The winter of Frankie Machine

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.”