The Second Life of Nick Mason (Nick Mason #1)(10)

“I told you how we should have done this,” Finn said just as Mason pushed up the ceiling tiles and pulled down a bundle of money.

The three of them spent the next few minutes pushing up every ceiling tile in the storage area. When they were done, they had a garbage bag full of cash, over twelve thousand dollars for one night’s work. One week if you counted the prep work. They had learned some good lessons that were useful on their next job. And the job after that. The ideal target was anyplace where a large amount of cash was put to bed for the night. Eddie learned a little more about alarm systems with each job. Mason learned about cheap safes and how to drill them open.

The last job the three men did together, years before getting together again one more time at the harbor, was another cash business with a drillable safe. By then, Mason wasn’t relying on anyone else for the setups. He’d learned how to recognize the easy targets. In this case, it was a car audio store, and as Mason stood at the counter, he could see the safe in the back room, a model he knew he could drill in ten minutes. It was practically begging to be opened.

He spent an hour watching the customers. Half of them wore gold chains and all of them wanted their rides to have the biggest subwoofers on the road. A lot of cash went into the register. Not many credit card receipts.

He kept watching the place. A few more days to learn the routine, to find out when they’d bag up the money and take it to the bank. Eddie learned about the alarm system, and on a Sunday night they broke in through the back door. Eddie disabled the alarm, Mason plugged in his industrial drill with the diamond-tipped bit, and Finn stayed at the front window to watch the street.

Mason went right through the face of the lock until he got to the drive cam. Then he used a long punch rod to push it out of the way. He opened the safe and stuffed everything into a trash bag.

As he stood up, he saw Finn coming toward him. “Cops,” Finn said, although the look on his face had already made that obvious, not to mention the flashing red lights that were suddenly reflected in the front window.

Mason told him to get down and to stay quiet. He went close enough to the lobby of the store to see out the window and caught sight of the back half of the patrol car. It was parked twenty feet from the door.

“We gotta get the f*ck out of here,” Eddie said from behind him. The only other way out was the back door.

Mason ran the odds through his head. Go out the back, get in the car, drive around the other side of the building, hit the street . . .

In that moment, Mason felt his whole life slipping away from him. The alarm was disabled, the safe was drilled open, the money was stuffed into a trash bag. This would be the easiest bust of the year for these guys. The only question would be what kind of deal they could make, three guys with some history but no felony convictions, now facing burglary and probably Class 3 larceny, depending on how much money was in that bag.

“I told you we should have brought guns,” Finn said, his hands shaking and his eyes as wide open as a junkie’s. “Did I not f*cking say that?”

Mason wanted to slap him hard across the face. For all of his rules, Mason had one blind spot—this one man who had been like a brother to him for as long as he could remember. Seeing him like this made Mason reconsider. Maybe he needed one more rule about working with guys who lose their shit and start talking about guns when they’re backed into a corner.

Mason took a breath and went over to the small side window, peering out at the parking lot. He saw the front half of the patrol car.

And then another car. An old beater with four male occupants. It had pulled over into the lot and was parked directly in front of the patrol car.

It was a traffic stop.

Mason kept watching out the window as the four high school shitheads were taken out, IDs checked, beer bottles dumped, and the empties lined up on the roof of the car. He let out his breath and whispered to Eddie and Finn that they weren’t all about to get arrested after all.

But now they’d have to wait to get out of there.

Parents were called and brought down to the scene of the crime. Another patrol car pulled in to help out. Thirty minutes passed and the three men were still trapped inside the store. Then an hour. Finn was getting anxious again.

At one point, one of the patrol officers actually came over to the store and looked in the front window. He cast a long shadow that reached all the way across the counter and into the back room. Mason, Eddie, and Finn all held their breath and made sure they couldn’t be seen. Then the shadow left the window and the cars started to pull out of the lot.

Except for the one patrol car.

Mason could imagine the two cops calling in on their radio, requesting backup. After all this time waiting, he thought, maybe we really do have to go out that back door and try to outrun them.

But then the car finally turned onto the street and drove away.

As soon as it was out of sight, they went out the back door and got in their car. Eddie carried the trash bag.

“Let’s get the f*ck out of here,” Eddie said as Mason started the car and hit the gas. When they counted the money an hour later, it turned out to be just over nine thousand dollars. Three thousand per man. Not nearly enough money for what they had risked.

It was time to take a break. And then, when they got back together, to make a decision. Either go bigger or get out.

But then Finn did something stupid, even by his own standards. He took a girl to a bar in McKinley Park and got in a fight with one of the locals who said the wrong thing to her. Bad enough to take her out of Canaryville in the first place when there were perfectly good bars on your own home turf and nobody’s calling the cops as long as it’s a fair fight. But Finn was a stranger in McKinley Park, so a patrol car did show up and Finn ended up hitting the first cop who put a hand on him. That cop got a concussion and Finn got eighteen months for aggravated assault and obstruction. When he was released, he didn’t even bother coming back to Canaryville to face Mason and Eddie. He went to Florida instead.