The Second Life of Nick Mason (13 page)

This was a secure police building—you wouldn’t even get to this floor if you weren’t a cop or else a cop was escorting you. But Sandoval still had to sit on the hard wooden bench in the little waiting area like he was an informant off the streets waiting for his meal
money. He could see over the half wall into the bull pen of SIS desks, arranged in random clusters. There were a dozen officers walking back and forth between the desks or talking on the telephones. The SIS uniform seemed to be tailored suits with the jackets hanging on the backs of chairs, everyone in dress shirts and ties, a few with suspenders.

Sandoval couldn’t help but notice the energy in the room. There was a testosterone-fueled buzz that seemed to hang in the air like the static electricity before a thunderstorm.

Then Sandoval noticed the one man standing still among all the others. He had his suit jacket on and was over by the big warehouse window, looking out at the summer day.

Making Sandoval wait. Making him absorb the atmosphere of this place, where the best cops in the city did their work.

Sandoval felt his blood pressure rising until finally the man turned and came toward him. Sergeant Bloome had that same imperial walk, those cold gray eyes looking out at the world from somewhere above it. As Bloome got closer, Sandoval could see a small black band stretched across the lower two points of the silver star on his belt.

Everyone in the unit was probably wearing one, Sandoval thought. In memory of Sergeant Jameson.

“Detective Sandoval,” Bloome said, swinging out the half-wall door and holding it open. “This way.”

Sandoval followed him into the bull pen. He took a quick scan of the place, saw three different bulletin boards with photographs tacked on them. Some were mug shots, others were obviously the product of a long-range surveillance camera. All of the SIS cops were giving Sandoval the eye as he walked between their desks,
measuring him, forming their own opinions of this outsider who’d been summoned here.

“We’ll talk in here,” Bloome said, leading him into an interview room. Like everything else, it was newer and cleaner than any interview room at Area Central Homicide. Bloome closed the door behind him and waited for Sandoval to sit down on one side of the table. Then Bloome sat across from him.

“I won’t waste any more of your time,” Bloome said, making it sound exactly like it was his time that was already being wasted. “One of my men heard you call in a plate today.”

“A cop calling in a plate. Go figure.”

Even seated, Bloome seemed to be looking down at Sandoval. His expression didn’t change. “Tell me why you’re interested in the driver,” he said.

This guy’s got ears everywhere, Sandoval thought. A one-minute exchange on the radio and he’s all over it. Which makes me wonder how I would have played this if I knew it would cause such a stir.

Hell, probably exactly the same way.

“You guys don’t have anything better to do? Sit around and monitor the radio all day?”

Bloome studied him carefully. “You know what we do here?” he said, nodding toward the closed door. “We’ve taken four hundred pounds of heroin off the street this year. Fuck knows how many guns on top of that. You want to come down to the evidence room and see?”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“We report directly to the supe, and we can take over any case we want. At any time.”

Sandoval had already seen it, in the motel room, when Bloome
had told him SIS was taking over the investigation of Jameson’s murder. That was the rule and it came straight from the superintendent himself—if SIS takes over, you get out of the way. There is no argument, no appeal, no room for discussion. If SIS wants your case, it’s theirs.

But there’s no way I’m gonna give them Mason, Sandoval thought. Hell, it’s not even a case. It’s something more.

“The driver of that Escalade,” Sandoval said, watching Bloome’s eyes, “Marcos Quintero. You think he’s part of a case I’m working on. And you want it.”

“I don’t know anything about your caseload,” Bloome said. “But I know you homicide guys usually have your hands full. And Quintero happens to be someone who’s already on my radar.”

“How do you know him?”

Sandoval watched Bloome working over the question.

“He’s a person of interest,” Bloome finally said. “That’s all I can say.”

Sandoval took a moment. He had to decide how to play this. “I’m watching someone else,” he said, “and Quintero shows up. I wonder who he is. That’s it.”

Bloome leaned back in his chair. He didn’t say a word.

This is where you keep your mouth shut, Sandoval thought. You wait to see what happens next. Because that might tell you everything you need to know.

“I’m going to bring in two of my men,” Bloome said. “Then we can keep talking.”

I just told him I was watching someone else, Sandoval said to himself. And yet he’s not asking me who that someone is.

Because he already knows.

Bloome was startled when Sandoval stood up. This was clearly something that didn’t happen. Ever.

You don’t get up and walk out of this room before you’re told to do so.

“Detective,” Bloome said, “where the fuck do you think you’re going?”

“I’m going back to work,” Sandoval said as he opened the door and walked through it, never looking back. He could feel a dozen eyes burning right through him as he made his way through the office and out the door.

•   •   •

I
t was late in the afternoon now. Mason trailed the 300 as it headed back north through Englewood. It pulled over on a street in Woodlawn and stopped at one of those rent-to-own places where you pay a little every month for furniture and electronics.

Mason watched them pay their visit to the manager, then get back in the car and take off, but this time they went to the expressway and headed downtown. They got off around the Loop and disappeared into the late-afternoon traffic. Two times, Mason thought he had lost the car but picked it back up again, until he saw it pull over in front of Morton’s Steakhouse.

A second black Chrysler 300 was already parked out front. The doors opened and a woman got out from the back. From forty yards away, Mason could see why a half-dozen other men on the street were already staring at her. She was a perfect blonde with a perfect body, right off a Stockholm runway, the kind of woman only a man like Tyron Harris could afford.

Harris greeted her with a kiss. Then the four of them—Harris,
this woman, and the two bodyguards—went inside, leaving the two drivers outside in the cars.

Mason parked the car, got out, and wolfed down a Polish dog at a place down the street, from where he could still see the cars. Unsure whether to call Quintero again, he decided to finish the day with Harris first. Waiting back out in the BMW, he could picture the scene inside the restaurant—bottles of wine and waiters falling all over themselves.

When the party broke up, Harris and the woman came out on the street, followed by the bodyguards, and this time both drivers got out of the cars and met with them. Everyone stood there, nodding and bumping fists. Still all business, but a little more relaxed. Taking their cue from the boss.

The woman got in the car with Harris, along with the bodyguards. Harris’s car took off in one direction while the other car went in the opposite. Mason kept his eye on Harris’s car and followed it back to the expressway. The sun was going down. He checked the gas tank and realized he didn’t have many more miles left.

But he didn’t have to go far. They stayed in the local lanes and got off on Forty-third Street. Just a few blocks in, they stopped at an old three-story brick building surrounded by two empty lots. Harris, the woman, and the bodyguards went inside. The driver stayed in the car.

Mason stayed a block away. He didn’t want to get too close. With no other cars on the street, he’d be spotted in a second.

So this is Harris’s home, Mason thought. It didn’t look like much from the outside, but that was probably the point. There was plenty of room on the inside, and a little money could have turned it into something comfortable.

The best part of all was, Mason knew exactly where he was. He was in Fuller Park, which meant he could have gotten out, walked down past the stoneworks to the tunnel on Forty-fifth Street that would take him through the embankment and under the railroad tracks. On the other side of those tracks was Canaryville. A few more blocks and he’d be standing in front of his old house.

They called that embankment the Berlin Wall when he was growing up over there. They probably still did, because things like that don’t change. You never went through that tunnel under the Berlin Wall. You stayed where you were, surrounded by your own.

He picked up the phone and called Quintero. He heard a woman’s voice in the background, words exchanged in Spanish. Mason gave him the update. He had found Harris’s home base. But he was surrounded by bodyguards at all times. Right now, there were two men in the house with Harris and the woman. Another in the car outside, and Mason wouldn’t be surprised if that man stayed there all night.

“It’s going to be hard to get to him,” Mason said. “He’s never alone.”

“You keep watching him. You find a way.”

“Do the math,” Mason said. “Wyatt Earp couldn’t get to this guy.”

“I’ll see if I can get you some help tomorrow.”

“What are you talking about? What kind of help?”

“You’ll know it when you see it,” Quintero said. “Then you’ll get your shot.”

The call ended.

As the street went dark, Mason sat there with the phone still in his hand, watching the house of a dead man.

Mason’s time had run out. He would get no chance to kill today.

It was midnight. The one man was still sitting in the car on the street. From a block away, Mason saw the window open and the hot red speck of a cigarette. A blue glow flickered in one of the top-floor windows for a while, then went out. Harris and his woman were in bed. Mason pictured the two bodyguards somewhere downstairs, probably sleeping in shifts.

He pulled away from the curb and drove north. He wasn’t sure whether Diana would still be at the restaurant at this hour, but when he came up Rush Street, he saw the Camaro parked out front. He couldn’t imagine somebody watching the car all day, but he looped around the block and parked in back just in case. He went in through the back door and found Diana alone in the office, reviewing the day’s receipts cashed out by her staff. Her eyes were closed and she had her head propped up with her right hand.

“I’m here,” Mason said.

She came back to life with a start.

“Didn’t mean to scare you,” he said. “You should have gone home.”

“Had to close out the day.”

“You always leave that back door unlocked?”

“Everybody left. They forget sometimes.”

Mason looked around the office, then out the door at the darkened dining room. “You shouldn’t be alone here,” he said. “Somebody could walk right in.”

“You don’t have to worry about me, Nick.”

Mason leaned back against the frame of the doorway. All he’d done that day was drive around looking for one man, then watching that man. Nothing else. So why was he so tired?

“You still haven’t told me why you’re here,” he said.

She looked at him. “I work here.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

He waited for her to answer. After a few moments, she finally spoke.

“I told you my father worked with Cole. He always fascinated me, from the first time I met him. He had this . . . way about him. This
presence
. After my father was killed, he asked me to move into his town house. I was already becoming attracted to him by then, so it wasn’t a hard decision. I didn’t have any other place I wanted to go. But then I started to see what his life was really like.”

She paused for a moment.

“He never tried to hide any of it from me,” she said. “There were no secrets because there was never any question of me leaving. Ever. When they arrested him, he told me to stay here. He said he’d be watching me every minute. And that someday he’d be back.”

“He’s in for all day and a night,” Mason said. “Life without parole.”

“I’m telling you, he’ll find a way.”

Mason didn’t try to argue with her. On some level, maybe he even believed the same thing.

“In the meantime, I have this,” she said, nodding toward the open doorway. “I run this place. It takes everything I’ve got. It’s not the best life in the world. I know that. But it’s mine.”

She looked up at him. Mason nodded. He understood. Maybe he was the only person in the world who could.

“Come on,” she said as she stood up. “It’s late.”

He followed her to the back door and watched her lock it. She got in her BMW and left him there. He walked around to the front of the restaurant, got in the Camaro, and sat there for a moment. By the time he got back to the town house, she’d be upstairs. He’d sit by himself for a while, maybe out by the pool. He wouldn’t be able to sleep. Not tonight.

Especially now, after talking to Diana, hearing about how her life had turned forever. How from one day to the next it would never be the same again.

For her, it was meeting her father’s partner, the man named Darius Cole.

For Mason, it was something else entirely.

He drove south, down quiet, empty streets, to the edge of the city. Crossing the Ninety-fifth Street Bridge, he parked outside the fence line, turned the engine off, and opened up the windows to let the night air in.

Five years later, Nick Mason had come back to the harbor.

This is where the railroad tracks came in from the state line and joined the big oval that ran around the Port District. Freight cars were stacked in neat rows in the interior, all lit up with artificial light. On the opposite side, the dark water of the Calumet River
flowed into Lake Michigan. The big ships all came here to unload, down here on the ass end of town, just this side of Indiana.

In a city that never put on too much makeup to begin with, this was where the landscape looked its hardest. It was all dirt and iron, and on one side of the shore, there was a great pile of old cars as if the ships had passed by and thrown them off like garbage on the side of a road.

This is where it happened, Mason said to himself. This is where you fucked up your life forever.

The job had been conceived as a misdirection, something you can pull off right under a man’s nose because he’s watching for something else. When you look at this Port District and all of the freighters unloading, you think, There’s only one way this can happen. One of these freight cars will have a certain something inside. Which we’ll proceed to unload into these two trucks and then drive to Detroit. Where we’ll be paid over a hundred thousand dollars each.

A huge payoff for one night’s work, if it was really possible. But, of course, it wasn’t. Not even close. The level of security here at an international port—the quarantine area, the cameras, the around-the-clock guards . . . Even if you had someone on the inside, how would you get all that weight moved onto the trucks without anyone noticing within two minutes? That was Mason’s first objection when the four of them were sitting around that table at Murphy’s. The day they met Jimmy McManus.

McManus wore expensive clothes, he had a gold ring in one ear, and he talked like a man who knew how to do things. But Mason had this guy pegged, first sentence out of his mouth. When he was eight years old and his mother called him in the backyard, the first thing out of his mouth was “I didn’t do it!” He was a Grade A fuckup when he was a kid, he was a Grade A fuckup when he was a
teenager, and now he was a Grade A fuckup as a man. He was absolutely the last guy you’d ever want on a job. It violated a half dozen of Mason’s rules just sitting here at this table listening to him.

“You’ll never move that much freight out of the Port District,” Mason said to him. “It’s impossible.”

“What kind of jackass do you think I am?” McManus asked him, and Mason had one or two answers ready. But then McManus laid out the plan.

Just beyond the Port District, after one bend in the river, was the area where sailboats and other smaller craft went for dry dock. That’s where the boat would be found. Everyone would be watching the Port District while the trucks left the dry dock and drove right past them.

“So why you?” Mason asked. “They got this valuable shipment coming in, how come they put you in charge of delivering it to Detroit?”

“They need four locals. Four white-faced boys from Chicago who won’t look out of place on the dry dock. Who can get the trucks in and out without having to stop and ask for directions.”

“You said a hundred thousand. That’s each man’s share?”

“I get two hundred for setting it up. You guys all get a hundred.”

“Then you can forget it,” Mason said. “Equal risk, equal pay. A hundred and twenty-five per man.”

Looking back, he should have already been on his feet and out the door instead of sitting there arguing over payouts. When McManus gave in, Mason looked at Eddie and he could tell his friend was thinking about it. He’d been sitting back and listening carefully, the way he always did. Absorbing every word and putting it together in his mind.

Mason dragged his friend outside.

“That man’s a clown,” Eddie said. “But I like the angle. Avoid the hot spot but don’t try too hard to hide.”

“Don’t do this because you want to buy a house,” Mason told him. “Do it because you think we can get it done and get out.”

“You could do a lot with that money, too,” Eddie said. “Think about Gina. And Adriana.”

“I wouldn’t even consider this if you weren’t a part of it. If you walk, I walk.”

“You know I’ll have your back,” Eddie said. “Don’t I always?”

“So you’re saying you’re in.”

Eddie looked at him. He didn’t have to say it. He was in.

Two days later, the four men arrived at the dry dock with the two panel trucks. McManus had found the trucks somewhere, each one with a lot of miles on it and four bad tires. No shocks left at all. But the trucks were clean and forgettable and that’s all they needed.

Mason drove one truck. He had Finn with him because Mason was the only man who could keep Finn calm if things went sideways. That left Eddie driving with McManus. They pulled into the dry dock area just as the sun was going down. They were wearing gray coveralls and baseball hats. The idea was to look busy, to look like they belonged there. You see four men loading up trucks, doing what looks like boring, productive work, you leave them alone.

Mason was surprised when they pulled up to the boat. It had come in earlier that day and was tied up along the edge of the dock and was bigger than what he’d been expecting. It was some kind of passenger ferryboat, at the end of a long journey from Canada, where it had been used for many years in Toronto’s Inner Harbour. At least a hundred feet long, it was built to look like one of those old-fashioned paddle wheelers, with the long double-decker canopy and two dozen rows of padded benches.

The four men got out of the trucks and boarded the boat. They started pulling up the pads from the benches and bringing them back down to the trucks. It was late enough in the day that there were no other people around on the dry dock. But not so late that they couldn’t see what they were doing. It was Eddie who had taken the time to make up the cover story about how this boat was scheduled to begin its overhaul the next morning and how he and the three other men had been contracted to pull out all of the existing upholstery. Hard, dirty, boring work that nobody else wanted to do. And yes, they were getting a late start on it. It had been one of those days. Rounding up the right crew. Then one of the trucks broke down. And so on. Eddie even had a work order made out to show if somebody happened to wander by and ask for it.

Eddie was good at cover stories and he was a natural-born actor. Finn could play along, but he could be counted on to stay in character for only so long. When the spell was broken, it was broken beyond repair and he would lose his game completely.

Mason kept an eye on Finn as they tore out the padding of one bench after another. He seemed to be doing just fine. It didn’t look like they’d have any reason to use Eddie’s cover story or to show the work order to any curious dockworkers who happened to wander over. There was a constant thrum of activity over in the Port District, but here at the dry dock it was deserted.

There was a sharp smell in the air. Diesel fuel, gasoline, dead fish. The last light of the day created a rainbow sheen on the surface of the water.

They worked for over an hour. Pulling up the padding was hard work. The pads weighed more than Mason would have imagined and he had to wrap his arms around each one to wrestle it off the boat and into the truck, feeling the rough wood of the backing
against his forearms and breathing in the dust from the padding he had to carry so close to his face. When they were done with the padding, they started in on the life vests. These were stacked tightly underneath the benches and stowed in side compartments along both gunwales.

“A hundred twenty-five grand,” Finn said to Mason as they were jumping off the boat for the last time. “Not bad for one night’s work.”

“We’re not done yet,” Mason said. “Keep your head on.”

“I told you this guy was for real,” Finn said. “You gotta admit, it’s a pretty smooth play.”

Mason kept hoping that Finn would shut the hell up. But he knew that Finn liked to keep talking and talking when he was doing a job and that it made him feel better. Like a release valve. So he let him keep going on about the money and what he was going to do with it like he already had it in his pocket.

Mason knew it wasn’t that easy. Not yet. They still had to close up the trucks and get the hell out of there. Then drive the four and a half hours, curling south under the lake and through Indiana, then across the wide, flat plain of southern Michigan, all the way to Detroit. They had an address to drive to. Some old building deep in the heart of Detroit that nobody knew anything about. It was the part of the trip Mason wasn’t looking forward to. But Finn and McManus were both convinced there was a big player out there who wouldn’t think twice about paying that kind of money, especially for two trucks full of old boat padding and life vests that were actually worth about ten million dollars. If it was cocaine, which was Mason’s best guess about what they were now hauling in these trucks, that meant about five hundred pounds of the stuff. A quarter ton. Hard to believe they could fit all that in a bunch of old bench padding and life vests, but, damn, if it wasn’t a total bitch lugging all of
that stuff off the boat. Mason knew he’d be sore as hell the next morning. But the money would make it a lot easier to deal with.

A better house for Gina. Maybe even college for Adriana. That’s what he was thinking.

It was just getting dark when they finally slammed the truck doors shut and got in the cabs. Mason had Finn with him again. He could practically feel the man vibrating in the seat next to him. McManus pulled his truck out of the lot and Mason followed him. The road took them over the railroad tracks and through an old neighborhood of two-story brick buildings.

They didn’t notice the car behind them. They didn’t know that in that car were two DEA agents, out of a half dozen who had been staking out the Port District that evening, operating on a tip that a major shipment would be unloading at the harbor. They’d made the same assumption that Mason had made when he’d first been told about the job. If it’s coming through the harbor, it’s on one of the freighters.

•   •   •

T
he agents were settling in for a long night of surveillance. There was a lot of ground to cover, if you looked at the road and the long fence around the railroad tracks, and even at the waterline itself. There was no reason why you couldn’t pull up a fast boat at the mouth of the river, load up, and then take off into the lake.