The Winter of Frankie Machine

by Don Winslow

“Stay out of sight,” Frank says. “Don’t let anyone know you were talking with me.” Corky stares at him. “You gonna take them on, Frank? Take my advice. Don’t do it. You don’t want to end up like me.” “You’re okay, Corky.” “I won’t see another summer, Frankie.” And then he’s gone. Eyes sunk back in his head with the thousand-yard stare, and Frank realizes that Corky Corchoran is in a place where he lives alone—somewhere in the past, maybe, somewhere in the future, nowhere in the here and now.

Karen eventually served two years in some Camp Fed, but she landed on her feet when she married a Rancho Santa Fe Realtor with old San Diego money. Whores land on their backs when they fall, madams on their feet.

Donnie Garth has the shower blasting. He’s standing under the spray, looking out through the glass at the ocean, when suddenly Frankie Machine’s standing there with a pistol in his hand. Garth shuts the water off. Frank hands him a towel. “Remember me?” Garth nods. “Wrap yourself up,” Frank says.

Which pisses Jimmy off. “Look, I know who we’re working for. I know the whole fucking thing, how your senator couldn’t get his macaroni al dente, how he killed the girl, how Frankie M. dumped her body….”

“Nike pays twenty-nine cents to a child for making a basketball jersey, then turns around and sells it for one hundred and forty dollars,” Frank said. “And I’m the criminal? “Wal-Mart sends half the mom-and-pop stores in the country the way of the buffalo while they pay the kids who make their cheap crap seven cents an hour. And I’m the criminal? “Two million jobs have gone adios in the past two years, a working man can’t afford a down payment on a house anymore, and the IRS mugs us like drunks at an ATM, then sends our money to a defense contractor who closes down a factory, lays off workers, and pays himself a seven-figure bonus. And I’m the criminal?

“You could take the Crips, the Bloods, the Jamaican posses, the Mafia, the Russian mob, and the Mexican cartels, and all of them put together couldn’t rake in as much green in a good year as Congress does in a bad afternoon. You could take every gang banger selling crack on every corner in America, and they couldn’t generate as much ill-gotten cash as one senator rounding the back nine with a corporate CEO. “My father told me that you can’t beat the house, and he was right. You can’t beat the White House, or the House of Representatives. They own the game and the game is fixed, and it isn’t fixed for us.