The Second Life of Nick Mason (Nick Mason #1)(17)

“You work alone sometimes,” Cole said, flipping to the next page. “Sometimes with a crew. All over the city. Sometimes you go in hard. Sometimes on the sly.”

He flipped back to the first page.

“Thirty years without going down. But then they get you and you don’t just go down, you go down hard. Some men wouldn’t handle that so well.”

“This is starting to sound like a job interview,” Mason said.

“That’s exactly what this is.”

The two men looked each other in the eye. Cole waited for Mason to say something.

“I handled it,” Mason said. “What choice did I have?”

“You always got a choice, Nick. Even here, you always got a choice. Like when I wanted to meet you.”

“Look, if we’re gonna do this again . . .”

“How come you didn’t give them up?” Cole said. “Twenty-five-to-life, you’re looking at. Hard federal time, Nick. But you keep your mouth shut.”

There was a long silence, finally broken when two inmates walked by in the hallway outside Cole’s cell. Their conversation ended as soon as they saw the look on the bodyguards’ faces, and the two men moved quickly away.

“One of your men got killed that night,” Cole said, looking back down at the papers. “Finn O’Malley. He a friend of yours?”

“Yes.”

“Two other men got away. Were they friends, too?”

“One was a friend. The other was a piece of shit.”

“But you didn’t turn on either of them.”

“I turn on the piece of shit, he turns on my friend. I’m still heading down here, either way. No matter what I did.”

“You had a wife,” Cole said, looking at the sheet again. “And a daughter.”

“I’m outta here,” Mason said.

“You don’t talk about them. They don’t belong in this place, right?” Cole leaned forward and studied Mason carefully for a long time. “What happens when they come to visit you?”

Mason looked away without answering. Cole shuffled through the papers again and found something interesting on one of the last pages.

“They don’t,” Cole said. “Ever. So you don’t talk about them. It’s, like, a rule you made up. To keep your mind right.”

Mason stared at Cole. He’d never mentioned his rules to anyone in here. It was an essential part of him that nobody else had ever seen.

“That’s right, Nick. You know what I’m talking about. You wanna hear one of my rules?”

Mason didn’t respond.

“I’m here for two lifetimes, Nick. But just because I eat here and I sleep here, does that mean I live here? Fuck that. I’m still back in Chicago, where I belong. Most guys hear that, they think I’m crazy. But maybe you understand what I’m saying.”

Mason looked at one bodyguard, then the other, wondering if they had to hear this bullshit every day.

“It’s a state of mind,” Cole said, tapping his temple with one index finger. “You look at it right, it’s just a problem of geography.”

A problem of geography, Nick thought. The man actually just said that.

“That’s just one of my rules,” Cole said. He picked up the file and opened it again. “I already know a couple of yours. Don’t sell out your friends. Keep everything separate. Keep your family inside you. I’m seeing a picture here.”

“You hear my name,” Mason said. “Now you read a file. And you think you know me?”

“I want to know what’s not in the file.”

“I do my time,” Mason said. “I mind my own business. I don’t f*ck with people and people don’t f*ck with me. I don’t need to make friends here. When you make a friend, that man’s enemies become your enemies. I don’t need that.”

Cole listened to him carefully, slowly nodding his head.

“That doesn’t mean I don’t look out for people,” Mason went on. “I look out for them, they look out for me. That’s how you survive. But I don’t owe them anything else. I don’t belong to anybody in this prison, Mr. Cole. And even though I can see you’ve got lots of power here and you can drag me down here anytime you want, I’m not going to belong to you, either. Nobody owns me.”

Cole kept looking at him, still nodding his head.

“You don’t always have to be that way,” he finally said. “People in my neighborhood, they have a problem, they don’t call nine-one-one. They call me. I’m the police, the fireman, and the judge.”

“Yeah, that’s your neighborhood. It’s not mine.”

Cole smiled at that. “How long you been here, Nick?”

“You saw the file. Four years.”

“Four years down, twenty-one to go if you’re lucky. So we got time to get to know each other. My boys will help you pack your stuff.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re coming to SHU, Nick. Better food, better equipment . . . You’ll like it here.”

“What if I say no?”

“It’s already done,” Cole said.





8




Mason left Elmhurst and gunned the Mustang down North Avenue, driving like a man with no family to live for.