Jackson Ford - The Girl Who Could Move Sh*t with Her Mind

Some . But for how long? “You could always ask Tanner. She—”

“Thought you might wanna know about Carlos,” she says.

The abrupt change of subject knocks me sideways a little. “Sure. I mean, if you—”

“You ever hear of a place called El Agujero?”

Carlos, impaled. Blood slicking his hands. Look up El Agujero. Look up microfibres in the water. They deserved what was coming to them .

“Little town near Puerto Vallarta, in Jalisco. Beautiful beaches, good tequila. Also a massive factory that made synthetic fabrics for clothes. Carlos—only he wasn’t called Carlos, by the way, name was Angel Campos—he ever tell you he had a brother?”

I’m having a hell of time trying to keep up with her. “No. Never.”

“Well, he did. Rigoberto. Floor boss at this factory. And Rigoberto, he finds out that the clothes they’re making got a problem. Sounds small, but like Mo-Mo said, it’s some genuinely scary shit.”

“When did you dig this up? How?”

“You think we been sitting on our asses while you been gone? Just listen. See, the problem was that this fabric, whenever it got turned into clothing and washed, would shoot these synthetic microfibres into the water supply. Billions of them. And that wasn’t even talking about the shit this factory was dumping direct into the ocean. This stuff, Teagan…” She shakes her head. “It’s making its way into the food chain, killing sea life across the whole planet. It’s this massive thing, and nobody even knows about it. Or if they do, they don’t care.”

“Carlos cared.” Even the feel of his name in my mouth sounds wrong.

“Be nice if he was that noble. But he only cared because of what happened after. He and Rigoberto got the workers organised. God knows how the fuck he pulled that off—these people didn’t have a lot, and they needed their jobs. But they did it. Started striking, protesting, the whole nine. Until the cops came along.

“Mexican cops don’t play. They never report that shit on the news here, maybe not even over there, but it was a massacre. Fifty people dead, including Rigoberto Campos.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah. Thing is, cops in that part of the world don’t do shit ’less they get paid for it. And as it turns out, the chief in El Agujero received one motherfucker of a wire transfer, just before. Reggie traced it back.”

“To Ultra.” It’s all starting to fall into place.

“Bingo. They were the factory’s biggest client, and they couldn’t afford for any of this to get out. Steven Chase probably didn’t think the massacre would happen, but he must have had some idea of what he was buying.”

“What about Hayden and Salinas? I thought Hayden worked for an ocean charity? Wouldn’t he have wanted to stop this?”

“Sure. Unless he took a payment too. Probably not the only one.”

“And Salinas?”

“Coastal Cities office of the health department handles water quality. Chase paid Salinas to look the other way on the official side, and paid off Hayden in case his charity did their own independent tests. Either way, Salinas is about to have some interesting conversations with the cops.”

Salinas’s wife and kid come to the front of my mind. I decide not to go there. “So Carlos wanted revenge.”

“Uh-huh. Probably why he came across the border to LA in the first place. Course he didn’t know how to get to Chase without getting caught, and even then it wasn’t just Chase he had to take care of. Must have taken him a long time to dig up what actually happened—who helped cover it up, I mean.

“Meantime Tanner recruits him, he bangs with us and then he meets this Jake kid and realises he’s got the perfect opportunity.”

“Me.”

“You.”

“Hold up. Why wait until we did a job at the Edmonds Building? He couldn’t have known that was gonna happen.”

“He didn’t.”

I frown at her. “I don’t get it.” The answer whacks me around the head before I’ve even finished the sentence. “Chase was never sending money to Saudi, was he?”

“Nope. He’d done some shit but none of that. My guess is Carlos somehow got word to Tanner, anonymously, that this was happening. Of course she wanted evidence herself, which is when we got sent in.”

“Why didn’t he just tell her about the microfibres? And his brother?”

“You think she’d give a fuck? Anyway, we go in, and Reggie brings down the cameras. Window of opportunity for Carlos’s boy to do his thing.”

“And we still don’t know how Carlos and Jake…”

A guilty look crosses her face. “Sorry, man. With both of ’em out of the picture…”

I take a deep, shaky breath. If I hadn’t thrown the truck as hard, if I’d stayed with Carlos a little longer…

Annie reaches over, grips my shoulder. “Hey. Look at me.”

I look at her.

“You did the only thing you could. I wasn’t even there, and I can figure that out.”

“I just… I don’t…” I squint at the sky, hunting for the right words. “It sounds like you’re talking about another person. Carlos, I mean. I know he really did do all this, logically, but it just doesn’t… I don’t get it.”

“I do.”

“Really?”

“Sure. Remember I told you about my dad?”

“Kind of.”

“When we were walking up to Nic’s spot. I told you about how he worked at the children’s library in Carson. Then he’d come home and tune up on my mom?”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“Same shit. People wear masks. They lie to each other. You know that more than most. But listen to me: I know you and Carlos were tight, but he doesn’t deserve any more energy. He fucked with all of us.”

“And how about you and me, Annie?”

“What?”

“Are we tight?”

She doesn’t hesitate. “Always, baby girl. Long as you don’t throw me out any more buildings.”

“No promises.”

Annie smiles, turns to go. “We’ll be around when you’re ready,” she says.

As she reaches the edge of the roof, right before the drop onto the lower level, her phone rings in her pocket. That gets me thinking: I need to get a new one. Or at least get my old one back from Africa. Shit— Africa ! Well, Idriss. I owe him big time, and right now a steak dinner sounds fan-fucking-tastic.

I still don’t have the first clue how to fix Skid Row—how to help the hundreds of people living in tents in the middle of one of the richest cities on the planet. But treating them like human beings is probably a good start, and nothing says you respect someone like buying them a meal. Or cooking them one: Idriss and Jeannette can come over to my place, and I can fix up some—

“Yo, Teagan.” Annie’s back, balancing on the roof’s apex.

“Huh?”

She holds out the phone. “Think you’d better take this one.”

As she heads back the way she came, she starts to hum something. I just catch it before she drops out of sight. “I’m a Slave 4 U.”

I lift the phone to my ear. “Hello, Tanner.”

“Good afternoon, Ms. Jameson.”

She’s not in her office; she’s in a public place—somewhere with distant voices, traffic. The joyful scream of a child. A park, maybe? It’s strange to think of Tanner mingling with people, just sitting there while joggers and hand-holding couples and sprinting kids move past her. Vaguely I wonder how she knew to phone Annie and not Reggie or Paul.

“The doctors tell me there’ll be no permanent damage from the smoke,” she continues. “And I wanted to check in with you, since you’re back on your feet. See how you were holding up.”

“Did you now.”

There’s a pause, as if she’s weighing up whether or not to call me out. Instead, she says, “I’m glad you’re back. We still have a lot of work to do. I trust you’ll keep working with Ms. McCormick’s team as before. I know you recently lost a team member, but we should be able to replace—”