Don Winslow: The winter of Frankie Machine

“Hey, Sherm,” Frank says, “you remember that time down in Rosarito? You were wearing that big sombrero?”

“I remember, Frank.”

“Those were good times.”

“Hell yes, they were.”

“Good-bye, Sherm.”

“Go with God, my friend.”

Frank has set this up so they’ll have to come uphill and into the sun. He wants every little edge he can get, even though it won’t make any difference in the end. But take, say, Jimmy the Kid out with you, you’ve done a good thing.

Maybe it’ll count in my favor when I answer to the man.

Go with God.

He hears the car before he sees it.

Then the engine noise stops.

Smart, Frank thinks. They’re coming in on foot. They’ll give the cabin lots of room, work around it, and come in from all sides. He settles in, lays the pistol barrel on the windowsill, and gets ready to put one in the first head that comes into sight.

A head appears, but he doesn’t shoot.

Because it’s Donna.

“They have Jill,” she says.

“What?”

“I’m sorry, Frank,” she says. “They have Jill.”

Frank’s barely listening as she tells him the deal. He hears her words, he’s taking them in, but all that’s really running through his head are the wordsThey have Jill. They have Jill. They have Jill. They have Jill. They have Jill.

Your faith.

Your trust.

Your love.

Your life.

Your child.

“Tomorrow morning,” she says. “Four a.m. Beneath Ocean Beach Pier. You come unarmed, but with a certain package they want. Do you know what they’re talking about, Frank?”

“Yes.”

“You give them the package, they’ll release Jill to me,” Donna says. “You go withthem, Frank.”

He nods. “How long,” he asks, “have you been with them?”

“Forever,” she says. “Since I was fifteen years old. My father was a drunk. He used to beat me up. It wasn’t the worst thing he did. Tony Jacks stopped him; he took me out of there. He saved me, Frank.”

When he was done with her, he found her a job and a husband, she tells Frank.

“When Jay left,” Donna says, “I was sad, but I wasn’t heartbroken. I didn’t really love him. I never went back to Tony, but I stillowed him, Frank. You have to understand that. I kept an eye on things in San Diego for him, that’s all.”

“You gave them my daughter.”

“I didn’t know,” Donna says, crying now. “I just thought they wanted to talk to her, Frank. I didn’t know they were going to do…this.”

“Tell them I’ll be there,” Frank says. “With the package. And I’ll go with them. If I see Jill, see her safe.”

He knows they won’t let her go. Knows that they’ll kill her. Please God, please let her not be dead already.

Please give me even a small chance to save her.

And now he knows that Fortunate Son is behind all this.

Because no wise guy in the world was ever low enough to kidnap someone’s daughter.

It would take a politician to do that.

But who do you trust?

Normally, if a family member is kidnapped, you go to the FBI, but you can’t do that, because the fedsare the kidnappers.

Or a wise guy would go to other wise guys to get justice. That’s how this whole thing of ours started anyway, wasn’t it? Ma figlia, ma figlia -my daughter, my daughter. But you can’t do that, because the other wise guys all want to kill you.

Go ahead, kill me, but let my daughter go.

But they won’t do that, because the wise guys have been corrupted by the politicians.

Lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.

The irony is, I could have killed Mouse Senior’s kid and Billy Jacks’ kid-they were both in my sights and I let them walk. But I didn’t, because I’m a father, too, and it just isn’t done. It just isn’t done.

So who do you go to? Who do you trust?

You’ve always been able to trust yourself, but can you trust yourself to gun down the army they’re going to bring, and keep Jill safe in the process? Maybe, maybe in your prime you could have done it, but you’re twenty summers past your prime. You’re old, and you’re tired, and you’re hurt.

You can’t trust yourself to do this.

So where does that leave you?

More important, where does that leave Jill?

The answer is too awful to contemplate.

Face it, Frank says, there is only one chance, and it’s not even a very good one.

But it’s the only one.

Reluctantly, he sets down his gun and picks up the phone.

Dave Hansen remembers a breakfast he had with Frank Machianno at the OBP Cafe a few years back, some months after the Carly Mack case.

It was after an especially flat session at the Gentlemen’s Hour, and Frank was in a rare bad mood. It was something in the paper about a crackdown on organized crime, and Frank just went off on a rant.

“Nike pays twenty-nine cents to achild for making a basketball jersey, then turns around and sells it for one hundred and forty dollars,” Frank said. “AndI’m the criminal?

“Wal-Mart sends half the mom-and-pop stores in the country the way of the buffalo while they pay the kids who maketheir cheap crap seven cents an hour. AndI’m the criminal?

“Two million jobs have gone adios in the past two years, a working man can’t afford a down payment on a house anymore, and the IRS mugs us like drunks at an ATM, then sends our money to a defense contractor who closes down a factory, lays off workers, and pays himself a seven-figure bonus. AndI’m the criminal? I’m the guy who should get life without parole?

“You could take the Crips, the Bloods, the Jamaican posses, the Mafia, the Russian mob, and the Mexican cartels, and all of them put together couldn’t rake in as much green in a good year as Congress does in a bad afternoon. You could take every gang banger selling crack on every corner in America, and they couldn’t generate as much ill-gotten cash as one senator rounding the back nine with a corporate CEO.

“My father told me that you can’t beat the house, and he was right. You can’t beat the White House, or the House of Representatives. They own the game and the game isfixed, and it isn’t fixed forus.

“Sure, every thirty-eighth blue moon, they’ll whack one of their own. Send a human sacrifice to some Club Fed for a couple of years as sop to the masses and an example to the others of what happens to a rich white guy stupid enough to let that fifth ace fall out of his sleeve in full view of the public. But letme slip on the cosmic banana peel, and I am going to the maximum hole with the rest of the losers for the rest of my life.

“You know why the government wants to shut down organized crime?

“We’re competition.

“That’s it. That’s what’s behind the OC Task Force, your FBI, RICO. RICO? Big government and big business? That is the workingdefinition of ‘racketeering in conspiracy.’ A felony happens every time two suits take a piss together in the Senate men’s room.

“So the government wants to beat down organized crime.

“That’s hysterical.

“The governmentis organized crime.

“The only difference between them and us is they’remore organized.”

That was Frank’s rant on organized crime.

Dave didn’t believe it then, but he sure as shit believes it now.

Not that it matters, he thinks. I have to do what I have to do.

I have the rest of my life ahead of me.

The rest of the guys are coming along the beach, but Dave is coming in by boat, from the water.

It seems only fitting.

It’s cold and dark coming on four in the morning on a winter’s day in San Diego.