“I don’t know,” he said. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”
They were heading straight back to the city, so he turned and cut to the west until they were in the forest that ran along the canal. He turned onto a gravel road leading off into the trees, the branches scratching at both sides of the car. He came to a fork and went left, then to another fork and went right. All the way into the middle of the forest until the ground rose and the road ended in a clearing.
Mason stopped the car. Diana had her head back on the seat, but her eyes were still wide open. I wonder if she’ll ever be able to close them again, Mason thought, without reliving this night.
“Where are we?” she said.
“Nowhere,” he said. “Good place to be.”
“How does this end?”
“I don’t know.”
“My house?”
“Gone.”
“My restaurant?”
“Forget it.”
“What about my life?”
“That life is over,” he said.
She shook her head and looked out at the trees.
“This goes back to Darius,” she said. “Those cops . . .”
“They were in business with him.”
“But he’s always owned cops,” she said. “As long as I can remember. I’d see them parked outside on the street. Darius would send Quintero out to talk to them, give them their money. He hated cops his whole life. He’d tell me stories about what they did to some of the kids on the streets when he was growing up. But he said you had to learn to use the thing you hate the most. ‘Tie your wagon to the Devil’s tail,’ he said.”
“This one got loose,” Mason said. “So Cole had to respond. That’s why I’m here.”
“I was doing just fine until you got here,” she said. “It wasn’t the exact life I wanted, but I was making it work.”
“This was not my idea, Diana.”
“You brought this on me.”
He felt like he was about to say the wrong thing, so he got out of the car and walked away. He looked up at the stars in the moonless night. To the east, he saw a great smudge of light in the sky. This city where he came from. This city where nothing would ever be the same again.
We need to go somewhere, he said to himself. We need to go somewhere safe where we can figure out our next move.
Which means one thing. There is one man out there who told me to come to him with any problems. He remembered his exact words. You need something, you call me. You get in a situation, you call me. Don’t get creative. Don’t try to fix anything yourself. You call me.
That’s his job. He couldn’t have made it any more clear.
He took out his cell phone.
He’s the only man who can help us, Mason thought. So why am I not calling him?
He heard the car door opening behind him. Then he heard the scream. As he wheeled around, he saw Diana halfway out of her seat, one foot on the ground. She was looking at the side-view mirror. At the blood on her face.
He went over and pulled her up from the car. He wrapped his arms around her and held on to her as she sobbed into his chest.
“It’s going to be okay.”
“What are we going to do?” she said. “Where are we going to go?”
“I know a place we can go,” he said. “It’ll be safe there.”
He picked up the phone again. He dialed Eddie.
“Thank you for what you did,” he said. “You saved our lives. Now we’re coming to your house.”
There was a long silence on the other end.
“You can’t bring this here,” Eddie finally said. “I’m glad I got a chance to help you out. You know that. But whatever this was, you can’t bring it into this house.”
“You can open the door,” Mason said. “Or I can knock it down.”
33
Sergeant Vince Bloome stood over the dead body of his friend and fellow SIS detective, trying desperately to figure out how the hell he was going to explain any of this.
Detective Sandoval’s question came back to him.
Do you even fucking remember when you were a cop?
He’d been a Chicago cop for the past twenty-nine years, including sixteen in Narcotics, then seven in SIS. But, right now, he didn’t know the answer to that question.
He went over to where Jay Fowler lay on the ground, got down on one knee, and turned the man over. His eyes were open. Shot from behind, Bloome thought. One of my best friends in the unit. One of the few men I’d even think about asking to be here tonight.
Bloome’s head was still ringing. He felt sick and dizzy, unsteady on his feet. Feeling along his right shoulder and neck, he came back with blood on his hand. He’d been hit by some scatter from the buckshot and by some glass. The Kevlar vest had taken most of it.