Stolen Child (Coastal Fury Book 13)

by Matt Lincoln

  While the cave was deep, it wasn’t all that wide, and Marston took them in further until they could tell for certain that no one was there.

  “Onto the next, I guess,” he murmured, turning the boat around quickly and heading back outside.

  Nina agreed, though she remained on alert the whole time until they got back out into the open water. She didn’t want to be caught off guard just in case something was lurking beneath the surface of the water.

  Nothing came, however, and the two of them churned on to the next cave, a far narrower one full of twists and turns.

  Marston had to work not to crash the boat here, and Nina was sure that if she had been tasked with running it, they would’ve been dead already.

  She craned her neck as he worked to see around each dank corner of the cave, but nothing came of it. It took them some time to reach the back, and still, there was nothing and no one to be found except for some moss and the occasional clump of algae.

  When they reached the back of the cave, Marston shook his head and stood up straight.

  “Let’s wait here for a moment,” he said, leaning back against the side of the boat and pulling out the map again. “It looks like there’s one more cave in this configuration.”

  “Does it say anything about what it’s like?” Nina asked, briefly peering over his shoulder at the map as she kept most of her attention trained on anything that might lie in front of them.

  “No, nothing,” he said, shaking his head and folding it back up as quickly as he’d taken it out. “It’s not very detailed. Like I had no idea that this one was going to be so…”

  “Hall of mirrors?” Nina finished for him when he couldn’t seem to find the right phrase, and they both laughed.

  “That’s one way to describe it, I guess,” he chuckled, glancing around at all the twists and turns in the area. The way the light reflected back up at them in odd angles around the cave made it seem kind of like a hall of mirrors to Nina.

  “Well, let’s hope the third one’s the charm,” Nina said, and Marston began to press the boat forward some more.

  Nina still stood at the ready in the front of the boat with her gun, though she doubted anyone was in there with them. They’d searched the whole place, and even if they hadn’t, she doubted many people other than Marston could maneuver through here without crashing, and this Charlie character surely wasn’t one of them.

  As they went back through the place, she also looked for any signs that they might’ve been there before and that someone had tried to get through the winding rocks and failed in the process.

  She’d looked on the way in, and she knew Marston had, too, but they were looking at it from a different angle, now.

  And that’s right when she saw it—the paint, grazing off a nearby rock near the mouth of the cave. So faint that she could tell it had been left not too long ago and nearly washed away by the water flowing in and out of the cave.

  “Marston, do you see this?” she hissed, pointing at it roughly.

  “Sure do,” he said, squinting in that direction in the light from her flashlight. “Looks fresh.”

  As they passed the area slowly, Marston reached up and grazed his hand lightly across it so that a fleck of the paint came off on his finger. He looked down at it as if studying it carefully.

  “It’s hard to say for sure, but it is white, and it seems like the same old shade of white as a lot of Mr. Samuels’s boats,” he said finally, seeing the confusion written across Nina’s face.

  “Well, there’s only one way to find out for sure,” Nina said, glancing over her shoulder at the cave’s entrance, which was barely in their line of vision. “And that looks pretty fresh to me. I don’t know about you, but I’d estimate that if that paint had been there any longer, it would’ve washed away.”

  “I agree,” Marston said, nodding to her. “Can you take a picture of it?”

  But Nina was already pulling out her phone to do so, the flash blaring through the dark cave several times as she looked to get at the image from every possible angle, just in case the forensics team ended up needing any of this.

  “Alright, then, let’s go,” Marston said when she seemed satisfied with her pictures, and she stood watch as he continued maneuvering the little motorboat around the twists and turns of the cave until they reached its mouth.

  Nina’s stomach was doing backflips. Mikey had to be in this next cave, or at least near it. He had to be. She was sure of it, or at least she wanted to be sure.

  They became very quiet as they whirred toward the third and final cave in the sequence. Nina wiped some sweat off of her hands on her jeans so that she could grip her gun more firmly.

  Marston maneuvered the boat into the mouth of the final cave. This one was wider than the last, but still quite small. There were fewer twists and turns here, though unlike the first cave, this one wasn’t wide open, so Nina couldn’t see it all when she shined her flashlight beam across it.

  Marston took them back and then to the left around a corner. Still, they couldn’t see the back of the cave. Only what felt like a kind of hallway filled with water, leading to another turn up ahead and to the right.

  Before Marston turned the second corner, Nina’s flashlight beam landed on something floating in the water. She blinked and stopped for a moment before realizing what it was, holding up a hand behind her to make sure that the MBLIS agent didn’t take the boat any further than he already had.

  She bent down and picked it up. A plain white wrapper with granola bar ingredients listed on it, a few soggy crumbs remaining in the package.

  She turned around and held it up for him, quickly flicking off her flashlight beam as she did so.

  It took a few moments for her eyes to adjust to the darkness, but when they did, she saw that Marston had realized what she had. This was one of the wrappers from the rescue kit in Mr. Samuels’s boat. Charlie and Mikey were there. They might still be there.

  Marston quickly silenced the motor so that they could listen. Nina worried that they’d already given themselves away to anyone who may be waiting there in the cave.

  It was some time before they heard anything, and Nina was starting to think that they were alone, and whoever had been there was long gone.

  But they weren’t. After a few moments, they heard a soft child’s voice ringing through the cave, giving it a natural echoing quality.

  “Mister, I’m getting thirsty again,” the boy said, and Nina and Marston stared at each other.

  It was Mikey. Who else could it be? It was a boy’s voice. He was alive. Mikey was alive.

  “Shut up,” a snide man’s voice clapped back at the boy. “I thought I told you to go to sleep.”

  “I want to go home,” the boy whined. “When do I get to go home? You said I get to go home.”

  “I told you, I’m working on that,” the man snapped.

  “How are you going to get to Atlanta, though? We can’t take this boat to Atlanta, can we? You said you would take me back to Atlanta,” the boy complained.

  “I told you, I’m working on it!” the man cried. Then, muttering as if to himself, “I just need to figure out a way to leave you there without anyone seeing.”

  “I promise you, I won’t tell anybody about you,” the boy assured the man. “If you just take me home, I’ll tell them I took a bus or something. That’s all.”

  “Oh, shut up,” the man said again. “I can’t trust you to do that. But I can’t afford to not take you home, either. Oh man, I’ve done it this time. I should’ve listened to Justin…”

  Nina stared at Marston again, unblinking. Charlie wanted out, she realized. He knew now how reckless his actions had been, and instead of killing Mikey in another impulsive act, he was biding his time, trying to find a way to return the boy to Atlanta without getting arrested.

  Well, good luck with that. That’s all she could say about that plan, though she was glad he had realized killing Mikey wasn’t going to help him any.

&nb
sp; His first plan had probably been to take the boat to one of the foreign islands, sell Mikey to another trafficking gang or even a lone-wolf predator there, or barring that, throw him overboard. But then he realized the boat, Lucy, wasn’t going to get him there, and he was stuck creeping along the North Carolina shore. If he killed the boy here, there was no doubt that someone would find the body, and Charlie himself would probably be recognized anywhere he went from all the news reports, local and national.

  In short, Charlie was screwed, and now he was literally stuck in the corner of this cave without anything to do.

  Nina and Marston looked at each other again. Nina motioned toward the sound of the voices with her gun as if asking a question. Marston nodded. By now, they were in sync. He understood her perfectly.

  And with that, Nina tossed him her flashlight, and he turned it on along with the boat’s motor while she held up her gun with both hands.

  “FBI!” she screamed. “We have you cornered. Come out here with your hands up and your weapons down, and hand over the child at once.”

  There was a moment of silence, a loud plopping sound as if something dropped into the water, and a curse as Charlie realized what was happening to him.

  “We know you want out, Charlie, and this is your way out,” Marston called out to him. “We know you want to return the boy, so just hand him over and be done with this, okay? This can all be over if you just give him to us.”

  “Wh-what’s going on, Mister?” the boy’s voice stammered. “Are they police?”

  “That’s right, Mikey, we’re the police,” Marston said, his tone suddenly kind and warm. “The man’s going to give you to us now, and we’re going to take you back to your family, okay?”

  “Is that…?” Mikey started to ask, but Charlie cut him off.

  “Shut up!” he cried again.

  “Charlie…” Nina began in a tone of warning, motioning for Marston to inch the boat forward. “Don’t do anything you might regret. We’ve already been through that a few times in the past couple of days, and it hasn’t worked out so well for you so far, has it?”

  They rounded the corner to reveal the edge of the cave with the flashlight beam. Charlie and Mikey had managed to park their boat in a relatively dry area against the back of the cave, away from the open water. It looked like they’d been holed up there for a while, and the whole area stunk of sweat, stale food, and fear.

  Mikey sat huddled in the left-hand corner of the cave with his legs scrunched up against his chest, his arms wrapped around his knees, and a blanket covering most of the rest of him. He was dirty and trembling but otherwise looked no worse for wear, with the same clothes on that he had been wearing when he was taken.

  Charlie, on the other hand, looked like he was about to combust. His eyebrows were all patchy like he’d been picking at him, and his pock-marked cheeks looked even more hallowed now than they had on the security video. He was wearing that brown jacket that had become his main identifier, and he was almost entirely covered in mud from head to toe. Nina surmised that he’d probably taken a tumble somewhere in the shallow water. He was hunched up in the opposite corner of the cave from Mikey, which meant that he was closer to the agents and their boat than the boy was.

  Charlie stared at Nina as if he was trying to figure out a way out of this one and kept coming up empty.

  “Come on, Charlie, don’t do anything rash…” Marston started to say, just as Charlie reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a gun.

  Nina had to stop herself from groaning.

  “Come on, man, we’ve already killed Rudy, and Justin’s told us everything,” she told him. “Then your gang got very mad and took him off to God knows where. We’ll get him back, though, hopefully in one piece. All this goes to say that we’re probably the closest thing to friends you’ve got left in this world.”

  “Look, your gang’s going down, with or without you,” Marston added. “Well, most likely without you, considering that they’re prepared to dump you just like they did the others. Do you really think they’ll protect you after this? And we’ll need a witness of our own against them, so we can help each other out. Just give us the boy.”

  Charlie was still hesitant, his hands trembling around the gun. Nina and Marston both had their own weapons pointed right back at him.

  “You did well not hurting him, and planning to bring him home,” Nina continued. “But you can’t have really thought you could make it to Atlanta without being arrested? This is all working out the best it could’ve for you. You just have to go with it.”

  Charlie’s eyes darted around the cave. Though Marston had dropped his flashlight beam to the side so he could hold his gun with both hands, there was a dim light from a lamp on the stolen boat that illuminated the back of the cave. Dim enough so that the agents hadn’t been able to see it before, but bright enough that Nina was now able to make out most of what was happening in the cave without squinting now that she was in full view of the light.

  Mikey was looking back and forth between his captor and the agents with wide, darting eyes, his knees trembling beneath the blanket.

  “Mikey, why don’t you come over here with me?” Nina offered, holding out an arm for the boy.

  “Don’t do that!” Charlie hollered, holding out his own arm to stop the kid.

  This wasn’t going to happen the easy way, then.

  Charlie took a step toward the agents, brandishing his weapon, and Marston quickly jumped down from the boat and moved between him and Mikey.

  Nina, for her part, rushed for the boy, holding out her arm to him still while keeping a close eye on what was going on in the other corner of the cave.

  A shot rang out, and she dropped down into the shallow water, motioning for Mikey, who remained huddled in the corner, to do the same.

  “Get down, Mikey, get down,” she urged him, and he hesitantly looked up at Charlie and Marston and then ducked his head down between his knees.

  More shots rang out, and Nina looked up to see Charlie falling into the water, blood pooling around him. Marston had shot him in the leg. She internally thanked him not for going for a fatal shot from the outset. If they didn’t find Justin, it was true that they would need Charlie to testify. They hadn’t been lying about that.

  Nina watched with horror as Charlie tried one last-ditch attempt to cripple Marston with another errant shot, but it ended up hitting the stolen boat instead, right in the dent on the back left bumper that old Mr. Samuels had gone to such great pains to describe. Poor old Lucy. She’d been through a lot. Nina couldn’t even begin to understand all these guys’ obsessions with these boats, but she knew enough to gather that old Dan would not be happy about the state in which Lucy returned to him.

  Mikey ran to Nina after Charlie was shot, and he wrapped his little arms around her waist and buried his face in her side as she rose from the water, covered in mud and dripping wet, with more than a few pebbles from the bottom of the water stuck in her shoes.

  She looked over at Marston again. He was handcuffing Charlie, having confiscated the gangbanger’s gun.

  It was all over. They’d found him.

  “Everything’s going to be okay,” Nina whispered to Mikey, and it felt like the weight of the world had been lifted off her shoulders.

  28

  Ethan

  We were able to send up a flare from the Coast Guard boat at the mouth of the cave since our cell reception was still bad, and two helicopters soon arrived. One to take Nina, myself, and Mikey back to the police station, and the other to transport Charlie to the hospital for treatment.

  There was a group of armed officers set to go with him, too. We weren’t taking any more risks with our suspects, not when we needed testimony to take the bigger guns down.

  When we were flying in the helicopter, Mikey stuck close to Nina while we asked him some questions.

  “Mikey, my name is Ethan,” I told him, ducking down so that I was eye level with him and holding out my hand
to take his if he would let me. He did.

  “Mikey,” he muttered, looking at me with the same wide, scared eyes he’d had since I first saw him.

  “I know,” I said, giving him a warm smile. “I know your parents.”

  “You do?” he asked, his eyes growing wider now, though not with fear this time, but with hope.

  “Oh yes,” I said, making sure I looked very serious. “They miss you very, very much. They’ve been looking for you this whole time, and my friend Nina and I have been helping them. So have the police.”

  I glanced up at Nina, and she nodded down at the boy to confirm. She still had her arms around him. She looked awkward but pleased with the way this had turned out.

  “So, Mikey, can we ask you some questions about what happened to you?” Nina asked him, and he craned his neck to look up at her and nodded.

  Though there were tear streaks on his muddy face, he hadn’t cried once since I’d first seen him. I wasn’t sure if he was in shock, or if he was all cried out, or if he was just brave. Probably a combination of the three.

  “Alright, Mikey, thank you,” I said, flashing him another smile. “Why don’t you tell us everything you remember since your parents took you to the mall yesterday.”

  “Well, I looked at the gum balls…” Mikey started to say, his lip starting to tremble. “And then that man took me. He never told me his name, so I just called him Mister. I didn’t want to be rude.”

  “I’m sure you weren’t rude,” I said, glancing up at Nina and stifling a laugh at the notion that Mikey wouldn’t want to be rude to the man who had just abducted him at gunpoint.

  “What happened next, Mikey?” Nina asked. “Were there any other men?”

  “Well, they took me through the game store, the two who were in the mall, and then there was a third one outside,” Mikey said, his story immediately lining up with Justin’s. “Then the men were fighting a lot. I didn’t really understand what they were talking about. I think it might’ve been about me.”