The Second Life of Nick Mason

by Steve Hamilton

  Higgins looked at him.

  “He killed a federal agent, Gary. Now he’s out.”

  “We never put that gun in his hand.”

  “The fuck does that matter?” Sandoval said. “You know it’s felony murder as long as he’s there. Who cares if he pulled the trigger?”

  Higgins put his hand on Sandoval’s chest and drove him backward, into the piling. Sandoval felt the rough wood digging into his back.

  “You think I don’t know this?” Higgins said, his face two inches away. “All of this? I know what I did, Frank. I know what I fucking did. Every night, I gotta drink myself to sleep so I don’t put a bullet in my head.”

  “We can climb out of this. Together.”

  “You don’t know these people,” Higgins said. “You don’t know what they’ll do to you. Is this worth your life, Frank? Your family’s life? That’s what the risk is here if you don’t stop. You say you want the answers, but you don’t. Believe me, you fucking don’t.”

  Sandoval had seen enough pain in his life. How many times had he answered a homicide call, met the wife or the parents, and seen a whole world of it? More than one person should be asked to bear? You never get numb to it. It’s new every time.

  He was seeing that now, that same kind of pain, staring back at him through his partner’s eyes.

  “I’m done,” Higgins said. “I’m over. You don’t have to be. Go back to Chicago and forget you ever saw me.”

  Higgins let him go. He turned away from him and went back to the end of the dock.

  “I’m not going to let this go,” Sandoval said to his back.

  Higgins didn’t turn. He kept walking away.

  “No matter what you say, Gary, I’m not going to stop.”

  6

  Nick Mason was staring at the house that contained his wife, his daughter, and another man who was apparently fulfilling his role as a husband and father.

  He was in Elmhurst, a suburb west of Chicago. He was parked on the street, looking out at a big Colonial, some shade of beige or taupe or desert sand or whatever the hell it said on the paint can. Black shutters, white trim. Everything just so. Probably three thousand square feet, with big bedrooms. It was the kind of house he would have laughed at back when he was in the market for a house himself. This McMansion. But if you had injected him with truth serum back then, he would have confessed his secret longing to live in a place just like this. To watch his daughter grow up here.

  The big sloping front yard was a half acre of perfect grass. It would take you an hour to cut it with a push mower, but Mason knew this guy had a rider mower with the snowplow you could put on the front for a Chicago winter.

  One bay in the three-car garage was open. He could see a bicycle parked inside. He could see a soccer net and a ball. Around the far edge of the house, peeking out from the backyard, a swing set. Not cheap metal, but cedar, with the clubhouse connected to it, green flags at the corners of its roof and a slide going out its door.

  Mason unfolded the piece of paper and checked the address. He couldn’t help wondering if Quintero had come here himself. If he had sat in his Escalade, in this exact spot, watching Mason’s daughter cross the front yard. The man’s eyes hidden behind his sunglasses, a ghost sitting behind the tinted windows of his big black vehicle.

  Then, as if conjured from his imagination, he saw the black Escalade roll past him. Quintero had followed him all the way here. The vehicle didn’t stop. It kept going down the quiet streets of Elmhurst and then disappeared after a left turn at the next corner.

  Mason tightened his grip on the steering wheel. He closed his eyes for a moment. Everything is wrong, he said to himself. Every reason for getting out of prison, for signing that invisible contract with Darius Cole, it’s all falling apart right in front of me.

  He waited for his heart to stop pounding. Then he got out of the Mustang and walked up the driveway to the house. He went to the front door and stood there for a few seconds. Then he rang the bell. Four notes chimed from somewhere deep inside the house.

  When he first met her, her name was Gina Sullivan. She had dirty-blond hair and green eyes. They were kids back then. Gina was eighteen and just out of high school. Nick was nineteen and already on his own most of the time, crashing at Eddie’s house some nights, other nights at Finn’s house. Other nights, wherever he landed.

  There was this party they had all gone to. There were a dozen girls there, and this one in particular. Young Gina asked young Nick what he did for a living, already guessing he wasn’t Sigma Phi Epsilon. Nick said he stole cars. Gina thought he was joking, so he told her to pick out a car and he’d steal it for her. She did and he did. They ended up in the backseat a few hours later. Not long after that, Gina confessed to him that the car he had stolen was her father’s.

  Gina went away to Purdue University that fall. When she came back, they picked right up where they had left off. She went away again that next fall, but only lasted another semester and came back to the family home up on the north end of Canaryville. After getting thrown out of the house, she lived with relatives for a while and in the midst of all that she broke up with Nick, then they were back together, then they broke up again. He was past auto theft and on to high-end work by then. Nick had written his rules, a whole set of them, refined through experience, and by learning from Finn’s mistakes.

  Gina had one rule for Nick. The only rule she needed. The straight life with me or the life you’re living without me.

  Nick chose life with Gina Sullivan. Because nobody on planet Earth could ever push his buttons like this woman could. Nobody could make him happier. Nobody could make him crazier. Even when he was trying to settle down. Trying to be a normal working stiff. Even then, maybe it was still more crazy than good most of the time.

  But when it was good, man, it was fucking great.

  They got married. They bought the house on Forty-third Street. They had a daughter. Nick kept his promise.

  Until the harbor job.

  Five years and a month later, he was standing at her door, waiting for someone to open it. He was starting to think nobody was home.

  Then the door was pulled open and Gina looked out at him.

  She hadn’t changed. Not really. It was the same dirty-blond hair, even if she had it cut at an expensive salon. They were the same green eyes. Mason saw the spark of recognition in those eyes just for a fraction of a second. That old fire that had burned so bright between them. But then it was gone just as quickly.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” She came out onto the porch and looked up and down the street like her neighbors would all be out in their yards, watching them.

  Mason had seven or eight questions to ask her. He couldn’t decide which one should come first.

  “You’re supposed to be in prison,” she said. As soon as those words were in the air, she covered her mouth. “My God, you escaped! Then you came here?”

  “No,” Mason said, reaching out to her with one hand.

  “Get away from me,” she said, taking a step backward.

  “I didn’t escape,” he said. “Will you fucking listen to me? I got out yesterday.”

  “That’s not possible. You’re in for another twenty years. At least.”

  “The conviction was overturned. They had to let me go. I swear, Gina, I’m telling you the truth.”

  He was watching her as she talked. The movements of her mouth. He could practically feel the heat of her body. He wanted to grab her, wrap her around himself.

  God, he wanted that so bad.

  “That’s bullshit, Nick. Nobody told me anything about letting you go.”

  “They didn’t have to. I’m not out on parole. I walked out of there a free man. They said if anybody else needed to know about it, it was up to me to tell them.”

  “Then how come you didn’t tell me?”
r />   “Here I am,” Mason said. “Now you know.”

  She looked away from him, rubbing her forehead. “I don’t get it,” she said. “I mean, wait. Just stop it. This isn’t happening. There’s no way they overturned your conviction.”

  “Clean record,” he said. “Like it never happened. I even have a letter of apology from the prosecutor. You want to see it?”

  She turned and looked at him again. “Nick, if this is really true . . .”

  “You never came,” he said. “Not once.”

  “Nick . . .”

  Five years, he thought. Five fucking years to finally say that to her.

  An inmate at Terre Haute is allowed seven visits per month. He gets three hundred minutes of phone time. So out of a possible four hundred and twenty visits, Gina had used exactly zero. Out of a possible eighteen thousand minutes of phone time, zero.

  Mason had tried calling her. He had written to her. It wouldn’t have been that hard for her to drive down there. Bring Adriana, sit in the visiting room for a few minutes. Just let him see their faces, say a few words to them.

  Even a quick phone call. Five fucking minutes.

  It would have given him so much. But it never happened.

  “Not once, Gina. No visits, no calls, no letters. Just nothing. Like I was dead and gone.”

  “I did what I thought I had to do, Nick. For Adriana.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She’s at practice,” Gina said. “With Brad.”

  Mason worked over the name in his head for a moment. Brad. Bradley. He wasn’t sure which was worse. “Are you two . . .”

  “We got married, yes.”

  Mason felt those words washing over him. He knew Gina had divorced him. That was the one small bit of contact he’d gotten from her—or, rather, from her lawyer—seeing those papers come through and having to sit there in his prison cell and sign them.

  But now, he said to himself, she’s living in this house. And, of course, she’s remarried. She stood in front of a judge and said all the words and she lives here with her new husband and is going to bed with him every fucking night.

  Somehow it wasn’t really true until this second. When she said those words.

  Cole must have known this, he said to himself. He made this deal with me, knowing I would try to get this part of my life back. Something that could never happen.

  “Okay,” Mason said, measuring his words, “so my daughter is at practice with your new husband, Brad. What kind of practice?”

  “Nick . . .”

  “When will she be back?”

  “Why are you asking me that?”

  “Because I want to see her.”

  “Listen to me,” she said. “Think about what you’re asking me here. Please, Nick, think about it. Your daughter’s in a good place. She goes to a great school. She has a great life. The life we both wanted for her, remember? She’s got that now. And you’re going to come around here, straight out of prison, and mess that up?”

  “You don’t get to pick your parents, Gina. She got me. And I’m not leaving until I see her.”

  “So how exactly do you think this is going to work? Are you going to come visit her every weekend? Have cookouts with us in the backyard? Are you going to come with us to the parent-teacher conferences? Or career day at the school, maybe? ‘Hi, this is my dad. He’s going to tell you how to steal a car.’ Is that how you think this is going to work, Nick?”

  Mason listened to her. He was holding on to himself, keeping his cool. He knew making a big scene here wouldn’t help anything. But, God damn, even now she could still push his buttons. “You never brought her to see me,” Nick said. “My own daughter. Not one time in five years.”

  “Because you broke your promise,” she said. Her voice was low, barely above a whisper. “Because you’re a criminal and you always will be. No matter what your piece of paper says.”

  She stopped to wipe her eyes.

  “I bet on you,” she said. “I bet everything I had on you. Look what I got. The best thing you can do for me, and for your daughter, is to just stay away.”

  It hurt him to hear it. He could see it hurt her just as much to say it. He was trying to think of something to say right back, something to convince her that she had it all wrong. That he really was innocent and never should have been in prison in the first place. But the truth was, another man had made his conviction disappear, and, without him, Mason would still be in a prison cell.

  There was nothing Mason could say to her. Not one word.

  Gina was crying. She couldn’t even look at him anymore.

  She reached out to touch his chest. One touch. For one second. All of the years they had spent together, the fighting, the making up, the sitting on a porch at night. All of the years trying to make a life. After everything, this was all she had for him now.

  She pulled away from him, went back in the house, and shut the door.

  7

  Darius Cole was born on the streets of Englewood. In the suburbs, you inherit wealth. In Englewood, depending on which block you live on, and which side of the street, you inherit a gang’s colors. By the time he was thirteen, he was on a corner. This was back in the 1970s, when the city saw a thousand homicides every year.

  Young Darius was given a bag of money one day. Take this to the laundry, he was told. If there’s one dollar missing, we’ll find out in two minutes. You’ll be dead in three.

  He took the money to the laundry—actually, it was a laundromat—and that’s where he met the man who kept a little office in the back of the place. It was one of several cash-based businesses the man owned all over the city. Laundromats, car washes, restaurants. Anyplace that handled a lot of bills, and even loose change. The man would take money from guys like Darius Cole and he’d mix it up with the cash from the businesses and like some kind of magic trick he’d somehow make it all come out clean.

  The man at the laundromat told Darius Cole that this was a trick invented in Chicago, by Al Capone, back in the Prohibition days. Later, Cole learned about Meyer Lansky, the criminal mastermind and financial genius who was a hell of a lot smarter than Capone. Lansky financed the National Crime Syndicate, held points in every casino from Vegas to London, and transferred every dollar he made to his own personal bank in Switzerland. He never spent one day in prison.

  Cole didn’t want to be just another kid working a corner. He wanted to be the black Meyer Lansky. No more drug addicts. No more gunfights on the streets. If you clean the money, you get clean yourself. You wear a suit like a legitimate businessman. Fuck that, you are a legitimate businessman.

  By the time he was twenty, Cole had a minority share in a dozen restaurants. In barbershops. In car washes. Even a few laundromats. Any business that handled cash, with minimal recordkeeping, Cole wanted a piece of it. He’d mix in drug money with the cash proceeds and deposit it all as legitimate income.

  The entire time, he kept a low profile. No flash. He paid federal agents to keep him out of the files. FBI, DEA, ATF, IRS, even Interpol. Cole stayed invisible.

  He bought more businesses all over the country. Better restaurants, nightclubs. If the bartender would take a hundred-dollar bill from you without blinking, Cole wanted to meet the owner.

  He got so good at it, he started handling other people’s money. Not from rival gangs, of course. Some lines don’t get crossed. But there were plenty of other criminal enterprises with money that needed cleaning. He didn’t get nervous about taking that money from white men in suits and giving most of it back to them. In fact, he would use the opportunity to learn everything he could about their operations, every last detail, until he could take over from the inside, like a Greek soldier from a Trojan horse, eliminating anyone who dared stand in his way.

  By the time he was thirty, Cole had grown smarter and even more powerful. He expanded ove
rseas, first in the Cayman Islands, then in Mexico, Brazil, Russia, Poland, Belarus—any country with soft banking laws. He always kept the money moving, more and more of it, faster and faster, in amounts small enough to avoid suspicion, but times a hundred, then a thousand, using accounts in other people’s names. People he could trust. People who knew the penalty for betraying him. The money would be round-tripped from one “smurf” account to another, Kraków to Rio to Jakarta, before coming back to Chicago.

  When the time was right, he moved back into the drug business, but he did it the smart way, on the wholesale end. There was already a direct pipeline from the Mexican cartels to Chicago—Cole took this over and made life easier for the Mexicans by giving them one single contact to work with. Then he supplied the product to high-level dealers who would move it throughout the entire Midwest. So instead of having a thousand customers, he had twenty or thirty, all men he could trust. This was how he managed the risk and maximized the revenue. Then he channeled that money into more and more legitimate businesses.

  He hired the best accountants. He hired the best attorneys. And he paid off the dirtiest cops. He grew his business into an empire.

  Most cops know how to follow criminals. Only a select few of them are good at following money. Cole stayed ahead of them for years until they finally brought him down on a federal RICO case. He’d been here in Terre Haute ever since.

  It was a story Mason never thought he’d hear. Not from Darius Cole himself. He never thought he’d make a second trip to the Secure Housing Unit. Or that the third trip would be permanent.

  The same two men came to get him that day. Mason ignored the stares and followed them out of the cellblock. As he walked between them, he had time to think it over. It must have been a hell of a first conversation or there wouldn’t be a second. But what did Cole really want from him? If he wanted Mason’s ticket punched, that would have happened already. Out in the yard or in the cafeteria. You wouldn’t walk the man right to your cell.