The winter of Frankie Machine

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.

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.