The winter of Frankie Machine

13

Dave Hansen walks out onto the beach.

The wet sand looks like dark, shiny marble and the cold rain pelts him in the face. Two thousand miles of coastline, he thinks, and the floater had to wash up on federal land, in weather like this. He’s at the edge of America, literally. Point Loma is the last stop in the continental USA, the end of the line.

The floater just made it.

A few feet the other way and the body would have been a Mexican problem.

A bunch of sailors from the Coast Guard station and a few San Diego cops are gathered around the body.

“We didn’t touch it,” the police sergeant tells Dave. “This is your jurisdiction.”

He sounds pleased as punch.

“Thanks,” Dave says.

Actually, the San Diego cops like Hansen. He has a light touch, for a fed. The sergeant says, “We haven’t had any missing persons report. Usually do in a drowning. I checked with Coast Guard, too. Nada.”

“He didn’t drown,” Dave says. “He’s not blue.”

The skin of drowning victims, even if they’ve been in the water for only a few minutes, turns a ghastly blue. No one who’s seen it ever forgets it. Dave squats down by the body. He opens up the guy’s jacket and sees the large entrance wound right where the guy’s heart used to be. He keeps looking and finds the other entrance wound in the stomach.

Whoever killed the John Doe shot him in the gut, then pressed the gun against his chest and finished him off. Even after an unknown number of hours in the water, the powder burns on his clothes are unmistakable.

“Probably a dope run gone wrong,” the sergeant said.

“Probably,” Dave says. He keeps looking through the guy’s clothes. The shooter also removed John Doe’s ID. No wallet, no watch, no ring, nothing. Dave looks closely at the victim’s face, or what’s left of it after the fish pecked at the eyes. He doesn’t recognize him, didn’t expect to, but there’s something vaguely familiar about him.

A faint memory, or an old dream, washed up onshore like a piece of driftwood.

It’s weird.

But it’s been a weird day, Dave thinks. Must be the weather; these high-pressure fronts seem to make everything and everybody a little crazy. People do odd things that they wouldn’t otherwise do.

Frank Machianno, for instance.

Frank’s at the bait shop every morning like clockwork for as long as Dave can remember, and then today he doesn’t show up. And Frank, who’s been a regular at the Gentlemen’s Hour for longer than Dave has, is a no-show for the best waves of the year.

Dave figured he was sick, and called the house to bust his chops about the great waves he missed, but no answer. Tried Frank on his cell, same thing. So he went back to the bait shop, only to find the kid Abe closing it up.

“Frank said to,” Abe told him. “Said take a few days off.”

“Franksaid take a few days off.”

“WhatI thought,” Abe said. “Told me to go home for a while.”

“Where’s home?”

Abe pointed south. “TJ.”

Like, where else?

So Dave took a drive over to Frank’s house. His van and his Mercedes in the garage, the house all locked up, no Frank.

So it’s been a strange day.

A murdered body that by all the rules of normal tide and current should have drifted down the Baja coast manages instead to snag itself up on the last tip of America.

When Dave first heard they had a floater, he was afraid it was Tony Palumbo. The star witness in G-Sting has been undercover for years as a bouncer at Hunnybear’s, and he was supposed to meet with Dave earlier that morning.

He didn’t show up.

He wasn’t anywhere to be seen, and a four-hundred-pound man is hard to miss.

So Tony Palumbo is 441.

And Frank goes off the radar.