Don Winslow - The winter of Frankie Machine

But why?

He can’t think of a thing he ever did to Vince Vena or the Migliores. He can only think of something he didfor them.

It was the summer of ’68.

The summer Frank came back from Vietnam.

The truth of the matter is, Frank thinks now as he watches the rain splatter against the window of his safe house, the truth is that I killed more men for the feds than I ever did for the mob.

And they gave me a medal and an honorable discharge.

Frank punched out a lot of VC and NVA during his stint in-country. That was his job-sniper-and he was damned good at it. Sometimes he felt bad about it, but he never felt guilt over it. They were soldiers, he was a soldier, and in a war, soldiers kill soldiers.

Frank never bought into any of thatApocalypse Now crap. He never shot any women or children, or massacred any villages, or even saw anyone who did. He just killed enemy soldiers.

The Tet Offensive was made for guys like Frank, because the enemy came out to be shot. Before that, it had been frustrating patrols in the jungle that usually turned up nothing, except when you walked into a VC ambush and lost a couple of guys and still never saw the enemy.

But in Tet, they came out en masse and got gunned down en masse. Frank was a one-man wrecking machine in the city of Hue. The urban house-to-house fighting was a perfect match for his skills, and Frank found himself in mano-a-mano duels with NVA snipers that sometimes went on for days.

Those were battles of wit and skill.

Frank always won.

He came back from Nam to find that the country he’d left didn’t exist anymore. Race riots, “peace riots,” hippies, LSD. The surf scene was just about dead because a lot of the guys were in Nam, or were screwed up because of it, or they went the hippie route and were living in communes in Oregon.

Frank put his uniform away and went to the beach. Spent long weeks surfing mostly by himself, holding his own small bonfires and cookouts, trying to reclaim the past.

But it wasn’t the same.

Patty was.

She’d written him every day he was in-country. Long, chatty letters about what was going on at home, who was dating who, who had broken up, about her secretary work, her parents, his parents, whatever. And love stuff-passionate passages about how she felt about him, how she couldn’t wait for him to come home.

And she couldn’t. The former “good Catholic girl” walked him up to her room the second her parents left the house and pulled him down on the bed. Not that I took much pulling, Frank remembers.

God, the first time with Patty…

They got to the brink, like they had so many times in the backseat of his car, except this time she didn’t clamp her legs tight or push him off. Instead, she guided him inside her. He was surprised, but he certainly didn’t object, and when it came time to pull out-all too quickly, he remembers ruefully-she whispered, “Don’t. I’m on the Pill.”

Which was a shock.

She had gone to the doctor and then went on the Pill in anticipation of his homecoming, she told him as they lay on her bed afterward, her head snuggled into the crook of his arm.

“I wanted to be ready for you,” she said. Then, shyly, added, “Was I okay?”

“You were terrific.”

And then he was hard again-God, to be young, Frank thinks-and they did it again, and this time she climaxed and said that if she’d known what she was missing, she would have done it a lot sooner.

Patty was good in bed-warm, willing, passionate. Sex was never their problem.

So Frank got back with Patty and they began the long, inevitable march toward matrimony.

What wasn’t inevitable was Frank’s future.

What was he going to do now, with his Marine tour winding down? He thought about re-upping, maybe making the Corps a career, but Patty didn’t want him going back to Vietnam, and he didn’t like being away from San Diego that much. His father wanted him to go into the fishing business, but that didn’t sound all that appealing, either. He could have gone to college on the GI bill, but there was nothing he was that interested in studying.

So it was a gimme putt he’d end up back with the guys.

It was nothing dramatic, nothing sudden.

Frank just ran into Mike Pella one day, and they had a beer, and then they started hanging out. Mike told him about his past, how he grew up in New York with the Profaci family and had a little hassle there and then was sent out west to work for Bap until things straightened out.

But he liked California, he liked Bap, and so he’d decided to stay.

“Who needs the fucking snow, right?” Mike asked.

Not me, Frank thought.

He started to go with Mike to the clubs where the guys spent their days, andthis hadn’t changed. This had stayed the same, like it was in a time warp. It was comforting, familiar. Familial, I guess, Frank thinks now.

It was all the same guys-Bap, Chris Panno, and Mike, of course. Jimmy Forliano had a trucking business out in East County, and he’d come around sometimes, but that was really about it.

They were a small, tight little group in what was, back then, still a small town. That was the thing about San Diego in those days, Frank thinks now. We weren’t really even a “mob,” or an obvious family like they had in the big East Coast cities.

And there wasn’t a hell of a lot going on.

The normally free and easy San Diego had a new federal prosecutor who was busting everyone’s balls. He’d worked up a twenty-eight-count indictment against Jimmy and Bap for some bullshit about the truckers’ union and was generally making life difficult for whatever organized crime there was in the city.

Bap also had a silent piece of a local taxi company, and he set Frank up with a job driving cabs.

Washing machines on wheels is what they really were, the guys laundered so much money through those taxis. Gambling money, loan shark money, prostitution money-it all went on cab rides.

And political money.

To city councilmen, congressmen, judges, cops, you name it. The chief of police got a new car every year, courtesy of the cab company.

Then there was Richard Nixon.

He was running for president and needed a war chest, and it just wouldn’t have looked good-mobbed-up guys in San Diego writing checks to the Nixon campaign. So the money went through the cab company in chunks “donated” by the owners and the drivers. Frank never would have found out about it except that he saw one of the checks on the office desk one night.

“I’m giving money to Nixon?” he asked Mike.

“We all are.”

“I’m a Democrat,” Frank said.

“Notthis year, you ain’t,” Mike said. “What, you want Bobby fucking Kennedy in the White House? Guy’s got a hard-on for us you could cut glass with. Besides, it ain’t really your money, is it? So relax.”

Frank was sitting in the office of the cab company with Mike, drinking coffee and talking shit, when the call came.

“Are you boys ready to take a step up?” Bap asked.

He was calling from a phone booth.

Bap never called from home, because Bap wasn’t stupid. What he’d do is, he’d put rolls of quarters in his pocket and he’d walk four blocks to this phone booth on Mission Boulevard at night and conduct his business from there, like it was his office.

Usually, they’d meet Bap on the boardwalk in Pacific Beach, just a few blocks from the boss’s house.

You wouldn’t have figured a guy like Bap to have loved the ocean so much.

Something he and Frank had in common, although, of course, Bap never got out on a board, or even went for a swim, as far as Frank ever knew. No, Bap just liked looking at the ocean; he and Marie used to go for sunset walks together on the boardwalk or stroll on Crystal Pier. Their condo had a nice oceanfront view, too, and Bap used to stand at the window and do watercolors.