The Second Life of Nick Mason (4 page)

Except for the one patrol car.

Mason could imagine the two cops calling in on their radio, requesting backup. After all this time waiting, he thought, maybe we really do have to go out that back door and try to outrun them.

But then the car finally turned onto the street and drove away.

As soon as it was out of sight, they went out the back door and got in their car. Eddie carried the trash bag.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Eddie said as Mason started the car and hit the gas. When they counted the money an hour later, it
turned out to be just over nine thousand dollars. Three thousand per man. Not nearly enough money for what they had risked.

It was time to take a break. And then, when they got back together, to make a decision. Either go bigger or get out.

But then Finn did something stupid, even by his own standards. He took a girl to a bar in McKinley Park and got in a fight with one of the locals who said the wrong thing to her. Bad enough to take her out of Canaryville in the first place when there were perfectly good bars on your own home turf and nobody’s calling the cops as long as it’s a fair fight. But Finn was a stranger in McKinley Park, so a patrol car did show up and Finn ended up hitting the first cop who put a hand on him. That cop got a concussion and Finn got eighteen months for aggravated assault and obstruction. When he was released, he didn’t even bother coming back to Canaryville to face Mason and Eddie. He went to Florida instead.

It felt like one more sign. Then Eddie met Sandra. Mason got back together with Gina, and if there was still any question left, she answered it for him.

It was time to get out.

•   •   •

M
ason turned thirty and he was trying to settle down, trying to stay straight. He was married to Gina by then. Adriana was four years old. Finn had been in Florida for a few years and had just recently returned to Chicago. He got picked up again on his first night back in town. Two days later, he found Nick Mason.

“Got a job for us,” he said.

“I’m out, Finn. Forget it.”

Nick had the house on Forty-third Street and he was doing whatever straight jobs he could find. Manual labor, construction, driving
a delivery truck. The same kind of working-stiff jobs everyone else in their neighborhood did.

“You don’t look retired to me. You look busier than ever, getting up early every morning to drive that truck around.”

“It’s called working for a living. You should give it a try. Just once in your life.”

“You have to hear me out,” Finn said. “This is a onetime thing and then you’re set.”

“No.”

“You take care of your family. You buy a nicer house. You change your whole life.”

“I said no.”

“Don’t you get it, Nickie? This is your walkaway job. A half million dollars for one day’s work.”

That stopped Mason dead.

“Half a million split four ways,” Finn said. “There’s a shipment coming in through the harbor.”

“A shipment of what?”

“Shipment of I don’t know and I don’t care. That’s not the point. The point is, someone needs four men to unload it and then drive two trucks to Detroit. That’s all we’re doing and then taking half a million for our trouble. Hop on a bus back home and have a fucking party.”

“Who are the four?”

“You and me and Eddie. And this other guy.”

“What other guy?”

“This guy I met in custody.”

“An ex-con.”

“He’s not an ex-con. He never went away. He was in the holding cell when I got picked up again. They had to let us both go the next
morning. But we’re talking and he asks me if I knew two other good men.”

“Answer’s still no,” Mason said. “I’ve got too much to lose.”

“I know that, Nickie. You do this for them. Your family. Think of what that money could do for you guys.”

“Find somebody else.”

“Just meet him,” Finn said. “What would it hurt? Meet the man and hear what he has to say. If you don’t like it, you leave.”

Mason thought about it. “What’s this guy’s name?”

“McManus. Jimmy McManus.”

Jimmy fucking McManus. That was the moment. Five and a half years ago. Mason could have walked away right then. He never would have met the man. He never would have made the biggest mistake of his life.

Mason wouldn’t have gone to prison. Finn wouldn’t have gone into a cheap pine box.

•   •   •

A
s he drove through his old neighborhood, Mason was replaying that day, and a thousand others, in his head. He was recognizing every tree and every fire hydrant. Every narrow lot with every house packed in tight with only inches between them. This place where everyone lived on top of one another, where there were no secrets, where outsiders were noticed immediately and watched until they were gone.

Mason drove down one block, threading his way through the cars that lined each side of the street. He came to a stop sign, then drove down another block. Then he was there.

Five years after leaving this house, Nick Mason was back, sitting
at the wheel of a restored 1968 Mustang, a car more expensive than any car he’d ever stolen. A car more expensive than all the cars he’d ever owned himself put together. Hell, maybe more than he paid for this house back when he actually lived here.

He sat there and watched the summer day go by on his old block. A woman was walking a dog. Across the street, a little girl was riding a bicycle. She must have been about five or six. She was good at riding her bike. It made Mason remember the week Adriana learned to ride without training wheels. He looked out the car window at the exact spot where she fell.
Right there.
She got up and fell again in the same spot. She got back up and this time she kept going.

The ghost of his former life, right here in front of him, playing across four seasons. Hanging the Christmas lights, building a snowman. That almost level front porch that he built with his own hands.

Actually, the porch looked dead true. It had a natural stain before. Now it was painted bright white.

The front door to the house opened. A man came out onto the porch. A stranger. For one instant, Mason was already reaching for the car door, getting ready to confront the man. What are you doing in my house? Where’s my wife and daughter?

But then the man called to the girl who was riding the bike. This man had fixed his front porch and had painted it. God knows what else he’d done to the place. But he has every right, Mason said to himself, because he lives here. Because this is his house.

Mason was startled by the sudden rapping on his window. He looked up and saw a man standing there by the driver’s-side door. Mason used the old-school 1968 crank to slide his window down. When he looked up, he saw a familiar face.

Quintero.

“The fuck you doing here?” Mason said. “Are you following me?”

Quintero didn’t speak. He handed Mason a piece of paper. Mason took it from him.

“What is this?” Mason said.

“What you’re looking for.”

A car started honking behind them. Quintero’s Escalade was double-parked, blocking the entire street. Quintero gave the driver a look and the honking stopped. Only then did he return to his vehicle. He got in and drove off.

Mason unfolded the paper. There was an address written down. In Elmhurst, of all places.

Elmhurst?

He looked out his windshield at the Escalade’s brake lights as the vehicle slowed at the stop sign, then disappeared down the street.

You know where they live, he said to himself. I shouldn’t be so surprised, but you know where Gina lives. You know where my daughter lives.

The man standing on his front porch was eyeing him now. Mason couldn’t blame him. A strange man in a strange car parked on his street. Then a gangbanger pulls up behind him in a gangbanger Escalade, blocking the whole street. If it were Mason on the porch, he’d already be wandering down to the street for a little chat.
Can I help you out, friend? Are you lost, buddy?

Mason pulled away from the curb. When he got to the stop sign, he saw two kids in an old beater slowing down at the intersection, checking out the black vintage Mustang. They were eighteen years old, maybe nineteen. Tough Irish kids like a thousand others Mason grew up with. Like Eddie, like Finn. Like himself. Mason could see their eyes following the smooth lines of the car, then coming up to meet his.

He could tell what they were thinking. This guy must have taken the wrong turn on the expressway and found himself on the wrong street.
You have no business driving down this street,
those eyes said to him.
This is our neighborhood. You do not belong here.

Looking back at them, Mason wondered which one of these kids would fuck up his life as badly as he had himself. Maybe both of them.

He hit the gas and headed to Elmhurst.

Detective Frank Sandoval had worked a hundred brutal homicides with his old partner Gary Higgins, but he’d never seen fear on the man’s face. Not once.

Until today.

Sandoval had come up here to this little inland lake west of Kenosha, Wisconsin, not knowing if he’d found the right place until he had walked around to the lake side of the house and had seen the old Crown Vic, pulled around back so it couldn’t be seen from the road. The sun was going down by then. Sandoval held up a hand to shield his eyes and saw the silhouette on the dock. He walked down the trail, moving fast. Sandoval was built short and compact, with Latin features, and dark piercing eyes that took in every detail around him. He was a man doing the one job in the world that could contain all of his energy.

When Sandoval was close enough, the silhouette resolved into a man he would have recognized anywhere. Late fifties, with wide shoulders and not much hair left on his head. One of the most
decorated homicide detectives in the city, with a list of high-profile arrests that would run off the page.

Sandoval thought back to the first time he’d ever seen this man. It was his first day as a detective at Area Central Homicide. The commander had partnered him with Gary Higgins. First thing Higgins told him was shut up and listen. Keep your eyes open and watch me. Learn how this really works before you start thinking you know something.

It was a six-man team, working under one sergeant. It didn’t take long for Sandoval to see how the other men took their lead from Higgins. Always the first man through the door. Knew when to lean on people and when to hang back. Knew which questions to ask and the right time to ask them. If Higgins hadn’t been a cop, he would have probably been a professor of human psychology.

He did it hard. He did it right. Most of all, he did it clean.

Everything Sandoval knew about being a good homicide detective, about being a good cop, he learned from Gary Higgins. But now, as he looked down the dock, he saw his old partner sitting motionless on a folding chair between the last two pilings. The water was as flat and still as a mirror. When Sandoval took one step onto the dock, Higgins turned around quickly. The surprise on his face gave way to anger.

“Whatever answers you thought you might be getting on the drive up here,” Higgins said, “you can forget it. You’ll get nothing from me.”

“We have to talk, Gary.”

Higgins stood up and came down the dock toward Sandoval. He’d seen this man just a few weeks ago. How could he be so much thinner? He looked like a man who’d aged ten years.

“Who’m I talking to?” Higgins said as he grabbed Sandoval by the shoulders and began to pat him down. “Who else is listening?”

“Take your fucking hands off me,” Sandoval said, pushing him away. “You think I’d come here
wired
?”

He studied Higgins’s face. The lines around his mouth, the dark bags under his eyes. From two feet away, he could smell the alcohol on his breath.

“Raise your arms,” Higgins said.

“Fuck you. I’m not wearing a wire.”

“How did you find me?”

“I remembered you talking about this place,” Sandoval said. “It’s still in your father-in-law’s name, so I came up here and took a shot.”

“Who else knows you’re here?”

“Nobody. I came on my own.”

“You should have stayed in Chicago, Frank. They could have followed you. They’re probably watching us right now.”

Sandoval looked around at the empty lake. There were other houses all along the shoreline, but he couldn’t see another soul. “Jesus,” he said. “What’s the matter with you?”

Sandoval watched Higgins, waiting for the rest of his old partner to come back. The man who could never stop talking when they were on the job.

“I was your partner for six years,” Sandoval finally said. “You never took money, never crossed the line. I know you’re not jammed up, so you tell me what kind of deal you made to put Nick Mason back on the street.”

“I got nothing for you, Frank. You’re wasting your time here.”

“Thirty years,” Sandoval said. “You expect me to watch you throw that away, not say a fucking word? Give me a name, let me start helping you.”

“You can’t help me.”

“Give me one name.”

“I can’t.”

“Okay, I’ll give
you
one. Darius Cole.”

Higgins looked away. It was a fraction of a second, but it was all Sandoval needed to see.

“Yeah, now we’re getting somewhere. Darius Cole, who happened to be in the same block with Nick Mason, down at Terre Haute. Of course, you already knew that much, right? And Mason’s got what, twenty years until his first parole hearing? At least two decades before he’s out, Gary. You know where he is right now?”

Higgins didn’t answer.

“He’s in a five-million-dollar town house in Lincoln Park. Which I’m sure is owned by guess who. I haven’t dug into it yet, but I don’t have to, because you know it’s one shell company that owns other companies, one for the restaurant, one for the town house, and who knows what else. But if you follow the money, it all flows back to Darius Cole. So Nick Mason’s out of prison and soaking in a hot tub and getting ready to do . . . what? Cole knows. Maybe
you
know. What horrible thing is he out to do, Gary? Whatever it is, you’re going to be wearing it. How’s that sit with you?”

Higgins looked at him.

“He killed a federal agent, Gary. Now he’s out.”

“We never put that gun in his hand.”

“The fuck does that matter?” Sandoval said. “You know it’s felony murder as long as he’s there. Who cares if he pulled the trigger?”

Higgins put his hand on Sandoval’s chest and drove him backward, into the piling. Sandoval felt the rough wood digging into his back.

“You think I don’t know this?” Higgins said, his face two inches
away. “All of this? I know what I did, Frank. I know what I fucking did. Every night, I gotta drink myself to sleep so I don’t put a bullet in my head.”

“We can climb out of this. Together.”

“You don’t know these people,” Higgins said. “You don’t know what they’ll do to you. Is this worth your life, Frank? Your family’s life? That’s what the risk is here if you don’t stop. You say you want the answers, but you don’t. Believe me, you fucking
don’t
.”

Sandoval had seen enough pain in his life. How many times had he answered a homicide call, met the wife or the parents, and seen a whole world of it? More than one person should be asked to bear? You never get numb to it. It’s new every time.

He was seeing that now, that same kind of pain, staring back at him through his partner’s eyes.

“I’m done,” Higgins said. “I’m over. You don’t have to be. Go back to Chicago and forget you ever saw me.”

Higgins let him go. He turned away from him and went back to the end of the dock.

“I’m not going to let this go,” Sandoval said to his back.

Higgins didn’t turn. He kept walking away.

“No matter what you say, Gary, I’m not going to stop.”