The Second Life of Nick Mason (17 page)

Holding his daughter for the first time in five years had made Nick Mason more determined than ever to find a way out of this nightmare. It was the one thing giving him the strength to keep moving.

When he was near the city limits, his cell phone rang.

“Restaurant,” Quintero said. “Now.”

The call ended.

The restaurant meant one thing—Diana and the possibility that she was in as much danger as he was.

She’s just as connected to Cole as I am, Mason thought. Sandoval said as much himself.

But she has no idea who may be coming after her.

He gunned the Camaro down the expressway, crossed the Kinzie Street Bridge, and turned up Rush Street.

Quintero’s Escalade was waiting in the parking lot. The driver’s-side window slid down as Mason pulled in next to the SUV and got out.

“Where is she?” Mason asked.

“She’s safe,” Quintero said. “Inside, working. Don’t worry about her.”

“What did you call me for?”

“You need to find that woman who was with Harris.”

Mason thought back to the strip club. The blonde who ran interference with the bodyguard and gave Mason his chance at Harris alone in the bathroom.

“What about her?”

“Track her down and give her this,” Quintero said.

He reached over to the passenger’s-side seat, picked up a black leather carry-on bag, and handed it to Mason. The bag wasn’t big, but it was densely packed with something and had to weigh twenty pounds. Mason didn’t ask how much money was inside.

“She was supposed to bring something to me,” Quintero said. “Now she’s disappeared. If you find her, make sure you get what she has and bring it to me right away. Do not waste a minute, you understand?”

Mason thought about the routine he’d seen over the two days of following them. “There’s only one place I can think of finding her. If she’s not there, I got no idea.”

“Then you better hope she’s there. Her name’s Angela.”

“You gotta listen to me,” Mason said. “I don’t know what this woman has that you want so bad, but I’ve got something a lot bigger to worry about.”

“No you don’t,” Quintero said. “Stop wasting time, because the same people after you are after her.”

Mason didn’t bother asking him anything else. He’d been dealing with these cops for years and he must have known what would happen once Mason started doing his job.

Would have been nice if somebody had told me, Mason said to himself as he looped the bag over his shoulder.

“Hey,” Quintero said. “Before you go, what the fuck were you doing getting arrested today?”

Mason remembered what Quintero had said to him. That first day, sitting in his car in front of the town house.
You get picked up for
anything
, now you’ve got two problems. The one you got picked up for . . . and me.

“He went after my daughter,” Mason said.

“If you were held overnight,” Quintero said, “then everything would be fucked right now.”

Mason put a hand on the car and leaned in. “Did you hear what I said? It was
my daughter
.”

“What’s his name?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“What’s his fucking name?”

“McManus. Jimmy McManus.”

“The best thing you can do for your family is to do your job,” Quintero said. “My job is to handle anything that gets in the way of you doing that. McManus is my problem now.”

Mason looked him in the eye. He didn’t know exactly what that meant, but it probably wasn’t good news for McManus.

“Go find that woman,” Quintero said. Then he backed out and drove away.

On his way back to his car, Mason saw a man and a woman walking in through the front door of the restaurant, going inside to sit down and have a nice dinner. Normal, happy people. Diana was inside, doing her job.

I need to tell her, Mason thought. She needs to know about the wolves. Tonight. After I do this.

Mason got back in his car and headed down the street. He took a few breaths, thought about where he was going, and tried to imagine what he might find when he got to Harris’s house.

What could this woman have that every dirty cop in the city would want so badly? As he got onto the Dan Ryan Expressway, a squad car came up behind him. Mason tensed up and ran through his options. Gun it and try to make the next exit. Or look for a break in the median so he could turn and go in the opposite direction. But then the squad car blew by him.

Mason let out his breath and kept driving.

When he got to Fuller Park, he slowed down to a crawl as he approached the house. The street was just as empty as the last time he was here, the night he had followed Harris. There were no lights on in the house itself. Both black Chrysler 300s were parked out front, but there was nobody sitting in either of them. No need to provide security for Tyron Harris anymore. He was probably still lying on a metal table somewhere downtown.

Mason watched the house for a while. Then he turned and parked a block down one of the side streets. He turned off the interior light in his car and waited a few minutes. Let your eyes adjust to the dark, he told himself. When you get out, move fast, but not too fast. Look like you belong here.

Mason took out the flashlight from the glove compartment. Then he eased open his door, got out, and closed it quietly behind him. He walked back toward the house—a long minute of feeling exposed and vulnerable.

His cars are here, Mason thought. So where are his men? The house looks deserted.

An old chain-link fence, half-collapsed in on itself, bordered the backyard. He looked up and down the street and then found a spot
where he could step over it. Mason went to the back door, gave another look in every direction, then tried the knob. It was locked.

The door window had nine panes of glass. Mason hit the bottom right pane with the heel of his hand, felt the glass break, and heard it falling on the floor inside. Then he reached through to unlock the door.

He pushed the door open an inch and listened. Nothing.

Absolute silence.

He turned on the flashlight and covered most of the lens with his hand so that only a thin beam of light was cast into the kitchen. The first thing he saw was the wreckage. Both doors of the refrigerator were open and all of the contents had been spilled out onto the floor. Every cabinet was open, every dish broken.

Taking another step, he felt a shard of glass break under his foot. He stopped and listened until he picked up on a noise from somewhere above him. A creak. Then another. Could be the house settling, he thought. Probably makes sounds like that all day and night.

He stayed still and waited. He didn’t hear another sound. Then, as he swung his flashlight, he saw the door that led down to the basement. He opened it and shone his light down the stairs. The smell of damp air and mildew came rushing up at him.

And something else.

The four bodies were all piled up at the bottom. All black.

Mason knew exactly who these men were.

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 Mor
ton’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.