“Why am I back here?” Mason said.
Cole turned in his chair and took off the glasses. He didn’t look like a librarian anymore. “You’re back here,” he said, “because you got something I wanna know more about.”
“Look, Mr. Cole . . .”
“Read up on you,” Cole said. “Got some questions.”
Cole reached behind him and grabbed a folder from the desk. As he opened it, Mason saw his own mug shot from four years ago on the top page. This was his criminal file.
“You’re dialed in,” Mason said. “You’ve got this whole place wired. Is there anything the guards won’t bring you?”
“You’re a Canaryville boy,” Cole said, putting his reading glasses back on and starting to flip through the pages. “‘Father unknown.’”
Mason didn’t respond to that. He didn’t like seeing this man reading through his file, but once again figured it was probably a great time to keep his mouth shut.
“Tough way to start your life,” Cole said. “Don’t learn how to be a man, sometimes, until it’s too late. You put work in on the streets for over fifteen years, never spent more than one night locked up.”
Mason watched Cole flip back to the first page.
“‘Possession of a stolen vehicle,’” he said, reading from the page. “Got a few of them here. You work for one shop? Freelance? How’d that work?”
“Whoever paid. I moved around.”
“‘Possession of burglary tools’? Man’s branching out. But that one got dropped, too. Nothing ever sticks to you.”
Cole kept reading the file.
“You work alone sometimes,” Cole said, flipping to the next page. “Sometimes with a crew. All over the city. Sometimes you go in hard. Sometimes on the sly.”
He flipped back to the first page.
“Thirty years without going down. But then they get you and you don’t just go down, you go down hard. Some men wouldn’t handle that so well.”
“This is starting to sound like a job interview,” Mason said.
“That’s exactly what this is.”
The two men looked each other in the eye. Cole waited for Mason to say something.
“I handled it,” Mason said. “What choice did I have?”
“You always got a choice, Nick. Even here, you always got a choice. Like when I wanted to meet you.”
“Look, if we’re gonna do this again . . .”
“How come you didn’t give them up?” Cole said. “Twenty-five-to-life, you’re looking at. Hard federal time, Nick. But you keep your mouth shut.”
There was a long silence, finally broken when two inmates walked by in the hallway outside Cole’s cell. Their conversation ended as soon as they saw the look on the bodyguards’ faces, and the two men moved quickly away.
“One of your men got killed that night,” Cole said, looking back down at the papers. “Finn O’Malley. He a friend of yours?”
“Yes.”
“Two other men got away. Were they friends, too?”
“One was a friend. The other was a piece of shit.”
“But you didn’t turn on either of them.”
“I turn on the piece of shit, he turns on my friend. I’m still heading down here, either way. No matter what I did.”
“You had a wife,” Cole said, looking at the sheet again. “And a daughter.”
“I’m outta here,” Mason said.
“You don’t talk about them. They don’t belong in this place, right?” Cole leaned forward and studied Mason carefully for a long time. “What happens when they come to visit you?”
Mason looked away without answering. Cole shuffled through the papers again and found something interesting on one of the last pages.
“They don’t,” Cole said. “Ever. So you don’t talk about them. It’s, like, a rule you made up. To keep your mind right.”
Mason stared at Cole. He’d never mentioned his rules to anyone in here. It was an essential part of him that nobody else had ever seen.
“That’s right, Nick. You know what I’m talking about. You wanna hear one of my rules?”
Mason didn’t respond.
“I’m here for two lifetimes, Nick. But just because I eat here and I sleep here, does that mean I live here? Fuck that. I’m still back in Chicago, where I belong. Most guys hear that, they think I’m crazy. But maybe you understand what I’m saying.”
Mason looked at one bodyguard, then the other, wondering if they had to hear this bullshit every day.
“It’s a state of mind,” Cole said, tapping his temple with one index finger. “You look at it right, it’s just a problem of geography.”
A problem of geography, Nick thought. The man actually just said that.
“That’s just one of my rules,” Cole said. He picked up the file and opened it again. “I already know a couple of yours. Don’t sell out your friends. Keep everything separate. Keep your family inside you. I’m seeing a picture here.”
“You hear my name,” Mason said. “Now you read a file. And you think you know me?”