Don Winslow - The winter of Frankie Machine

“Are you a cop?!” Henkel demanded. A fine tone of panic had seeped into his voice. “Fuckinganswer me!”

Frank slid the blade down one rod, then the other.

One, then the other.

Slowly, carefully.

“My lawyers will crucify you!” Henkel yelled, stupidly.

Frank looked at him now, then tested the blade against his thumb and winced as it cut him. He set the blade on his lap, removed the two stone rods, put them back in the case, and carefully replaced them with two titanium bars, then started the whole process all over again.

The sun was just starting to come up, faint and pink.

It was still cold out there, so Henkel was shivering anyway, but now he started to shake with fear. He started to scream, “Help! Help!” even though he must have known it was hopeless. A desert rat like Henkel would have known that they were out in the middle of the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, and that no one was going to hear him.

He must know this, Frank thought, just the way he knew that no one was going to hear Carly Mack’s screams.

Frank ran the bar down one rod, then the other.

One, then the other.

Henkel started to sob, then his bladder let go and urine ran down his leg onto the duct tape at his ankles. His chin dropped to his chest and his head bobbed up and down as he cried.

Frank finished theGianni Schicchi aria and switched to “Nessun dorma.”Ran the blade down one bar, then the other. One bar, then the other. He tested the blade again, nodded his satisfaction, and carefully stored the bars back in their case. He got up from his stool, laid the blade against the skin on Henkel’s chest, and said, “Harold, you have a decision to make-prison for life, maybe a lethal injection, or I skin you.”

Henkel moaned.

“I’m going to ask youonce, ” Frank said. “Harold, where’s the girl?”

Henkel gave it up.

He’d left Carly in an old mine shaft just eight miles from this spot.

“Is she alive?” Frank asked, trying to keep the quiver out of his voice.

“She was when I left her,” Henkel said.

He didn’t have the guts to kill her after he’d raped her, so he’d just left her for dead. Frank set the knife down, took a cell phone from his pocket, called Dave, and gave him the location. Then he said to Henkel, “We’re going to sit here until it checks out. And if you’ve lied to me, you piece of crap, I’ll take five hours to kill you and God Himself will turn a deaf ear.”

Henkel started to mutter an Act of Contrition.

“While you’re praying?” Frank said. “Pray that that little girl is still alive.”

She was.

Barely-she was close to hypothermia and severely dehydrated, but she was alive. A weeping Dave Hansen called Frank as they were loading her on the chopper. “And Frank,” he said. “Thank you.”

“Keep it out of the papers,” Frank said.

Dave did, of course. So did Henkel. Frank untied him and left him out there with a warning that none of this had ever happened, that Henkel had confessed to the FBI, and that if any other story emerged, he wouldn’t last a day in prison.

Mike drove in, whisked Frank away, and the feds arrived ten minutes later. That night, Frank sat in front of the television, watching the reunion of Carly with her mom and dad.

He cried like a baby.

Henkel never opened his mouth.

He pled out, got 299 years, and survived two of them as the cell-block pinata, until some biker on a crank rush got carried away and ruptured his spleen.

Henkel died before the EMTs ambled to the scene.

Charges were dropped against the biker for lack of evidence, mostly because twenty other guys came forward to claim the honor and would have testified to it in court, and anyway, the prosecutors had better things to do.

The Macks moved out of the city and quit “the lifestyle.”

Frank and Dave never spoke about it, except for one time, during the first Gentlemen’s Hour after Carly Mack had been found alive.

“I owe you one” was all Dave had said.

Nothing about Frankie Machine, or what he knew about Frank’s other life, nothing about how Frank had gotten Henkel to give it up.

Just, “I owe you one.”

Dave’s pushing his longboard into the back of his van when Frank comes up behind him.

“Very sketchy, surfing in a rainstorm,” Frank says. “God only knows what toxic crap is pouring out of the storm drains. You’re just begging for hepatitis.”

“You have the right to remain-”

“You’re not arresting me, Dave.”

“Why not?”

“Because you owe me one.”

It’s the truth, and Dave knows it. “Let’s prove everyone wrong,” he says, “and get in out of the rain.”

Frank gets into the passenger side of the van. The two men sit there looking at the ocean as raindrops splatter against the windshield.

“You catch anything good?” Frank asks.

“Mostly slop,” Dave says. “Where the hell have you been?”

“Running.”

“Did you run into a guy named Vince Vena, by any chance?”

Frank stares at him.

“He washed up in my jurisdiction,” Dave says. “Thanks a heap.”

“Weird tides in weather like this,” Frank says.

“Missed it bythat much.”

“If Iwere to say I killed him,” Frank says, “which I’m not, I’d say it was self-defense.”

“How about Tony Palumbo?” Dave asks. “Was that self-defense, too?”

“As a matter of fact.”

“Bullshit, Frank,” Dave says, getting angry. “You’re taking out the G-Sting witnesses.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Palumbo was one of my guys,” Dave says, “an undercover. Had been for years. Who paid you? Teddy Migliore? Detroit?”

“Here’s how they paid me, Dave.”

Frank pulls the neck of his sweatshirt down to show Dave the scar, which is still angry and red. “Your boy tried to take me out, Dave. He had a garrote around my neck.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Dave says.

“Palumbo wouldn’t be the first UC to work both sides of the fence,” Frank says. “Besides, was Vena one of your witnesses?”

“I was hoping he would be after I indicted him,” Dave says. “But you took care of that.”

“You have this backward, Dave. They tried to killme. They didn’t get it done.”

He tells Dave what Mouse Junior had to say, about his discussion with John Heaney and his confrontation with Teddy Migliore. About a crew from Detroit trying to take him out.

Dave looks at his old friend. Two decades of Gentlemen’s Hours, you get to know a man. And then there was the Carly Mack case…

“What’s G-Sting have to do with me?” Frank asks.

“Nothing that I know of,” Dave says.

“Tell me the truth!” Frank yells. “I’m trying to save my life here!”

“I can help you, Frank.”

“Yeah, like you helped me in Borrego?” Frank asks. “Like you helped me in Brawley? You had Sherm Simon wired, Dave. You had the GPS put in with the money. You tracked me and you gave me up to Detroit.”

“I tracked you,” Dave admits. “But I didn’t give you up to anybody.”

“You’re a dirty cop,” Frank says, looking into Dave’s eyes for confirmation.

He doesn’t see it.

What he sees is that his old friend is angry. He hasn’t seen him like this since the Carly Mack case.

“Come in,” Dave says.

“I won’t go into the program,” Frank says. “Whatever else I am, I’m not a rat.”

“Then you’d be about the only guy who isn’t.”

“I can’t answer for other guys,” Frank says. “I can only answer for myself.”

“These guys are trying to kill you!” Dave yells. “And you’re going to stand up for them? What has Pete Martini ever done for you? Orany of these guys? Ever? You have a daughter, Frank, on her way to med school. What’s Jill going to do with you six feet under?”