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Unless…
Unless Raj was making a show out loud for some reason knowing that Drew could hear him, which ofcoursehe fucking could, because Raj wasn’t a dumbass. So him refusing to give me what I wanted meant thatsomeonedidn’t want him to, but he knew Drew would do it anyway. Maybe even told him to.
Okay. So I had Raj and his team on my side, which was good news. I didn’t have their bosses, but at leastsomebodywas in my corner.
And I had a connection between Landa, Vidal, and Garcia—which then also had a connection to the Ordo. Good in the sense that things were falling into place, although bad in the sense that it meant that I had a royal fucking mess in my lap.
Vidal was untouchable—for me, anyway. And Doc was still insisting that he thought Vidal wasn’t as dirty as his associates were making him look, although I wasn’t going to stake my life—or even my morning coffee—on that. Raj and company knew there was a possible link between the mayoral candidate and the Ordo shootings, but because there was nothing actionable, there wasn’t a lot they could do about it other than encourage him to maintain high personal security.
Not like it would do shit against the Ordo’s invisible bullets.
And I couldn’t do anything with Vidal, since some random PI wasn’t going to be allowed anywhere near him, especially if even his own sister couldn’t tell us what he was up to, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t go talk to Garcia. Landa was dead, and Ward and Doc weren’t terribly keen on including me in seances for my own safety after the Bazan debacle.
At least, according to Ward, until they figured out a reliable way to keep me protected from any future attempts by magically inclined ghosts to strip me of my innate magic. Or do some other horrible thing to me that I had no idea even existed. So while I was certain they were going to work the dead-people angle, I was useless there.
And Ihatebeing useless.
It was time to see what more I could find out about Garcia.
22
Drew had comethrough for me again with a file on David Garcia, but it—sadly—hadn’t told me very much. His financials were clean. His business dealings were all disturbingly above board. He’d never been personally audited, and his business audits had found only minor errors that were clearly errors and not intentional infractions.
He had a sister living somewhere in Florida, but no spouse or children.
He was a practicing Catholic who donated to his local church.
His FBI file even told me that he gave money to the Democratic Party—so not shocking that he was a donor to Vidal’s campaign—and that he contributed to about a half-dozen charities targeting cancer research, disaster relief, civil liberties, Alzheimer’s disease, and homelessness.
With a record like that, I was surprised that Garcia wasn’t the one running for mayor.
It also made me extremely suspicious.
Nobody is that perfect.
Especially not when they were in business.
Call me jaded—fuck, Iamjaded—but Garcia seemed far too squeaky clean for my liking. And I would swear that the fact that he was almost certainly tied to the Culhua in some way, whether through Vidal or Bazan or somebody else was only the tip of this particular iceberg. There had to be dirt there, and, in my experience, the more you’ve done to hide your dirt, the more likely it is that what you’ve got is really just one polished-to-hell turd.
I was looking through every social media post I could find from Garcia, from Whitehead, from Bazan, from Landa, and from Vidal to see if I couldn’t findsomethingmore substantial. Anything that would give me a crack to stick my crowbar in.
So far, jack shit.
When my phone lit up with an image of Tony the Tiger, I picked it up almost absently.
“I don’t suppose you’ve got more on Garcia to give me,” I said by way of answering it.
“Grab Ward, come to the wastewater treatment plant on the river.”
“Um. Okay… why?”
“Just get here, Hart.” Raj hung up.
I got up and went to find my boss and load him into my car.
* * *
The air smelled like shit.Actual, literal shit. It was a fucking wastewater treatment plant—aka, giant vats of shit that were being fed to bacteria and probably doused with chemicals so that they could pretend it was nice, clean water and dump it back into the James just upstream—yeah,upstream—of one of the fancier riverside developments with a whole bunch of little docks.
