The Second Life of Nick Mason

by Steve Hamilton

  Mason knew exactly who these men were.

  29

  Mason had to confirm that Angela was not among the victims. He went halfway down the stairs, just close enough to see each man’s body, how it had landed and gotten tangled up with the others. There was no woman here.

  Quintero said they were looking for her, Mason said to himself. If she was here, then they must have taken her away after killing every single one of these men.

  Meaning I got here too late. And now it’s time to get the hell out of here.

  As Mason went back up the stairs, he mentally retraced his steps through the house, thinking about every surface he might have touched. He didn’t think he’d put his hand anywhere except for the back door itself. Simple enough to wipe down the knob on his way out, which was the one direction he was now headed. He grabbed a dish towel from the kitchen.

  He opened the back door and was just about to wipe the knob. That’s when he heard the voice.

  One more thing about these old houses—they have the ventilation system that runs in open ducts between the floors. He could remember living in old pieced-out apartments in shithole houses in Canaryville when he was growing up and how sometimes you could actually see through the vents to the apartment below you. Interesting if the person down there was worth looking at. Not so interesting if it was some drunken asshole in his underwear yelling at his wife.

  He heard the voice again. Hoarse and strained, almost unintelligible. It might have been the whimper of an animal. An alarm clock was already going off in Mason’s mind. He’d been here too long. Being in the same house for more than a few minutes with four dead men piled up in the basement seemed like a violation of one of his rules. Or, in any case, a really bad idea.

  But he had to find out where the voice was coming from.

  He started into the main part of the house and saw the ghostly shadows of upturned furniture. The dining room table on its side, all of the chairs thrown around the room and broken. A cabinet of drawers emptied.

  Mason stood and listened again. Then he went into the front room and saw thin threads of blood woven together on the floor. Bullet holes in the walls.

  He went up the stairs.

  A spiderweb of cracks spread out from the center of a huge HD screen, even bigger than the screen in the town house. Everything else in the room was opened up and turned over, but there was no more blood up here. No more bullet holes. Just anger and destruction.

  The third floor had two bedroom suites with whirlpool tubs, tile showers, king-sized beds, and everything else you could ever want. Every drawer and cabinet had been emptied.

  More anger, more destruction.

  But no bullet holes. And no blood.

  He got down and looked under the bed in the first room. The closet had been emptied, but he took a moment to kick through the pile of clothes on the floor. Same in the second room.

  There was an even bigger pile of clothing in that closet, but there was nobody hiding there. He looked up at the ceiling and started to wonder about the attic.

  The voice spoke again and this time Mason could make out a word. A woman’s voice, almost singsong now. Saying the same word over and over. It sounded like . . . Jordan?

  He waited.

  Nothing happened.

  But then he looked more closely at the back wall. A wire shelf with a break in the middle was mounted on the wall. He wrapped the dish towel around his hand, grabbed the shelf, and pulled.

  Half of the back wall started to swing forward. There was nothing but darkness behind the wall until he swung his flashlight and saw a woman’s wide-open eyes.

  And the gun barrel pointed right at his chest.

  Her eyes got wider and Mason knew her finger was already tightening on the trigger.

  A first-time shooter will squeeze the trigger and pull the shot high and right. It’s the only thing that saved him.

  Mason dropped to the ground as the gun shattered the silence of the room and he felt the bullet pass over his left shoulder.

  He rolled away from the closet and came up on one knee.

  “Don’t shoot!” he said. “Angela, you need to trust me. I can get you out of here.”

  “Where’s Jordan?” she said, her voice ragged.

  “How long have you been in there?”

  “I don’t know. Hours. He told me to stay here. He told me to shoot anybody else who came into the room.”

  Mason remembered seeing Angela get out of the car at the restaurant and the driver who seemed to double as her bodyguard. He figured that must have been Jordan.

  And that Jordan was one of those men at the bottom of the basement stairs.

  “Jordan is dead,” he said.

  He waited a minute and listened to her softly crying. Then he got to his feet.

  “Come on,” he said to her. “We need to get out of here.”

  She came out of the closet with the gun still in her hand.

  It was a Beretta M9. Probably Jordan’s gun. And probably why Mason was still alive. The thing weighed two pounds, with a fifteen-round magazine. If she’d had her own little Beretta Nano, she probably would have shot him right in the head.

  “Give me the gun.”

  She looked down at the gun and then handed it to him. He tucked it into his belt.

  Her face and hair were a mess from all of the crying, and from hiding in that little secret compartment for God knows how long. But she was still beautiful.

  “Where are we going?” she said, wiping her eyes with both hands.

  “Anywhere you want to go.”

  “Are you sure Jordan’s dead?”

  Mason had been thinking she was some kind of fashion model from Sweden the first time he had seen her with Harris outside Morton’s. This time, he was hearing her talk with the classic flattened-out vowels of a South Sider. This woman was more Stockyards than Stockholm.

  “He’s dead,” Mason said. “They’re all dead.”

  He thought she’d start crying again. But, instead, she looked at him with what seemed to be a sudden hatred.

  “I recognize you,” she said.

  “The club,” Mason said. He flashed back to that moment when Harris got up from the table and this woman held back the bodyguard who was about to accompany him to the bathroom.

  “Yeah,” she said, looking away. “I was there. Now you want to buy something from me.”

  She went back to her hiding place, bent down in the darkness, and picked something up. When she stood up again, she handed it to Mason. It was the size of a hardcover book. But it was made of shiny black plastic.

  “You wouldn’t be giving me anything,” she said, “if I didn’t have this. And you wouldn’t give a shit about me getting out of here.”

  If I didn’t give a shit, Mason thought, I’d shoot you and take it off your dead body.

  “What is this?” he said, turning the black box over in his hand.

  “It’s what those cops were after.”

  “Come on,” Mason said, grabbing her arm.

  He led her downstairs, but she stopped in the kitchen and demanded to know where Jordan was. He pushed her past the stairs to the basement and out the back door, not forgetting to wipe off the doorknob on his way out.

  As they stepped outside, he felt more vulnerable than ever, leading this woman across the backyard and over the fallen-down fence to the street.

  “Where the hell is your car?” she said.

  “Right down here,” he said, fighting off a sudden urge to put her back inside the house. Headlights blinded him as he opened the passenger’s-side door and put her inside. By the time he got to his own door, the car was coming up behind them, moving fast. The flashers came on, red and blue lights bouncing back and forth between the headlights. An unmarked police car.

  He found the keys and
fired up the Camaro. The tires squealed on the pavement as he hit the gas and started running.

  30

  The cop caught up to Mason by the first corner. The car edged its nose in front of his Camaro and tried to ride him right off the street.

  This wasn’t the usual unmarked police sedan, either. It was a Dodge Hellcat. Mason couldn’t see the face of the driver. He didn’t need to.

  Swinging his car to his left, he felt the scrape on his driver’s-side door as he edged back in front of the other car. The Dan Ryan Expressway was just ahead of them, but Mason wasn’t going to head that way. If this guy didn’t have help, he’d have it pretty fucking soon and they’d be able to run Mason down if he was stupid enough to get on the open road. They’d put him into the guardrail and then shoot them both. They wouldn’t even let him get out of the car.

  Mason cut the wheel, made a hard right, and then another right. Angela screamed as she was thrown against the passenger’s-side door.

  “Hold on,” he said.

  The two turns had Mason doubled back and heading west. He couldn’t see the car behind him, but he knew it wasn’t far away. Angela snapped her seat belt on and slid down in the seat, her eyes closed, as Mason gunned the accelerator.

  I’ve got one good chance here, Mason thought as he headed toward Forty-fifth Street. The embankment came up fast and he barely slowed down as he went under the bridge. The Berlin Wall, this same boundary he’d known since he was a kid. The girders flew by, just inches from either side of the car. When he came out on the other side, he was in Canaryville. He was home. Now he had both the fastest car on the road and home-field advantage.

  Mason cut down to Forty-seventh, where he’d have some room to run. He passed every car in his lane, swerving into oncoming traffic and then back, hearing a dozen different horns blaring behind him. It was late enough at night, he figured he could just barely make this work.

  He looked in the rearview mirror and saw the Hellcat two blocks behind him. Its flashers were still on and some of the other cars on the road pulled over to let it pass.

  I need some space, he thought, before I can start using the side streets. He went around the cars waiting at the next red light, coming so close to an oncoming truck that he felt it tick against the corner of his rear bumper. He swung back hard to the right and gunned it up Halsted. It was a good open stretch where he could really fly and he ran through two more red lights. When he looked in his mirror, he could barely see the flashing lights a few blocks behind him.

  Time to show you Canaryville, he thought as he took a hard right on Pershing. He looked back to make sure he was clear, threw the car onto the first side street, then took another turn and headed down through the heart of the neighborhood. He knew the streets were narrow here. He had to be careful where he was going. One car backing out of a driveway and he’d be fucked.

  But he knew which streets ran all the way through and which streets ran into dead ends. He even remembered the alleys he used as shortcuts when he was a kid.

  He went down one of those alleys, working his way past the backyard garages and squeezing past a dumpster that almost blocked him dead. He finally looped all the way around and pulled into the loading dock of the old meatpacking plant that had been standing there for a century. He wedged the car in tight between two semis. Nobody would see them here. He turned off the car so that even the low, growling idle wouldn’t be heard.

  He caught his breath for a moment while Angela slid up in her seat and looked out the window.

  “Where are we?” she said.

  “Someplace safe,” Mason said. “We’ll let them run for a while.”

  “They would have killed me,” she said. “If they had found me in that house . . .”

  Mason nodded.

  She closed her eyes and put her head back against the seat. He could see her whole body shaking. Her hair seemed to glow in the near darkness.

  “How did this get so fucked up?” she said. “Jordan was just trying to get me out. To get us both out.”

  It wasn’t hard to imagine. The man was assigned to protect this woman. He spends that much time with her alone in a car. He smells her perfume, laughs at her jokes. She starts really talking to him. She sees something in him. Something different.

  “He didn’t want to be in the life anymore,” she said. “We were going to go away together. This was our chance. That’s why I . . .”

  She didn’t finish the thought. She didn’t have to. They both knew the parts they’d played that night.

  Mason reached behind him and grabbed the black box from the backseat.

  “Are you gonna tell me what that is?”

  “That was Tyron’s insurance policy.”

  Looking it over more carefully, Mason saw access ports along one edge, where you could plug in a power supply, and then another cord to connect it to a computer.

  Or a laptop.

  “He kept records of every meeting he had with those guys,” she said. “Every deal he made. Every payment.”

  “It’s a backup drive,” Mason said. He pictured Harris, walking down the street with his laptop. Going from one place to the next. Doing his daily business.

  “It was more than just the deals,” she said. “He had this . . . thing on his laptop. Whenever he was with any of them, he’d turn it on and it would record the whole conversation. Even when the laptop was closed. It’s all there.”

  Mason remembered the coffee shop near Homan Square. The man in the suit, his arm around Harris’s shoulders. That conversation, whatever it was about, was stored inside this box, too.

  “He thought it would protect him,” Angela said, looking down at her hands. “He thought it would protect everyone. All of his men. And me.”

  Mason hefted the thing in his hand. A couple pounds of hard plastic and computer parts, whatever else was in one of these things.

  And enough evidence to bring down a whole squad of dirty cops.

  “You need to get out of town,” Mason said, “and never come back.”

  “Take me to 2120 MLK. This guy’s gonna let me stay there for a few days, then get me out.”

  No surprise, Mason thought. There will always be a man to help you when you look like that.

  They waited another twenty minutes. Then Mason pulled out from the loading dock and went back up the alley. When he got to Forty-seventh, he looked up and down the street, trying to spot the Hellcat or anything else fast enough to chase him down. He made the turn and drove at normal speed, hoping to blend back in. But he was ready to run again. One flashing light and he’d gun it.

  He went to MLK and found the address. He pulled over in front of the house and waited for the door to open. When he gave her the bag, she unzipped it and took a quick look at the contents. She let out a breath and nodded her head.

  “See ya around,” she said as she got out quickly and went to the door of the house.

  Mason watched her go inside. Then the door closed behind her.

  His cell phone rang. He took it out, expecting Quintero. I got your fucking package, he was ready to say to him. Tell me where you are.

  But it was Diana.

  “Nick,” she said.

  One word and he could already hear the fear in her voice.

  “Diana, what’s going on?”

  “They want to talk to you. Nick, get me out of here.”

  Mason didn’t have to ask what she was talking about. He could already feel it burning a hole through the bottom of his stomach.

  “Mason,” a voice said.

  “Who is this?”

  “This is Bloome. Bring that hard drive to me. We trade, the two of you walk away.”

  Mason knew it was a lie. He wasn’t going to question it. It wouldn’t help him. It wouldn’t help Diana.

  “Where are you?” Mason said.

  He l
istened carefully as he was told exactly where to go.

  “Your men are looking for my car,” Mason said. “You have to call them off.”

  “Already done,” Bloome said. “No need to do this in the streets.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  He ended the call. Then he pulled out the M9 that Angela had given him. He checked the load. It looked like the clip had been full when she had fired it at him. So with one round in the chamber, that left him fifteen.

  Fifteen shots.

  31

  As Mason looked down into the depths of the enormous quarry, he was already standing in the crosshairs of a high-powered sniper rifle. His friend Eddie Callahan was waiting in his vehicle by the gate, a Precision Pro 2000 trained at Mason’s back.

  It felt like he was standing at the edge of the world. There was a four-hundred-foot drop straight down this sheer wall to the quarry’s floor. A thin line of cars ran along the highway on the northern rim, tiny pinpoints of light like distant stars. The space between here and there just empty darkness.

  They’d been taking limestone from this place for almost a century, grinding it into powder, using it for roads, for cement, to build the skyscrapers of the city. He could taste it in the air as he scanned the canyon for any light, for any movement, for any sign at all that would tell him where they were. Where Diana was.

  He had come through at the southeast corner, had gotten out of the car and unlooped the gate’s chain. The padlock had been unlocked, as Bloome had told him it would be. He had driven through the swirling dust to the edge, where a vehicle could start the long descent down the narrow shelf cut into the wall.

  Mason took a breath and tried to clear his head. His plan was simple. He was going to save Diana. He was going to kill everyone else. Everyone he could find.

  The hesitation he felt at the motel, that would be gone. The horror he felt at the strip club, that would be gone.

  He would take all of the violence that had been forced into his life by Darius Cole and he would turn it all back on these men.

  This is why he chose me, Mason thought. It finally makes sense to me. He didn’t want some premade killer from the cellblock. He wanted to make his own.