The Second Life of Nick Mason by Steve Hamilton Read Free Book Online Page B

big sloping front yard was a half acre of perfect grass. It would take you an hour to cut it with a push mower, but Mason knew this guy had a rider mower with the snowplow you could put on the front for a Chicago winter.
    One bay in the three-car garage was open. He could see a bicycleparked inside. He could see a soccer net and a ball. Around the far edge of the house, peeking out from the backyard, a swing set. Not cheap metal, but cedar, with the clubhouse connected to it, green flags at the corners of its roof and a slide going out its door.
    Mason unfolded the piece of paper and checked the address. He couldn’t help wondering if Quintero had come here himself. If he had sat in his Escalade, in this exact spot, watching Mason’s daughter cross the front yard. The man’s eyes hidden behind his sunglasses, a ghost sitting behind the tinted windows of his big black vehicle.
    Then, as if conjured from his imagination, he saw the black Escalade roll past him. Quintero had followed him all the way here. The vehicle didn’t stop. It kept going down the quiet streets of Elmhurst and then disappeared after a left turn at the next corner.
    Mason tightened his grip on the steering wheel. He closed his eyes for a moment. Everything is wrong, he said to himself. Every reason for getting out of prison, for signing that invisible contract with Darius Cole, it’s all falling apart right in front of me.
    He waited for his heart to stop pounding. Then he got out of the Mustang and walked up the driveway to the house. He went to the front door and stood there for a few seconds. Then he rang the bell. Four notes chimed from somewhere deep inside the house.
    When he first met her, her name was Gina Sullivan. She had dirty-blond hair and green eyes. They were kids back then. Gina was eighteen and just out of high school. Nick was nineteen and already on his own most of the time, crashing at Eddie’s house some nights, other nights at Finn’s house. Other nights, wherever he landed.
    There was this party they had all gone to. There were a dozen girls there, and this one in particular. Young Gina asked young Nickwhat he did for a living, already guessing he wasn’t Sigma Phi Epsilon. Nick said he stole cars. Gina thought he was joking, so he told her to pick out a car and he’d steal it for her. She did and he did. They ended up in the backseat a few hours later. Not long after that, Gina confessed to him that the car he had stolen was her father’s.
    Gina went away to Purdue University that fall. When she came back, they picked right up where they had left off. She went away again that next fall, but only lasted another semester and came back to the family home up on the north end of Canaryville. After getting thrown out of the house, she lived with relatives for a while and in the midst of all that she broke up with Nick, then they were back together, then they broke up again. He was past auto theft and on to high-end work by then. Nick had written his rules, a whole set of them, refined through experience, and by learning from Finn’s mistakes.
    Gina had one rule for Nick. The only rule she needed.
The straight life with me or the life
you’re living without me.
    Nick chose life with Gina Sullivan. Because nobody on planet Earth could ever push his buttons like this woman could. Nobody could make him happier. Nobody could make him crazier. Even when he was trying to settle down. Trying to be a normal working stiff. Even then, maybe it was still more crazy than good most of the time.
    But when it was good, man, it was fucking great.
    They got married. They bought the house on Forty-third Street. They had a daughter. Nick kept his promise.
    Until the harbor job.
    Five years and a month later, he was standing at her door, waiting for someone to open it. He was starting to think nobody was home.
    Then the door was pulled open and Gina looked out at him.
    She hadn’t changed. Not really. It was the same dirty-blond hair, even if she