The Second Life of Nick Mason (Nick Mason #1)(47)

They worked for over an hour. Pulling up the padding was hard work. The pads weighed more than Mason would have imagined and he had to wrap his arms around each one to wrestle it off the boat and into the truck, feeling the rough wood of the backing against his forearms and breathing in the dust from the padding he had to carry so close to his face. When they were done with the padding, they started in on the life vests. These were stacked tightly underneath the benches and stowed in side compartments along both gunwales.

“A hundred twenty-five grand,” Finn said to Mason as they were jumping off the boat for the last time. “Not bad for one night’s work.”

“We’re not done yet,” Mason said. “Keep your head on.”

“I told you this guy was for real,” Finn said. “You gotta admit, it’s a pretty smooth play.”

Mason kept hoping that Finn would shut the hell up. But he knew that Finn liked to keep talking and talking when he was doing a job and that it made him feel better. Like a release valve. So he let him keep going on about the money and what he was going to do with it like he already had it in his pocket.

Mason knew it wasn’t that easy. Not yet. They still had to close up the trucks and get the hell out of there. Then drive the four and a half hours, curling south under the lake and through Indiana, then across the wide, flat plain of southern Michigan, all the way to Detroit. They had an address to drive to. Some old building deep in the heart of Detroit that nobody knew anything about. It was the part of the trip Mason wasn’t looking forward to. But Finn and McManus were both convinced there was a big player out there who wouldn’t think twice about paying that kind of money, especially for two trucks full of old boat padding and life vests that were actually worth about ten million dollars. If it was cocaine, which was Mason’s best guess about what they were now hauling in these trucks, that meant about five hundred pounds of the stuff. A quarter ton. Hard to believe they could fit all that in a bunch of old bench padding and life vests, but, damn, if it wasn’t a total bitch lugging all of that stuff off the boat. Mason knew he’d be sore as hell the next morning. But the money would make it a lot easier to deal with.

A better house for Gina. Maybe even college for Adriana. That’s what he was thinking.

It was just getting dark when they finally slammed the truck doors shut and got in the cabs. Mason had Finn with him again. He could practically feel the man vibrating in the seat next to him. McManus pulled his truck out of the lot and Mason followed him. The road took them over the railroad tracks and through an old neighborhood of two-story brick buildings.

They didn’t notice the car behind them. They didn’t know that in that car were two DEA agents, out of a half dozen who had been staking out the Port District that evening, operating on a tip that a major shipment would be unloading at the harbor. They’d made the same assumption that Mason had made when he’d first been told about the job. If it’s coming through the harbor, it’s on one of the freighters.

? ? ?

The agents were settling in for a long night of surveillance. There was a lot of ground to cover, if you looked at the road and the long fence around the railroad tracks, and even at the waterline itself. There was no reason why you couldn’t pull up a fast boat at the mouth of the river, load up, and then take off into the lake.

Nobody paid any attention to the two panel trucks leaving the dry dock. Until Sean Wright and his partner, who were watching the southern perimeter of the Port District, happened to see the trucks rumbling by them. Sean’s partner, who was driving, pulled out and followed them. It was an unlikely lead, two trucks coming out of the dry dock, but better to make sure and not get reamed out by their boss if those trucks ended up being something they shouldn’t have missed.

? ? ?

Mason kept following McManus as he drove the lead truck down Ewing Avenue. There was a series of three bridges coming up ahead. They would drive under them—two for railroad tracks, one for the expressway. Mason could feel Finn starting to tense up and for once he was just about to tell him to calm the hell down. The words were right there on the tip of his tongue.

That’s when he noticed the car following close behind him. One of those dark-colored sedans that look plain and boring and suspicious. He watched his big side mirror for a few seconds, but it was too dark to see through the car’s windshield.

They came to the first bridge. Its fa?ade was a low, crumbling band of concrete just inches above their heads. Everything narrowed under the bridge, with rusted-out I beams squeezing in close on either side of the trucks. Pale sodium lights made everything look like a fever dream. Mason checked the car behind him. It was too close. If he even tapped on his brakes, there’d be contact.

McManus slowed down ahead of Mason. It was too narrow for speed. One slight mistake and you’re scraping either iron or concrete or bouncing back and forth between both. They came out from under the first bridge and Mason saw the open night sky above them. The reprieve was short-lived as the second bridge loomed, even more dilapidated than the first, with a thin row of high weeds lining the tracks. The first truck was swallowed by the darkness, the sodium lights blinking and flickering now. Mason entered a second later. Another long, narrow passage, Mason holding his breath, waiting for the trucks to pass through into the open air again, already anticipating the daylight and the highway overpass beyond. A clear road ahead of them, the traffic light beyond the last bridge already turning green. He saw it all in that moment and let himself believe that they had passed through to safety.