“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.
• • •
The 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.
Nobody paid any attention to the two panel trucks leaving the dry dock. Until Sean Wright and his partner, who were watching the southern perimeter of the Port District, happened to see the trucks rumbling by them. Sean’s partner, who was driving, pulled out and followed them. It was an unlikely lead, two trucks coming out of the dry dock, but better to make sure and not get reamed out by their boss if those trucks ended up being something they shouldn’t have missed.
• • •
Mason kept following McManus as he drove the lead truck down Ewing Avenue. There was a series of three bridges coming up ahead. They would drive under them—two for railroad tracks, one for the expressway. Mason could feel Finn starting to tense up and for once he was just about to tell him to calm the hell down. The words were right there on the tip of his tongue.
That’s when he noticed the car following close behind him. One of those dark-colored sedans that look plain and boring and suspicious. He watched his big side mirror for a few seconds, but it was too dark to see through the car’s windshield.
They came to the first bridge. Its façade was a low, crumbling band of concrete just inches above their heads. Everything narrowed under the bridge, with rusted-out I beams squeezing in close on either side of the trucks. Pale sodium lights made everything look like a fever dream. Mason checked the car behind him. It was too close. If he even tapped on his brakes, there’d be contact.
McManus slow
ed down ahead of Mason. It was too narrow for speed. One slight mistake and you’re scraping either iron or concrete or bouncing back and forth between both. They came out from under the first bridge and Mason saw the open night sky above them. The reprieve was short-lived as the second bridge loomed, even more dilapidated than the first, with a thin row of high weeds lining the tracks. The first truck was swallowed by the darkness, the sodium lights blinking and flickering now. Mason entered a second later. Another long, narrow passage, Mason holding his breath, waiting for the trucks to pass through into the open air again, already anticipating the daylight and the highway overpass beyond. A clear road ahead of them, the traffic light beyond the last bridge already turning green. He saw it all in that moment and let himself believe that they had passed through to safety.
Then a car pulled out in front of the first truck.
There was a service road from Indianapolis Avenue, cutting in sharply to merge with Ewing. An unmarked police car pulled forward and stopped, lights flashing, and everything that happened next was preordained by the basic physics of two trucks with bad tires and bad brakes suddenly trying to stop.
The lead truck hit the car. Mason’s truck slammed into the lead truck. The car behind slammed into Mason’s truck. A haze of noise pierced Mason’s ears, and then there was a slow-motion pantomime that would have been a comedy if it didn’t include such sudden deadly force—three more unmarked cars fanning out behind the first, plainclothes officers wearing tactical vests throwing open the doors and streaming toward them. Mason saw McManus already out the open door of the truck in front of him. He was running awkwardly, his head low, on a sidewalk on the other side of the iron rail. A moment later, Eddie came running behind him. Mason saw that his door was blocked by the girders and that there’d be nowhere to go even if he could get out that way. He had to get out the other door.
That’s when the gunshots started.
He looked out the passenger’s-side window just in time to see McManus fire at the two men coming out of the car behind them. One was hit. The driver threw himself to the ground on the other side of the car.
The screams of a dying man, the truck’s windshield suddenly exploding all around him as the cops in front fired on them. Mason went down and tried to take Finn with him. He pulled down Finn’s head and saw where the bullet had entered his skull through the left eye.
Mason pushed the door open and Finn fell to the pavement. Mason tried to pick him up, but he was already gone.
Shouts from the officers ahead of him, now using the first truck for shelter. The driver from the car behind him yelling, “Hold fire!” His partner was down. Those few seconds when every weapon was still, Mason saw his one chance to escape. Back to the open air between the bridges, a break in the concrete wall, through the brush and garbage, to a thin strip of land where the power lines were held high by their towers. The foliage had been trampled already by Eddie and McManus. Mason followed their trail to the high grass between the towers but did not see either man in the dark.
He heard more sirens in the distance. Every cop in the city would be out looking for them. He didn’t think any of them had gotten a clear look at his face. That was his only hope. There was a line of trees to his right. He went in that direction, knowing that it was east and that it would lead him farther from his home and from where his car was waiting in Murphy’s parking lot. But that was miles away and he’d have to find some way to get back there as quickly as possible. Which meant another vehicle.
He didn’t know the neighborhood, so he didn’t know if there was an easy spot for stealing a car, and he didn’t have his tools with him, anyway. He hadn’t carried those tools in years. He felt exposed as he came out of the woods and started walking down the street. He passed a storefront church and a liquor store. Some of the signs were in Spanish, and the people he saw walking on the other side of the street all had darker skin. He knew he’d stand out if somebody took a close look at him. The flashing lights of a police car lit the street. Mason stepped into a parking lot and pressed his body against the wall as it drove by.
He went down another half a block, waiting for more police cars, waiting for the helicopter to start circling around in the sky, shining down its white-hot spotlight.
He held off the thought of Finn’s dead body lying on the ground because right now it was all still in the moment and the moment was about getting the hell out of there. He saw the side door of a building open and the light spill out. A man came across the parking lot, stumbling his way to his car. He had his keys out in his right hand and he was singing something in Spanish.
Mason went right up to him, doing things the Finn way for once. You want something, you just take it, without another thought in your head. The man’s eyes went wide when he saw Mason coming at him in that parking lot. “Sangre,” the man said, pointing at Mason’s chest. But Mason was already on top of him before he could do anything else. The man was too drunk to put up a fight. Mason took the man’s keys and discarded the man on the ground.
He got in the car, some filthy old beater of a thing, and pulled out of the lot. When he was finally a few blocks down the street, he looked down at his chest and saw the blood. For one second he thought, I’ve been hit. Then he realized that the blood was Finn’s.
A few more police cars raced past him in the opposite direction as he made his way back to the heart of the South Side. He dumped the car a mile away from Canaryville and wiped himself off with a blanket he found in the backseat. As he walked up Halsted Street, he composed himself into something resembling a calm man taking a normal evening walk, then went in through the back door of Murphy’s and cleaned himself off in the bathroom as well as he could.
He watched the last of Finn’s blood run down the drain.
Then he got in his own car and drove home.
Gina was surprised to see him home so early. She figured he’d be out at Murphy’s until after midnight, drinking with his friends.
“I’d rather be here,” Mason said to her. “This is where I want to be.” He went into his daughter’s bedroom and sat there for a long time, watching her sleep. Then he climbed into bed with his wife and made love to her. That night would be the last time.
Now, five years and change later, Mason was sitting in his car, reliving that whole night.
The Port District was right there in front of him, glowing in the night. A turn of the head and there was the dry dock, mostly hidden in darkness.
The newspapers were still stacked in the box on the backseat. He picked them up, switched on his interior light, and paged through them. They were in reverse order, so he saw his own face on the first front page. Being led into the station, his hands cuffed behind his back.
Mason leafed through to another front-page photo, the Chicago police superintendent standing behind a microphone, telling a roomful of reporters that even though it was a federal DEA agent who was killed, today all divisions and rivalries were forgotten. Today, Sean Wright was one of them.
One more front page. The day after the bust, the trophy shot, with a line of cops standing behind a table, bags of white powder spread out in front of them. He looked at the photo closely. Something didn’t look right.
There should be more, Mason said to himself. All those hours we spent dragging the stuff off that boat, this is how much of it actually made it to the police station? Just enough for the photo op.
Mason switched off the light and sat in darkness again. He put the newspapers down and started driving, retracing their escape route. He went down Ewing, the street quiet, with everything closed up for the night.
Why did we come this way? Why didn’t we get right back onto the expressway, start making time for Detroit?
When he got to the bridges, he felt the same claustrophobic feeling as the concrete and iron closed in around him. The same cheap sodium light giving everything an otherworldly glow.
T
he street was empty and he was alone under the second bridge. He slowed down as he got to the exact spot. Here’s where Finn got shot. Here’s where Finn died, sitting on the seat next to him.
He came out from under the bridge, to the place where the cops were waiting for them. This exact spot. Of course. This is where they were waiting.
He stopped the car in the middle of the street, opened the door, and stepped out. He looked back at the bridges, at this perfect funnel that would bring anyone coming down that street right into your lap if you happened to be waiting right here.
That’s exactly how it happened, Mason thought. All those cops had to do was sit here and wait for us. Sit here and wait for McManus to lead the trucks into the trap.
He remembered what Eddie had said to him about McManus being out of the truck before the first shots were even fired. He remembered what he had seen with his own eyes—McManus firing only at the agents behind them, never at the cops in front of them. He panicked when he saw the agents blocking his escape.
It was all stacked against them that night. Everyone involved, right down to the man who put the team together in the first place.
Mason, Eddie, Finn . . . they never had a chance.
Everything else that happened, Mason said to himself, from going to prison and losing my family to meeting Darius Cole and making this deal to come back. And everything I’ve had to do, killing one man, planning on killing another . . .
It all goes back to that one night. The night we were betrayed.
23
Mason had two and a half seconds to kill five men.
He had a Glock 20 in each hand, the same type of gun he’d used at the motel room. He’d never fired with his left, but the first two men had to be done together. Take out the first bodyguard, then the second. Easy shots, then move on to the drivers. Keep firing and all five men will be dead. If he does it in two and a half seconds.
The Second Life of Nick Mason Page 15