Don Winslow: The winter of Frankie Machine

It’s all about Fortunate Son.

Frank looks at the clock. It’s 3:30 in the morning and there’s nothing he can do about it for a couple of hours at least.

The best thing he can do is get a little sleep.

But it’s too much effort to get out of the chair, and it hurts too bad to move, so he just leans back and shuts his eyes.

Troy drives carefully through the rain, even though there’s little traffic on the streets this time of night. But he can barely see in the slashing rain-his front and rear wipers are putting up a brave but losing fight against the buildup of water on the glass.

He drives down through the Lamp, gets out of his car near Island, puts his umbrella up, and walks into a phone booth.

An umbrella to walk three steps, Dave thinks, watching him from a car a block away. With a cell phone clipped to your belt.

Who are you calling, Dave wonders, you don’t want a record of?

He doesn’t pause to think about it, though. There’ll be time to grab the phone records in the morning. He has to get over there before the people on the other end of that phone, whoever they are.

Jimmy the Kid Giacamone sets the phone down.

“Let’s rock and roll,” he says.

Carlo’s beginning to think that Jimmy is a real asshole.

Jimmy knows he’s got to get in and out fast.

A quickie in the sticky.

Wham, bam, thank you, M.

He’s in a race with the feds to see who gets there first. No consolation prize for second place, no gift baskets or all-expense-paid weekends at a second-rate resort, thank you for playing, and we hope you had fun.

Winner take all.

Way it should be.

So Jimmy and the Wrecking Crew roll up at the address hard and fast and with bad intent. No more time for subtlety-just go through the door, shoot anything that moves, hope you get The Machine before The Machine gets you.

That’s good, Jimmy thinks as the car skids to a stop. I should go in the studio and cut that-“Get The Machine Before The Machine Gets You.” Next hip-hop hit out of Motor City.

“Eight Mile” my rosy ass.

He gets out of the car.

The address is a Jack in the Box.

Dave, parked across the street, can make out a crew when he sees one, even in the pouring rain.

Don Winslow

The Winter of Frankie Machine

Dave goes back to his house and works from his study.

It doesn’t take too long. The Patriot Act gives him carte blanche access to phone records, and he has the number that Troy dialed within five minutes. It’s a cell phone, of course, and that’s more complicated.

He still tackling it on his computer when Barbara comes in with a pot of coffee and some oatmeal cookies.

“One of those nights?” she asks.

He nods.

They’ve been married thirty-five years. She’s been through more than one of these nights.

“You look worried,” she says.

“I am.”

“Taking this one personally?”

“I suppose.”

It’s one of the things she loves about him, that he cares about his cases. They’re not just numbers to him, even after all these years. “Pretty soon,” she says. “A few more months and you won’t have these nights.”

She kisses him on the forehead. “Want me to wait up?”

“I don’t even know if I’m going to make it to bed.”

“I’ll wait,” she says. “Just in case.”

It takes three more hours to wade through the records-then he tracks it down.

Troy called Donnie Garth.

Daylight finds Frank in San Diego.

Counting on the fog and the hour to shield him from view.

And the gun at his hip to protect him from harm.

Frank hobbles down toward Eleventh and Island, where the old men sleep on cardboard on the sidewalk. Limping past the line of the sleeping homeless, he listens to their mumbles and their groans, smelling the body odor of caked night sweats and stale urine, and the stink of rotting skin.

He stops at the door of the Island Tavern and bangs on it. The place is closed, but he knows he’ll find the heavy drinkers in there for their eye-openers. After a minute, the door cracks open and a jaundiced eye peeps out.

“Corky there?” Frank asks.

“Who wants to know?”

“Frank Machianno.”

Frank hears some muddled conversation; then the door opens and the old man-Frank searches for the guy’s name, remembers it’s Benny-lets him in and points to the bar.

Detective (retired) “Corky” Corchoran sits on a stool, hunched over the bar, a squat glass of whiskey by one hand, a cigarette in the other.

Frank sits down next to him.

“Long time, Corky.”

“Long time.”

Back in the day-before the bottle and the bitterness got him-Corky was a damn good cop. On the arm, like a lot of guys, he’d take an envelope to overlook the gambling and the hookers, but Corky was a straight arrow on the serious things, and all the guys knew it.

You beat a woman, you hurt a civilian, you killed someone outside the lines, Corky was after you. And if Corky was after you, he was going to get you.

But that was a long time ago.

“Buy you a drink, Corky?”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

Corky was never a big man, but he seems to have shrunk, Frank thinks as he signals Benny to bring another. And his hair is thin and dry, his skin yellowish, drawn tight over the bones in his face.

“I need your help, Corky.”

Corky finishes his old drink, then takes Frank’s and knocks it back. “What can I do you for?”

“Summer Lorensen.”

Corky looks at him blankly and shakes his head.

“Back in ’85,” Franks prompts him. “You were Homicide then. All those prostitute murders.”

“‘No humans involved.’”

“‘No humans involved,’” Frank says. “That’s right. Her body was found up on Mount Laguna, in a ditch off the road.”

Corky sits there thinking about it for a long time. Just when Frank thinks the old cop has drifted back into the Enchanted Forest, Corky says, “She had rocks in her mouth.”

“That’s right,” Frank says. “It went unsolved, but the department later laid it on the Green River Killer.”

Corky pulls a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and lights another. His hands tremble. “Wasn’t no Green River Killer. We laideverything on that fucking guy. He was a one-man clearance sheet.”

“How do you know?” Frank asks. “How do you know it wasn’t him?”

Corky shifts into that crystal clarity that winos sometimes get. They don’t come often and they don’t last long, but he’s in one now, and Frank hopes he stays there long enough.

“First,” Corky says, “she was beaten to death, not strangled. The Green River Killer strangled his victims. She had trauma marks on her throat, but they were made postmortem. Two, there was no sign of intercourse. He raped his girls. Three, she wasn’t killed out there along the road.”

“How do you know?”

“No blood smears, Frankie. She’d stopped bleeding a long time ago.”

“But she had rocks in her mouth,” Frank says.

“So fucking what?” Corky asked. “Her real killer couldn’t read a newspaper?”

“So if you knew-”

“The department shut me down,” Corky answered. “It came down from on high-‘Lay off the Lorensen file. Move on. No humans involved.’”

Corky takes another long pull from his cigarette.

“Beginning of the fucking end for me, Frank,” he says. “The top of the slippery slope.”

Frank reaches into his wallet, pulls out two one-hundred-dollar bills, and presses them into Corky’s hand. It brings back old times.