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When Lauren opened her door, she saw blood.
She tried to catch Nick as he collapsed across the doorway. He hit the floor hard. The dog, locked in another room, started barking.
“Oh my God! What happened?”
He didn't answer. She felt his soaking wet shirt, saw the drops of blood spilling onto her hardwood floor. In one of his pockets, a cell phone was ringing. Lauren shut the door behind Nick and pulled him into the apartment, back against the wall. He let out a moan as she started to remove his shirt.
“Who did this to you?”
She stopped when she saw the black tactical vest.
The surprise lasted for only a moment, then that feeling turned into something else. She'd always known this day would come. When he'd leave, he couldn't tell her where he'd go, what he'd do... All she knew was that he hated doing it. And now, whatever he'd done tonight, it was going to kill him. He was going to die right here on her floor.
“It's not so bad. You're okay,” she said. It felt like both a lie and a prayer.
She undid the vest's Velcro straps, slowly pulling it from his body. He let out another moan, and she saw the wound to his shoulder. A jagged hole in his flesh just above his collarbone, close to his neck. The blood flowed again, streaming down his chest. Lauren gasped, nausea and panic nearly overwhelming her. She willed them away. Running to the kitchen for towels and the portable phone, she slipped on the blood-wet floor but didn't fall. When she returned, she pressed the towels against the wound with one hand. With the other hand, she dialed.
Mason reached up and slapped the phone out of her hand. It skidded across the floor.
“No,” he said. His voice was ragged, like he couldn't catch his breath. “No calls.”
“You're bleeding to death.”
“No nine-one-one! Just let me—”
“Are you crazy?”
Mason grabbed her wrist.
“Nick, please...” She tried to pull away.
Mason held on. He was losing consciousness.
His cell phone rang again. This time, Lauren slipped it out of his pocket and read the screen.
PRIVATE NUMBER.
“Don't answer that!” He slurred the words, his eyes fluttering shut.
Not ever touching his phone: it was one of the things she had promised him. That, and she'd never ask where he'd been or what he'd done.
“I have to answer,” she said, pulling out of his grasp. “You'll die if I don't. I'm not going to let that happen.”
• • •
MASON FLOATED THROUGH an ocean of darkness. Beyond light, beyond sound. As he slowly came toward the surface, he heard words being spoken somewhere in the distance. Words that didn't yet mean anything.
My name is Lauren. Nick's been shot. He needs help. He won't let me call nine-one-one. What do I do?
Mason turned away from the surface and dove back down into the darkness. He stayed there for a minute, or an hour, or a day, until he felt himself rising again. There were sounds—a knock on the door, the muffled bark of a dog, a woman yelling—drawing him toward the surface. Then he broke the surface and saw a face looking down at him.
Quintero was kneeling before him on the floor, a brown plastic bottle in his hand. As he poured the peroxide onto the wound, pain racked Mason's body again, every muscle clenching so hard it was like a seizure.
“What... are you... doing?... How... did I... get here?” Mason said, eyes unfocused.
“I don't know, man. But you fucked up.”
Quintero poured some of the clear liquid into a metal mixing bowl. The gold chains around his neck were swaying with every movement, the muscles flexing and animating the world of tattoos on both arms.
“Lauren,” Mason said as it came back to him.
“I'm here.”
Her voice came from somewhere behind him. He strained to see her, but Quintero put one hand on Mason's chest to steady him.
Why'd I come here? Mason asked himself. Because this place is my refuge. From that first night she brought me here, this became the one place I could come and at least pretend that nothing else in my life could find me here.
And now I've destroyed it.
“Come here. Hold this,” Quintero said to Lauren, waving a gauze pad at her. “Press it to his shoulder.”
She didn't move.
“He's going to bleed out if you don't help me,” he said, louder but still calm.
Mason could see it in Lauren's eyes: she knew this man. He was her nightmare. The man who followed Nick. Gave him orders. The obstacle that stood between Nick and her having a life.
She didn't move.
“It's okay,” Mason told her. “You can help him.”
He focused on her face, her lips, her brown eyes, now filled with fear and worry. It had been her short brown hair that had first caught his eye the minute he walked into the pet shop to buy Max, the way it shouted youth and independence . A carefree life. But it was her honesty, her basic goodness, that ultimately drew him in, all those things about her that seemed to represent what he couldn't have for himself.
Quintero held the cotton gauze up to her. “Take it. Press it to his shoulder.”
She took the gauze but did not kneel, her eyes focusing on the bulge showing through the back of Quintero's untucked shirt. Mason could see the thought forming in her mind. She didn't know guns. Hated them. But...
“Just do what he tells you,” Mason said. And don't try anything stupid.
The spell was broken, any thought of going for Quintero's gun gone. She got down on her knees and pressed the gauze to the wound, the pure white cotton turning instantly red and wet in her hand.
“Harder,” Quintero said.
Mason looked out the window at the darkness and the lone streetlight that burned high above the pavement. A blue light flickered, moving across the wall. A police cruiser passing by on the street below. Following the light, he reconstructed his drive here, from the Aqua to this apartment building, just around the corner from Wrigley Field.
“My car,” Mason said. “It's probably blown.”
Quintero shook his head at him. “You were supposed to bring it to the shop.”
Mason wasn't going to argue the point. Nudging Lauren's hand away, he tried to look at the wound, but it was too close to his neck to see.
Lauren threw the blood-soaked gauze onto the floor. Quintero looked over to her, his expression cold and menacing. “Grab more cotton and get back down here.”
“I'll be fine,” Mason said to Lauren. “Just keep calm. He knows what he's doing.”
Quintero poured more of the peroxide into the metal bowl. After that, he dropped in a pair of tweezers and an X-Acto knife.
“You.” He pointed to Lauren. “Forget the bandages. Get me your sewing needles. Thread, too. Strong thread.”
That did it. Lauren stood up. “This is bullshit. I'm calling nine-one-one.”
She pulled Nick's cell phone out of her pocket, but before she could dial the first digit, Quintero was on his feet.
“Look at me,” Quintero said, pointing at his own eyes. “You can help or you can let him die on your floor. That's up to you. But the one thing you're not going to do is call an ambulance. Understand?”
Lauren nodded, but the phone was still in her hand. Three digits, she thought. She could dial them with her thumb. 9-1—
Someone snapped his fingers. When Lauren looked up, Quintero had a gun on her. Her breath caught in her throat.
He snapped again. Held out his free hand. “The phone.”
“Give it to him,” Mason said, trying to prop himself up.
Lauren handed Quintero the phone.
“Needle and thread. Now.”
“Nick...” She was looking at him, fighting back tears, refusing to give in to them.
“Get him the thread,” Mason said. “It'll be okay.”
She shook her head and left the room. When she left, Quintero helped Mason back into a sitting position and took the tweezers out of the peroxide.
“What happened today?” he asked Mason.
“I got the target. Had some trouble getting out.”
“You shouldn't have come here.”
“Don't worry about her.” Mason didn't even want to say her name aloud in front of this man. “Just get me out of here.”
“You can't move yet.”
Quintero spread open the sides of Mason's wound, poked the tweezers around inside the shoulder. The pain had Mason diving back down into the darkness. Quintero pressed his hand against the back of the shoulder.
“No exit wound. The bullet's still in there. Vest must've stopped it.”
“So take it out.”
“No shit. You think this is the first time I've done this? Just shut up and stay still.”
Quintero dipped the tweezers in the bowl again. “This is gonna hurt like a bitch.”
Mason clamped his eyes shut and waited. He felt the touch of cold metal and then the same electric jolt of pain, doubled now, then tripled. A welding iron cutting through his nerve endings, sending showers of sparks in every direction.
“Stay still,” Quintero said in a calm whisper.
Mason was beyond hearing him. He kept his eyes closed, counting the seconds, until the pain suddenly eased and he could take a breath. He heard the slug ping into the bowl and opened his eyes.
“Forty caliber,” Quintero said.
“I need a better vest.”
“Or don't get shot.”
“The target wasn't in the right room,” Mason said, the anger replacing the worst of the pain. “Your source had bad intel.”
“And you dealt with it,” Quintero said, picking up the X-Acto knife.
“What are you doing?”
“Got to clean the edges so I can sew you up.”
Mason squeezed his eyes shut, felt the same surge of electricity shoot through him again as Quintero scraped and cut.
Lauren came back into the room, carrying a spool of thread and a selection of needles. She held them out to Quintero. “Here.”
He took one of the needles. Made a face. “This the best you got?”
“I sew ripped jeans, not bullet wounds.”
He ignored that and snapped off two feet of thread from the spool.
“You're not going to want to watch this,” Quintero said.
“I'm not leaving,” she said.
Quintero shook his head, reached into his shirt pocket, and pulled out a fold-up pair of reading glasses. They sat low on his nose. A strange moment of stillness as he carefully threaded the needle, this former gangbanger with the green-and-white La Raza tattoo on his arm and three rings in his ears, guiding the thread through the eye of the needle with the skill of a seamstress.
Mason closed his eyes one last time as he felt the needle piercing his flesh. He tried and failed not to picture Quintero going down through all the layers of his skin, crossing the open wound, and up through the skin on the opposite side. Straight, then diagonal to come back, then straight again. He felt the pull as Quintero tightened the thread, the fresh sting as he paused to wipe away the blood and douse the wound with peroxide.
“I need your help again,” Quintero said to Lauren as he began to pack the wound with bandages. “Rip that tape into foot-long pieces.”
“I'm sorry,” Mason said, looking past Quintero at her.
Sorry had never sounded so inadequate.
Mason thought he saw a thousand things in Lauren's expression. He hoped forgiveness was one of them.
When Quintero was done securing the last piece of tape, he lifted Mason to his feet. He threw Mason's left arm over his shoulder. “Now we go.”
“Wait,” Lauren said, putting herself between them and the door. “Go where?”
“Someplace safer.”
“Safer for who?” she asked.
“For all of us.” He looked at Mason. “Let's move.”
Lauren closed the door behind them and surveyed the bloody mess that was her front hallway. She collapsed to her knees, wrapping her arms tightly around herself. The rush of adrenaline was gone now, leaving her weak. But that's not what started her sobbing. It was the thought that even if Nick Mason lived through this...
She might never see him again.
• • •
QUINTERO LED MASON into the hallway and down the stairs. He gave the street a quick scan, opened the apartment building's door, and walked Mason to his black Escalade parked half a block away.
“My car...” Mason said.
“Already taken care of.”
Quintero pulled out into traffic. The SUV stopped at a light, as a police car crossed silently through the intersection, blue light flashing.
“You really fucked up,” Quintero said, easing the Escalade away from the intersection. “This is gonna come back on all of us.”
“What do you mean,” Mason said, “ all of us ?”
“You know the rules. Everyone's in play.”
After everything else he had been through that night, Mason needed a moment to let that sink in.
“Your job was to take out the accountant,” Quintero said. “Mine was to drive to Elmhurst. Wait to hear from you... Or not.”
Mason sat straight up in the car seat. Elmhurst meant two things:
His ex-wife, Gina.
His daughter, Adriana.
It was a threat Mason had heard before: you fail, they die. A simple equation. But tonight, a bullet dug out of his shoulder, his blood all over Lauren's apartment, the threat felt more real somehow. Tonight, he had come inches away from losing more than just a few pints of blood.
He steps out of this vehicle, Mason said to himself, the entire scene coming to him at once. He walks up to the front door. It's locked, but that barely slows him down. One foot against the door, just next to the dead bolt. By the time everyone wakes up, he's already up the stairs. Maybe Brad has a gun, maybe he doesn't. It doesn't matter. As much as he wants to protect his wife and stepdaughter, he has no idea how. Not against a man like Quintero.
He takes the first bullet in the forehead.
Gina is screaming. In another room, down the hallway, a room Mason has never even seen before, his daughter Adriana is sitting up in her bed.
Is she crying? Does she try to hide? Try to run?
Mason stopped the movie in his head before it could go another frame.
“Don't you ever threaten my family again,” Mason said. “Ever!”
“Don't give me a reason,” Quintero said, keeping his eyes straight ahead, “and I won't have to.”
From the moment Mason had walked out of that prison, he'd been thinking about what it would take to break free from this second life he'd found himself in.
He'd been watching. And waiting.
But on this night, as Quintero drove him down the dark streets of Chicago's North Side, Mason knew that the watching and waiting was over.
I am going to burn you down, he thought. You. Darius Cole. Everyone else who works for him.
I am going to burn you all down.