“You’re damn right it’s a problem.” Garth turns to look at him. Rain drips off the edge of the hood onto his nose. “You’re a few months away from retirement. Take your pension and go fishing. Visit the grandkids. Forget about all this.”
“What if I don’t?”
“There are certain people who want you to know,” Garth says, “that if you persist with this crusade, you’ll leave with nothing. You’ll be a security guard on the night shift, if you’re not in jail, that is.”
“In jail for what?”
“Start with cooperation with a known organized crime figure, Frank Machianno,” Garth says. “You’ve been protecting him. Or how about your collusion in the torture of Harold Henkel? Or assaulting a federal agent. There’s plenty, Hansen. More than enough, trust me. And without friends to protect you…”
“Oh, you want to be my friend.”
“You need to decide who your friends are, Dave,” Garth says. “You choose wrong, you end up as a disgraced cop with nothing. Choose right, you can live a happy life. Christ, why would you sacrifice your future for some second-rate hit man, anyway?”
“He’s afirst -rate hit man, Donnie,” Dave says. “As you, of all people, should know.”
Garth stops and turns around. “I’ll walk back by myself. If Frankie Machine contacts you, we expect you to do the right thing. Do you understand?”
Dave looks over the man’s shoulder at the waves.
I’d rather be out there, he thinks, in a wave, under a wave. Anything would be better than this.
“Do you understand?” Garth says.
“Yeah.”
I understand.
85
Frank sits in the little shack in the hills outside of Escondido. He’s known about the place for years-it sits up a dirt road in a canyon above the orange groves. It’s a place to hidemojados -they live up here away from themigra and go down just before dawn to pick the oranges, then return at dusk.
Except there are nomojados now.
You don’t pick oranges in the winter, in the rain.
Nevertheless, he can smell the tangy scent of the orange trees below. Makes him nostalgic, sad, that he won’t be around to taste the oranges in the spring.
He has one gun and four bullets.
It won’t be enough.
They’ll be coming with an army-so four bullets, or forty, or four hundred, or four thousand, it won’t make any difference, because there’s only one of you.
And you can’t win this battle.
All those cliches about life-they’re all true. If you could cook one more meal, ride one more wave, have a chat with a customer, smile at a friend, hug your lover, hold your child. If you had more time, you’d spend it differently.
If only you had more time.
Stop feeling sorry for yourself, he thinks. After all, you’ve got it coming. You’ve done a lot of bad things in this world. You’ve taken life, and that’s the worst thing there is. You can justify it all you want, but when you look back at your life with your eyes open, you know what you were.
All you can do-maybe, maybe -is get a small measure of justice for a dead woman.
Take the rocks from her mouth.
Maybe give her daughter a chance for a real future.
The way you’d like someone to giveyour daughter a chance.
Jill.
What’s she going to do?
You have to take care of your own daughter.
He calls Sherm.
“Frank, thank God, I thought-”
“Don’t thank him yet,” Frank says. “Look, I need to know-”
“It was the feds, Frank,” Sherm says. “They had me under. It was your buddy Dave Hansen-he had me wired. He passed the info along.”
“It doesn’t matter now,” Frank says. “All that matters is that Jill and Patty are taken care of. If you flipped on me, you flipped on me. I’m sure you had your reasons. It’s blood under the bridge-”
“Frank-”
“There are some properties,” Frank says. “You know how to dig them out. Something should happen to me, liquidate the assets, make sure Jill’s medical school is paid for.”
“You can count on it, Frank.”
“They have to let me take care of my family,” Frank says. “They can do what they want with me, butthey have to let me take care of my family. That was always the way, back in the old times.”
“Patty and Jill will be taken care of,” Sherm says. “You have my word.”
It’s hard to hear the tone of a man’s voice over the telephone, especially these tinny cell phones, but Frank is satisfied by what he can hear. It’s all he can do anyway, trust The Nickel to do the right thing by the money, even if Sherm did betray him.
If there’s a trace of honor left in this thing, they’ll let a man go out knowing his family is taken care of.
“Hey, Sherm,” Frank says, “you remember that time down in Rosarito? You were wearing that big sombrero?”
“I remember, Frank.”
“Those were good times.”
“Hell yes, they were.”
“Good-bye, Sherm.”
“Go with God, my friend.”
Frank has set this up so they’ll have to come uphill and into the sun. He wants every little edge he can get, even though it won’t make any difference in the end. But take, say, Jimmy the Kid out with you, you’ve done a good thing.
Maybe it’ll count in my favor when I answer to the man.
Go with God.
He hears the car before he sees it.
Then the engine noise stops.
Smart, Frank thinks. They’re coming in on foot. They’ll give the cabin lots of room, work around it, and come in from all sides. He settles in, lays the pistol barrel on the windowsill, and gets ready to put one in the first head that comes into sight.
A head appears, but he doesn’t shoot.
Because it’s Donna.
86
“They have Jill,” she says.
“What?”
“I’m sorry, Frank,” she says. “They have Jill.”
Frank’s barely listening as she tells him the deal. He hears her words, he’s taking them in, but all that’s really running through his head are the wordsThey have Jill. They have Jill. They have Jill. They have Jill. They have Jill.
Your faith.
Your trust.
Your love.
Your life.
Your child.
“Tomorrow morning,” she says. “Four a.m. Beneath Ocean Beach Pier. You come unarmed, but with a certain package they want. Do you know what they’re talking about, Frank?”
“Yes.”
“You give them the package, they’ll release Jill to me,” Donna says. “You go withthem, Frank.”
He nods. “How long,” he asks, “have you been with them?”
“Forever,” she says. “Since I was fifteen years old. My father was a drunk. He used to beat me up. It wasn’t the worst thing he did. Tony Jacks stopped him; he took me out of there. He saved me, Frank.”
When he was done with her, he found her a job and a husband, she tells Frank.
“When Jay left,” Donna says, “I was sad, but I wasn’t heartbroken. I didn’t really love him. I never went back to Tony, but I stillowed him, Frank. You have to understand that. I kept an eye on things in San Diego for him, that’s all.”
“You gave them my daughter.”
“I didn’t know,” Donna says, crying now. “I just thought they wanted to talk to her, Frank. I didn’t know they were going to do…this.”
“Tell them I’ll be there,” Frank says. “With the package. And I’ll go with them. If I see Jill, see her safe.”
He knows they won’t let her go. Knows that they’ll kill her. Please God, please let her not be dead already.
Please give me even a small chance to save her.
87
And now he knows that Fortunate Son is behind all this.
Because no wise guy in the world was ever low enough to kidnap someone’s daughter.
It would take a politician to do that.
But who do you trust?
Normally, if a family member is kidnapped, you go to the FBI, but you can’t do that, because the fedsare the kidnappers.