The Second Life of Nick Mason

by Steve Hamilton

  “Tell me why I just killed a cop,” Mason said.

  Quintero didn’t move. He kept his arms folded in front of his chest and said something to the other two men in Spanish. The men laughed.

  “Tell me why,” Mason said, “before I kick the shit out of you right here.”

  Whatever trace of a smile had been on Quintero’s face disappeared in an instant. “Shut the fuck up, Mason. We got business to take care of. Take off your clothes.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “We gotta get rid of them. You smell like a slaughterhouse.”

  Mason looked down at himself. It was his first good look in bright light. Even though his jacket and pants were black, he could see that they were soaked with blood. He took the towel from the motel bathroom out of his jacket. Then he took the gloves out of one pocket. Finally, he took the gun out of the other.

  “Chingada Madre!” Quintero said. “The fuck is the matter with you? That gun is clean!”

  “So what?”

  “So you don’t bring it with you, you stupid pendejo. You leave it in the room.”

  “Excuse the fuck out of me,” Mason said. “I never shot anybody before.”

  Quintero took the gun from Mason as he said something else in Spanish to the other two men. They already had both car doors open and were working on the seats.

  “What are they doing to the car?” Mason said.

  “What do you think they’re doing?” Quintero said, taking the gloves and the towel. “Now take off your clothes. Unless you have any other surprises for me.”

  Mason took off his clothes. Quintero took them from him and put them in a garbage bag. Then he led Mason to a shower in the corner of the warehouse. He handed him a bar of soap and a large scrub brush.

  “Every inch,” he said. “No DNA, no fibers. We take no chances.”

  Mason got to work scrubbing himself down. When he was done, he stepped out of the shower. He grabbed the towel that had been put on a nearby worktable. Next to it were a pair of jeans and a shirt, underwear, socks, and shoes. He put on the clothes and looked at the rough mirror someone had screwed to the wall over the sink. The scrape over his left eye was still raw, and his whole face needed an ice bag. But he wasn’t about to ask for one. He walked back to where the men were working on the engine of the Mustang. They already had the car seats out. Now they were pulling out the battery.

  “You’re not going to chop this car,” Mason said.

  They ignored him.

  “They’re not going to chop it,” Quintero said from behind him. “They’re going to fucking obliterate it. They’re going to break it down to nothing like it never existed. That cop who saw the car? He saw a ghost.”

  Quintero took the wet towel from Nick and added it to the bag of clothes.

  “Over here,” Quintero said. He led him to the opposite side of the warehouse, where there was an incinerator. Quintero used a long pair of pliers with taped-up handles to open the door. Both men raised their arms against the sudden wave of heat. Quintero threw in the bag and it was instantly consumed by the flames. He nudged the door with the pliers until it was shut again.

  “That camera at the motel,” Mason said to him. “I didn’t see it on my way to the room.”

  “What do you think I do?” Quintero said, throwing the pliers on the bench. “Just drive around and watch you? You don’t think I had every angle at that motel taken care of? The feed on that camera was disabled. On all of the cameras, including the ones you didn’t see. I even rented out every other room.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Jameson. Sergeant Ray Jameson. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Yeah, no big fucking deal.”

  “Listen,” Quintero said, “you think that was Serpico you took out? I had to deal with that prick for years. Thought he could do anything he wanted, like he owned the whole fucking city. Whatever I paid him, he always wanted more. He was a piece of shit who happened to carry a badge in his pocket. Take away the badge and he’s still a piece of shit. Just not as useful.”

  “If he’s useful, why take him out?”

  “He stopped being useful when he stopped doing the things we paid him to do.”

  “All right, hold on,” Mason said. “You gotta understand something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I can’t do this shit.”

  “You can,” Quintero said. “You just did.”

  Mason hesitated, because he didn’t know how else to say it. He’d just killed a man, but there hadn’t been a moment of truth. He didn’t have to look the man in the eye. He didn’t have to hear the man beg for his life or watch him piss himself. He didn’t have to calmly pull the trigger and then walk away.

  Instead, it all just happened in a rush. Hell, it almost felt like self-defense. But that was a distinction he knew Quintero wouldn’t get. Mason was sent to kill the man. Mason came back. The man was dead. End of story.

  Why me? That’s the question Mason had asked Cole, sitting in that prison cell, right after Cole had made his offer to him. All those other men in that unit, many of them murderers. Multiple murderers. Men who could have killed that cop in the motel room without blinking. Why did Cole choose Mason?

  It still didn’t make sense.

  “Your new ride,” Quintero said. He led Mason to the farthest bay in the garage, beyond the reach of the fluorescent lights. They might as well have been on the bottom of the ocean. Quintero snapped on a light. The darkness separated in the glare from the caged bulb. There was something there, covered with a gray tarp. When Quintero pulled away the tarp, Mason saw a 1967 first-generation Camaro SS. It was painted jet-black, just like the Mustang. But where the Mustang was sleek and beautiful, this thing was just a beast. Twin pipes. A simple flat grille. This car was fast when it was made, too fast for any sensible person to actually drive on the street. Mason guessed it was just as fast now.

  “How many cars like this are you gonna destroy?” Mason said.

  “Maybe next time we won’t have to.”

  Mason’s heart rate was back to normal. He stood there looking at the Camaro and he thought about everything that had happened that night. This wasn’t the right way to do it, he said to himself. Go into a motel room, kill the man with a gun, drive away in a car that was unlike any other car in the city. There were too many ways it could go wrong.

  But maybe that was part of the test, seeing if Mason could deal with those problems. And then, once he did, proving to Mason that Quintero would be here for the cleanup, even if that meant destroying a car that belonged in a museum.

  It was all part of the show. And both men had learned something important about the other.

  Quintero took a set of keys from his pocket and tossed them to Mason. “Those bruises look good on you,” he said. “Make you look humble.”

  “Open the door so I can get the fuck out of here.”

  Quintero hit a button on the wall and the bay door cranked open. Mason backed out the Camaro and took off.

  • • •

  He tried to keep it out of his mind as he drove back to Lincoln Park, pulled into the town house garage, and went up the stairs. The dark cherrywood was the same color as the blood-soaked carpeting in the motel. The television was on and Diana was sitting on the leather couch, watching a cooking show, magnified on the huge HD screen. She glanced up as she heard Mason and for one moment it looked like she might ask him why the hell he hadn’t showed up at the restaurant like she’d asked him to.

  But then she saw his face. She turned back to her show without saying a word.

  Mason went into his bathroom and took off the clothes Quintero had given him. Even though he was probably the cleanest man in the world, he got in the shower and spent a half hour under the hot spray.

  His own reaction was finally coming through to him now that he had
stopped moving. He kept hearing the shot against the man’s chest, kept feeling the weight of the man’s dead body on top of him.

  I always had rules, he said to himself. They never failed me until the day I started ignoring them. Now I need some new rules. New rules for new problems.

  When he got out of the shower, he once again caught sight of himself in the mirror. The bruises were already looking worse.

  He threw on some new clothes, went out to the kitchen, and filled a plastic bag with ice. He grabbed a Goose Island out of the fridge and sat down on the far end of the couch, holding the ice against his face. Diana didn’t react. She didn’t look at him. She didn’t make a sound. She kept sitting there, watching the television.

  It was a special break-in from the local news. A woman reporter was standing outside somewhere, holding a microphone. Behind her was a thin strand of yellow crime scene tape. Behind the tape was a line of doors. Above those doors was a balcony.

  Mason knew this place.

  The crawl across the bottom of the screen gave Mason the news he didn’t need to read. Sergeant Ray Jameson, a highly decorated police officer, was killed by an unknown gunman. He leaves behind a wife and three children.

  Mason looked over at Diana. She had her knees drawn up to her chest and she was hugging them. She kept staring at the screen.

  Mason closed his eyes for a moment. He pressed the ice against his face. The cold was painful, but eventually it started to make him feel numb.

  When he opened his eyes again, the reporter was signing off. Just before the camera cut away, he saw a plainclothes police officer stepping right into the shot, blinking at the glare of the camera lights. On the screen the man looked bigger than life and Mason knew him immediately even though he hadn’t seen him in five years.

  It was Detective Frank Sandoval.

  14

  When an SIS sergeant was killed forty-eight hours after Nick Mason had been released from prison, Detective Frank Sandoval figured this was one crime scene he had to see.

  As he ducked under the crime scene tape, a uniformed officer moved to stop him. Sandoval showed him his star and the officer stepped aside to let him pass.

  He went up the stairs and down the exterior hallway to Room 215. He saw the blood on the walls first. Then the body on the floor. He took a step inside the room and looked at the exit wound on the man’s back. A bullet goes in clean, but then it meets resistance. It flattens out, slows down, and pushes the tissue in front of it like a snowplow. By the time it comes out the back, it’s not a clean missile anymore. It’s a goddamned musket ball.

  He looked up over his head. There was more blood on the ceiling. It had started to drip down onto the bed.

  He took a glance into the bathroom. He counted three towels. They were all clean. Sandoval knew there had probably been a fourth.

  Sandoval came back out into the main room. He stepped back out onto the balcony. It was after midnight. There was one news truck below him, getting a jump on the other stations, and a half-dozen squad cars, the lights bouncing blue and red on every surface. Beyond the parking lot it was just darkness and quiet streets.

  Another car pulled into the lot. A black Audi. He watched the driver get out and walk past the uniforms. They made no move to stop him. A few seconds later, he heard him on the stairs, then saw him coming down the hallway, moving with purpose. He was a tall man, with hard features, hair cut close and so blond it was almost white. His eyes were a pale, metallic shade of gray. Sandoval knew him by reputation only. It was Sergeant Bloome, one of the original members of SIS, one of the men who stood behind the mayor when they announced the big new initiative in Chicago’s War on Drugs.

  When they first put this team together, it was called Special Investigations Section. An elite task force of all the best narcotics officers in the city, handpicked by the superintendent himself. They were given their own floor at Homan Square, their own prosecutors and staff, anything they wanted. Their jurisdiction was the entire city of Chicago. They could go anywhere they wanted, talk to anybody at any time, take over any investigation. In a city overrun with drugs, they had been given a blank check from the highest levels to do whatever it took to bring down the dealers. They didn’t have cases. They had targets.

  They stood apart from every other cop on the force. You could see an SIS man from three blocks away, always in a dark suit, perfectly tailored, perfectly pressed. Expensive leather shoes. He had his pick of any car confiscated in a drug bust, so he always drove the best. Nothing like the homicide-issued Ford Fusion that Sandoval was driving.

  After two years in operation, you started to hear some things about these guys. Illegal seizures, low-level guys on the street getting robbed and beaten. Nothing to lose any sleep over, since they were making arrests every day, piling up numbers that a homicide detective could only dream of. The crime rate went down. The mayor was happy. The brass was happy. So the rumors were ignored, and every uniformed officer—like those guys standing down there in the parking lot, letting Bloome walk by with nothing but a nod—they all kissed SIS ass, because SIS was what every Chicago cop wanted to be. They were stars. Celebrity cops.

  Bloome passed by Sandoval without even looking at him. He went into the room. Sandoval waited. A minute later, Bloome came back out. He leaned over the railing, breathing in the night air. Then he finally looked up and noticed Sandoval standing there.

  “Who are you?” he said.

  “Detective Sandoval. Area Central Homicide. Got a question for you.”

  “For me?”

  “You’re SIS,” Sandoval said. “Jameson was SIS.”

  “Wow, you’re some kind of investigator,” Bloome said. “Whose dick did you suck to make detective?”

  “Why was he here alone?”

  Bloome took his arms off the railing and stood up straight. “Guy I worked with for twenty fucking years is dead on the floor in there,” he said. “A friend. A great cop. So I’m not in the mood to answer your bullshit questions.”

  “You see a suitcase? He wasn’t staying here. What was he doing, meeting a CI?”

  “He was doing whatever the fuck he was doing,” Bloome said. “Before somebody blew a hole in him. We’re taking this case, by the way, so you can leave.”

  “It was never mine,” Sandoval said. “Ryan’s downstairs. He’s caught it.”

  Bloome worked that over in his head for a moment. “Then what the fuck are you doing here?” he said. “That’s a dead cop on the floor. You got no respect?”

  “I’m working on something else,” Sandoval said. “Thought it might be connected.”

  “Connected to what?” Bloome said. “What the fuck’s the matter with you? Do you let guys off the street come walking onto your crime scenes?”

  He stopped and looked at Sandoval’s star again.

  “Wait a minute,” Bloome said. “You’re Sandoval? Gary Higgins’s partner?”

  Sandoval nodded.

  Bloome looked him up and down. “Here’s what’s gonna happen, Detective. You’re gonna get the fuck out of here right now and I’m not gonna see your face again. Any crime scene. Anyplace got anything to do with me, with my men, with SIS. Just stay the fuck away from us so the real cops can do their job.”

  Sandoval nodded. “That’s one way. Other way is I tell you to fuck off and I keep doing my job.”

  Sandoval turned and walked down the hallway. When he was in the parking lot, he looked back up at the balcony and saw Bloome watching him. Then he walked through the glare of the news team’s camera lights, got in his car, and drove away.

  15

  Ten hours after committing his first murder, Nick Mason was desperate to find one good reason for it.

  He had to see his daughter.

  Mason went to the same house, the house where Adriana woke up every morning. Came home from school, did her homework. Went outside to
play. Went to sleep. Did she still have nightmares? She had them two or three nights a week when she was four years old. How many more did she have when her father was taken away?

  He took off his sunglasses and tilted the rearview mirror to look at himself. The scrape over his left eye was still an angry red, both cheeks were still swollen, and the bruises were turning every shade of black, blue, green, and even a little yellow. Mason had been in fights before, more than he could count, and he’d lost his share of them. But it had been a long time since he looked this bad.

  When Diana had seen him that morning, she had put together another bag of ice for him, and she had stood over him for a few moments, getting a better look.

  “Let me guess,” she finally said to him, almost smiling. “I should see the other guy, right?”

  “Yeah,” Mason said. “Something like that.”

  The way he said it made her smile slip away. “Don’t say another word.”

  She gave him some ibuprofen for the swelling. Then she went to work. Mason got in his new Camaro and came out to Elmhurst. It was becoming obvious that the house was empty. He put the rearview mirror back in position and started the car.

  As he was driving away, a couple of facts came together in Mason’s mind. Gina had said that her husband and Adriana were at practice the other day. Mason remembered seeing the soccer goal in the garage, too. It was a Saturday morning in July. Maybe today was game day.

  He’d seen the high school on his way here, so he backtracked and looked for soccer fields, but saw only a football field, and the whole place was deserted, anyway. He went up a couple of blocks and found Elmhurst College and a soccer field with players on it, but no young kids. He drove around for another few minutes and was about to give up when he saw a soccer ball sticker on the back of a minivan. He followed it south, all the way to Oak Park, into a big parking lot where a half-dozen kids—all around Adriana’s age and dressed for soccer—piled out.