by Matt Lincoln
“Yeah, well, I figured one of us should get some sleep, at least,” Nina shrugged. “Plus, I’m going to be on this thing for a while yet, dealing with the Durham part of the case. I figure the public might as well get used to me.”
“I thought you said you weren’t going to be doing any more press briefings,” I reminded her, shooting her a sly grin.
“Yeah, well, my supervisor might make me,” she grumbled, shooting another scathing look back at the television screen. “He says they liked me or something.”
I practically roared with laughter at this.
“Well, I can’t say I blamed them,” I chuckled, as she turned that glare of hers right on me.
Just then, I heard a familiar voice come roaring out from where the throng of reporters still stood.
“Hold up, hold up, let me through,” Holm hollered at them. “Federal agent coming through! No, I will not answer any of your stupid questions.”
I laughed again and opened the front door for my partner, pulling him through and into the entryway where Nina and I stood. His clothing and hair were all tousled, and he looked a little tired, but otherwise, he seemed no worse for wear.
“You’re back!” I cried, patting him on the shoulder as he smoothed out his rumpled clothes. “How are you feeling?”
“Oh, I’m fine. Those doctors are always overzealous anyway,” he said, waving away my concern. “All they’re worried about is lawsuits.”
“I don’t know about that,” Nina said skeptically. “You weren’t looking too hot when we went to see you yesterday.”
“Yeah, well, we all know that was just an excuse so you two could keep all the glory to yourselves,” Holm said, winking at her. “I thought I told you not to go breaking this case without me!”
“Well, I thought it was all about finding the kid,” I pointed out, rolling my eyes, though we all knew that Holm was just messing with us.
“Yeah, but you did that already!” he cried. “Now I get to complain about it.”
“Oh, okay, is that how that works?” I laughed, shaking my head at him.
“Damn straight,” he said, giving me a wink this time.
“Were you actually discharged, or did you run out of there the second you saw the news?” I asked, giving him a stern look.
“Well, I can’t say the news didn’t speed things up a bit, but I was discharged,” he relented. “I’m the proud owner of a clean bill of health! Well, with orders to follow up with someone back in Miami when we get home.”
“Make sure he does that,” Nina said, giving me a pointed look.
“Oh, I will,” I assured her. “And so will Diane. Come on, partner, let’s go get you some coffee.”
I dragged Holm through the double doors to the lobby and back to the breakfast area, Nina following close behind us.
When we got to the table strewn with cereal, coffee, and pastries, however, I turned around to find that she was gone. I scanned my eyes around the clusters of people all over the lobby until I found her spiky black hair. She was talking to the man I remembered coming up to her the previous night when we got off the helicopter, who I assumed to be her supervisor. They seemed to be deep in conversation.
“Speaking of Diane, I talked to her this morning,” Holm said as he filled a cup to the brim with black coffee, not seeming to notice that Nina had gone. “She said you didn’t even call her to tell her you broke the case.”
His tone was one of mock chastising, and I groaned as I realized that he was right. I pulled out my phone to find a couple of missed texts from Diane congratulating me for finding Mikey and asking when I thought we would be back in Miami to pick up work on the Holland case.
“I forgot,” I said, running a hand across my face as I tried to remember everything that had happened the night before. It was all such a blur.
“It’s alright, she’s not mad,” Holm said, handing me a cup of coffee of my own. “She figured you were just tired or got caught up in everything else that was going on. Man is it a relief that you guys found that kid, though. I was starting to get worried the case would go cold, or even worse.”
“Yeah, me too,” I admitted, grabbing a cinnamon roll from the table and sitting down across from him at a nearby table. “I’m just glad nothing major happened to him while he was gone.”
“Is that so? The news was pretty vague about the details, obviously,” Holm said. “So he wasn’t abused or anything?”
“No, nothing like that,” I assured him, and he relaxed his shoulders as if he’d been carrying some extra tension there on the issue. “Charlie didn’t so much as touch his shoulder, it doesn’t sound like. The guy just kind of freaked out and then stayed on the water, and then in the caves, trying to figure out what to do next. When we found them, he was even telling Mikey that he was going to find a way to sneak him back to Atlanta without anyone knowing about it.”
“That… sounds like a terrible plan,” Holm said, scrunching up his face in confusion. “Did he really think he wouldn’t get caught?”
“I think he knew that he would probably get caught, but that things would definitely be bad for him if he killed the kid,” I sighed, shaking my head. “I think he realized pretty quickly how much of a mistake he’d made, and then he just hid out and tried to work out some scheme to get himself out of it.”
“Sounds pretty weird to me,” Holm said with a shrug. “The whole thing seems weird to me, but whatever.”
“It was a weird case,” I laughed. “We have a knack for getting those, though.”
“We sure do,” Holm sighed, shaking his head.
“Hey,” I heard Nina’s voice behind me, and I nearly jumped in surprise as I swiveled around in my seat to face her. She was standing behind me with her hands behind her back.
“Hey,” I said, glancing back over at where the man she had been talking to now stood, speaking with Detective Lance from Durham. “Is that your supervisor?”
“Sure is,” Nina said, giving me a sly smile and pulling out a chair to sit down next to me. Then, she set a small black telescope on the table between us, and a small, yellowed old note on a frayed half-page, guarded up in a protective seal.
“What is this?” I asked, staring down at the items and shaking my head in confusion.
“Something we found on Lafitte’s ship,” she said. “I just got cleared to give it to you. Read the note. We think it was from the Dragon’s Rogue originally.”
I stared at her, unable to believe my ears. Then I gingerly reached down and pulled the note up so that I could read it.
Thought you might like this, the note read, in all too familiar handwriting. A reminder of old times.
“That’s… that’s Grendel’s handwriting,” I stammered, recognizing it instantly from the journal. “This was on Lafitte’s ship?”
Nina nodded.
“We don’t know if the Hollands put it there or what,” she said. “Maybe one of your experts can inquire about its authenticity. I’m sorry I couldn’t give it to you until now. Bureaucracy has its drawbacks, as I’m sure you know. As for the ship itself, we’re still not through with it, but we’re going to invite you out to see it as soon as we can. I need to finish up with this case in Durham first, though.”
“I… I understand,” I managed, gently picking up the telescope and balancing it in my hands, then. “Nina, this is amazing, thank you.”
“No, thank you,” she said, grinning and meeting my eyes. “We did it, Marston. We found him.”
“Yeah,” I said, unable to stop a smile from spreading across my own face then. “Yeah, we did it.”
Epilogue
“Wow,” Charlie breathed when I was finished, for once not complaining that I had ended my tale too soon. “For a minute there, I actually thought you might not find that kid.”
“Yeah, me too,” I admitted, wincing at the memory as I finished off my third and final drink for the night. “I’d never been more glad to be wrong.”
The alcohol settled in
my stomach, warming me up. I’d needed a fair amount to get through that story. Just the memory of the race against the clock to find Mikey tied my stomach into knots.
“Man, that’s always a nail biter,” Mike said, letting out a low whistle. “Couldn’t have turned out better, though.”
“No. No, it couldn’t,” I agreed with a chuckle. “We got very, very lucky that night, and so did Mikey.”
“Well, what happened next?” Ty asked, characteristically jumping straight to the next thing without taking a moment to enjoy what we’d just finished. “Was Mikey okay? Did his parents start getting along better?”
“Oh, yeah, things turned out alright for them,” I assured my audience. “Last I heard, he goes to see Jackson and his stepmom on summers and alternating holidays. The parents didn’t even have to litigate after all was said and done. They were just all glad to have their son back safe and sound.”
“How was he psychologically, though?” Mac asked, getting at the heart of the issue as she was apt to do. “That’s a lot to go through for a little kid, even if he wasn’t abused.”
“Good question,” I said, nodding to her. “Last I heard, he still sees Dr. Osborne sometimes, but he’s an otherwise well-adjusted kid. He just has a great story to tell, is all.”
Mac nodded thoughtfully, seeming satisfied with this answer.
“Did Mr. Samuels get his boat back?” Jeff asked, grinning at the memory of the old man.
“Oh, yes,” I chuckled. “I returned it to him the next day. He was a little chagrined at the damage, but he mainly seemed excited that one of his boats had been through such an exciting adventure. He said it was just proof that Lucy was the best boat he ever had! The nephew just rolled his eyes.”
Everyone laughed at this, and I mean everyone. The other customers were all gone by then, and every bar girl was now standing around the booth, listening to the end of my story. I think they’d been there since around when Nina and I figured out that Justin was missing at the station.
“What about Justin?” Charlie asked. “Did you ever find him?”
“Oh, yeah. Holm and I weren’t on that part of the case, but Nina and the detectives from Durham found him the night after we found Mikey. The gangbangers had intended to kill him but wanted to know what he’d told us first, and he was smart enough to figure that out and hold out long enough for the police to find him. He was pretty beat up, but he lived.”
“And the rest of the gang?” Jeff asked eagerly.
“Well, that took longer, but eventually, everything fell into place,” I sighed. “They even managed to rescue some more kids. Not all of them, but I suppose we couldn’t get that lucky. Anyway, no kids have been taken in the area since, as far as I know.”
“And Holm was okay, too?” Ty asked. I noted that he knew better than to ask where Holm was now, though I could tell that he wanted to know.
“Yeah, he was alright,” I said, waving away the kid’s concern. “He’d lost a fair amount of blood, but he was okay. I made him follow up with that doctor in Miami, and the guy said he was fine. He had some kind of condition that made him need the extra blood transfusion. I don’t remember what they called it. Anyway, everything turned out alright in the end. This is one of my more harrowing stories, but it’s also more uplifting than a lot of the other ones, I think.”
“You guys did get pretty lucky with this one, didn’t you?” Mike remarked, winking at me as he finished off the last of his beer, and Rhoda quickly moved to clear up all our empty glasses.
“Sounds like they get pretty lucky most of the time,” she remarked as she took my whiskey glass from me.
“You could say that,” I chuckled. “It always drove the other agents nuts. Anyway, we didn’t really feel lucky while we were in the thick of it. It was a really tough case. But in the end, yeah, we were on cloud nine.”
“What about that microscope, though?” Charlie asked, his eyes drifting up to where it hung above us on the wall. “Did it really come from the Dragon’s Rogue?”
“Now, you don’t think I’m going to answer that tonight, now, do you?” I asked, winking at him in my own turn.
“Come on, it had to have come from the Dragon’s Rogue,” Ty complained. “It was Grendel’s handwriting, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah, but remember, the Hollands forged the fake journal,” Mac pointed out. “They could’ve forged the note, too, right?”
Ty opened his mouth as if to argue the point but didn’t seem able to find any retort.
“My, you do have them wrapped around your finger, don’t you?” Mike asked, raising his eyebrows at me.
“I suppose,” I said coolly. “Though I won’t be saying any more tonight. That will have to be for next time.”
As I spoke, I nodded in the direction of an ornate piece of metal hanging on the wall above the telescope. Everyone stared at it, but they knew better than to ask what it was.
I wasn’t going to tell them. Not yet, anyway.
Author’s Note
Hey, if you got here, I just want you to know that you’re awesome! I wrote this book just for someone like you, and if you want another one, it is super important that you leave a review.
The more reviews this book gets, the more likely it is there will be a sequel to it. After all, I’m only human, and you have no idea how far a simple “your book was great!” goes to brighten my day.
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