The Second Life of Nick Mason

4

After five years without a visit or a phone call, Nick Mason didn’t even know if the life he’d left behind would still be there, but he had to try.

He went through the clothes in his room and put on a black sports coat over his jeans and white dress shirt. When he went down to the garage, he found the keys to the Mustang in the ignition. He hadn’t driven a car in five years. He opened the garage, put it in reverse, backed out into the street. Then he headed south.

If you grow up in Chicago, you know it’s a city of neighborhoods, a great patchwork of separate communities, spreading out in three directions from the shores of Lake Michigan. Each neighborhood has its own rhythm, its own way of life, and its own food-from the deep-dish pizza in Streeterville to the pierogies in Avondale to the fried rattlesnake in La Villita.

And if you grow up in what they officially call New City, like Nick Mason did, you know it’s really two separate neighborhoods in one: Back of the Yards and Canaryville. Back of the Yards is where you find the kids with the Polish last names, the grandchildren of the men who worked as meatpackers in the Union Stock Yards. On the other side of that is Canaryville. That’s where you find the Irish kids. Like Eddie Callahan. Or Finn O’Malley. Or a half-Irish, half-whatever kid named Nick Mason.

Of the three, Eddie was the smartest. He was a short, redheaded kid with freckles, built as solid as a fullback. Surprisingly fast when he had to be. He didn’t always talk like a kid from Canaryville. He even had both parents at home most of the time.

Finn was tall and underfed, with a haunted look in his eyes that made him irresistible to some girls and unsettling to everyone else. His mother worked at the corner grocery, and his father was usually either missing or sitting at one of the bars on Halsted Street.

Nick’s mother lived in one tiny apartment after another and sometimes relied on charity from St. Gabriel’s. He had a vague memory of some men who’d come by to see her, but he couldn’t remember any single man as his father no matter how hard he tried. It bothered him sometimes, but then he’d think, what the hell, it’s probably just some local loser who may or may not be kicking around anymore. Sometimes he’d even wonder what would happen if he met an older man at the bar and saw enough resemblance in the face to make the connection. He honestly didn’t know what would happen next, but it probably wouldn’t be good.

A year older, Finn was the first one of the three to get drunk, the first to get laid, the first to steal a car. He was the first to get picked up by the police and held in a cell until his mother could get off work and come pick him up.

When Nick and Eddie followed Finn into the auto theft business, they discovered that they had a real talent for it. Something that Finn would never have. They were a lot more careful, for one thing. They were more patient. They knew to walk away if everything wasn’t right. Once they had that part figured, the rest was easy. It wasn’t like breaking into people’s houses. It wasn’t that kind of personal invasion. It was just cold metal on wheels.

Eddie, in particular, got good at the technical side of car theft. He’d read the electrical diagrams on some of the models so he’d know where to find the wires to the main fuse, the ignition circuit, and the starter motor. Once you’ve got those three wires pulled out from the wiring harness and cut, you’re in business.

It didn’t take Nick and Eddie long to find the people who would buy the cars from them. If you did a clean job, and if you were willing to go out and find exactly what they wanted, there would always be people willing to pay you.

That’s what Mason did instead of junior and senior year of high school. That’s what he did instead of college. That was his job for six years. He got picked up a few times, but he was never charged. He was proud to say he’d never spent two consecutive nights in custody. The first time Mason and Eddie both got picked up together, Eddie’s parents convinced him to join the Army. Mason was surprised when he agreed to it. He wasn’t surprised when Eddie came back two years later.

“Turns out I can shoot a gun,” Eddie said the first night Mason saw him again. “I mean, really shoot. And I loved it. But I couldn’t take the rest of it, some asshole pounding on a garbage can lid and telling me to get out of bed.”

“So two years of your life…” Mason said.

“Yeah, two years and I’m out,” Eddie said. “But I can still hit anything inside a thousand yards.”

Mason had never used a gun on a job before. You don’t need one when you’re stealing cars. But now with Eddie back, they had a new plan.

Robbing drug dealers.

It took less time than stealing a car, it paid twice the money, and nobody involved in this transaction had any interest in calling the police. The basic routine was to find a dealer, observe his routine, catch him when he was carrying the maximum amount of money. Do it quickly, decisively, and then get the hell out. The risk was a lot higher, so that meant some new rules. And when it came to the guns, they needed one very carefully thought-out rule that would keep everyone alive, including the dealers. A real cowboy like Finn would have come up with something straight and simple like Don’t bring out the guns unless you plan on using them. But that’s bullshit. Absolute suicidal bullshit. Because you don’t want to use your gun. You just want the other man to think you will. The rule they came up with was Act like you want to shoot the man. Act like it’s the one thing you want more than anything else in the world.

It was a rule that worked, because if you could sustain that belief within yourself, then the man you were robbing would believe it, too. No dealer wanted to die over a few thousand dollars. Not if it was money he could make back the next day.

Of course, you could only do that kind of job so often. It wasn’t like stealing cars, with a fresh supply lined up and down the street every single day. You knocked over dealers and they started putting extra men on the corners. So you backed off and let things go back to normal. Then you hit them again.

The business stayed profitable for two years. Then one night they had a house lined up in Roseland. Abandoned for months, it became a place for users to score, but within another couple of days the operation would be moved to yet another house. All they had to do was wait for the right moment, enter in front and back to introduce themselves, take the money, and say good night.

They were just getting ready to move when another vehicle pulled up on the other side of the street. A big Ford Bronco. Three white men got out. One of the men went around back. The other two went to the front. Their guns were out before they even hit the door. It was as if they had borrowed the same plan and then executed it exactly as Nick, Eddie, and Finn would have.

They were back out of the house within two minutes. One of them was carrying a grocery bag. They got in their Bronco and took off.

“You know who that was?” Eddie asked.

Nobody answered. The way these guys looked, the way they moved, the fact that they didn’t care about being seen… that was Mason’s first encounter with dirty cops. It wouldn’t be his last. But, for now, it meant one thing: when the cops take over your business, it’s time to find a new one.

After six years of stealing cars and two years of taking down drug dealers, Nick Mason graduated to high-end robbery. He got his first job through one of his old chop shop contacts, who told Mason about a business supplying and servicing video poker games in bars. The bar customers weren’t supposed to be playing for real money, of course, but the owner had been overheard complaining about how the “not real” money was piling up and he didn’t want to put it in the bank and have to account for it on the books. So it was all just wads of cash that barely fit into the hiding places all over his shop. He hadn’t spent any of that money on a safe.

As soon as Mason shared this with Eddie and Finn, Finn wanted to bust right into the place and put a gun to the man’s head and ask him where the money was hidden. But Mason knew this was an opportunity to learn how to do this kind of job right. Like a pro.

Mason watched the place for a few days. It dealt with more than just the video poker. It was a “vending and amusement supply company,” for cigarette machines, pinball machines, video games, you name it. There was always someone in the building from eight in the morning until six in the evening, at which point everything was locked up and the alarm was turned on. There was a side window with thick iron bars, but Mason could look through and see the work area in the back of the building. Mason made detailed notes so he’d be sure to have a plan once he got inside, along with the proper tools.

Meanwhile, Eddie was learning everything he could about the alarm system. He was the one who knew how to hot-wire cars, so he was the natural choice for alarm man. The sticker in the front window told Eddie what kind of system it was. All he had to do was figure out how to disarm the system within the thirty-second delay after the front door was opened.

When the night came, the three men broke the glass on the rear door and were inside in seconds. Eddie went straight to the security panel in the front of the building and disabled it, which for that particular model meant grabbing it and pulling the entire old-school landline piece of crap right off the wall. Mason started searching through locked metal cabinets, using the large bolt cutters he had brought with him. He came up empty every time. Eddie joined him and started going through the hollow consoles of the vending machines and video games. Finn just poked around, getting more and more anxious.

“I told you how we should have done this,” Finn said just as Mason pushed up the ceiling tiles and pulled down a bundle of money.

The three of them spent the next few minutes pushing up every ceiling tile in the storage area. When they were done, they had a garbage bag full of cash, over twelve thousand dollars for one night’s work. One week if you counted the prep work. They had learned some good lessons that were useful on their next job. And the job after that. The ideal target was anyplace where a large amount of cash was put to bed for the night. Eddie learned a little more about alarm systems with each job. Mason learned about cheap safes and how to drill them open.

The last job the three men did together, years before getting together again one more time at the harbor, was another cash business with a drillable safe. By then, Mason wasn’t relying on anyone else for the setups. He’d learned how to recognize the easy targets. In this case, it was a car audio store, and as Mason stood at the counter, he could see the safe in the back room, a model he knew he could drill in ten minutes. It was practically begging to be opened.

He spent an hour watching the customers. Half of them wore gold chains and all of them wanted their rides to have the biggest subwoofers on the road. A lot of cash went into the register. Not many credit card receipts.

He kept watching the place. A few more days to learn the routine, to find out when they’d bag up the money and take it to the bank. Eddie learned about the alarm system, and on a Sunday night they broke in through the back door. Eddie disabled the alarm, Mason plugged in his industrial drill with the diamond-tipped bit, and Finn stayed at the front window to watch the street.

Mason went right through the face of the lock until he got to the drive cam. Then he used a long punch rod to push it out of the way. He opened the safe and stuffed everything into a trash bag.

As he stood up, he saw Finn coming toward him. “Cops,” Finn said, although the look on his face had already made that obvious, not to mention the flashing red lights that were suddenly reflected in the front window.

Mason told him to get down and to stay quiet. He went close enough to the lobby of the store to see out the window and caught sight of the back half of the patrol car. It was parked twenty feet from the door.

“We gotta get the fuck out of here,” Eddie said from behind him. The only other way out was the back door.

Mason ran the odds through his head. Go out the back, get in the car, drive around the other side of the building, hit the street…

In that moment, Mason felt his whole life slipping away from him. The alarm was disabled, the safe was drilled open, the money was stuffed into a trash bag. This would be the easiest bust of the year for these guys. The only question would be what kind of deal they could make, three guys with some history but no felony convictions, now facing burglary and probably Class 3 larceny, depending on how much money was in that bag.

“I told you we should have brought guns,” Finn said, his hands shaking and his eyes as wide open as a junkie’s. “Did I not fucking say that?”

Mason wanted to slap him hard across the face. For all of his rules, Mason had one blind spot-this one man who had been like a brother to him for as long as he could remember. Seeing him like this made Mason reconsider. Maybe he needed one more rule about working with guys who lose their shit and start talking about guns when they’re backed into a corner.

Mason took a breath and went over to the small side window, peering out at the parking lot. He saw the front half of the patrol car.

And then another car. An old beater with four male occupants. It had pulled over into the lot and was parked directly in front of the patrol car.

It was a traffic stop.

Mason kept watching out the window as the four high school shitheads were taken out, IDs checked, beer bottles dumped, and the empties lined up on the roof of the car. He let out his breath and whispered to Eddie and Finn that they weren’t all about to get arrested after all.

But now they’d have to wait to get out of there.

Parents were called and brought down to the scene of the crime. Another patrol car pulled in to help out. Thirty minutes passed and the three men were still trapped inside the store. Then an hour. Finn was getting anxious again.

At one point, one of the patrol officers actually came over to the store and looked in the front window. He cast a long shadow that reached all the way across the counter and into the back room. Mason, Eddie, and Finn all held their breath and made sure they couldn’t be seen. Then the shadow left the window and the cars started to pull out of the lot.

Except for the one patrol car.

Mason could imagine the two cops calling in on their radio, requesting backup. After all this time waiting, he thought, maybe we really do have to go out that back door and try to outrun them.

But then the car finally turned onto the street and drove away.

As soon as it was out of sight, they went out the back door and got in their car. Eddie carried the trash bag.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Eddie said as Mason started the car and hit the gas. When they counted the money an hour later, it turned out to be just over nine thousand dollars. Three thousand per man. Not nearly enough money for what they had risked.

It was time to take a break. And then, when they got back together, to make a decision. Either go bigger or get out.

But then Finn did something stupid, even by his own standards. He took a girl to a bar in McKinley Park and got in a fight with one of the locals who said the wrong thing to her. Bad enough to take her out of Canaryville in the first place when there were perfectly good bars on your own home turf and nobody’s calling the cops as long as it’s a fair fight. But Finn was a stranger in McKinley Park, so a patrol car did show up and Finn ended up hitting the first cop who put a hand on him. That cop got a concussion and Finn got eighteen months for aggravated assault and obstruction. When he was released, he didn’t even bother coming back to Canaryville to face Mason and Eddie. He went to Florida instead.

It felt like one more sign. Then Eddie met Sandra. Mason got back together with Gina, and if there was still any question left, she answered it for him.

It was time to get out.

Mason turned thirty and he was trying to settle down, trying to stay straight. He was married to Gina by then. Adriana was four years old. Finn had been in Florida for a few years and had just recently returned to Chicago. He got picked up again on his first night back in town. Two days later, he found Nick Mason.

“Got a job for us,” he said.

“I’m out, Finn. Forget it.”

Nick had the house on Forty-third Street and he was doing whatever straight jobs he could find. Manual labor, construction, driving a delivery truck. The same kind of working-stiff jobs everyone else in their neighborhood did.

“You don’t look retired to me. You look busier than ever, getting up early every morning to drive that truck around.”

“It’s called working for a living. You should give it a try. Just once in your life.”

“You have to hear me out,” Finn said. “This is a onetime thing and then you’re set.”

“No.”

“You take care of your family. You buy a nicer house. You change your whole life.”

“I said no.”

“Don’t you get it, Nickie? This is your walkaway job. A half million dollars for one day’s work.”

That stopped Mason dead.

“Half a million split four ways,” Finn said. “There’s a shipment coming in through the harbor.”

“A shipment of what?”

“Shipment of I don’t know and I don’t care. That’s not the point. The point is, someone needs four men to unload it and then drive two trucks to Detroit. That’s all we’re doing and then taking half a million for our trouble. Hop on a bus back home and have a fucking party.”

“Who are the four?”

“You and me and Eddie. And this other guy.”

“What other guy?”

“This guy I met in custody.”

“An ex-con.”

“He’s not an ex-con. He never went away. He was in the holding cell when I got picked up again. They had to let us both go the next morning. But we’re talking and he asks me if I knew two other good men.”

“Answer’s still no,” Mason said. “I’ve got too much to lose.”

“I know that, Nickie. You do this for them. Your family. Think of what that money could do for you guys.”

“Find somebody else.”

“Just meet him,” Finn said. “What would it hurt? Meet the man and hear what he has to say. If you don’t like it, you leave.”

Mason thought about it. “What’s this guy’s name?”

“McManus. Jimmy McManus.”

Jimmy fucking McManus. That was the moment. Five and a half years ago. Mason could have walked away right then. He never would have met the man. He never would have made the biggest mistake of his life.

Mason wouldn’t have gone to prison. Finn wouldn’t have gone into a cheap pine box.

As he drove through his old neighborhood, Mason was replaying that day, and a thousand others, in his head. He was recognizing every tree and every fire hydrant. Every narrow lot with every house packed in tight with only inches between them. This place where everyone lived on top of one another, where there were no secrets, where outsiders were noticed immediately and watched until they were gone.

Mason drove down one block, threading his way through the cars that lined each side of the street. He came to a stop sign, then drove down another block. Then he was there.

Five years after leaving this house, Nick Mason was back, sitting at the wheel of a restored 1968 Mustang, a car more expensive than any car he’d ever stolen. A car more expensive than all the cars he’d ever owned himself put together. Hell, maybe more than he paid for this house back when he actually lived here.

He sat there and watched the summer day go by on his old block. A woman was walking a dog. Across the street, a little girl was riding a bicycle. She must have been about five or six. She was good at riding her bike. It made Mason remember the week Adriana learned to ride without training wheels. He looked out the car window at the exact spot where she fell. Right there. She got up and fell again in the same spot. She got back up and this time she kept going.

The ghost of his former life, right here in front of him, playing across four seasons. Hanging the Christmas lights, building a snowman. That almost level front porch that he built with his own hands.

Actually, the porch looked dead true. It had a natural stain before. Now it was painted bright white.

The front door to the house opened. A man came out onto the porch. A stranger. For one instant, Mason was already reaching for the car door, getting ready to confront the man. What are you doing in my house? Where’s my wife and daughter?

But then the man called to the girl who was riding the bike. This man had fixed his front porch and had painted it. God knows what else he’d done to the place. But he has every right, Mason said to himself, because he lives here. Because this is his house.

Mason was startled by the sudden rapping on his window. He looked up and saw a man standing there by the driver’s-side door. Mason used the old-school 1968 crank to slide his window down. When he looked up, he saw a familiar face.

Quintero.

“The fuck you doing here?” Mason said. “Are you following me?”

Quintero didn’t speak. He handed Mason a piece of paper. Mason took it from him.

“What is this?” Mason said.

“What you’re looking for.”

A car started honking behind them. Quintero’s Escalade was double-parked, blocking the entire street. Quintero gave the driver a look and the honking stopped. Only then did he return to his vehicle. He got in and drove off.

Mason unfolded the paper. There was an address written down. In Elmhurst, of all places.

Elmhurst?

He looked out his windshield at the Escalade’s brake lights as the vehicle slowed at the stop sign, then disappeared down the street.

You know where they live, he said to himself. I shouldn’t be so surprised, but you know where Gina lives. You know where my daughter lives.

The man standing on his front porch was eyeing him now. Mason couldn’t blame him. A strange man in a strange car parked on his street. Then a gangbanger pulls up behind him in a gangbanger Escalade, blocking the whole street. If it were Mason on the porch, he’d already be wandering down to the street for a little chat. Can I help you out, friend? Are you lost, buddy?

Mason pulled away from the curb. When he got to the stop sign, he saw two kids in an old beater slowing down at the intersection, checking out the black vintage Mustang. They were eighteen years old, maybe nineteen. Tough Irish kids like a thousand others Mason grew up with. Like Eddie, like Finn. Like himself. Mason could see their eyes following the smooth lines of the car, then coming up to meet his.

He could tell what they were thinking. This guy must have taken the wrong turn on the expressway and found himself on the wrong street. You have no business driving down this street, those eyes said to him. This is our neighborhood. You do not belong here.

Looking back at them, Mason wondered which one of these kids would fuck up his life as badly as he had himself. Maybe both of them.

He hit the gas and headed to Elmhurst.