Not one word.
He went outside, took a breath of cold air, saw Alonso coming up the steps. It looked like he’d stopped to get his suit pressed on the way here, with another stop for a shoeshine while he got his hair cut.
“What the fuck took you so long?” Sandoval said, all his adrenaline finding its release. “Do you know what could have happened in there?”
“Yeah, I know,” Alonso said, stepping close to Sandoval and looking him in the eye. “You should be careful going in alone. That supercop shit’s gonna get you killed someday.”
“The fuck you talking about?”
Alonso was already shaking his head and turning away from him. Sandoval grabbed him by the lapels of his jacket.
“Hey, I’m talking to you.”
“We don’t need any cowboys on this crew,” Alonso said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means what it means,” Alonso said, looking him in the eye. “We’re not safe if you don’t have our backs. And you’re not safe if we don’t have yours.”
Alonso turned away again. This time, Sandoval didn’t stop him.
He knows, Sandoval said to himself. Which means everyone knows.
There’s twelve thousand cops in Chicago. SIS was a disgrace to every other cop who ever served this city. So some cops will shake my hand. Some will buy me a drink. Some will ignore me. Some will wonder if I’m watching them a little too closely.
But the only ones I’ll think twice about are the ones who want to put a bullet in my back.
As he watched Tony Alonso getting into his car, he noticed for the first time just how nicely he kept it polished. To go along with the tailored suit and the perfect haircut.
How many cops had been on their way to becoming SIS rock stars themselves, counting the days until they got that call from Homan Square?
• • •
A FEW HOURS LATER, after the sun had gone down and his shift was over, Frank Sandoval sat on the front porch of his dead parents’ house in Avondale. The house where he had grown up and had dreamed of someday becoming a cop like his old man. The house where he’d later move back in after his marriage ended, like a man going back in time.
He had a bottle of Dewar’s on the little table next to the wooden chair and he was drinking alone.
When he went inside, he lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling, waiting for sleep to come. He could still feel it in his bones, that moment of truth when he could have either killed a man or died himself …
And with the rat label hung on him for bringing down SIS, he wasn’t sure there wouldn’t be payback waiting for him down the next blind alley or around the next dark corner. Even so, on this night his only thoughts were of another man. The man who, less than five miles away, was sitting on the deck of a Lincoln Park town house, looking out at Lake Michigan. The man who would always live inside Frank Sandoval’s head as long as he was free: Nick Mason.
• • •
ON THE OTHER SIDE OF TOWN, Eddie sat in his Jeep, watching a house in a neighborhood they called La Villita. The Little Village.
A black Escalade was parked out front. Eddie had followed it from the shooting range, keeping the vehicle just on the edge of the horizon, until they were back on the north side of Chicago.
He’d watched his man tail Mason all the way up Lincoln Park West until the Jaguar pulled into the open garage door beneath the town house and the Escalade pulled over on the street.
Eddie watched for four hours, wondering how the hell this man could stand doing this. Must be getting paid well. Finally, as the sun went down, he saw a gray sedan pull up on the street. The driver of the Escalade got out, giving Eddie his first good look at him: middle-aged, Latino, in a T-shirt despite the cold weather. Faded tattoos on his arms. He walked over to the sedan and stood by the driver’s-side window until it rolled down. A few words were exchanged, then the man came back and got behind the wheel again. He pulled out and made the turn around the town house, leaving the sedan to take the parking spot. Eddie followed the Escalade.
He stayed behind the vehicle as it crossed the river and went south, down to the Lower West Side, with more and more Spanish on the store signs as they crossed into South Lawndale and then here. This modest little house with a little kid’s seesaw in the front yard.
Eddie wrote down the address. The first piece of information he would gather for Nick Mason to help him find a way out.
10
While Mason waited for everything else to fall into place, there was one thing he needed now. A place of his own. Beyond the reach of Sandoval, Quintero, even Diana. A place where no one could touch him. Not even Darius Cole.
“I’ve got five apartments for you to look at,” the woman said, reaching for an envelope on the cushion next to her. Her name was Alexa, and she was sitting across from Mason at a two-top booth at the back of the restaurant. With the bleached hair, the bleached teeth, she was obviously trying too hard to look twenty years younger. “They all meet your specifications and they all fall into your—”
“Great,” Mason said, rolling the bottle of Goose Island Ale in his hands. “You pick.”
“But Mr.—”
“I’ll be okay with whichever one you choose. The cash will be delivered to your office this afternoon.”
“Works for me,” Alexa said, raising her dirty martini in a toast. “You just need to fill out the paperwork and—”
“I’d appreciate it if you could take care of that, too. And remember, everything in your name.”
For the first time since she sat down, her plastered-on smile vanished.
Mason revived it. “There’ll be a cash bonus in it for you.”
As Alexa waved to the waitress for another martini, Mason saw Diana standing in the shadows, eyeing him. Not for the first time, he was struck by how beautiful she was in the most effortless way he’d ever seen. From that first moment in the town house, a day after he walked out of that prison … She had been the one person who could understand the life he had found waiting for him. Because she was living through her own version of it herself.
There was something else he had noticed about her: she never smiled. Not really. Even now, as she stood watching Mason’s table, she was still just as much a mystery as the shadows she was bathed in.
As the meal progressed, Alexa got drunker and flirtier as she totaled up the windfall she would make on the deal—“Are you sure you don’t want to see the units? We could test each one out. See how sturdy the bedroom floors are”—Mason caught glimpses of Diana. At times, he swore Diana’s expression was that of a jealous woman. Odd, he thought. I never saw that look when Lauren was around. Not once.
“A little old for you,” Diana said, coming to the table only after Alexa had gone.
“It was business.”
“What kind of business?”
“My business.”
Diana looked wounded—the first time he’d ever seen it. This was a rare day.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you were jealous.”
“Maybe I am, but not of that woman,” Diana said. “Of your freedom. You can move around. Do whatever the hell you want.”
“Mobility and freedom are two different things.”
“And I don’t have either. I’m on a tether that allows me to travel between the town house and this restaurant. That’s it.”
“Listen,” Mason said, putting his hand on hers. He wasn’t sure how much he could tell her yet. The secret apartment, the ongoing project with Eddie … It wasn’t a fully realized plan yet, with one clear step laid out after another. It was more like a crudely drawn map with a starting point in one corner and a big X marking a spot somewhere on the other side of the mountains. A spot that meant real freedom for Mason—and, by extension, for Diana. Because saving his own life meant saving hers, too.
But he didn’t want to raise her hopes yet. She’d been living in this cage for twelve years, a lot longer than he had. She’d
probably left more false hopes behind her than she could count.
Diana looked down at his hand on top of hers. It was a gesture more intimate than he had intended, but she hadn’t moved her hand away. He could feel the warmth of her skin.
“Hang on,” he said. “This won’t last forever.”
“I need to get back to work.” She pulled her hand away, not roughly, just the simple movement of a woman shifting her focus back to business.
Mason watched her as she decanted a bottle of wine on the other side of the restaurant with the care and precision she brought to even the smallest tasks. The charming mask she wore for her customers, so unlike the woman Mason saw at home. Not for the first time he was moved to wonder:
How well do I really know her?
• • •
AS EDDIE SAT IN HIS JEEP waiting for the bank to open, he wondered how a man would carry himself if he was delivering ten thousand dollars in cash to a safe-deposit box.
Eddie watched the first customer of the day, a middle-aged man in a gray suit, walk through the front door of the First Chicago Bank on Western Avenue. Eddie was the second man inside. He paused for a moment in the lobby, clocked the man doing his business at one of the tellers’ cages. Another teller caught Eddie’s eye and asked if she could help him.
“I’m thinking about opening a safe-deposit box,” Eddie said. The teller called one of the assistant managers, who took Eddie through the process, which included a look inside the room and the fact that he’d be left alone to access the box’s contents in complete privacy. Eddie thanked the woman and told her he’d think about it.
Eddie sat in his Jeep for another two hours, watching through the glass of the bank’s front door, waiting to see who else would walk across the lobby to the assistant manager’s desk. During that time, he saw three men go into the safe-deposit box area. One was empty-handed on the way into the room and carried a small black case on the way out. Another was at least ninety years old, bent over and shuffling with a cane—not a likely candidate. A third looked promising—a man in a leather jacket, bald as a cue ball, with a ring in one ear. Eddie went inside and stood in the lobby, watching the man carefully, but his impression of him shifted when the man sat in the chair across from the assistant manager and chatted with her for a solid ten minutes. He had a canvas messenger bag at his side and he went into the safe-deposit room for just enough time to drop something into a box and then leave. But the chattiness didn’t feel right.
Like Nick said, this guy will be a pro. In and out. All business.
Eddie didn’t want to raise suspicion by spending too much time waiting in the bank lobby, so he went back out to his Jeep and kept watch.
Thirty minutes later, he knew he had the right man.
A gray sedan pulled up in front of the bank. The same gray sedan—Eddie was sure of it—that he had seen parked outside Mason’s town house the night before. He remembered seeing a white man behind the wheel when the window had rolled down. It looked like the same face now as he got out of the car. The man was wearing a gray suit, tailored to accommodate his huge frame. He had a buzz cut, so short his head looked like a dirty tennis ball. Eddie picked up the digital SLR camera with the 300mm lens from the seat beside him and started taking photographs.
The man carried a leather bag into the bank. Then the passenger’s-side door opened and another man got out. He was black, bald, wearing dark sunglasses, and his suit was a lighter color of gray. Eddie took more photographs as the man waited on the sidewalk, looking carefully up and down the street.
The first man came out of the bank eight minutes later. Both men got back in the car and took off. Eddie pulled out into the late-morning traffic behind them, working his way through town, north to south, until the car got off the Skyway and made its way west.
A few minutes later, he was parked just outside the Bedford Park rail yard, the biggest in the city and one of the biggest in the country. There were thousands of railroad cars from all over North America, cranes rising high above them, and a huge wicket-shaped tower in the center of it all. Eddie had tailed them to the north side of the yards, and he took more photographs as they walked into the International Exposition Services office, then came back out a few minutes later and drove to a loading dock attached to a warehouse. There was a large panel truck with a built-in loader waiting. The driver got out and worked the loader, putting several large crates into the truck, while the other man stood by and watched, his expensive suit looking out of place in the noise and dust of the yard.
When the truck was done loading, the driver stayed in the truck and the second man got behind the wheel of the sedan. They left the rail yard in a convoy and Eddie followed as they made their way south again until the car and the truck finally pulled in behind a store on 111th Street. Eddie stayed a block away, waited for a few minutes, then pulled up and stopped his Jeep on the street. He took more photos, focusing first on the sign next to the front door:
Imperial Import/Export, LLC.
He took more shots of every vehicle he could see in the parking lot. Besides the truck and the sedan, there was a silver Porsche Panamera. Must have run someone at least eighty grand, Eddie thought. Not what you’d expect to find parked next to an anonymous concrete-block store on the back-ass end of town.
Eddie stayed on the street and watched the place for another hour. He saw nobody else coming or going, decided to go in for a closer look. He laid the big camera and long lens on the floor of his Jeep. If he had to move quickly, he couldn’t have a camera hanging around his neck. If he had to take more photos, he’d use his cell phone.
He got out of the Jeep, walked around the block, and approached through the side alley next to a muffler shop, so he was looking at the loading dock of the store. One of the bays was open, but he didn’t see anyone moving inside. As he came closer, he looked for security cameras. He stopped at the dock, fished out his cell phone, and took some shots of the crates that had just been unloaded. He tried to focus on the shipping labels, but he wasn’t quite close enough, so he climbed up over the edge of the dock.
Eddie moved around the crates, taking photographs, until he came to one that had already been opened. Lifting the top, he saw boxes of automotive air filters.
He wasn’t thinking about how far inside the loading area he had come. Bad idea, he thought just in time to hear the voices.
Eddie ducked down beside the crate as the two men he’d been following came into the bay, laughing roughly about some private joke, as the white man jumped down off the dock and stepped outside. The black man pulled down the overhead door with a loud clatter. It banged shut, trapping Eddie inside the bay.
He heard the truck start up outside. That left him inside with just the one man—an even match, at least, if that’s what it came to. Eddie waited and listened until he heard receding footsteps and was reasonably sure the man had walked back into the interior of the building.
What now?
Raising the door was not an option. The sound of the corrugated steel would be so loud that every person in the building—however many that was—would hear it. His next best option was to stay right where he was until everyone left. Which could be hours.
Screw that.
Eddie stood up and went to the hallway, put his back to the wall when he heard a voice. He froze, waited another beat, then started moving again. He felt sweat sticking his shirt to his back as he came to a doorway. The voice grew louder. He peeked around the edge and saw a different man sitting in an office chair, surrounded by a computer screen and a bank of video monitors. This one was younger, white, dressed more casually in jeans and a sweatshirt. He was distracted, talking on the phone, staring at the ceiling, not the monitors.
Studying the angles, Eddie wanted to make sure there was no reflection that would give him away when he crossed the doorway and moved down the hallway away from the control room. He was set to move when he took one last look at the man on the phone. That’s when Eddie’s focus drifted
to the monitors. His eyes locked on the screens because what they displayed was familiar to him: Nick Mason’s town house. The back deck, the kitchen, his bedroom.
Eddie already knew there were cameras in the town house. They weren’t hidden, and Nick had even asked him how easy it would be to disable them, if he ever needed to, or how they’d go about finding the people who were watching on the other end.
It’s all here, Eddie said to himself. This is the command center.
I can tap into their Secure Sockets Layer just like a wiretap on a phone. See what they’re doing here.
But first I have to get out of here.
Eddie put his head down, crossed the doorway, and turned down the hallway. He didn’t let out his breath until he was twenty paces down the hall. He heard footsteps. He stood still, listening. The footsteps were getting louder. Eddie pushed through the first door on his left. It was a bathroom with old-fashioned black-and-white tile, two stalls, and one big porcelain urinal. He stayed close behind the door, listening. The footsteps grew louder still, a man’s shoes clacking against the terrazzo floor. The footsteps stopped outside the bathroom door.
Damn it!
The door pushed in a few inches. Eddie moved as quietly as he could so that he would be covered by the door until whoever was coming in was in. He felt his body preparing itself, his adrenaline rising. His mouth was cotton, his heart was pounding in his chest. As the door swung open, Eddie readied himself to take the man down.
“Hey, man, Quintero’s on the phone,” a voice shouted from farther down the hall. “He wants to talk to you. Now.” It was the white guy from the control room.
“I gotta piss.”
“You want me to tell him that?”
“Fuck no.”
The bathroom door swung shut.
Eddie listened as the footsteps went down the hall in the direction of the control room. He waited a few beats before opening the door a slit. He looked toward the control room. His path was clear, and he made his way to the front of the building and out the door without encountering anyone else.
Eddie hopped into his Jeep and got moving. When he was sure he wasn’t being followed, he pulled over and dialed Mason’s cell.
Exit Strategy Page 9
