Page 87 of The Woman in the Garage

“Not we, baby. I don’t want you anywhere near it.”

“Well, I don’t want you to get in trouble either.”

“Spent my whole life not getting caught while doing illegal things; I’ll be fine.”

“How would you even move it?”

“In a moving truck,” he admitted. “Wearing gloves and masks and hoods.”

“Where would you keep it?”

“In a shipping container at the docks. We keep a few unclaimed containers around just in case we ever need to have somewhere to store some shady shit while still having plausible deniability.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m positive. I’m not going to get caught. Neither will anyone else. And all we will need from you are the codes to the gates and the keys.”

“I have some of the codes. Others, though, I might have to go to the office to get passcodes.”

“Okay. Well, we will start with the ones where we have access. We can worry about the others after.”

“This all sounds like… a lot. My head is spinning.”

“We’re gonna take it one step at a time. Today, I have Dom and Dante putting up cameras in your office and the waiting room. They should be at the store now.”

“Shouldn’t I be there then?”

“That’s up to you.”

“I think I should be there. Let whoever it is know that I’m not scared.”

To that, he nodded.

“Guess you should start looking up what kind of makeup we need to pick up… while I make you breakfast.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Santo

“Jesus Christ,” Luca said, standing on Dasha’s driveway with me.

Dasha was inside trying out her new makeup, getting dressed, and packing bags to come back to my place for the foreseeable future.

We’d made it over to her place after a trip to the pharmacy for the makeup guaranteed to even cover up tattoos and spent an hour gathering all of the most important paperwork—everything to do with the shipping containers, storage units, the mortgage for the house, and the business. It was all sitting in a box in my trunk to bring back to my place and pore over later.

Once we’d finished with that, though, I told her I needed to fill in my boss while she got everything she needed gathered.

“Yeah,” I agreed.

“That could potentially be… a hundred million in drugs.”

“I know.” I’d redone the math in my head over and over, sure I was calculating wrong. In the end, though, that was the exact sum if the other storage units featured the same amount of cocaine.

“Why so many units, though? If there are only a few boxes in each?”

“I was wondering that too. But when I saw the paperwork, it’s because they’re scattered all through the state. My best guess is Phil had dealers in different areas, so he opened the units closer to each of them to limit how much driving around he—or they—would be doing with the drugs on them.”

“Alright. That makes more sense. Christ, I can’t believe he was running this big of an operation under our noses.”

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