he stopped taking the harem and just disappeared by himself, to emerge late in the afternoon, if at all, and demand more coke.

  It changed him.

  Mac started to be angry all the time. He’d fly into sudden, unpredictable rages, and launch into long, barely coherent rants about how he did all the work and all the thinking and how nobody appreciated him.

  Then came the paranoia.

  They were all out to get him, all plotting against him. He doubled the amount of security around the place, bought Dobermans that he let prowl the grounds at night, installed more alarm systems, and spent more and more time huddled alone in his room.

  He stopped going into his dojo altogether. The heavy bag hung still and unused, a lonely symbol of Mac’s decline.

  Frank tried to talk to him. It didn’t do any good, but Mac loved him for the attempt.

  “All these people,” he said to Frank one night when they were sitting alone together at the pool. “All these people are hangers-on. They’re all parasites. Not you, Frank Machianno, you’re a man. You love me man to man.”

  It was the truth.

  Frank did love him.

  Loved the memory of the distinguished, generous genius that Mac had been, and could be again. Instead of the paranoid, mean, incoherent shell he had become. Mac looked awful—the once-tight body was sagging and thin. The man rarely ate, his eyes were dilated, and his skin looked like dark brown parchment paper.

  “These people,” Mac continued, “will kill me.”

  “No, Mac,” Frank said.

  But they did.

  John Stone came to Frank one day at the Sunday party that autumn and said, “He’s cheating us.”

  “Who is?”

  “Our ‘partner,’” Stone said. He gestured toward Mac’s bedroom, where Mac was holed up, as he usually was those days. And the Sunday party wasn’t what it used to be, either. Fewer and fewer people came, and those who did were mostly the hard-core sex and coke freaks.

  “No way,” Frank said.

  “Don’t tell me no way,” Stone said. “Half our money is going up that nigger’s nose.”

  Frank didn’t want to believe it, but the “cheating” talk only got worse. Stone and Sherrell met with Mike to show him the figures. Frank refused to be there. He had it rationalized six ways to Sunday: (a) Mac wasn’t stealing; (b) even if he was, he was making them so much money, they were better off with him stealing than without him; (c) Mac wasn’t stealing.

  But Mac was.

  He knew Mac was.

  Stone confronted Mac with the evidence and Mac threatened to kill him, kill him and his whole family, kill them all.

  “He’s gotta go,” Mike said to Frank.

  Frank shook his head.

  “No one’s asking you for your vote, Frankie,” Mike said. “The decision’s been made. I just came as, you know, a courtesy, because I know the guy is your friend.”

  You just came, Frank thought, because you wanted to make sure that Frankie Machine wouldn’t take it personally. See it as a grudge, respond the way I did over Georgie Y’s killing. Well, you have a legitimate concern there.

  “The guys down in the Lamp,” Mike added, “they’ve signed off on it.”

  Letting Frank know that if he decided to do something about this, he’d be taking on Detroit, too.

  “What do the Migliores have to do with it?”

  “They own strip clubs,” Mike said. “This moolie get
ting toxic affects them, too. They don’t like it. Headlines are bad for business. He’s gotta go, Frank.”

  “Let me do it.”

  “What?”

  “Let me do it,” Frank said.

  You guys are scared shitless of him. You’ll panic and just blast away until there’s nothing left of the man. If it has to be done, let me do it quick and clean.

  I owe the man that much.

  He’s my friend.

  Frank found him in the dojo. The sound system was blasting out Miles Davis’s “Bitches Brew.” Frank walked in and saw Mac standing on one shaky leg, kicking the heavy bag with the other.

  The bag barely moved.

  And Mac didn’t even notice him.

  Frank walked up and put two .45 slugs into the back of his head.

  Then he went home, got his old longboard out of the garage, and gave it a good waxing. Then he took it out into the water and let the waves pound him.

  He never went back to the limo business or the Pinto Club.

  Patty filed for divorce later that year.

  Frank didn’t contest it.

  He gave her the house and custody of Jill.

  50

  Four more bodies, Frank thinks as he drives through the desert.

  English Pat Porter and his two boys.

  And Mac.

  Four more candidates, but not exactly strong ones. Hell, all that was almost twenty years ago. Even back then, the word was that people in London were relieved that Porter and his crew hadn’t cashed in on their round-trip tickets.

  And Mac?

  He’d had no family, no people. And the SDPD hadn’t exactly rushed to investigate the murder of a crooked ex-cop.

  Of course, Mike lost the Pinto Club. Without Mac to restrain him, he ran it into the ground and ended up burning it down before the IRS, the bank, or the other creditors could take it away from him.

  Then he got popped for the arson and went in for a ten spot.

  The Migliores eventually took over the whole San Diego strip club business, and the prostitution and porn that went with it, with the Combination as their grand protectors.

  But what does it have to do with me? Frank wonders.

  Is it possible that the feds have reopened one of the Strip Club War cases and are going after the Migliores? So they’re eliminating potential witnesses, including yours truly?