The Second Life of Nick Mason (Nick Mason #1)(4)

Mason went back out to the kitchen and opened up the refrigerator. After five years of prison food, Mason stood there staring at the salmon, at the cooked and chilled lobster, at the aged steaks. He didn’t know where to start. Then he saw the bottles of beer on the lower shelf. He shuffled through the selection, mostly microbrews he’d never heard of. Then he found a bottle of Goose Island.

He opened the bottle and took a long swallow. It took him back to summer nights sitting out on his porch. Listening to a ball game with Eddie and Finn. Or listening to his wife and watching their daughter try to catch fireflies.

He found a take-out container of beef tenderloin with some kind of shiitake mushroom sauce, with angel-hair pasta. He went through the drawers until he found the silverware, grabbed a fork, and ate the entire dish cold, standing there in the middle of the kitchen. He wondered what the inmates in Terre Haute had for dinner that night.

Wednesday night, he said to himself. Usually hamburger night. Or, at least, what they called hamburger.

When he was done eating, he went to the black leather couch, found the remote control, and turned on the television. Leaning back and putting his feet up on the table, he took another long swallow from his beer, found the rain-delayed White Sox game, and watched the last inning. The Sox won. Then he spent a few minutes flipping up and down through the channels just because he could. You try doing that on the television in the common room and you’ll start a riot. He shut the television off.

He went back to the refrigerator and took out another Goose Island, then went outside through the big sliding glass door off the kitchen. Still high above the street, with a swimming pool sunk into the great concrete monolith beneath the patio, the water surrounded by bluestone, lit up with underwater lights and glowing aquamarine in the darkness. A table, chairs, and a grill with a wet bar stood by, ready for an outdoor party.

Mason went to the rail and looked out at the park and, beyond that, the endless horizon of Lake Michigan. He could see the lights from a half-dozen boats on the water. He could hear the distant bass notes from a car cruising by on the street. A perfect summer night to be out on the town, no matter where you were going.

A breeze came off the lake and gave him a brief chill. Sixteen hours ago, Mason had woken up in a maximum security prison cell. Now he was standing in a town house in Lincoln Park, drinking a bottle of Goose Island and looking out at the lake.

I knew this man had power, he said to himself, but that was a federal f*cking prison I walked out of today. How does one man make that happen?

Unless there’s even more to him than I know . . .

As he was about to turn away, he looked up and saw the security camera, its little red light blinking. There was a similar camera on each of the other three corner posts. Someone, somewhere, was watching him.

This was his life now. It felt like he was holding his breath, waiting to see what this would truly cost him. How long until that happened?

How long until that phone rings?

When he finally went back into his room and lay down in his bed, he stared at the ceiling for a long time. He was tired. But his body was waiting for the guard to call lights-out. Waiting for the metallic click of his cell door locking shut. Then the horn, that lonely, faraway buzz, that sent him to bed, every single night, for the last five years.

He lay awake, waiting. The sounds never came.





2




The first time Nick Mason ever heard Darius Cole’s name, he was four years into his twenty-five-to-life at USP Terre Haute.

It was a high-security facility, strictly segregated into six different housing units, a maze of one wing after another, with gray, featureless walls that seemed to stretch out forever. The whole compound was surrounded by a high fence topped with razor wire. Then a no-man’s-land. Then another fence, with more razor wire. A guard’s turret stood at every corner.

There were fifteen hundred other men in this place, including some of the most notorious inmates in the country. Serial killers, Islamic terrorists. A man who raped and killed four children. They had all been sent here, and the men in one housing unit were scheduled to die here, just like Timothy McVeigh did, strapped to a table and injected with potassium chloride, because Terre Haute was now the one and only facility designated for all federal executions.

The guards told you when to wake up and when to go to sleep. They told you when you could leave your cell or when you had thirty seconds to get back in it. They could search your body at any time. They could search your cell, come in and flip your bed and pick through everything you owned, while you stood still in the hallway outside, your face to the wall.

This was Nick Mason’s life.

He was outside that day, the day he first met Darius Cole, sitting on the top of a picnic table and watching the Latinos play baseball. One of those perfect summer days that could really get to you if you let it. Mason had always lived by his own carefully constructed set of rules, refined over the years to cover any situation—to keep him alive and out of prison. But now that he was here, those rules had been stripped down to their essence. They were all about simple survival, getting through each day one at a time, holding on to his sanity, not thinking about how good life would be on the other side of that fence. Not thinking about the past or the people he left behind. The night at the harbor and how it sent him here. Not thinking about the future, how many endless days just like this one he had in front of him.

In fact, that was his new rule number one (prison edition): Deal with today. Tomorrow doesn’t exist.