The Second Life of Nick Mason

33

Sergeant Vince Bloome stood over the dead body of his friend and fellow SIS detective, trying desperately to figure out how the hell he was going to explain any of this.

Detective Sandoval’s question came back to him.

Do you even fucking remember when you were a cop?

He’d been a Chicago cop for the past twenty-nine years, including sixteen in Narcotics, then seven in SIS. But, right now, he didn’t know the answer to that question.

He went over to where Jay Fowler lay on the ground, got down on one knee, and turned the man over. His eyes were open. Shot from behind, Bloome thought. One of my best friends in the unit. One of the few men I’d even think about asking to be here tonight.

Bloome’s head was still ringing. He felt sick and dizzy, unsteady on his feet. Feeling along his right shoulder and neck, he came back with blood on his hand. He’d been hit by some scatter from the buckshot and by some glass. The Kevlar vest had taken most of it.

Squinting in the near darkness, he scanned the construction vehicles, the cliffs, the empty road that ran along the top. Then the ring of the tunnel, casting the only light in this whole place. The door to the trailer was still open behind him, but they had left the lights off. There was nobody else here.

He looked back down at the dead man’s face. Fowler had been part of SIS for five years. He came out of the Narcotics unit, just like Bloome had. He was young, he was ambitious, he wanted to be a rock star cop. And that meant SIS. He’d found Bloome in Homan Square, had walked right up to him in the hallway, told him he’d be part of the team someday. Bloome had remembered him. When they had an opening, Fowler was the first man he called.

He was married now. His wife’s name was Joanne. Everybody called her Jo. Jay and Jo. She was seven months pregnant.

I did this, Bloome said to himself. I brought this man here. He will never see his own child.

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.

All that unpaid overtime they were putting in. This was just a little compensation. Totally justified.

Bloome didn’t sleep that night. He thought they’d catch up to him.

They never did.

It got easier the next time. Easier again when it was two or three cops working together.

You had to take the money then. You were part of the team and it would make everyone else nervous if you didn’t.

The suits got more expensive. You started seeing manicures and hundred-dollar haircuts. You started seeing the cars taken from the dealers parked in the lot outside, gleaming in the sunshine. Mercedes, BMWs, Audis, Porsches. Usually black, always fast.

Nobody said a word. In fact, it was more high-profile arrests, more commendations, more pictures with the mayor, more detectives from around the city wanting to be a part of SIS.

And then came Darius Cole.

It was Jameson who first brought up the name, based on a recorded conversation between two high-level dealers. Bloome remembered Cole from his first year in Narcotics and the airtight RICO case the feds had put together to put him away for two consecutive lifetimes. It seemed impossible now that a man who’d been in prison for years could still have such influence in Chicago, two hundred miles away. But Jameson put Cole’s name on the board and the two men got to work.

While Bloome and Jameson were putting together a case on Cole and the men who worked for him, those same men were busy putting together a case on Bloome and Jameson. They knew everything about the two detectives. Where they lived. Where their children went to school. Every case they’d ever worked on. Every bribe they’d ever taken. Until the day Cole contacted them both directly on a prison guard’s cell phone and gave them a choice. I’ll make you fucking rich men or I’ll make you fucking dead men. Your choice.

They took the money. Every month, in an envelope delivered by one of Cole’s men, an ex-gangbanger named Marcos Quintero. At first, Cole was also giving them tips on members of rival organizations, which led to even more arrests than before, their reputations in the unit rising even higher.

We’re still doing good police work, the two men told themselves. And yes, making some good money on the side. Everybody wins.

But Cole’s tips eventually turned into requests for favors. Then those requests started to sound like orders.

When Tyron Harris came along, the first man who actually looked smart enough to take over Cole’s territory, Jameson tried to make a new deal. End the relationship with the man in prison, start fresh with this new kid, somebody we can break in the right way. Somebody who won’t make so many demands.

Cole can’t touch us. That was the idea.

Now Jameson and Harris were both dead. And here I am, Bloome said to himself. Look at where I’m standing. Look at what I was prepared to do to protect myself.

If Jameson was here, Bloome thought, we’d talk this over, see if we had any chance to make this look right. Three dead cops in a quarry, three members of the most elite unit in the city… in the middle of the night, with no backup. Nobody else knowing anything about the operation. How do you explain that?

Bloome could already see himself giving his version of this story to Internal Affairs. Then the superintendent. Then the mayor. Then a federal prosecutor in open court.

So it better be one fuck of a story.

He looked down at Fowler again.

Or else it better be a fucking mystery why the three of you guys were down here alone.

I don’t know if I can do that, Bloome said to himself. These are the three guys I trusted the most, now that Jameson is gone. That’s why they were here tonight.

But Bloome knew he had to sell them out to save himself. He had to go get his neck cleaned up somewhere. Get rid of this vest. Then play dumb about this night when they ask about it tomorrow. And every other day for the rest of his life.

That feeling he had whenever they had a target identified, that cold chill in his gut, knowing they were going to put that man away… Bloome had that same feeling now. But for the first time, he was on the other end of it.

Bloome knew that Mason had the evidence to put him away forever. Those recordings, all of their conversations with Harris… Mason would take them right to the man who sent him here in the first place. And Darius Cole would now have the power to destroy him.

The war was over.

If he lets me live, Bloome thought, Cole will own me. For the rest of my life. Anything he tells me to do, I’ll have to do it.

Even if I get to Mason, or Quintero, or anyone else he sends… I’ll never be able to touch Darius Cole.

We thought that prison would keep us safe. It keeps him safe.

Bloome walked toward the tunnel. He had to see his other two men one more time. He felt smaller and smaller as he took each step toward the giant ring of light. Then as he disappeared into the earth, walking through the first puddle, the line came back to him one more time. That question that Sandoval had asked him.

Do you even fucking remember when you were a cop?