Mason opened another door and saw a full gym. A row of dumbbells, neatly arranged in pairs, ranged from nothing to the big fifty-pounders at the end. A bench with a rack, a treadmill, an elliptical trainer. A television was mounted high in one corner of the room. A heavy bag hung in another corner. The back wall was a full mirror. Mason looked at his own face from twenty feet away. Cole had told him he could go anywhere in the world with this face, but he never thought he’d end up in a Lincoln Park town house.
He went up the long flight of stairs to what was obviously the main floor. The sleek, modern kitchen had polished granite countertops, an island with a Viking stove and a restaurant hood hanging over it. The bar top looked out over a great open area dominated by the largest television screen Mason had ever seen. He was pretty sure the square footage of the screen was larger than the square footage of the cell he woke up in that morning. In front of the television was a U-shaped expanse of black leather with a large oak coffee table in the middle. You could easily sit a dozen people here. It made the quiet emptiness of the place feel like a sin.
The formal dining room had a table long enough to seat all dozen people that had watched the television in the other room. He left that room and went into what turned out to be the billiards room. An actual room for billiards, with a red felt table and a woven net under each pocket. There was dark paneling on the walls. A pair of stained-glass Tiffany lamps hung over the table. The far corner of the room was set up for darts, and yet another corner had two overstuffed leather chairs with a three-foot-tall humidor between them. Looking through the glass at the selection of cigars inside, Mason remembered how a single cigarette could go for ten dollars in Terre Haute. A carton could get someone killed.
He went up another set of stairs to the top floor. There were bedrooms on each side of a long hallway. When he got to the last door, he tried turning the knob. It was locked.
Mason went back downstairs and found a door on the other side of the kitchen. He walked through and saw another bedroom suite. There was an iron-framed bed topped with black linen, and on top of that were several shopping bags. He took a quick look through them. Pants, shirts, shoes, socks, underwear, belts, a wallet—everything a man could possibly need. Most of the bags had come from Nordstrom and Armani. One from Balani, the custom shop on Monroe Street. He did a quick check of the tags. Everything was his size.
I don’t see my new friend Quintero doing this, he thought.
Mason went back out to the kitchen and opened up the refrigerator. After five years of prison food, Mason stood there staring at the salmon, at the cooked and chilled lobster, at the aged steaks. He didn’t know where to start. Then he saw the bottles of beer on the lower shelf. He shuffled through the selection, mostly microbrews he’d never heard of. Then he found a bottle of Goose Island.
He opened the bottle and took a long swallow. It took him back to summer nights sitting out on his porch. Listening to a ball game with Eddie and Finn. Or listening to his wife and watching their daughter try to catch fireflies.
He found a take-out container of beef tenderloin with some kind of shiitake mushroom sauce, with angel-hair pasta. He went through the drawers until he found the silverware, grabbed a fork, and ate the entire dish cold, standing there in the middle of the kitchen. He wondered what the inmates in Terre Haute had for dinner that night.
Wednesday night, he said to himself. Usually hamburger night. Or, at least, what they called hamburger.
When he was done eating, he went to the black leather couch, found the remote control, and turned on the television. Leaning back and putting his feet up on the table, he took another long swallow from his beer, found the rain-delayed White Sox game, and watched the last inning. The Sox won. Then he spent a few minutes flipping up and down through the channels just because he could. You try doing that on the television in the common room and you’ll start a riot. He shut the television off.
He went back to the refrigerator and took out another Goose Island, then went outside through the big sliding glass door off the kitchen. Still high above the street, with a swimming pool sunk into the great concrete monolith beneath the patio, the water surrounded by bluestone, lit up with underwater lights and glowing aquamarine in the darkness. A table, chairs, and a grill with a wet bar stood by, ready for an outdoor party.
Mason went to the rail and looked out at the park and, beyond that, the endless horizon of Lake Michigan. He could see the lights from a half-dozen boats on the water. He could hear the distant bass notes from a car cruising by on the street. A perfect summer night to be out on the town, no matter where you were going.
A breeze came off the lake and gave him a brief chill. Sixteen hours ago, Mason had woken up in a maximum security prison cell. Now he was standing in a town house in Lincoln Park, drinking a bottle of Goose Island and looking out at the lake.
I knew this man had power, he said to himself, but that was a federal fucking prison I walked out of today. How does one man make that happen?