Don Winslow - The winter of Frankie Machine

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 amp; 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.

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 thatthat 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 tokeep 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 goingdown stairs, 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 nailedthat 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 dogreat. 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.