Close Out (The Noah Braddock Series, #8) by Jeff Shelby

Author:Jeff Shelby [Shelby, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1230002652528
Published: 2021-10-31T14:05:46+00:00

TWENTY TWO

Shannon was out the door the next morning at five and I couldn't get back to sleep. It felt more like I'd taken a nap than gotten a good night's sleep. I showered to rinse the sleep from my eyes, dressed, and toasted a bagel while I booted up my computer. The bagel was done at the same time the computer came to life. I leaned over the counter, eating while I looked up Mario Quintero.

Quintero was on his third term as a city councilman in San Diego. He had made a name for himself as being pro-business, pro-development, and had started drawing hard lines on immigration. He'd helped form new penalties for employers caught using undocumented workers and leaned hard on the cities to the south to do the same. He'd fought for funding for an immigration task force that seemed to have done nothing more than attempt to police the homeless population and force them to provide identification that proved citizenship. He'd run afoul of the ACLU and the governor's office, but he'd never apologized. Over and over, he'd cited the fact that his parents had come from Mexico, but they'd gone through the appropriate channels to achieve citizenship.

I polished off the bagel and rinsed the plate before setting it in the sink. Quintero's stance on immigration was interesting to me because he was only a city councilman. Immigration law and policy weren't really under his purveyance, but he'd decided to pretend like it was. I wondered why.

And I wondered what his relationship with Frank Newhouse had been. Seemed too coincidental to me that the guy who was bilking undocumented people was working as a consultant for a guy who was making his reputation on kicking undocumented people out of the city and punishing anyone associated with them.

I carried the laptop over to the couch and sat down, looking for more on Quintero. He was married with two kids. Lifelong San Diego resident. Graduate of SDSU, then a law degree from USD. He'd gone into private practice, with an emphasis in civil litigation. He'd earned a small fortune before jumping into local politics. And I found several profiles that mentioned him as a candidate for a bigger office.

There were two specific articles within the last year, one in the paper and one in the city magazine, that both mentioned him as a potential entrant in the upcoming Congressional election. A long-serving House rep had announced retirement and Quintero lived in his district. He'd been coy about his interest in the position, but he'd done nothing to deny it, either. Both profiles, though, were the kind of profiles that were usually the result of a publicist reaching out to contacts, letting them know they had a client who was available and looking for a little push.

Meaning, they hadn't happened by accident.

And if Quintero had pushed for them, then he was probably testing the waters to see what kind of reactions he got to a possible candidacy.

I found his bio on the city council website.

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