Looking farther down in the canyon, he can see the firemen spraying the car with a heavy blast. They’ll be looking for a body, Frank thinks, and they won’t find one. But the cops will track the rented car back to Jerry Sabellico, so that cover is blown.
And his whole survival kit is in the car-his clothes, his weapons, his money.
Everything.
So this is what it comes to, Frank thinks as he tries to work his way into a more comfortable position: shivering in a cave, in pain, everything gone, waiting for night.
64
Jimmy the Kid waits for the hour then turns the local radio news on.
The traffic reporter chirps that both lanes of Highway 78 on the grade just past San Pasqual Road are closed due to a one-car accident.
“A car went through the guardrail and plunged into the canyon,” she says. “However, no fatalities have been reported.”
“Motherfucker” is what Jimmy says.
65
“Your boy Machianno’s on quite a tear.”
“Yes, sir.”
Dave sits across the desk from the regional director. Called on the carpet, as it were.
“First Vena and Palumbo,” the RD says. “Now Pella. For Chrissakes, Dave, a witness in the program, gunned down in his own house! How’s that going to look?”
“Not good.”
“You have a gift for understatement.”
Dave doesn’t reply, proving hedoes have a gift for understatement.
“Anyway,” the RD says. “It looks like Machianno’s back at his old career. Find him, Hansen. Find him and stop him.”
“Yes, sir.”
Dave gets up to leave.
“And Hansen? Machianno killed a federal undercover agent,” the RD says. “We don’t really want to provide this piece of shit with a lawyer, do we?”
Meaning, Dave thinks as he walks out the door, he’s not being ordered to find and stop Frank.
He’s being ordered to find him and kill him.
66
It takes him two hours to make it to the top of the canyon.
Aching and sore, Frank picks his way through the brush and rocks in uncertain moonlight and fog. He gets to the top and walks along the edge of the road, throwing himself flat when he sees headlights coming. Each time he goes down, it hurts more and it’s harder to get up.
But he has to keep doing it because he knows they’ll be looking for him.
67
Jimmy’s sitting in the passenger seat with one of those big halogen lights. They’d gone to Costco and bought it when they heard the radio news.
“Shouldn’t we get right back there?” Carlo had asked.
“He won’t come up till dark,” Jimmy had said. “If he’s alive at all. Either way, we got plenty of time.”
So they’d gone to Costco.
“It’s a good thing I brought my card,” Jimmy says. Now he shines the light along the side of the road as they cruise slowly up and down the canyon. Tony, Joey, and Jackie are in another car, doing the same thing in the other direction.
It’s likeRun Silent, Run Deep, Jimmy thinks, with the Japanese destroyers steaming back and forth, waiting for the American sub to surface. Because it has to come up-it’s running out of oxygen.
Like Frankie M.
“You see anything?” Carlo asks.
“Bigfoot,” Jimmy says.
“Where?”
“I was pulling your pud, asshole,” Jimmy says.
“Hey, that Bigfoot thing is no joke,” Carlo says. “I saw a documentary on the National Geographic Channel. National Geographic don’t mess around.”
Jimmy the Kid isn’t listening. He’s thinking it through.
What he’s thinking is that Frankie Machine is a cockroach.
You just can’t kill this motherfucker.
Yeah, but you got to, so think.
A good hunter thinks like his prey.
So think like Frankie M.
Okay, you’re hurt, maybe bad. You ain’t moving so fast. You’re going to go to cover during daylight and try to move by night. You gotta get out of that fucking canyon, and you ain’t going out the other side, because it’s too steep, too high, and there ain’t nothin’ back there anyway.
So you’re going to come back up the way you came. You’re going to come back up the road because you don’t have a car anymore and you’re going to have to find transportation somehow.
Okay, but how?
You’re fifteen hard miles from the nearest town where you can rent a car. Even if you do, your ID is going to ring bells as a guy who crashed and burned his last rental, but you’re Frankie Machine, so you ain’t gonna even try that.
So that leaves you two choices: You either hitch a ride or you steal a ride.
Nobody in his right mind is going to pick you up, and you ain’t going to stand out in the open on this road with your thumb out anyway, because you know we’re looking for you and so are the cops.
So you’re going to boost someone’s sled.
Cool, but how?
No red lights out here, no stop signs, no gas stations.
So what’s left?
What’s out here where people are going to stop?
Then it hits him.
“Shit,” Jimmy says. “Turn around. Hurry.”
“What’s up?”
“We’re going parking.”
68
Danny Carver is about to get bare tit.
Finally.
What he gets for dating a Mormon girl. Other chicks are passing out blow jobs like Skittles, but Shelly will not give it upat all. Danny’s been at it for three months-taking her to the movies, to the mall, going bowling, playing freakingminiature golf -and the most he can get is a quick kiss, no tongue.
He would have dropped her on, like, date two if she weren’t so goddamn hot. Blond hair, big blue eyes, and thatrack…
It took two months just to get her to go parking with him at all, come out here to the roadside parking lot where, in the daytime, the tree-huggers park their cars to go hiking down in the canyon.
But at night, the place is like health class. You got droves of teenagers out here studying sex ed like it’s going to be on the SATs, and tonight Shelly isinto it. Her hand doesn’t even come down on his like a castle gate when he starts to unbutton her blouse.
I am in, Danny thinks.
Thank you, God.
I amin.
“Oh myGod, ” Shelly says.
Oh yeah. You theman.
“Oh-my-God.”
Her body stiffens and she’s looking over his shoulder.
It’s her father, Danny thinks.
Six-foot-six Mormon who shoes horses for a living.
Danny’s body stiffens.
He looks back over his shoulder.
Bigfoot is in the window.
It’s like one of those stories you used to tell on camping trips, about the guy with the hook. Except this guy doesn’t have a hook-he has a gun. And he gestures for Danny to roll down the window.
Danny does.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” the guy says to Danny, yanking him out of the car. “I just need your vehicle.”
All Danny can do is nod as the guy slips past him into the driver’s seat.
Frank looks at the girl.
“You can get out now,” he says. “And button your blouse, huh?”
Shelly does both.
Frank puts it in reverse and takes off.
69
Jimmy the Kid sees the two teenagers standing out in the parking lot. The boy has a cell phone in his hand.
“We’re too late,” Jimmy says. “We’re too fucking late.”
He rolls down the window. “What kind of car?”
“Are you the triple A guys?” Danny asks.
“What kind of car?”
“A ’96 Celica,” Danny says. “Silver.”
Jimmy the Kid roars off.
“We’re going to have to call my dad,” Shelly says.