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CANTOR WAS TEN MINUTESearly. When he pulled past Harris’, he saw that it was closed. He couldn’t help but think back to the night when he’d been there with Jenny and she left him standing in front of the place before they’d both been busted for a date that turned into a train wreck.
Now he made a U-turn on Van Ness, came back around, and pulled into the lot directly across the street from the restaurant, empty now.
Turned off the car and waited.
He wasn’t officially a cop right now. But he hadn’t forgotten how to be one. Or how to wait.
He was thinking about Mason again. The former cop who had worked for Joe Wolf and then John Gallo and now Michael Barr once Gallo had either jumped or been pushed. Mason had been sent to Jenny’s house by Barr, who was clearly the guy behind the curtain with Gallo’s relentless pursuit of the Wolves. But Masonhadworked for Gallo before that. The Wolf brothers had been working with Gallo. If Jack and Danny had been with Gallo on what had essentially been an attempted hostile takeover of the Wolves, did that mean they were with Barr now, even if Danny had finished the season working for the Wolves?
Pimping themselves out to Barr the way the former commissioner of the National Football League had?
He could see Jack doing it, looking out for himself that way. And maybe Danny had just been giving Jenny a head fake by coming back to the team and had been working against her all along, as if Gallo or Barr or both had embedded him in his old office.
One thing was certain: if anybody in this group was capable of murder, it was Mason. All day long, Cantor had been making calls to LA about him. Learned about the excessive force tags on his sheet before they finally let him go for good. And about the shooting of a gang member on which he’d eventually skated, a shooting that everybody thought looked like an execution. White cop. Black kid. Shocker.
Cantor checked his watch. Ten after the hour. Now Mason was ten minutes late. Maybe the last charity event for Barr had run long. Maybe Mason was bluffing. Or wasn’t. And was coming here tonight to point a finger at either Danny Wolf or Jack or both of them, because if Mason wasn’t the one who’d gotten the killing done, it could only be one of the two Wolf brothers still standing.
Or both, as odd a couple as they were.
Cantor still liked Mason for it. Mason: taking orders now from Michael Barr, the one who wanted the team and everything that came with it and didn’t care what he had to do to get it.
All Cantor knew for sure was that he felt like a cop again tonight, back to working his case whether his bosses wanted him to be anywhere near it or not.
With or without his badge.
He saw a Mercedes ease into the lot then. Cantor flashed his lights, got out of his car. Mason pulled up, shut off his own lights, got out of the Mercedes. Once the car lights had been turned off, the lot was very dark.
The two cars were maybe thirty yards apart. Maybe a little more. Cantor was standing next to the open door of his, leaning an arm on it.
Then there was just enough light, even in the semidarkness of the lot, for Cantor to see that Mason was wearing a ski mask and walking quickly toward him.
“Face-to-face,” Mason barked, “just like I promised.”
Before Cantor could react, Mason was raising what looked to be a long handgun, and then there was the sound a gun like that made, like a cork coming out of a bottle, with a suppressor attached.
The first bullet hit Cantor squarely in the chest.
Then the second.
One Hundred Ten
HE HAD BEEN COMPLETELYhonest with Mason when he said he wouldn’t wear a wire.
He hadn’t said anything about wearing a vest.
But even wearing one, Cantor felt as if he had been hit—twice—in the middle of his chest with a sledgehammer, the pain both fierce and immediate, making him feel as if his chest had been concussed, the bullets taking most of the air out of him as he went down hard.
They were center-mass shots, just as cops were taught to fire, the two shots grouped as if Ben Cantor were nothing more than a target at the range.
Maybe the arrogant bastard hadn’t anticipated that Cantor would wear a vest. Maybe he thought he was in complete control of the situation. Maybe he planned to stand over Cantor and finish him if he discovered that Cantor was still alive.
Cantor wasn’t waiting to find out. He rolled behind his open car door now and cleared his Glock from the holster on his hip as he did.
Face-to-face, Mason had said.
Cantor didn’t hesitate. His chest still hurt like hell, and he was having trouble breathing. But he got to his feet, using the door for cover, aiming the Glock over the top of the car door and firing.
Then he was the one taking a center-mass shot at Erik Mason.
