Page 57 of Under Cover

“Fuck me. Wait. Go inside, get the package, but wait for a text from me before you walk outside and into the party, you understand?”

Garcia sighed. “Sir, if he goes back to the… to the nonparty room….” He sent Harding the picture of Toby that McEnany had sent Crosby.

“I’ll kill him,” Harding muttered. “There was no goddamned reason for that.”

And Garcia hated saying this—he did, because he wanted to believe Crosby had just left him, carted off in his own goddamned heroism and bailed on a relationship. It was so much fucking easier to deal with him being gone if Garcia could be mad at Crosby for leaving.

But Crosby had been right. Damn him, he’d been right about the whole sitch.

“No,” Garcia said, keeping his voice steady. “That’s why our boy had to go.”

Harding’s short, hard burst of air into the phone told Garcia he’d made a point.

“Hang in there,” Harding said in a moment. “Wait for our signal before you leave one party room and dive into another, you hear me?”

“Roger that.”

“We’ll have some medical professionals ready to take care of our package. Goddammit. Goddamn all these fuckers to hell.”

“Roger that too, sir. Out.”

Garcia hit End Call and glanced up at the Lyft driver. The guy hadn’t even checked his rearview mirror as Garcia had cleared with Harding.

CROSBY TEXTEDhim as he was getting out of the Lyft at the precinct.

Here. He should be released inside.

Roger that.

Be safe.

You too.

And that was that. Garcia hated that he’d had to wait for Crosby to text “Be safe” before Garcia could respond, but he also appreciated the warning. Crosby had a shiver up his spine, and so did Garcia.

He went in and flashed his ID, asking where he’d go to pick up a released prisoner, only to be told they didn’t have anybody by the name Toby Trotter there.

Garcia was about to go nuclear, pull his rank, call every lawyer he’d known through ATF when he heard an agonized scream coming through the double doors leading to the jail.

Oh fuckthat.

He shoved his way through the smirking cops and through the doors that separated the front offices from the detainees’ spaces in the back. The precinct was old, with stucco walls and cracked beige tile, but sound carried like an arrow, and he followed the direction of that scream. He arrived at a crowded hallway in time to see a cop retracting his nightstick while Toby writhed on the ground at his feet.

The rest of the squad was about to close in when Garcia pulled out his phone, hit Record, and held it over his head.

“Smile for the fucking camera, guys,” he yelled. “I got you going straight to the press!”

It might not have won him any popularity contests, but it had the desired effect.

The beginning melee of police officers stopped what they were doing, standing up straight while Toby huddled on the ground cradling an arm that looked broken. His clothes were bloody and ripped, and Garcia thought sickly that if Crosby hadn’t had his boy’s back, he would have died here tonight, a victim of a beating from the police or from the inmates of the crowded jail. Nobody would ever know the difference.

Garcia was streaming the video to Harding. Harding would know the difference.

“He resisted arrest,” snarled the officer with the telescoping nightstick, but Garcia shook his head.

“In fact, he did not,” he said. “Believe me, I know exactly how he ended up here. Toby, can you get up on your own?”

Toby’s voice was as broken as his body looked. “I… I think my ankle’s broken.”