Don Winslow - The winter of Frankie Machine

Absolutely.

Frank makes himself wait for thirty seconds before he crawls out from under the table.

The would-be strangler is dead, two bullet holes and a bunch of plywood splinters in his face. And the guy is enormous-four bills easy. Frank checks out what’s left of the guy’s face. He recognizes him from someplace but can’t quite remember where.

Vince is still breathing, sitting with his back against the bulkhead, his hands trying to hold his guts in.

Frank squats down beside him. “Vince, who sent you?”

Vince’s eyes stare out into space. Frank has seen the look before-Vince isn’t going to make it. Whether he’s looking at the white light, or whatever, he’s already checked out ofthis motel, and whatever sound he’s hearing now, it isn’t Frank’s voice.

Frank gives it one more try, though. “Vince, whosent you?”

Nothing.

Frank puts the pistol barrel against Vince’s heart and pulls the trigger. Then he sits down to catch his breath, surprised and pissed off that his chest is pounding. He makes himself take a few long, deep breaths to slow his heart rate.

It takes a minute.

You’re not getting any younger, he thinks. And you almost weren’t getting anyolder, either. And don’t deserve to, either, being so stupid and careless.

Letting a punk kid like Mouse Junior set you up.

And that’s what he did. How do the kids say it these days? He “played” you. Worked on your ego and set you up.

Frank gets up and takes a long look at the dead guy on the table.

The wire garrote is still clutched in his hands. Old-school, Frank thinks, using a wire. But they probably didn’t want to risk the noise of a gun unless they had to. Use a silencer, then. Unless the garrote was meant to make it slow and painful, in which case this hit waspersonal.

But who has that kind of beef with me? he wonders.

Get real, he tells himself, it’s a long list.

Frank starts the engine. Then he goes back out and unmoors the boat from its slip. One piece of luck is that the two flanking boats are both empty, battened down for the winter. He goes back in, lets the engines warm up, then backs the boat out of the slip.

He steers it into the channel and heads out to sea.

Not a good night to be out on the open ocean.

Too much swell and chop, and the roll coming out of the storm keeps working the boat back toward the coast.

Frank hacks it out about ten miles into the ocean anyway. He fished these waters hundreds of times as a kid. He knows every current and channel and he knows just where he wants to dump the bodies so if they ever come to shore, it’ll be in Mexico.

Thefederales will figure it’s a dope deal gone bad, and put about two minutes’ work into solving the case.

Still, it’s a bitch out here tonight, with the wind and rain and the roll, and Frank’s biggest fear is that he’ll run into a Coast Guard vessel that will stop him and want to know what kind of jackass is taking a boat out on a night like this.

I’ll just play stupid, Frank thinks.

Which shouldn’t be hard, given my track record tonight.

His neck hurts from the wire. But pain is good, he figures, seeing as how by all rights he shouldn’t be feeling anything.

It had to be Mouse Senior, he thinks, making sure I don’t flip on the Goldstein hit.

Don’t think about that now, he tells himself.

Take care of one thing at a time.

He finds the current he’s looking for, tosses out an anchor, and shuts the running lights out.

It’s a lot of work, dragging two bodies over the side. Hence the expressiondead weight, he thinks as he gets his arms under Vince’s and hefts him to the afterdeck. Fortunately, it’s a sportfishing boat with a step-down aft, so he doesn’t have to lift him over the rail, just drag him to the aft and kick him off.

The other guy is a bigger problem, literally, and it takes Frank a good ten minutes to drag him out onto the deck, then get down behind him and roll the body into the water.

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. Thebest 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 tohave 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.