Mike lunged off the ground and raced to the house, and they stayed there for a few seconds, pressed flat against the wall, catching their breath.
The sliding glass door was locked. Frank smashed the glass with the rifle butt, then reached in and pushed the door open. Mike pushed past him and went in with his shotgun at his cheek and swept the room.
Nothing.
Frank leapfrogged past him to the next wall and they made their way through the house like that.
They found Mac in the dojo.
Shirtless and barefoot, wearing only the pants of a blackgi, he was slowly and rhythmically slamming roundhouse kicks into a heavy bag. The bag doubled up and popped toward the ceiling with every kick, the solid wham of the impact echoing through the empty room.
A jazz flute played quietly on the sound system.
A stick of incense burned in a holder on the floor.
Frank stayed twenty feet back and kept the rifle trained on him. A man of Mac’s size and athletic ability could cover that distance in a stride and a half, and the kick would be lethal.
Mac turned his head to glance at them but didn’t stop kicking.
“I left the front door open for you,” he said. “You went to a lot of needless trouble, upset my animals, and you broke my slider.”
“They beat the kid to death,” Frank said.
Mac nodded and kicked the bag again. The motion looked both smooth and effortless, but the bag flew up toward the ceiling and then dropped again with a shudder. “I heard,” Mac said. “I didn’t authorize it. I don’t approve of it.”
“Let’s just fucking shoot him, Frank!”
“I’ve left myself vulnerable to you as a gesture of my sincerity,” Mac said, “and of my contrition. If you want to kill me, kill me. I’m at perfect peace.”
He stopped kicking the bag.
Frank backed off two more steps and kept the rifle trained, but Mac knelt on the floor, rested his haunches on his heels, took a deep breath of the incense, closed his eyes, and opened his arms with his palms held flat up.
“The fuck is this?” Mike asked.
Frank shook his head.
But neither of them shot.
A long minute went by; then Mac opened his eyes, looked around as if he was a little surprised, and said, “Then let’s discuss business. You should know that you are behind the information curve: Mr. Porter has decided to pursue his own agenda. His exact words were, ‘I’m tired of working for some jumped-up monkey,’ the monkey in question being myself. That being the case, I am willing to accept a fifty percent purchase of the Pinto Club. And if you want me to kill Pat Porter, I’ll kill him.”
“That’s already been taken care of,” Frank said.
Mac got to his feet and smiled. “That’s what I thought you’d say.”
Life was really good for a while.
They’d had to lay low in Mexico for a few weeks, with the cops and the media all over the Strip Club Wars like vultures. It had everything that the eleven o’clock news guys could want and more-sex, violence, gangsters, and more sex. Stripper after stripper gave on-air interviews, and one even held a press conference.
Then some new horror took the pride of place and the media moved on.
The cops had a longer attention span.
Four murders in one night, apparently related, put a lot of heat on the homicide guys, and the FBI came in on the OC angle and started a turf battle. Everyone liked Mike Pella for the Georgie Yoznezensky murder, but for a change, Mike was actually innocent of that, so it never got any traction.
Myrna kept her mouth shut and Mike got her a job at a club in Tampa. The stripper with the junkie boyfriend just split town, and Frank heard years later that she’d overdosed in East St. Louis.
As for the three Brits gunned down in ninety seconds at the White Hart, nobody at the bar could identify the shooter and the guns had no prints and were untraceable. Eventually, the San Diego cops and the feds decided that it had been a London turf battle fought out in Mission Viejo and they put it in the cold file.
So Mike and Frank took a vacation in Ensenada and then came back to the sweet life, because being partners with Big Mac McManus wascake.
Mac had the golden touch.
He was like this king, this magnificent emperor of an enchanted land where milk, honey, women, and money flowed in streams.
But Frank didn’t get in on any of that. He turned down Mike’s offer of a piece of the Pinto, because the feds were all over it. He kept working the limo thing, plowing the money into his fish business or socking it away against the proverbial rainy day. He would go to the Sunday afternoon parties sometimes, though, to get in on the buffet.
“You’re going to pick up whores,” Patty would say.
“No, I’m not.”
It was a tired old argument.
“Sundays should be for your family,” Patty argued.
“You’re right,” Frank said. “Let’s all go.”
“Nice,” Patty said. “Now you want to bring your wife and daughter to anorgy. ”
She had a point there, Frank had to admit. Although he never took part in the sexual escapades. Mostly, he and Mac would repair to the dojo and work out. Mac taught him martial arts, taught him, in fact, the move that would save his life on the boat almost twenty years later.
They’d work out hard-hitting and kicking the bag, then doing some sparring, then hitting the weight bench, where they’d spot for each other. Then they’d go and sip fruit juice and talk about life, business, music, philosophy. Mac taught Frank about jazz, and Frank got him into opera.
They were good times.
They couldn’t last.
It was the coke.
Frank never knew when Mac started doing it, but it seemed like all of a sudden that’s all he was doing. Mountains of coke would go up Mac’s nose, and he would take what seemed like a harem into his bedroom and disappear for days. After a while, he stopped taking the harem and just disappeared by himself, to emerge late in the afternoon, if at all, and demand more coke.
It changed him.
Mac started to be angry all the time. He’d fly into sudden, unpredictable rages, and launch into long, barely coherent rants about how he did all the work and all the thinking and how nobody appreciated him.
Then came the paranoia.
They were all out to get him, all plotting against him. He doubled the amount of security around the place, bought Dobermans that he let prowl the grounds at night, installed more alarm systems, and spent more and more time huddled alone in his room.
He stopped going into his dojo altogether. The heavy bag hung still and unused, a lonely symbol of Mac’s decline.
Frank tried to talk to him. It didn’t do any good, but Mac loved him for the attempt.
“All these people,” he said to Frank one night when they were sitting alone together at the pool. “All these people are hangers-on. They’re all parasites. Not you, Frank Machianno, you’re aman. You love me man to man.”
It was the truth.
Frank did love him.
Loved the memory of the distinguished, generous genius that Mac had been, and could be again. Instead of the paranoid, mean, incoherent shell he had become. Mac looked awful-the once-tight body was sagging and thin. The man rarely ate, his eyes were dilated, and his skin looked like dark brown parchment paper.
“These people,” Mac continued, “will kill me.”
“No, Mac,” Frank said.
But they did.
John Stone came to Frank one day at the Sunday party that autumn and said, “He’s cheating us.”
“Who is?”
“Our ‘partner,’” Stone said. He gestured toward Mac’s bedroom, where Mac was holed up, as he usually was those days. And the Sunday party wasn’t what it used to be, either. Fewer and fewer people came, and those who did were mostly the hard-core sex and coke freaks.
“No way,” Frank said.
“Don’t tell me no way,” Stone said. “Half our money is going up that nigger’s nose.”