“Come on,” she said as she stood up. “It’s late.”
He followed her to the back door and watched her lock it. She got in her BMW and left him there. He walked around to the front of the restaurant, got in the Camaro, and sat there for a moment. By the time he got back to the town house, she’d be upstairs. He’d sit by himself for a while, maybe out by the pool. He wouldn’t be able to sleep. Not tonight.
Especially now, after talking to Diana, hearing about how her life had turned forever. How from one day to the next it would never be the same again.
For her, it was meeting her father’s partner, the man named Darius Cole.
For Mason, it was something else entirely.
He drove south, down quiet, empty streets, to the edge of the city. Crossing the Ninety-fifth Street Bridge, he parked outside the fence line, turned the engine off, and opened up the windows to let the night air in.
Five years later, Nick Mason had come back to the harbor.
This is where the railroad tracks came in from the state line and joined the big oval that ran around the Port District. Freight cars were stacked in neat rows in the interior, all lit up with artificial light. On the opposite side, the dark water of the Calumet River flowed into Lake Michigan. The big ships all came here to unload, down here on the ass end of town, just this side of Indiana.
In a city that never put on too much makeup to begin with, this was where the landscape looked its hardest. It was all dirt and iron, and on one side of the shore, there was a great pile of old cars as if the ships had passed by and thrown them off like garbage on the side of a road.
This is where it happened, Mason said to himself. This is where you fucked up your life forever.
The job had been conceived as a misdirection, something you can pull off right under a man’s nose because he’s watching for something else. When you look at this Port District and all of the freighters unloading, you think, There’s only one way this can happen. One of these freight cars will have a certain something inside. Which we’ll proceed to unload into these two trucks and then drive to Detroit. Where we’ll be paid over a hundred thousand dollars each.
A huge payoff for one night’s work, if it was really possible. But, of course, it wasn’t. Not even close. The level of security here at an international port—the quarantine area, the cameras, the around-the-clock guards . . . Even if you had someone on the inside, how would you get all that weight moved onto the trucks without anyone noticing within two minutes? That was Mason’s first objection when the four of them were sitting around that table at Murphy’s. The day they met Jimmy McManus.
McManus wore expensive clothes, he had a gold ring in one ear, and he talked like a man who knew how to do things. But Mason had this guy pegged, first sentence out of his mouth. When he was eight years old and his mother called him in the backyard, the first thing out of his mouth was “I didn’t do it!” He was a Grade A fuckup when he was a kid, he was a Grade A fuckup when he was a teenager, and now he was a Grade A fuckup as a man. He was absolutely the last guy you’d ever want on a job. It violated a half dozen of Mason’s rules just sitting here at this table listening to him.
“You’ll never move that much freight out of the Port District,” Mason said to him. “It’s impossible.”
“What kind of jackass do you think I am?” McManus asked him, and Mason had one or two answers ready. But then McManus laid out the plan.
Just beyond the Port District, after one bend in the river, was the area where sailboats and other smaller craft went for dry dock. That’s where the boat would be found. Everyone would be watching the Port District while the trucks left the dry dock and drove right past them.
“So why you?” Mason asked. “They got this valuable shipment coming in, how come they put you in charge of delivering it to Detroit?”
“They need four locals. Four white-faced boys from Chicago who won’t look out of place on the dry dock. Who can get the trucks in and out without having to stop and ask for directions.”
“You said a hundred thousand. That’s each man’s share?”
“I get two hundred for setting it up. You guys all get a hundred.”
“Then you can forget it,” Mason said. “Equal risk, equal pay. A hundred and twenty-five per man.”
Looking back, he should have already been on his feet and out the door instead of sitting there arguing over payouts. When McManus gave in, Mason looked at Eddie and he could tell his friend was thinking about it. He’d been sitting back and listening carefully, the way he always did. Absorbing every word and putting it together in his mind.
Mason dragged his friend outside.
“That man’s a clown,” Eddie said. “But I like the angle. Avoid the hot spot but don’t try too hard to hide.”