Page 105 of The Woman in the Garage

In the end, it wasn’t exactly complicated, but it was more widespread than any of us had realized.

While Aurelio, Nino, and Lucky wrangled David into a chair for ‘questioning,’ Mass and I brought up the footage of the shop.

We rewound to see Aurelio looking around the shop, moving to glance out the window, likely looking for Dasha. She’d been running late.

As I watched, I regretted not waking her up before I left. Sure, something might have still happened to her, but it was less likely that she would be alone for it to happen.

Switching camera feeds, we checked out the inside of the garage.

I saw the exact moment David made the decision to leave, to track down and attack Dasha.

His gaze kept slipping to her empty office, his jaw twitching. Then he was gone.

Going back further, we watched cars come into the bays.

Two seemed legitimate.

Three were gone before a mechanic did so much as pop the hood. What they did do, though, was open the back doors of each of the cars.

The camera didn’t quite catch anything being put in the cars. But any idiot could draw conclusions.

The thing was… it wasn’t like it was just David running an operation. It was all of them. All of the mechanics were involved.

After some lightinterrogationof David, we got the name of his contact in Mexico and Columbia, found out their arrangement, and learned that Phil had started his little side hustle a few years before.

The shop had been struggling. He’d been falling behind on his mortgage. And, on top of all of that, he had been noticing a decline in his health. It was confirmed by his doctor that not only was it his blood pressure and cholesterol he had to worry about, but also advanced heart disease and a fatty liver.

It seemed like he thought there wasn’t much time nor anything to lose.

When he found out that a couple of his mechanics were low-level drug dealers, he got an idea.

Once he made contacts in Mexico, he sold his beloved vintage Mustang for a couple hundred grand, ordered his car parts and cocaine, and became a drug kingpin.

It scaled up quickly, making Phil decide not only to use his shop to continue dealing, but to reach out to many other drug-dealing organizations across the state.

In the end, it didn’t seem like David deliberately killed Phil.

Apparently, the two of them hadn’t been getting on for a long time, with David feeling like he was owed more than he was getting and Phil freezing him out more and more.

The day of his death, the two of them had a screaming match that had almost come to blows.

David said he’d stormed out.

And maybe he had. Maybe Phil, his blood pressure up from the argument, had started to feel shitty, gotten in his car to go home or to the hospital, and simply had the heart attack the police and medical examiner assumed.

For the sake of sounding like a good person, I’d like to say that David breathed another day. But he’d attacked Dasha. Twice. He was connected to dangerous people.

He had to go.

And while Dom volunteered to handle the body, I walked out of the storage unit he was dead inside to make my way across the docks toward the one full of cocaine.

Because there was something still nettling me.

The garage totes from the day before.

The ones that felt different.

Dante was already there, leaning back against the container. “You’re curious too, huh?” he asked.

---