The bartender vaults the bar with a nightstick in his hand and swings it down toward the back of Frank’s head. Frank turns, raises the bat horizontally to block the nightstick, pulls his arms back in, and then thrusts the bat back into the bartender’s nose, which breaks with a splatter of blood. Then Frank crosses his right foot over his left, whirls, and delivers a home-run swing into the bartender’s floating ribs.
Three guys down.
Teddy Migliore stands there like his feet are rooted to the spot.
Then he turns and runs.
Frank lofts the bat low across the floor. It bounces and catches Teddy in the back of the knees, sending him sprawling to the floor. Frank’s on top of him before he canstart to get up. He puts his right knee into the small of Teddy’s back, grabs him by the back of the collar, and smashes his face into the expensive tile until he can see blood trickle into the grouting.
“What,” Frank yells, “did I ever do to you? Huh? What did I ever do to you? ”
Frank leans down, slips one hand under Teddy’s chin, and lifts as his other arm forms a bar across the top of Teddy’s neck. He can either snap Teddy’s spinal cord or choke him out, or both.
“Nothing,” Teddy gasps. “I just got the word is all.”
“Whogave the word?” Frank asked.
Frank hears police sirens start to wail. Some citizen must have spotted the bartender writhing on the sidewalk and called the cops. Frank puts more pressure on Teddy’s neck.
“Vince,” Teddy says.
“Why? Why did Vince want me clipped?”
“I don’t know,” Teddy groans. “I swear, Frankie, I don’t know. He just told me to deliver you.”
Deliver me, Frank thinks. Like a pizza. And Teddy’s lying. He knows exactly why Vince wanted to kill me, or else he’s just laying it all on a dead man.
“Police! Come out with your hands where we can see them!”
Frank lets go of Teddy, steps over him into the office, and lets himself out the back door. As he’s leaving, he hears a voice on the answering machine.“Teddy? It’s me, John…”
Frank steps out in the alley and runs.
Teddy Migliore sits in his office and rubs his throat. He looks up at the uniformed cops and says, “You sure took your time…the fucking money we pay…”
The cops don’t look too eaten up with sympathy. They’ve stopped taking the money anyway. You’d have to be a fucking idiot to take an envelope from Teddy Migliore these days, what with everything going on.
Operation G-Sting.
“Do you know who did this?” one of the cops asks.
“Do you want to file a report?” asks the other.
“Get the fuck out of here,” Teddy tells them.
He’s going to file a report all right, but not with these two losers. He waits until they’ve left, though, to pick up the phone.
Frank jogs out of the alley and back onto the street.
You had it exactly backward, dummy, he tells himself. It wasn’t L.A. who contracted with Vince to take you out; it was Vince who used L.A., or at least Mouse Junior, to set you up.
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.
23
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.