It’s what happens, this life of ours.
Piece by piece, it takes everything away from you.
Your home.
Your work.
Your family.
Your friends.
Your faith.
Your trust.
Your love.
Your life.
But by that time, you don’t even want it anymore.
They take him on a downhill curve on Highway 78.
59
Jimmy the Kid waits with what’s left of the Wrecking Crew.
Paulie’s on injured reserve with his leg wound, but Carlo, Carlo is a gamer, dude. Carlo knows the diff between hurt and injured, and he’s going to be there when the whistle blows. Besides, he’s got a little payback to deliver.
And payback, as they say, is a bitch.
It was Jimmy who figured it out: Sooner or later, Frankie M. would go to Mike Pella to try to get this straightened out. Pella was his wingman, his boy, his goombah. So it was a simple matter of finding out where the feds had Pella stored, then putting a net around it and waiting.
For Frankie M. to fuck up.
Which he did.
Rode right into the old box canyon.
There are only four roads out of Ramona, and three of them break off the same intersection. So when Frankie M. turns north on the 78, they know they got him. It’s the worst-possible route for the man to take, because it winds down the edge of a steep canyon.
A stone cliff on one side of the road, the big drop on the other.
So as Frankie M. goes into the canyon, they put a car behind him. Jimmy’s car waits at a turnoff on the other side of the road, about two miles down.
It’s like one of them old Westerns, Jimmy thinks.
The dumb-ass cavalry goes riding into the canyon.
Where the Apaches are waiting for them.
Frankie M. is Custer.
And I’m Geronimo.
60
He doesn’t see it coming.
That’s the thing. Fatigue, heartache, the sheer grind of being on the run combine to make him careless.
Of course they wouldn’t hit him at a protected witness’s house. That would be giving the game away. They wouldn’t hit him close, but wait until he was miles away, then do it.
And make it look like an accident.
So he doesn’t see it until it’s too late.
The silver Lexus coming up behind him fast, then-
A black Envoy-a big, heavy SUV-roars up, passes the Lexus, and pulls alongside Frank.
Jimmy the Kid’s in the Envoy, bopping his head up and down like he’s listening to some of that hip-hop crap, then smiles at Frank and jerks his wheel to the right.
The Envoy bumps into Frank’s car, sending it toward the edge of the cliff.
Frank manages to correct it, but Jimmy rams him again.
The physics are against him. Something the businessman in Frank knows is that numbers never lie; arithmetic is absolute. A heavier vehicle at greater speed is always going to win the contest. He tries to pull out, letting off the gas so he can cut behind the Envoy, but the Lexus has him boxed in and bangs him forward. Frank’s only hope is that a car comes up the other way and forces the Envoy to swerve, but even that wouldn’t be any good, because there’d be no place for the Envoy to go and some citizen would get killed.
Which is the only thing I can say for myself, Frank thinks. I never took out anyone who wasn’t in the game.
Only players.
He manages to stay on the road for the top part of the sweeping curve, but physics are physics-numbers don’t lie-and the bottom half is too much for the little rental car, especially when Jimmy the Kid bashes into it again to make sure.
Frank looks over and sees Jimmy waving bye-bye.
Then he goes over the edge.
61
They say your life flashes in front of you?
Sort of-Frank hears a song.
The Surfaris doing “Wipeout.”
“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-a…wipeout!”
That insane, sarcastic laugh, then the famous drum solo, then the guitar riff, followed by the drum again.
He hears it all the way down.
Wipeout.
Actually, surfers have about a gazillion expressions for going over the edge of a big wave:
Wipeout, certainly.
Off the lip.
Over the falls.
In the washing machine.
Frank’s been there before.
Tumbling over and over and over, wondering if it’s ever going to stop, if you’re ever going to come to the surface, if you can hold your breath long enough to see the sweet sky again.
Only that waswater -this is earth. And trees, and rocks, and brush, and the horrible sounds of metal being crushed against all of the above-then the sound of a gunshot, which at first Frank thinks is the coup de grace, but is the gunpowder of the air bag going off. The bag smacks him in the face, then along the sides, and the world is this tumbling pillow, this unfun ride as the car plunges down the side of the canyon, scraping against everything in its way.
It’s the scraping that saves his life.
The car scrapes against a tree limb, which slows it down, then against the side of a boulder, then tilts over the edge of a narrow ravine, slides over, and finally comes to a stop against an old post oak.
The guitar riff fades out.
Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-a…
Wipeout.
62
“We should go down there and check,” Carlo says.
They have the Envoy and the Lexus pulled off to the side of the road. They can’t see the car where it’s plunged into the little ravine, but they can see the flames shooting out of it.
“Check on what?” Jimmy the Kid asks. “You can grill hot dogs on him yet?”
The police and fire sirens have already started.
“What we should do,” Jimmy says, “is get the fuck out of here.”
And they do.
63
Frank crawled out during the last guitar riff.
It hurt like crazy just to unsnap the seat belt, never mind open the door and tumble out, and it’s even crazier when he hit the ground. The ribs are at least cracked, if not out-and-out broken, and his left shoulder is a bulge down closer to his elbow than it should be. And he doesn’t even want to know what’s going on with his right knee.
Doesn’t matter.
He has to get away from the car.
He knows he’s taking a chance moving at all, that a broken rib might puncture a lung or the internal bleeding might turn into an internal hemorrhage, and then game over, but it beats getting flash-fried when the car goes Fourth of July.
Belly-crawling a good fifty feet away before the explosion, he gets flat to the ground and digs his face into the dirt before it goes off. The concussion is like a blow against his whole body, and he feels his ribs burn like heis on fire.
But I’m alive, he thinks.
And I shouldn’t be.
He stays flat to the ground for a couple of minutes. For one thing, he needs to catch his breath. For another thing, Jimmy might be coming down for a kill shot. And he knows the firemen and cops will be all over this place, if they’re not up there already.
When he catches his breath, he grabs his left shoulder and pops it back into place, biting his arm to suppress his scream. He lies back down and gasps for air.
And it’s a good thing it’s raining, or the fire might spread faster than Frank can crawl away from it. As it is, the flames are just burning gas and air and not catching on the wet grass or the sodden trees.
Frank starts to crawl away, along the canyon bottom. He figures he needs to get a good quarter of a mile from the accident, and he knows what he’s looking for-a place to hole up until dark.
It takes him a half hour to find it-a crevice under a rock on the facing canyon wall. A thick mesquite bush hides the entrance, and the overhanging rock will give him some shelter against the wind and rain. He crawls in. There’s just room enough in there for him to pull himself, painfully, into a fetal position.