The Second Life of Nick Mason (Nick Mason #1)(69)

Bloome stood up and tried moving his neck, felt the muscles tightening, the skin stretching over something hard, embedded just under the surface. He stopped testing it.

“Reagan,” he said out loud. “Koniczek.”

The two men inside the tunnel. Bloome knew they were dead. He knew by the simple math of a dozen gunshots and Mason and the woman somehow walking away.

They were dead.

Walter Reagan. John Koniczek. He knew their wives, too, just as well as he knew Fowler’s. He knew their kids.

None of these men should have been here.

Bloome spotted his gun lying on the ground, went back over and picked it up. He brushed it off before holstering it and, as he did, he remembered the day he bought it. Chicago cops have to buy their own weapons and he had picked out a Sig P250, chambered with .45 ACP shells. It was the only weapon he’d ever carried, even today when it was no longer on the approved list. If you already had one, they let you keep it.

He remembered the first time he had fired it on the streets. Just a few years in, on a West Side buy-and-bust, some low-level runner taking a crack at them as he fled down an alley. Back when they had no idea what they were doing. When their best idea for finding the traffic was looking for white buyers in the wrong neighborhoods or picking up junkies and turning them into informants. Trying to work their way from the bottom up. And never getting anywhere.

Things didn’t get much better when Bloome joined the Narcotics unit as a detective. It still felt like a losing battle every day. But then he got partnered with a detective named Ray Jameson. A former college wrestler with permanently mauled ears and a personality as big as his body, he was a human wrecking ball when it came to police work, a perfect counterpart to the cold, machinelike precision of Vincent Bloome. These were two men who never should have gotten along, not for five minutes, but it was Bloome’s couch that Jameson chose to sleep on whenever his wife threw him out of the house. And from the moment Bloome and Jameson started working cases together, it was obvious their individual strengths formed a perfect combination to get things done on the streets.

Bloome and Jameson were putting up good numbers, but the overall picture in Chicago was getting worse every year. More drugs, more violence. More pressure on the mayor to do something about it. Anything.

That’s how SIS was born. Bloome and Jameson were two of the first men to walk into that empty space on the top floor of Homan, already talking about how they’d lay out the office. Desks here, where the sun could come through these big windows. Interview rooms along that wall. It was time to get to work.

From the beginning, everything was different if you were a member of the new team. You dressed better than other cops. Tailored suits, leather shoes, long topcoats in the colder months. You worked harder. You worked longer. It was part of the team ethos that you didn’t even bother keeping track of your hours. You didn’t put in for overtime. You didn’t complain if you worked all weekend and didn’t see your family. The job itself was your reward.

As SIS detectives, Bloome and Jameson could go after anybody they wanted, at any level. They didn’t care about the little shit anymore. Low-level dealers were just stepping-stones to the suppliers above them. By the end of their first year together, they were putting together major cases, working them for weeks at a time. Making the arrests that got you photos with the mayor and profiles on the six o’clock news.

That was the payoff, right there. That’s why the young guys like Fowler and Reagan and Koniczek wanted to be a part of it.

Bloome remembered the feeling he’d get whenever they’d select their next target. It might have been nothing more than a name and a photograph on the bulletin board at that point, but this man was the target and that meant he was going down. Didn’t matter if the man would eventually confess or keep his mouth shut. Didn’t matter if they’d get full-color video of the crime or one unreliable witness. Bloome would look at that face on the board and know he was on his way to prison. It might take an hour, it might take a week. But the man had a date in the courtroom no matter what they had to do to make that happen.

Sometimes that meant shortcuts. He remembered the first time he saw Jameson put false information on a police report. They picked up a dealer just before he put a bag in his car. On the report, the bag was already in the trunk. Bloome had some misgivings about it at first. All the years he’d been in Narcotics, he’d never lied on a report. Not once. But Jameson took him aside and asked him a simple question: “Was that bag going in his car?”

“Yes,” Bloome said.

“Does the case get complicated if we stop him before that happens?”

“Yes.”

“Is there a small chance he walks because of that?”

“Yes.”

That’s all he had to say. They were getting the right result, even if that meant a white lie.

Not only did they make the case, they both got commendations.

It was Bloome’s first lesson in how the normal rules didn’t apply to them anymore. Not to SIS.

He remembered the first time he broke down a door without a warrant. The first time he searched a car with no probable cause. It was all a new part of doing good police work, taking weight off the streets, making arrests. Nobody ever questioned the shortcuts. They were making their numbers and Chicago was becoming a safe, more drug-free city. That’s all that mattered.

He remembered the first time Jameson took money off a dealer. Money that the dealer wouldn’t miss, Ray had said. Money he’d make back in eight hours. Money that would sit in a metal drawer downtown for a few months until maybe somebody else took it.