The winter of Frankie Machine

38

Jay Voorhees was the security chief at the Paladin, in charge of making sure that the casino wasn’t being skimmed, so in the interest of efficiency, he was also in charge of the skim. He was good at it, the Harry Houdini of the counting room, the way he could make coins and bills escape from lockboxes.

Then the FBI got to him, started to put pressure on him, and he caved.

Ran to Mexico, where the feds couldn’t get to him. Fine as far as it went, but Chicago wasn’t looking to extradite him; they were looking to make Houdini disappear for good. Because Voorhees knew everything-he could give up Carmine, Donnie Garth, everybody. Then the whole house of cards, as it were, would come tumbling down. They had to find Voorhees and put him out.

People think it’s easy to disappear.

It isn’t.

It’s hard and it’s tiring and it’s expensive as hell. Moneyhemorrhages when you’re traveling, anyway, and when you’re on the move and trying not to leave any footprints, it bleeds all the faster. You’re trying to use cash everywhere, but you see it just flying out of your pocket, and you go to the plastic.

Unless you’re prepared to go off the radar, it’s a difficult trick to pull off, and Jay Voorhees wasn’t prepared. He had just panicked and run. And it was only a matter of time before he figured out that the feds would offer him a pretty good deal to trade up, and he’d get tired of running and come in from the cold.

Frank had to find him first.

“We can put a crew down there,” Carmine Antonucci said. “Anything you need.”

“I don’t want a crew,” Frank said.

Bunch of doofs tripping over one another’s feet. A pool of potential witnesses when the feds flipped them five years down the line. No, he didn’t want a crew, just operating expenses, in cash, because he didn’t want to leave any footprints, either.

And there were a lot of footsteps. Frank followed Voorhees from Mexico City to Guadalajara, then across to Mazatlan and Cozumel, then to Puerto Vallarta and all the way down the tip of Baja to Cabo.

Aconnection develops between hunter and prey. Guys deny it as airy-fairy bullshit, Frank thought, but they all know it happens. You track a guy long enough, you get to know him, you’re living his life, one step removed, and he becomesreal to you. You try to get inside his head, think the way he thinks, and if you succeed at that, in a strange way you become him.

And he becomes you, for the same reason. If he has any instinct at all, he begins to feel you. As he runs, as he tries to outthink you, to anticipate your moves and counter them, he gets to know you, too.

You’re on the same road-by necessity, you go to the same places, eat the same food, see the same things, share the same experiences. You develop things in common. Youconnect.

Frank missed him by three days in Mexico City, talked to a cabbie who drove him to the airport, bribed a baggage agent who put him on a flight to Guadalajara. He wasn’t sure, but he might have glimpsed him on the Cross of Squares there, outside the cathedral. Going to pray? Frank wondered. Maybe he bought a little clay model-amilagro -from one of the street vendors and left it at the altar with a contribution and a request for a miracle. He missed him by one night at his hotel, found out he went to the train station. He might have lost the trail there, except that Voorhees used his AmEx to check into a hotel in Mazatlan. Frank went to the resort town and just walked the beach, asking everybody if they’d seen him, throwing around money. He didn’t expect to get an answer and he didn’t hide the fact that he was there-hewanted Voorhees to know.

“Flushing the bird,” is what Bap had called it. “The bird might be safe hiding in the bush, but it sees the hunter and flies, and that’s what kills it.”

Voorhees fled to Cozumel, Frank right after him. Voorhees checked in and out of second-rate hotels. One time, Frank missed him by an hour. He actuallysaw him in Cabo, at a cheap hotel on the Pacific side, drinking a beer and picking at a plate ofcamarones. He was gaunt and thin; his slacks were bunched up awkwardly around his waist.

Voorhees sawhim, too; he definitely did. He made you, Frank thinks now. He looked at you with those scared, haunted eyes andknew. Voorhees paid his check and left the place, and Frank followed him. But there was no place to do it, so Frank let him get on a bus and go.

He knew Voorhees’s string was running out.

In every town he’d gone to, the hotels had gotten a little cheaper, the meals a little skimpier. He had started on jets, then had rented cars and taken trains, but now he was on a rundown rural bus, and a bad one at that. Frank checked the route-the bus was headed on the single road up the east coast of Baja.

Now his options weren’t radial; they were linear. He had trapped himself along this spine of coastline, with the ocean on one side and impenetrable desert on the other, and all he could do was make his way from one little fishing village to the next.

Frank enjoyed that trip, if enjoyment is a concept that can be hooked to hunting a man down in order to kill him. But he savored the leisure of the bus trip, with nothing to do but marvel at the stark countryside, or read, or watch the startlingly blue water of the Sea of Cortez. He liked playing with the kids on the bus, holding a baby that one time so the mother could get a break, and he reveled in the relentless sun and the baking, soothing heat.

Those were good days, those days following Jay Voorhees up Baja. Frank was almost sorry that it was about to end.

Voorhees went to ground in the little village of Santa Rosalia. He’d found himself a little fisherman’s shack on the rocky beach. It’s what he should have done in the first place, Frank thought, gone to a little town where he could have bought protection from the localcomandante. We would have outbid him, of course, but it would have taken me longer to find him, and maybe I never would have.

But that wasn’t what happened.

What happened was Frank spent the afternoon at a cantina in the village, sipping a couple of beers and doing crossword puzzles in a little English-language magazine that some tourist must have left behind. It was a long, slow crawl to sunset, the dusk muted and subtle on an eastern-facing coast. But when the blue went out of the water, he headed down to the beach, to the thatched shack that Voorhees had managed to procure with his dwindling bankroll.

The man was sitting on a rough-hewn chair outside, smoking a cigarette and staring out at the water.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” he said when he saw Frank.

Frank nodded.

“I mean, you’re the guy, aren’t you?” Voorhees said, only a slight quiver in his voice. “The guy they sent?”

“Yeah.”

Voorhees nodded.

He looked more worn out than scared. There was this look of resignation on his face, almost relief, not the hard edge of fear that Frank had expected. Yeah, Frank thought, or maybe it’s just the soft glow coming off the ocean at dusk that takes the edge off. Maybe it’s the fading light that makes Voorhees look tranquil.

Voorhees finished his cigarette, took the pack from the pocket of his faded denim shirt, and lit another one.

His hands were shaking.

Frank leaned over and helped him hold the match steady.

Voorhees nodded his thanks. After he’d gotten a couple of drags down, he said, “It’s thebullet I’m afraid of. The thought of it smashing in my head.”

“You won’t feel anything.”

“It’s just the thought-you know, my head blown away.”

“That doesn’t happen,” Frank said, lying. Do it now, he told himself. Do it before he knows it’s happening.

Voorhees started to cry. Frank watched the water well up in his eyes, saw the man bite his lip and try to hold it back, but the tears overflowed and rolled down his cheeks, and then Voorhees just lost it. His head slumped and his shoulders bobbed up and down as he sobbed.

Frank stood there and watched, aware that he was violating one of Bap’s key precepts. “You don’t need to give them last words or last rites,” Bap had lectured. “You ain’t a warden or a priest. Get in, do the job, get out.”

No, Bap wouldn’t have approved of this scene.

Voorhees finished crying, looked up at Frank, and said, “I’m sorry.”

Frank shook his head.

Then Voorhees said, “A doctor in Guadalajara wrote some scrip for me. Tranquilizers.”

Frank already knew this. The doctor had given it up to him for a couple of hundred in cash. So much for the Hippocratic oath.

“I still have most of them,” Voorhees said. “I mean, I think I haveenough. ”

Frank thought it over for a few seconds.

“I’ll have to stay with you,” he said.

“That would be okay.”

Voorhees got out of the chair and Frank followed him into the little shack. Frank went into a canvas bag that had once been Voorhees’s carry-on and now contained all his earthly goods. He took out a vial of pills-Valium, ten-milligram dosage-and a bottle of vodka, about two-thirds full.

They went back outside.

Frank sat down on the sand.

Voorhees sat back down in the chair, shook a handful of pills into his hand, and swallowed them with a swig of vodka. He waited a few minutes, then did it again, then a minute later took the last of the pills and sat sipping on the vodka bottle as he looked out at the ocean.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” he mumbled to Frank.

“Beautiful.”

A second later, he lurched back in the chair, then forward, and he slumped over onto the rocks.

Frank picked him up and put him back in the chair.

He went back to the village, found a working telephone, and made a call to let Donnie Garth know that he was safe.

Frank went home from that job to find that Patty had changed the locks on the doors. Tired, angry, and sad, he kicked the front door in. Called a locksmith buddy at two in the morning to put new locks in, then went upstairs, got into the shower, sat down under the steaming water, and cried.

The next night, he drove to Garth’s house-to do what exactly, he didn’t know. He parked across the street and sat in the car for a long time. Garth was having a party. He watched the expensive cars and the chauffeured limousines pull into the circular driveway and he looked at the beautiful people in their beautiful clothes get out and go to the door. It looked like a benefit, a fund-raiser for some charity-the men were in black tie, the women in evening dresses, their hair up, exposing long, graceful necks adorned with glittering jewels.

How many people, Frank asked himself, have to die so the beautiful people can stay beautiful?

Question for the ages.

The picture window was open and there was a golden glow inside. Frank could see Garth flitting around, playing the social butterfly, making jokes and glittering conversation, and Frank figured it had to be his imagination, but he thought he could hear the laughter of elegant women and the clinking of priceless crystal.

It would have been an easy shot, he knew, even through the glass. Use something fast and heavy like a. 50 sniper rifle steadied against the car window, squeeze the trigger, and blow Donnie’s boy-wonder brains all over his lovely guests.

Nowthat would have been a benefit. To a lot of people, Frank thought.

If he had known then…but he didn’t.

Then he thought it might be fun just to walk in there. Stroll up to Garth in the middle of the glittering crowd and say, “Donnie, your tit’s out of the wringer. Again. I killed Jay Voorhees for you, same way I killed Marty Biancofiore.” See what your high-class friends would have to say to that.

But he thought, Probably nothing. They’d probably get off on it.

So he sat in the car and watched San Diego’s finest come and go. It was in theUnion-Tribune the next morning, on the society page, how Donnie Garth had raised almost a million dollars for the new art museum.

Frank used the page to wrap fish.

When the news got out that the former chief of security of the Paladin had died of an overdose in Mexico, guys in the know just naturally assumed that Frankie Machine had forced him to take the pills. Frank never did anything to disabuse them of the notion.

It was just a technicality anyway, he thought.

You can’t slide on this one just because you didn’t hold the gun to his head, just because you gave him a choice, cut the guy a break. I don’t know-maybe itwill mean a couple of centuries less in purgatory. More likely, a slightly nicer niche in hell.

Me and Donnie Garth, at the same party at last.

Garth flipped later, of course. The feds got him in a room and he gave up the whole thing.

Frank waited for the call to come, but it never did.

It took him years to figure out why Donnie Garth got a pass.