The Second Life of Nick Mason

38

Nick Mason sat on the edge of his bed, listening to the rain outside, waiting to see if Cole would change his mind and send his “brother” to kill him that night.

He had defied the one man you don’t defy. But he wasn’t going to run away. He wasn’t going to hide. If Cole decided that extending his contract wasn’t enough of a punishment, Mason would be ready. He still had the M9, with six shots left. That would be enough.

He kept waiting. The rain stopped. Finally, he got up and went out to the pool. As he turned the corner, he felt the impact against the back of his head. He dropped the gun as he went down, then saw it kicked away from his reach.

When he looked up, he saw Jimmy McManus standing over him. He was holding his own gun in his right hand.

He was in his customary tight jeans and muscle shirt, with some new gold chains around his neck. He held the gun a little too casually, like it was one more accessory in the overall fashion statement, that of a man right out of the movies, a man you do not fuck with. But the bruises around both of his eyes, the shattered nose Mason had given him, turned that statement into a lie.

“This is quite a place you got,” McManus said, gesturing with the barrel of the gun, pointing at the pool and everything else around him.

“What do you want?” Mason said, getting to his feet and rubbing the back of his head. McManus backed away from him.

“I’m here to settle things,” he said. “It’s like I told you last time. It’s the loose ends that hang you, Nickie boy. And you are one hell of a loose end.”

Mason took a step toward him. McManus flinched and tightened his grip on the gun, the barrel trained on Mason’s chest.

Mason had seen this man fire his gun in a blind panic while he was running away from that truck at the harbor. But this was different.

Facing a man. Ending his life. Something most men cannot do. It takes another kind of man.

A killer.

Mason knew that now.

“Go ahead. If you really have it in you.”

He looked Jimmy McManus in the eye and waited.

McManus swallowed and tightened his grip again. He raised the gun to eye level and sighted down the barrel.

Mason waited.

They say you never hear the shot that kills you, but it rang in Mason’s ears.

McManus stood there for one more moment, his neck bent at a strange new angle. Blood came running down his face, between his eyes. Then he fell forward into the pool.

Mason watched the pink swirl growing around the body as it turned clockwise in the water. Then he looked up.

Marcos Quintero stood twenty feet away, a gun in his right hand. Quintero gave Mason a slight nod of his head.

Mason stared him down for a long time before finally nodding back.