He waved his hand as if to encompass his estate, and Frank got what he was trying to say: Boys, look at my home and then look at yours. He’s right, Frank thought. It was the move to make-take a profit from the sale of the eighty points, then let Big Mac make money for them.
“What would we have to do with the club if we sold you this interest?” Mike asked.
“Nothing,” Mac said. “Go to the mailbox, pick up your checks.”
And that was the problem, Frank saw. Mike loved the club. He loved playing owner, being the man. This was the flaw in the plan that Mac couldn’t see. He hadn’t correctly gauged Mike Pella’s real interest.
“I’d want to maintain some kind of managerial voice in the operation,” Mike said.
“You mean sell coke to the girls and shylock them the money?” Mac asked, smiling. “No, that has to stop. The business is growing up, Mike Pella. You’d better grow up with it.”
“Or what?”
“Or I’ll drive you out of business.”
“Not if you’re dead, you won’t.”
“Is that really the road we want to walk down?” Mac asked.
“You tellme. ”
Mac nodded. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, as if he was meditating. Then he exhaled, opened his eyes, smiled, and said, “I’ve made you a business offer, Mike Pella. I encourage you to consider it in a businesslike fashion, and get back to me in a timely manner. In the meantime, I sincerely hope that you enjoy the rest of your afternoon. If you’d like, Amber can introduce you to some friends of hers who are unattached.”
Mike liked.
He hooked up with one of Amber’s friends and they found their way to a bedroom in the guest house.
Frank went back outside and enjoyed the food, the wine, and the beautiful people. Mac’s “associates” were there, of course. John Stone was in the full swing of the party, frolicking in the pool with a couple of young ladies while Danny “Chokemaster” Sherrell played his faithful wingman.
Porter wasn’t in the pool.
He was in his same dark suit, sucking on a cigarette, and every time that Frank glanced his way, Porter was checking him out from behind a whirl of smoke. Either the guy is queer for me, Frank thought, which is very doubtful, or he has an agenda. Either way, Frank wasn’t going to let it ruin his enjoyment of the party food, which was excellent.
He was munching on a shrimp satay when Mac approached him.
“You’re too smart for those people,” Mac said. “You’re wasting yourself. Come work with me-make some real money in a classy environment.”
“I’m flattered,” Frank said. “But Mike and I have been together a long time.”
“Every additional day is a waste.”
“Thanks for the offer,” Frank said. “But no thanks. Mike’s my guy. I’ll stick with him.”
“I respect that,” Mac said. “No offense.”
“None taken.”
“But try to get him to do the smart thing, will you?” Mac said. “The smart thing is always good for everybody.”
But Mike didn’t see it that way.
Later that night, even as he was relating the marvels of sex with a futurePenthouse model, he was saying, “You know, we’re going to have to kill that moolie.”
“No, I don’t know that,” Frank said. “As a matter of fact, I think you should sell him the eighty points.”
“You’re fucking kidding me, right?”
“I’m serious as a heart attack.”
“No fucking way, Frankie,” Mike said. “No fucking way.”
“He’s acop, Mike.”
“He’s anex -cop,” Mike said, “and an ex-con.”
“Once a cop, always a cop,” Frank said. “They stick tighter than we do. And he’s got a cop partner, so it’s the same thing.”
“I ain’t selling the Pinto,” Mike said.
He called Mac to tell him so.
The next week, inspectors started coming around the place-fire inspectors, health inspectors, water inspectors. They all found something wrong, and none of them took the usual C note. Instead, they wrote the place up.
The following week, CHP cars started parking across the street. Customers would pull out of the lot and get stopped for DUI. Jerked out of the car, made to walk the line, blow into the tube, the whole nine yards. Even if they weren’t legally drunk, it was a hassle.
Undercover cops started coming into the place-sniffing around the men’s room for dope, pretending they were johns looking for working girls, trying to buy coke from the bartenders.
Customers started to be afraid to come in.
It hurt business.
“Something’s gotta be done,” Mike said to Frank, and Frank knew what that something was.
“You want to start a shooting war with the CHP?” he asked Mike.
Mac called and upped his offer by ten grand, as a peace gesture.
Mike told him to go fuck himself.
The next week, two girls were busted for prostitution, and another for possession. The following morning, Pat got a call from the liquor commissioner, who was threatening to yank the club’s license.
Mac upped his offer again.
Mike told him to fuck himself in the ass.
Privately, he wasn’t so confident.
“What the fuck are we going to do?” he asked Frank. “What the fuck are we going to do?”
“Sell him the club.”
Mike had a different answer-more of a traditional wise-guy response.
He firebombed the Cheetah Lounge.
He was very careful to do it after closing, even making sure that the janitor was out; then he and Angie Basso launched two very well-built Molotov cocktails through the window.
The joint didn’t burn to the ground, but it was going to be a long time before it opened again. Just to make sure Mac got the point, Mike phoned him with condolences. “Gee,” he said, “it’s too bad the fire inspectors weren’t out there.”
Mac got the point.
He got it so well that Angie Basso got jumped coming out of his dry-cleaning business late at night. Pat Porter and Chokemaster Sherrell dragged him to the edge of the sidewalk, held his hands over the edge, and jumped on his forearms, snapping both his wrists.
“You shouldn’t play with fire,” Porter told him.
“What am I going to do?” Angie asked Mike the next night. “I can’t even take a piss by myself.”
“Don’t look at me,” Mike said.
But he responded. He had to, or give it all up.
So, three nights later, Frank waited in the backseat of a car parked across the street from Bare Elegance, waiting for the Chokemaster to lock up. Mike was in the driver’s seat, because Frank didn’t trust him to make a good shot.
“I’m just going to shoot him in the leg,” Mike had said.
“You’d screw up and hit the femoral artery,” Frank had told him. “Then Sherrell would bleed out and we’d be in a full-scale war.”
“I’d aim for his dick,” Mike’d said. “Couldn’t missthat target.”
Mike had rented a couple of Sherrell’s old porn videos and shown them in the back room of the club. Frank was half-convinced that Mike had picked the Chokemaster for a target out of phallic jealousy.
Anyway, now he sat low in the backseat of a work car and watched while Sherrell came out, said good night to the bartender, pulled the metal screen down, and started to set the padlock.
Frank stuck the. 22 rifle through the car’s open window, sighted in on the fleshy part of Sherrell’s right calf, and fired. Sherrell went down, Mike hit the gas, and that was it. Frank knew that the bartender would come back and get Sherrell to the hospital. The Chokemaster would be on crutches for a couple of weeks, if that.
All in all, it was a very tempered response to the assault on Angie Basso, whose wrists would take months to heal. If anything it was ade escalation of the war, but instead, the other side kicked it up a notch.
Frank saw it happening-literally.
He was at the airport waiting for a pickup when he saw Pat Porter walk into the terminal. Frank gave him a little space and then followed him in, where Porter met a direct flight from Heathrow and warmly greeted two men as they got off the plane.