The Second Life of Nick Mason

29

Mason had to confirm that Angela was not among the victims. He went halfway down the stairs, just close enough to see each man’s body, how it had landed and gotten tangled up with the others. There was no woman here.

Quintero said they were looking for her, Mason said to himself. If she was here, then they must have taken her away after killing every single one of these men.

Meaning I got here too late. And now it’s time to get the hell out of here.

As Mason went back up the stairs, he mentally retraced his steps through the house, thinking about every surface he might have touched. He didn’t think he’d put his hand anywhere except for the back door itself. Simple enough to wipe down the knob on his way out, which was the one direction he was now headed. He grabbed a dish towel from the kitchen.

He opened the back door and was just about to wipe the knob. That’s when he heard the voice.

One more thing about these old houses-they have the ventilation system that runs in open ducts between the floors. He could remember living in old pieced-out apartments in shithole houses in Canaryville when he was growing up and how sometimes you could actually see through the vents to the apartment below you. Interesting if the person down there was worth looking at. Not so interesting if it was some drunken asshole in his underwear yelling at his wife.

He heard the voice again. Hoarse and strained, almost unintelligible. It might have been the whimper of an animal. An alarm clock was already going off in Mason’s mind. He’d been here too long. Being in the same house for more than a few minutes with four dead men piled up in the basement seemed like a violation of one of his rules. Or, in any case, a really bad idea.

But he had to find out where the voice was coming from.

He started into the main part of the house and saw the ghostly shadows of upturned furniture. The dining room table on its side, all of the chairs thrown around the room and broken. A cabinet of drawers emptied.

Mason stood and listened again. Then he went into the front room and saw thin threads of blood woven together on the floor. Bullet holes in the walls.

He went up the stairs.

A spiderweb of cracks spread out from the center of a huge HD screen, even bigger than the screen in the town house. Everything else in the room was opened up and turned over, but there was no more blood up here. No more bullet holes. Just anger and destruction.

The third floor had two bedroom suites with whirlpool tubs, tile showers, king-sized beds, and everything else you could ever want. Every drawer and cabinet had been emptied.

More anger, more destruction.

But no bullet holes. And no blood.

He got down and looked under the bed in the first room. The closet had been emptied, but he took a moment to kick through the pile of clothes on the floor. Same in the second room.

There was an even bigger pile of clothing in that closet, but there was nobody hiding there. He looked up at the ceiling and started to wonder about the attic.

The voice spoke again and this time Mason could make out a word. A woman’s voice, almost singsong now. Saying the same word over and over. It sounded like… Jordan?

He waited.

Nothing happened.

But then he looked more closely at the back wall. A wire shelf with a break in the middle was mounted on the wall. He wrapped the dish towel around his hand, grabbed the shelf, and pulled.

Half of the back wall started to swing forward. There was nothing but darkness behind the wall until he swung his flashlight and saw a woman’s wide-open eyes.

And the gun barrel pointed right at his chest.

Her eyes got wider and Mason knew her finger was already tightening on the trigger.

A first-time shooter will squeeze the trigger and pull the shot high and right. It’s the only thing that saved him.

Mason dropped to the ground as the gun shattered the silence of the room and he felt the bullet pass over his left shoulder.

He rolled away from the closet and came up on one knee.

“Don’t shoot!” he said. “Angela, you need to trust me. I can get you out of here.”

“Where’s Jordan?” she said, her voice ragged.

“How long have you been in there?”

“I don’t know. Hours. He told me to stay here. He told me to shoot anybody else who came into the room.”

Mason remembered seeing Angela get out of the car at the restaurant and the driver who seemed to double as her bodyguard. He figured that must have been Jordan.

And that Jordan was one of those men at the bottom of the basement stairs.

“Jordan is dead,” he said.

He waited a minute and listened to her softly crying. Then he got to his feet.

“Come on,” he said to her. “We need to get out of here.”

She came out of the closet with the gun still in her hand.

It was a Beretta M9. Probably Jordan’s gun. And probably why Mason was still alive. The thing weighed two pounds, with a fifteen-round magazine. If she’d had her own little Beretta Nano, she probably would have shot him right in the head.

“Give me the gun.”

She looked down at the gun and then handed it to him. He tucked it into his belt.

Her face and hair were a mess from all of the crying, and from hiding in that little secret compartment for God knows how long. But she was still beautiful.

“Where are we going?” she said, wiping her eyes with both hands.

“Anywhere you want to go.”

“Are you sure Jordan’s dead?”

Mason had been thinking she was some kind of fashion model from Sweden the first time he had seen her with Harris outside Morton’s. This time, he was hearing her talk with the classic flattened-out vowels of a South Sider. This woman was more Stockyards than Stockholm.

“He’s dead,” Mason said. “They’re all dead.”

He thought she’d start crying again. But, instead, she looked at him with what seemed to be a sudden hatred.

“I recognize you,” she said.

“The club,” Mason said. He flashed back to that moment when Harris got up from the table and this woman held back the bodyguard who was about to accompany him to the bathroom.

“Yeah,” she said, looking away. “I was there. Now you want to buy something from me.”

She went back to her hiding place, bent down in the darkness, and picked something up. When she stood up again, she handed it to Mason. It was the size of a hardcover book. But it was made of shiny black plastic.

“You wouldn’t be giving me anything,” she said, “if I didn’t have this. And you wouldn’t give a shit about me getting out of here.”

If I didn’t give a shit, Mason thought, I’d shoot you and take it off your dead body.

“What is this?” he said, turning the black box over in his hand.

“It’s what those cops were after.”

“Come on,” Mason said, grabbing her arm.

He led her downstairs, but she stopped in the kitchen and demanded to know where Jordan was. He pushed her past the stairs to the basement and out the back door, not forgetting to wipe off the doorknob on his way out.

As they stepped outside, he felt more vulnerable than ever, leading this woman across the backyard and over the fallen-down fence to the street.

“Where the hell is your car?” she said.

“Right down here,” he said, fighting off a sudden urge to put her back inside the house. Headlights blinded him as he opened the passenger’s-side door and put her inside. By the time he got to his own door, the car was coming up behind them, moving fast. The flashers came on, red and blue lights bouncing back and forth between the headlights. An unmarked police car.

He found the keys and fired up the Camaro. The tires squealed on the pavement as he hit the gas and started running.