42
The town of Brawley is an oasis in the desert.
Back during the Depression, the WPA put thousands of guys to work digging a canal from the Colorado River west into the desert. The result is that the area around Brawley produces some of the best alfalfa in the world. It’s startling to fly over it-you’ve seen nothing but miles and miles of stark, bleached brown, and then suddenly there are these rectangles of emerald green.
Driving into it is less dramatic, but the town does come as a welcome relief to the desert. And it has everything a small agricultural town has to offer-a strip of fast-food places, a couple of banks, a big Agricorp grain elevator, and some motels.
Frank finds the place he’s looking for pretty quickly and settles in.
Lies down, stretches out, and closes his eyes.
43
Jimmy walks up the stairs to the second floor of the motel.
He isn’t doing any comedy bits now; he’s mainlining adrenaline, his asshole gripped tighter than a white-collar con at his first day in the showers.
What’s waiting up in that room, after all, isFrankie Machine. He might be an old dude, but there’s a reason hegot to be an old dude. Jimmy knows all the stories, and if even half of them are true…Jimmy’s heard the story about how The Machine walked into that bar in San Diego and gunned down those Brits before they could even get their hands off their teacups. Nevertheless, if you want to be the Man, you got to be the man whobeat the Man, so Jimmy is psyched for the opportunity.
And Jimmy has a plan.
The Machine probably has the chain lock hooked, so Carlo has one of those DEA warrant-service battering rams to smash the door in with. Then Jimmy will step in and put a few into Frankie M.’s head.
Hopefully, the old fuck is asleep anyway.
Jimmy the Kid nods and Carlo swings the battering ram.
The door isn’t exactly Fort Knox material anyway and caves like the Yankees against the Red Sox.
Jimmy goes in.
Frankie M. isn’t in bed.
He ain’t anywhere in the room.
Jimmy the Kid suppresses his adrenaline rush and swings his gun in a controlled arc, sweeping the room in precise vectors, left to right.
No Machine.
Then he hears water running.
The old bastard is in the shower, didn’t even hear the door cave in.
Now Jimmy can see the steam from under the bathroom door.
He grins.
This is going to be easy.
Andclean.
Jimmy nudges the bathroom door open with his foot.
His hands are on the. 38, out in front of him in the approved FBI shooting stance.
Except he don’t see nothing in the shower. No shape of a man through the thin shower curtain.
He yanks the curtain open with his left hand.
And sees a note-duct-taped on the shower wall with the little GPS monitor.
Jimmy grabs the note and reads: “Did you think you were playing with children?”
Jimmy hits the deck.
He belly-crawls out of the bathroom and back toward the front door.
Carlo is already down, sitting propped against the wall with his hand pressed against a wound in his shoulder, blood seeping between his fingers, his other hand limply holding his gun.
Paulie lies on the balcony floor, mewling and clutching his right lower leg, looking at Jimmy like a wounded soldier looks at a bad officer, like, What have you gotten us into, and how are you going to get us out?
It’s a good fuckin’ question, Jimmy thinks as he curls up as tight as he can against the door frame and tries to peer through the balcony rails. He can’t see where the shots have come from. He searches for a motion, a reflection, anything, but he can’t lamp a single thing that might help him. He only knows the next shot could smash into his head. On the other hand, if Frankie M. was shooting to kill, both Carlo and Paulie would already be dead.
Are Jackie and Tony hit, too? Jimmy looks down in the parking lot for their car and can just make them out, slumped down in the front seat, their hands on their guns, looking up at him. Jimmy makes a small gesture with his hand: Stay down, stay put.
“I need a doctor,” Paulie whines.
“Shut up,” Jimmy hisses.
“I’m bleeding out!” Paulie cries.
No you ain’t, Jimmy thinks, looking at his leg. The bullet didn’t hit an artery-it was precisely placed to stop but not to kill.
Frankie freaking Machine.
44
Frank lies on the roof of the grain warehouse across the road, his rifle barrel resting on the lower curve of theg in the big Agricorp sign.
He places the infrared sight squarely on the kid’s forehead. He doesn’t recognize this kid, the one who’s squeezed against the door, making himself as small as possible.
Not small enough, Frank thinks.
He doesn’t know Leg Wound, either, which makes sense. He’s too young for me to have ever worked with him, Frank thinks. Or maybe that’s just a process of getting older, that everyone looks young to you.
The kid crouching in my sights is no joke. He made a mistake, but he isn’t a clown. A clown would have come running out of that room. This guy had the sense to get low and crawl out of there. Even the way he’s holding himself now-looking around, not panicking, not overreacting about his wounded crew, controlling his men-says that the kid has something.
Frank can see it in the kid’s eyes.
He’sthinking.
Thinking men are dangerous.
So take him out, Frank thinks.
You can’t afford to have this guy on your tail.
He resettles his aim and squeezes the trigger.
45
The bullet smacks the wood a half inch above Jimmy the Kid’s head.
His whole body quivers and then he fights for control of himself and wins.
A dumber guy would have thought that Frankie Machine had missed, but Jimmy is smarter than that.
Frankie Machine doesn’t miss.
Frankie was sending a peace message: I could have killed you if I wanted, but I didn’t.
Jimmy the Kid waits five minutes, then starts cleaning up the wreck of the Wrecking Crew. Carlo’s gotten over the shock and can walk, so he and Jimmy haul Paulie down the stairs and into a car. Then they drive out on the highway a little ways, because even the cops have woken up in this sleepy town to the fact that something out of the ordinary has gone down at the EZ Rest.
Then Jimmy puts in the call he really doesn’t want to make.
Wakes Mouse Senior out of a sound sleep.
“I got two down,” Jimmy says.
“And?”
“And nothin’,” Jimmy says. “He slipped us.”
“Sounds like he did more thanslip you,” Mouse Senior says, and Jimmy hears a trace of satisfaction in his voice.
“Listen,” he says, “what am I gonna do about my two guys?”
“Are you hot?”
“Fuckyes. ”
“Okay,” Mouse Senior says, taking on this calming, fatherly-type voice, like he’s Jim fucking Backus inRebel Without a Cause, which sends Jimmy up the freaking wall. “You’re about twenty-eight minutes from Mexico. Drive across the border to Mexicali. Hold on.”
Mouse Senior comes back on the phone about three minutes later and gives him an address. “Go there. The doctor will fix your guys up. You have health insurance?”
“What?”
“Just joking, kid.”
Yeah, you’re Open-Mike Night at the Comedy Store, Jimmy thinks, punching off. I hope you’re still yukking it up when I perform your colonoscopy with a Glock and hold the trigger down.
Then Jimmy makes the call he really doesn’t want to make.
Thisguy he doesn’t wake up.
Thisguy answers before the first ring stops; this guy has been obviously sitting by the phone waiting for the call.
But notthis call.
This guy was waiting for the call that said Frankie Machine was at a family reunion with his ancestors. He definitely does not want to hear that Frankie M. is still in this world.