by Matt Lincoln
21
Ethan
As Nina and I headed back up to the parking lot and her rental car, I checked my watch. It was getting to be around dinner time.
As eventful as the day had been, I was worried that we were running short on time. Mikey could be anywhere on this great big ocean, and while we knew a lot more about what had happened to him after he was taken from the mall, I couldn’t help but feel like we still weren’t doing enough to figure out where he was now.
“I should call my contact with the Coast Guard,” Nina said, pulling out her phone as we stopped in front of her car, and I leaned back against its side.
“Agreed,” I said with a nod, pulling out my notebook and handing the description of Lucy over to her. “And ask them… ask them if they’d be willing to pick us up in a little while.”
“Pick us up?” she repeated, arching an eyebrow at me.
“I think it’s time we go straight out there and look for Mikey ourselves,” I explained. To her credit, she didn’t miss a beat with this.
“Alright, then,” she said, stepping off to the side as her phone rang.
I didn’t try to listen in on the conversation. She’d tell me what it was about. I just took a moment to lean back and breathe in the ocean air, enjoying the sun beating down on me for once.
“They’ll be here in an hour,” Nina’s voice said, cutting into my brief reprieve in not too long. “They’ll have a boat for us to take out, and they could send one guy with us if we want. Otherwise, they’ll let us branch off so we can cover more ground faster.”
“Yeah, that’ll work,” I said, nodding and squinting at her in the sun. “We can grab a bite to eat in the meantime, so we don’t have to worry about it later.”
The owner of the restaurant we’d been going to didn’t look surprised to see us.
“Hey, where is your friend?” he asked when we walked in. “Everything alright, I hope?”
“Yes, he’s just… elsewhere,” I said, not wanting to say that Holm had gotten shot. The rumor mill in this town was running wild enough as it was.
“We’ll take whatever you have on hand,” Nina told the man. “We’re in a hurry.”
“Coming right up!” he cried, disappearing right into the back.
There were only two other occupied tables in the restaurant, at the height of dinnertime.
Before Nina and I could even get settled at our usual table, the man returned with two heaping plates full of seafood pasta to keep us both full, along with some of those biscuits for good measure.
It was delicious, and my pasta was full of garlic and butter, and crab and lobster bits. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was after that gunfight until all the food was right in front of me.
“What do we think about this boat?” Nina asked me when we were both about halfway through our plates, working quickly to try to get done before the Coast Guard arrived.
“I’m thinking that either Mikey and this Charlie guy are hiding out somewhere, or they drowned trying to make it to one of the islands on such a small, old boat,” I said darkly, wiping some cheese sauce off of my upper lip.
“Do we think that he would know enough about the boat to get it back somewhere in time to avoid drowning?” Nina asked. “The Coast Guard said they originally spotted them in international waters.”
“I know,” I said, as I had been turning this around in my head ever since our conversation with Mr. Samuels and his nephew. “It wasn’t far out, though, and the witness didn’t give an exact location since he didn’t realize this Charlie guy was a wanted man until he got back to shore. They could’ve turned back around.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” Nina pointed out. “Do we think this guy would have enough knowledge to do that, even?”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly, pursing my lips. “We just don’t know enough about this guy, just that he works for a human trafficking organization and that he’s a little strange. And honestly, even if he had the knowledge, I’m not really sure that he would have the presence of mind to turn around anyway, given the situation.”
“I was afraid you were going to say that,” Nina sighed, setting down her fork and peering out the window toward the ocean in the distance.
“I mean, he was panicked enough to take this kid in the first place and then steal the boat,” I continued. “We don’t even know if he knows a thing about boats! Does he know how to refuel? Does he even have enough fuel to make it very far? Would he even know?”
“So basically, for all we know, he could already have killed Mikey, or they could both already have drowned, or they could be hiding out in a cave somewhere biding their time, or they could’ve come back to shore without us realizing it yet,” Nina summarized, her mouth set in a thin line.
“Yeah,” I said, letting out a long breath. “Not sounding so great, is it?”
“No,” she agreed. “We can only hope it’s the cave thing.”
“It looks like that’s our best option,” I agreed. “Did you talk to the Coast Guard about that?”
“Yes,” she confirmed with a nod. “When that ship comes into shore for us, they’re going to send a guy to debrief us on the area and the caves and other possible hideout places around here that they could be using. Then we’ll go from there.”
“They already got guys looking through those places?” I asked.
“They’re starting now,” Nina said. “They looked through some of them already, but their focus since Mikey was taken has been on spotting the ship out at sea, mostly in international waters. That’s where we assumed we would find them based on the little information we had at the time.”
“These cases can change at the drop of a hat,” I sighed, shaking my head. “One comment at the end of our conversation with that old man, and our whole tactic changes.”
“That’s the thing about these,” Nina said, meeting my eyes. “You never know what little detail is going to end up being important. Take that guy’s blog, for example. I only talked to him for a minute and put it at the bottom of my pile of things to look into. And he turned out to be the only one who had put two and two together correctly.”
Her brow furrowed like she was angry with herself for not seeing this connection any earlier. I reached out and placed my hand over hers across the table.
“Look, it’s not your fault,” I assured her. “It’s not any of our faults. We’re doing the best we can, and for all we know, someone else wouldn’t have even put that random guy’s blog in their to-do pile at all, even at the bottom. Same with talking to that old man. Most people would’ve just dismissed him as a crackpot, too. We’ve said it before, and it’s true. If anyone’s going to find Mikey, it’s us.”
“And if we don’t find him?” she asked, meeting my eyes again, and I could see the worry there—the same worry which had been threatening to overtake me all day.
“Then we’ll know we did everything we can,” I assured her, applying some gentle pressure to my hand over hers. “Us, and the police here, and the police in Atlanta and San Diego, and the Coast Guard. We’re all doing what we can for this kid. This is a really bad situation, though. The odds were never in his favor from the start, knowing what we know now.”
This was true enough. If Mikey turned out to still be alive at this hour, it would be no small miracle. It was a needed miracle, though, for the boy and for all three of his parents.
Nina gave me a small smile, then shook her head as if she was coming back to herself and pulled her hand out from under mine gently, giving it a squeeze on her way out.
“You’re right, Ethan, of course, but we have to keep hope up,” she said, all uncertainty now gone from her face. “If we don’t, well, who will? We’re more likely to find him if we think he’s still alive out there, and as far as I’m concerned, he is.”
I nodded and smiled at this.
“Yes, me too,” I assured her. “We need to set an example for everyone else. I have a feeling we’ll find him tonigh
t when we go out on the water. We have to. The clock is ticking, and he’s waiting for us to get there.”
“I hope you’re right,” she said, looking anxiously at the time stamp on her phone.
“Did the Coast Guard say anything else?” I asked. “About another sighting, or about the boat’s description, or anything?”
Of course, I knew that if anything this major had come up, she would’ve told me already. But still, I had to ask. It was part of keeping that hope alive, in some small way.
“Only that they were grateful for such a detailed description,” she said, shaking her head. “They were only looking for a generic white boat before, and now they have a better idea of what they’re dealing with.”
“I guess all that time spent looking on other islands, and with Diane contacting foreign countries to tell them to be on the lookout of this guy wasn’t good for much in the end,” I reasoned. “In all likelihood, they’re back in American waters, or… well, we don’t need to talk about the worst-case scenarios again.”
“The Coast Guard did say that if we don’t find them in the next day or so, they’re going to start looking for shipwrecks on the ocean floor,” Nina added. “I know we’re trying to stay positive, but that’s an important thing to mention for our timeline.”
I pursed my lips at this new information. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it at all, really. If the Coast Guard started doing that, it was a signal that they assumed Mikey was dead. The other agencies would follow suit, then.
Sure, Holm and I would be allowed to stick around for a few more days just in case before heading back to Miami to pick things back up on the Holland case, but that would just be a formality, so it didn’t look like we were giving up. Nina and Dr. Osborne would probably stick around for a little longer, a couple of weeks maybe, but most of their focus would be turned to taking down the whole criminal trafficking organization in Durham, not on finding Mikey anymore.
The police would keep the case open, and they’d keep looking for a while. Maybe locals would start organizing their own search parties, and the media would stay on the story for another month at least. But eventually, everyone but the parents would move on, leaving them with no choice but to hire those private investigators and make the rounds on any news station that would still take them, begging for someone to keep looking for their son.
No, we needed to find Mikey, so that didn’t happen. Too many broken families had to suffer that fate of uncertainty. If we didn’t find him alive, we had to at least find a body to give his family some closure. They deserved that much, at least, and so did he.
One way or another, we would have to bring this boy home. There simply wasn’t any alternative. Not one that I could live with, anyway.
22
Ethan
We finished eating earlier than we expected, our appetites killed by the talk of what may have happened to Mikey already, and even further dampened by unspoken thoughts of what he might be going through now. Wherever the boy was, he was no doubt terrified and wishing he was anywhere else in the world.
“Looks like the ship’s going to be an hour late,” Nina sighed when she checked her phone as we walked out of the restaurant. “They want to look at some caves on the way in, check and see if they might be there.”
“That’s good, that’s good,” I said, covering up my mutual disappointment that our trek out to look for Mikey ourselves would be delayed. “Whether we’re there or not, the point is that we find them.”
“True, but I’m itching to get out there,” Nina said, flashing me a grin. “I’ve only been out on the water on a case once, and that was in New Orleans with you. Good times.”
“If you’re talking about when we all almost got killed by nearly a dozen goons who ambushed us in the dark, uh, yeah, good times,” I chuckled, though I did look back on that case fondly since it was the first time I’d met Nina. The case was now colored in my mind by the knowledge that the Hollands were orchestrating things behind the scenes, unbeknownst to us at the time.
“So what do we do now?” Nina asked, throwing her hands up in the air weakly. “We’ve turned this whole town up and down, and there are still police and detectives out looking. Neighboring towns, too. I don’t want to just sit around until the Coast Guard shows up.”
“Agreed,” I said, just as my phone buzzed in my pocket. Pulling it out to squint at the tiny screen in the waning daylight, “It’s Holm. He wants an update.”
“We could go see him,” Nina suggested. “Can’t hurt to throw around a few ideas, see what he thinks.”
“And we’ll be able to tell the parents that there are still three agents working on the case,” I added. “Not a bad idea. The hospital’s not far from here, I remember. I’ll tell him we’re on our way.”
The first thing I noticed when we got to the hospital was just how small it was. There were barely any cars in the parking lot of the one-story, boxy white building, and the ones that were all seemed to be in staff parking lots.
When we walked through the front door, the woman sitting behind the front desk seemed to know who we were immediately, even though I’d never seen her before in my life.
“You must be the other agents,” she said quickly, practically jumping out of her chair to greet us. “Are you here to see Agent Holm?”
“Sure are,” Nina said. “Can you give us his room number?”
The woman directed us down a nearby hallway to the third door on the right, where the door was standing open to reveal Holm lying in bed, his arm all bandaged up where he had gotten shot, and some nasty bags under his eyes. Even so, he grinned with his whole face the second he saw us.
“I was beginning to worry that you all forgot all about me,” he scolded in a tone of mock disappointment. “Like I get one bullet lodged in me, and I’m not even important anymore.”
“Did they get it out, then?” I asked, narrowing my eyes at the covered wound.
“Yeah, didn’t take much,” he said, shrugging it off. “Doc says the real problem was all that blood I lost lying there. They fixed that up too, though.”
He gestured up to an empty bag hanging above his IV, traces of red remaining in the clear packet from his last blood transfusion.
“How many of those did you have to have?” Nina asked, furrowing her brow at it.
“Just two,” he said dismissively, and Nina and I exchanged a look. Two was one more than he probably should’ve had to have, which meant that his condition was likely more serious than he’d led us to believe. He looked better now, though.
“Well, we’re just glad you’re going to be okay,” I said, reaching out and squeezing his good shoulder gently.
“The real question is what’s been going on with you,” Holm said quickly. “You haven’t texted in a while, ‘till you said you were coming here.”
Nina and I quickly caught Holm up on everything we’d learned from both the elder and younger Daniel Samuels and the Coast Guard.
“Whoa,” he sighed when we finished, giving a low whistle. “That’s a lot for a couple of hours. So now we don’t even think this guy could’ve fled to an island somewhere?”
“Not unless he picked up another boat along the way,” I said with a nod.
“So either he doubled back when he realized he couldn’t make it and found his way to shore undetected, or he’s hiding in one of these caves somewhere along the coast, or…” Holm surmised, his voice trailing off before he got to the worst-case scenario.
“Yes,” I said curtly. “Those are the three options as we see them. Unless, as I said, he somehow got ahold of another boat.”
“That would mean that he would have to get back to shore, and then find another boat somehow, then head right back out on the water without anybody seeing him,” Holm said, shaking his head. “Seems like a lot of work for a guy in a state of panic and who doesn’t seem to be in the right headspace to make a lot of sound decisions. Do they even have any food or anything? When’s the last time he ate or
drank?”
“Well, most of those boats come stashed with some food and water in case of emergencies,” I pointed out. “And the younger Daniel Samuels doesn’t seem like the type to forget to restock.”
“So it seems like they have to still be out there somewhere, hiding out and biding their time until this Charlie fellow can figure out what to do next,” Holm said, setting his jaw hard as he made this decision. “That has to be it. The other scenario is just too unlikely, or…”
We all knew what he was going to say but didn’t. That the most likely scenario was probably that Mikey was dead, and Charlie was probably dead, too. But we weren’t there yet. As Nina said, it was important to keep faith at this hour, believe that the search could still yield something. We all knew that, too, including Holm.
“Yes, that’s what we’re thinking, too,” I agreed, nodding to him as I leaned back against the nearby windowsill. Nina had taken a seat in the lone chair by the door.
“We’re going out on the water as soon as a Coast Guard ship comes back into the bay,” Nina explained. “We’re just biding our time until then. They’re a little late because they have a set of caves they want to check out on their way in.”
Holm’s eyes widened at this, and I groaned internally. There was a reason I hadn’t brought this up myself. I knew my partner far too well at that point in our careers. Come hell or high water, he was going to want to come with us.
“You’re going out to look on the water!” he cried, predictably and true to form. “Hold on, let me just get this crap off me, and I’ll come with you. Why didn’t you say anything sooner?”
My partner moved to begin taking off his IV and other monitors, but I noticed how he winced as he sat up in the bed. There was no way this was happening. Clearly, the doctors thought he needed to be watched overnight in case he needed a third blood transfusion or had some kind of reaction to the first two. I’d been in this business long enough to know when doctors were just being overcautious or not, too, and Holm looked fragile enough compared to his normal state to convince me that he needed to be right where he was for the time being.
