The Second Life of Nick Mason (Nick Mason #1)(63)

They couldn’t touch Cole directly, not if he was sitting in a federal prison two hundred miles away. They could kill Mason, they could kill Quintero, they could kill any man Cole sent to Chicago. Cole would just send someone else.

Diana was the one person in the world he cared about. The one person who couldn’t be replaced. Kill her and you’ve taken the war right to him.

Mason couldn’t imagine where the war would go after that. But he knew he’d be a part of it.

And you don’t go to war without someone covering your back.

“Where are you?” he said as he touched the Bluetooth headset in his left ear.

“I’m stopped at the gate,” Eddie said. “I see you.”

“I’m going down. Hang back until I tell you.”

Mason had remembered what Eddie had told him when the two of them were catching up over beers in his garage. How he still got to the range once in a while even though he’d been out of the Army for years.

He just hoped Eddie could still hit anything inside a thousand yards.

“You’re too far away,” Eddie said in his ear. “Too dark to cover you.”

“Do your best,” Mason said. “Don’t get too close.”

He was inching his way down the shelf. You couldn’t call it a road. It was too steep a drop, with no rail on the side. One slip and the car would go over the edge and fall for five seconds before finally hitting the bottom.

He was glad Eddie was trailing behind him in a four-wheel-drive Jeep.

“Hey,” Mason said, gritting his teeth as he kept the wheels dead straight. “While I got a chance . . .”

“What?”

“Shoot anybody you want. Just not me or Diana, okay?”

He heard a nervous laugh on the other end.

Mason came to a place where he had to make a tight turn and head in a new direction. He could see nothing past his headlights. When he finally crawled all the way to the bottom, he stopped for a moment and got out of the car to take a look around.

The quarry floor was mostly flat and empty, with dark mounds of broken limestone scattered in the distance. As he looked up, he could barely see the thin line of cars on the highway that passed along the north rim.

He had just driven into his own grave.

“I’m down,” he said. “Nobody here.”

He got back in the car and drove across the quarry, his car bouncing on the rough ground. As he got closer to the north wall, he saw nothing but a sheer cliff rising forty stories above him. He turned and traced along the edge of it until he found a pass-through leading under the highway.

He found himself in another canyon, just as vast as the first, just as deep, but now there were ponds of standing water all across the floor, and in the far corner, he could make out a dim circle of light.

“Pass-through under the highway,” he said, picturing Eddie in his Jeep somewhere behind him. “I’m on the other side.”

“You’re too far ahead of me. Wait up.”

Mason didn’t bother answering. As he moved the car forward, his headlights played against the construction vehicles, all standing idle for the night. He weaved his way past a giant backhoe, the tires ten feet high, then a dump truck just as large. He was a tiny figure in a tiny car, a speck moving across this vast chasm. But he kept going. There was no turning back.

? ? ?

Mason still couldn’t see why they were doing this here. A quiet place, with nobody else around—that much he got. But they could have done that almost anywhere. Even in the middle of Chicago you find an abandoned house, with known drug traffic. Just like the house in Fuller Park. Bring Mason there. Kill him. Throw him down the stairs with the rest of the dealers. Even Diana. Just two more people in the wrong place at the wrong time. Caught up in something they should have had no part in. Let the uniforms sort it out.

But no, it was all going to happen here. In a f*cking limestone quarry.

Mason made a tight turn between two more construction vehicles and saw a circle of light in the distance. It could have been a mile away or it could have been suspended in outer space.

He kept driving toward it, splashing through the standing water, then passing by one construction trailer, then another. The circle kept growing, kept getting brighter. Until Mason came close enough. Stopping his car, Mason stepped out onto the ground.

He stood at the mouth of a tunnel.

The circle was forty feet high. A perfect round hole cut into the side of the cliff. A strand of braided rebar, as thick as a tree, reinforced its perimeter. A half-dozen halogen lamps were mounted around its rim, giving the entrance an eerie glow.

Mason just stood there, looking up in wonder at the size of this tunnel.

“Where are you?” Eddie said.

“Find the tunnel,” Mason said. “Can’t miss it.”

This was the Deep Tunnel he’d been hearing about since he was a kid in Canaryville. Because Chicago was built on a swamp, the sewers and the storm drains would overflow every time it rained hard enough. They’d been working on this tunnel for forty years, so they could bring all the rainwater and piss and shit and f*ck knows what else in a giant pipe away from the city and apparently right into this quarry. The whole thing would be flooded soon. Any dead bodies left in this quarry would be swallowed up under four hundred feet of water and never seen again.

Now I get it, Mason thought. This is why they chose this place. He took the gun from his belt.