Voorhees started to cry. Frank watched the water well up in his eyes, saw the man bite his lip and try to hold it back, but the tears overflowed and rolled down his cheeks, and then Voorhees just lost it. His head slumped and his shoulders bobbed up and down as he sobbed.
Frank stood there and watched, aware that he was violating one of Bap’s key precepts. “You don’t need to give them last words or last rites,” Bap had lectured. “You ain’t a warden or a priest. Get in, do the job, get out.”
No, Bap wouldn’t have approved of this scene.
Voorhees finished crying, looked up at Frank, and said, “I’m sorry.”
Frank shook his head.
Then Voorhees said, “A doctor in Guadalajara wrote some scrip for me. Tranquilizers.”
Frank already knew this. The doctor had given it up to him for a couple of hundred in cash. So much for the Hippocratic oath.
“I still have most of them,” Voorhees said. “I mean, I think I haveenough. ”
Frank thought it over for a few seconds.
“I’ll have to stay with you,” he said.
“That would be okay.”
Voorhees got out of the chair and Frank followed him into the little shack. Frank went into a canvas bag that had once been Voorhees’s carry-on and now contained all his earthly goods. He took out a vial of pills-Valium, ten-milligram dosage-and a bottle of vodka, about two-thirds full.
They went back outside.
Frank sat down on the sand.
Voorhees sat back down in the chair, shook a handful of pills into his hand, and swallowed them with a swig of vodka. He waited a few minutes, then did it again, then a minute later took the last of the pills and sat sipping on the vodka bottle as he looked out at the ocean.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” he mumbled to Frank.
“Beautiful.”
A second later, he lurched back in the chair, then forward, and he slumped over onto the rocks.
Frank picked him up and put him back in the chair.
He went back to the village, found a working telephone, and made a call to let Donnie Garth know that he was safe.
Frank went home from that job to find that Patty had changed the locks on the doors. Tired, angry, and sad, he kicked the front door in. Called a locksmith buddy at two in the morning to put new locks in, then went upstairs, got into the shower, sat down under the steaming water, and cried.
The next night, he drove to Garth’s house-to do what exactly, he didn’t know. He parked across the street and sat in the car for a long time. Garth was having a party. He watched the expensive cars and the chauffeured limousines pull into the circular driveway and he looked at the beautiful people in their beautiful clothes get out and go to the door. It looked like a benefit, a fund-raiser for some charity-the men were in black tie, the women in evening dresses, their hair up, exposing long, graceful necks adorned with glittering jewels.
How many people, Frank asked himself, have to die so the beautiful people can stay beautiful?
Question for the ages.
The picture window was open and there was a golden glow inside. Frank could see Garth flitting around, playing the social butterfly, making jokes and glittering conversation, and Frank figured it had to be his imagination, but he thought he could hear the laughter of elegant women and the clinking of priceless crystal.
It would have been an easy shot, he knew, even through the glass. Use something fast and heavy like a. 50 sniper rifle steadied against the car window, squeeze the trigger, and blow Donnie’s boy-wonder brains all over his lovely guests.
Nowthat would have been a benefit. To a lot of people, Frank thought.
If he had known then…but he didn’t.
Then he thought it might be fun just to walk in there. Stroll up to Garth in the middle of the glittering crowd and say, “Donnie, your tit’s out of the wringer. Again. I killed Jay Voorhees for you, same way I killed Marty Biancofiore.” See what your high-class friends would have to say to that.
But he thought, Probably nothing. They’d probably get off on it.
So he sat in the car and watched San Diego’s finest come and go. It was in theUnion-Tribune the next morning, on the society page, how Donnie Garth had raised almost a million dollars for the new art museum.
Frank used the page to wrap fish.
When the news got out that the former chief of security of the Paladin had died of an overdose in Mexico, guys in the know just naturally assumed that Frankie Machine had forced him to take the pills. Frank never did anything to disabuse them of the notion.
It was just a technicality anyway, he thought.
You can’t slide on this one just because you didn’t hold the gun to his head, just because you gave him a choice, cut the guy a break. I don’t know-maybe itwill mean a couple of centuries less in purgatory. More likely, a slightly nicer niche in hell.
Me and Donnie Garth, at the same party at last.
Garth flipped later, of course. The feds got him in a room and he gave up the whole thing.
Frank waited for the call to come, but it never did.
It took him years to figure out why Donnie Garth got a pass.
39
“He is one smart son of a bitch,” Carlo says.
They’re sitting in the parking lot of a Burger King in El Centro, sixty miles east of Borrego and hard by the Mexican border. Jimmy has the rest of his crew spread around the town. He took the Burger King, sent Jackie and Tony to Mickey D’s, Joey and Paulie to Jack in the Box.
“How comewe get Jack in the Box?” Paulie had complained.
“What, you want Burger King?” Jimmy had asked.
“Yeah, okay.”
“Well, fuck you, I get Burger King,” Jimmy had said. Burger King’s got better french fries and the sodas aren’t so gassy. You’re cooped up in a car with another guy hours at a time, you don’t want gassy sodas. Now he looks at Carlo and says, “He didn’t get to be Frankie Machine by being stupid.”
“He got away,” Carlo says. “Now he’s got money, he’s got an open road. We don’t know where the fuck he is; he could be anywhere.”
“Chill,” Jimmy says. “One fucking phone call, I’ll know right where he is.”
Carlo looks at him, impressed and skeptical at the same time. “Who you gonna call?”
“Ghostbusters.”
40
Dave watches the little red light blink on the electronic map. The GPS device placed in the bank bag with the money is working perfectly.
“I thought he would have gone down to Mexico,” Troy says.
“Mexico is a dead end,” Dave answers. “Machianno knows that.” Hell yes, he does, Dave thinks; he sure made it a dead end for Jay Voorhees. The Bureau had always liked Frank for that piece of work but could never come close to pinning it on him.
Classic Frankie Machine.
Troy studies the map.
“It looks like he’s headed for Brawley,” he says.
They keep an eye on the screen into the evening.
The light stops in Brawley and beeps steadily in the same location. They run a cross-check and it comes up positive.
Frank’s gone to ground in the EZ Rest Motel two blocks off the 78.
41
“The EZ Rest Motel,” Jimmy says, punching off the phone. “Lock and load, rock and roll.”
Carlo starts the car.
Lock and load, rock and roll.
He loves Jimmy, but he’s kind of an asshole.
“The EZ Rest Motel where?” Carlo asks.
“Brawley, California.”
They look at the road atlas. Brawley is only about an hour away.
“‘Ladies and gentlemen,’” Jimmy intones in his best Michael Buffer imitation, “‘for the thousands in attendance and the millions watching around the world…let’s get ready to rumble!’ The Brawl in Brawley!”
The Brawl in Brawley. Carlo chuckles.
Asshole.