Don Winslow - The winter of Frankie Machine

The guitar riff fades out.

Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-a…

Wipeout.

“We should go down there and check,” Carlo says.

They have the Envoy and the Lexus pulled off to the side of the road. They can’t see the car where it’s plunged into the little ravine, but they can see the flames shooting out of it.

“Check on what?” Jimmy the Kid asks. “You can grill hot dogs on him yet?”

The police and fire sirens have already started.

“What we should do,” Jimmy says, “is get the fuck out of here.”

And they do.

Frank crawled out during the last guitar riff.

It hurt like crazy just to unsnap the seat belt, never mind open the door and tumble out, and it’s even crazier when he hit the ground. The ribs are at least cracked, if not out-and-out broken, and his left shoulder is a bulge down closer to his elbow than it should be. And he doesn’t even want to know what’s going on with his right knee.

Doesn’t matter.

He has to get away from the car.

He knows he’s taking a chance moving at all, that a broken rib might puncture a lung or the internal bleeding might turn into an internal hemorrhage, and then game over, but it beats getting flash-fried when the car goes Fourth of July.

Belly-crawling a good fifty feet away before the explosion, he gets flat to the ground and digs his face into the dirt before it goes off. The concussion is like a blow against his whole body, and he feels his ribs burn like heis on fire.

But I’m alive, he thinks.

And I shouldn’t be.

He stays flat to the ground for a couple of minutes. For one thing, he needs to catch his breath. For another thing, Jimmy might be coming down for a kill shot. And he knows the firemen and cops will be all over this place, if they’re not up there already.

When he catches his breath, he grabs his left shoulder and pops it back into place, biting his arm to suppress his scream. He lies back down and gasps for air.

And it’s a good thing it’s raining, or the fire might spread faster than Frank can crawl away from it. As it is, the flames are just burning gas and air and not catching on the wet grass or the sodden trees.

Frank starts to crawl away, along the canyon bottom. He figures he needs to get a good quarter of a mile from the accident, and he knows what he’s looking for-a place to hole up until dark.

It takes him a half hour to find it-a crevice under a rock on the facing canyon wall. A thick mesquite bush hides the entrance, and the overhanging rock will give him some shelter against the wind and rain. He crawls in. There’s just room enough in there for him to pull himself, painfully, into a fetal position.

Looking farther down in the canyon, he can see the firemen spraying the car with a heavy blast. They’ll be looking for a body, Frank thinks, and they won’t find one. But the cops will track the rented car back to Jerry Sabellico, so that cover is blown.

And his whole survival kit is in the car-his clothes, his weapons, his money.

Everything.

So this is what it comes to, Frank thinks as he tries to work his way into a more comfortable position: shivering in a cave, in pain, everything gone, waiting for night.

Jimmy the Kid waits for the hour then turns the local radio news on.

The traffic reporter chirps that both lanes of Highway 78 on the grade just past San Pasqual Road are closed due to a one-car accident.

“A car went through the guardrail and plunged into the canyon,” she says. “However, no fatalities have been reported.”

“Motherfucker” is what Jimmy says.

“Your boy Machianno’s on quite a tear.”

“Yes, sir.”

Dave sits across the desk from the regional director. Called on the carpet, as it were.

“First Vena and Palumbo,” the RD says. “Now Pella. For Chrissakes, Dave, a witness in the program, gunned down in his own house! How’s that going to look?”

“Not good.”

“You have a gift for understatement.”

Dave doesn’t reply, proving hedoes have a gift for understatement.

“Anyway,” the RD says. “It looks like Machianno’s back at his old career. Find him, Hansen. Find him and stop him.”

“Yes, sir.”

Dave gets up to leave.

“And Hansen? Machianno killed a federal undercover agent,” the RD says. “We don’t really want to provide this piece of shit with a lawyer, do we?”

Meaning, Dave thinks as he walks out the door, he’s not being ordered to find and stop Frank.

He’s being ordered to find him and kill him.

It takes him two hours to make it to the top of the canyon.

Aching and sore, Frank picks his way through the brush and rocks in uncertain moonlight and fog. He gets to the top and walks along the edge of the road, throwing himself flat when he sees headlights coming. Each time he goes down, it hurts more and it’s harder to get up.

But he has to keep doing it because he knows they’ll be looking for him.

Jimmy’s sitting in the passenger seat with one of those big halogen lights. They’d gone to Costco and bought it when they heard the radio news.

“Shouldn’t we get right back there?” Carlo had asked.

“He won’t come up till dark,” Jimmy had said. “If he’s alive at all. Either way, we got plenty of time.”

So they’d gone to Costco.

“It’s a good thing I brought my card,” Jimmy says. Now he shines the light along the side of the road as they cruise slowly up and down the canyon. Tony, Joey, and Jackie are in another car, doing the same thing in the other direction.

It’s likeRun Silent, Run Deep, Jimmy thinks, with the Japanese destroyers steaming back and forth, waiting for the American sub to surface. Because it has to come up-it’s running out of oxygen.

Like Frankie M.

“You see anything?” Carlo asks.

“Bigfoot,” Jimmy says.

“Where?”

“I was pulling your pud, asshole,” Jimmy says.

“Hey, that Bigfoot thing is no joke,” Carlo says. “I saw a documentary on the National Geographic Channel. National Geographic don’t mess around.”

Jimmy the Kid isn’t listening. He’s thinking it through.

What he’s thinking is that Frankie Machine is a cockroach.

You just can’t kill this motherfucker.

Yeah, but you got to, so think.

A good hunter thinks like his prey.

So think like Frankie M.

Okay, you’re hurt, maybe bad. You ain’t moving so fast. You’re going to go to cover during daylight and try to move by night. You gotta get out of that fucking canyon, and you ain’t going out the other side, because it’s too steep, too high, and there ain’t nothin’ back there anyway.

So you’re going to come back up the way you came. You’re going to come back up the road because you don’t have a car anymore and you’re going to have to find transportation somehow.

Okay, but how?

You’re fifteen hard miles from the nearest town where you can rent a car. Even if you do, your ID is going to ring bells as a guy who crashed and burned his last rental, but you’re Frankie Machine, so you ain’t gonna even try that.

So that leaves you two choices: You either hitch a ride or you steal a ride.

Nobody in his right mind is going to pick you up, and you ain’t going to stand out in the open on this road with your thumb out anyway, because you know we’re looking for you and so are the cops.

So you’re going to boost someone’s sled.

Cool, but how?

No red lights out here, no stop signs, no gas stations.

So what’s left?