The Second Life of Nick Mason (Nick Mason #1)(45)

He pulled away from the curb and drove north. He wasn’t sure whether Diana would still be at the restaurant at this hour, but when he came up Rush Street, he saw the Camaro parked out front. He couldn’t imagine somebody watching the car all day, but he looped around the block and parked in back just in case. He went in through the back door and found Diana alone in the office, reviewing the day’s receipts cashed out by her staff. Her eyes were closed and she had her head propped up with her right hand.

“I’m here,” Mason said.

She came back to life with a start.

“Didn’t mean to scare you,” he said. “You should have gone home.”

“Had to close out the day.”

“You always leave that back door unlocked?”

“Everybody left. They forget sometimes.”

Mason looked around the office, then out the door at the darkened dining room. “You shouldn’t be alone here,” he said. “Somebody could walk right in.”

“You don’t have to worry about me, Nick.”

Mason leaned back against the frame of the doorway. All he’d done that day was drive around looking for one man, then watching that man. Nothing else. So why was he so tired?

“You still haven’t told me why you’re here,” he said.

She looked at him. “I work here.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

He waited for her to answer. After a few moments, she finally spoke.

“I told you my father worked with Cole. He always fascinated me, from the first time I met him. He had this . . . way about him. This presence. After my father was killed, he asked me to move into his town house. I was already becoming attracted to him by then, so it wasn’t a hard decision. I didn’t have any other place I wanted to go. But then I started to see what his life was really like.”

She paused for a moment.

“He never tried to hide any of it from me,” she said. “There were no secrets because there was never any question of me leaving. Ever. When they arrested him, he told me to stay here. He said he’d be watching me every minute. And that someday he’d be back.”

“He’s in for all day and a night,” Mason said. “Life without parole.”

“I’m telling you, he’ll find a way.”

Mason didn’t try to argue with her. On some level, maybe he even believed the same thing.

“In the meantime, I have this,” she said, nodding toward the open doorway. “I run this place. It takes everything I’ve got. It’s not the best life in the world. I know that. But it’s mine.”

She looked up at him. Mason nodded. He understood. Maybe he was the only person in the world who could.

“Come on,” she said as she stood up. “It’s late.”

He followed her to the back door and watched her lock it. She got in her BMW and left him there. He walked around to the front of the restaurant, got in the Camaro, and sat there for a moment. By the time he got back to the town house, she’d be upstairs. He’d sit by himself for a while, maybe out by the pool. He wouldn’t be able to sleep. Not tonight.

Especially now, after talking to Diana, hearing about how her life had turned forever. How from one day to the next it would never be the same again.

For her, it was meeting her father’s partner, the man named Darius Cole.

For Mason, it was something else entirely.

He drove south, down quiet, empty streets, to the edge of the city. Crossing the Ninety-fifth Street Bridge, he parked outside the fence line, turned the engine off, and opened up the windows to let the night air in.

Five years later, Nick Mason had come back to the harbor.

This is where the railroad tracks came in from the state line and joined the big oval that ran around the Port District. Freight cars were stacked in neat rows in the interior, all lit up with artificial light. On the opposite side, the dark water of the Calumet River flowed into Lake Michigan. The big ships all came here to unload, down here on the ass end of town, just this side of Indiana.

In a city that never put on too much makeup to begin with, this was where the landscape looked its hardest. It was all dirt and iron, and on one side of the shore, there was a great pile of old cars as if the ships had passed by and thrown them off like garbage on the side of a road.

This is where it happened, Mason said to himself. This is where you f*cked up your life forever.

The job had been conceived as a misdirection, something you can pull off right under a man’s nose because he’s watching for something else. When you look at this Port District and all of the freighters unloading, you think, There’s only one way this can happen. One of these freight cars will have a certain something inside. Which we’ll proceed to unload into these two trucks and then drive to Detroit. Where we’ll be paid over a hundred thousand dollars each.

A huge payoff for one night’s work, if it was really possible. But, of course, it wasn’t. Not even close. The level of security here at an international port—the quarantine area, the cameras, the around-the-clock guards . . . Even if you had someone on the inside, how would you get all that weight moved onto the trucks without anyone noticing within two minutes? That was Mason’s first objection when the four of them were sitting around that table at Murphy’s. The day they met Jimmy McManus.