by Matt Lincoln
He clenched his jaw and began to stomp in my direction with his gun held high. I realized that he wanted to shoot me at the closest range he could, to make it hurt. Or he wanted to strangle me with his bare hands. Or both. Either way, I had to get away from him, fast.
But Tessa was right behind me, and I didn’t want to endanger her, either. As quickly as I could, I ran across the room into the darkness, moving his attention away from her and Miles’s general vicinity and after me.
I ran into another room, the dim light shining from the doorway and the way that my eyes had already adjusted to the dark atmosphere allowing me to maneuver around the scant furniture and doors.
I ended up in what I thought was a kitchen area, though I doubted that anything in it worked. There was an old sink, and there were rotting counters, but there wasn’t anything resembling an appliance or a modern food item in sight.
I ducked down behind one of the counters and waited for the guy to come after me. The stomp of his massive legs against the ground gave him away. His outline appeared in the doorway to the kitchen, looking around wildly for me.
He didn’t see where I went, I realized. He didn’t know where I was.
Slowly, I crept upward from where I lay crouched behind the kitchen counter, sidling the barrel of my gun over the old tiles until it was pointed directly at him.
I didn’t shoot to kill. No, I wanted this guy alive just as much as he seemed to want me dead. He had to talk.
I waited for him to move a little closer so that I could get a better shot in the dark.
The silence was deafening, my ears still ringing from when I’d shot the two other goons. Finally, I got him right where I wanted him.
I shot him in the right shoulder twice, where I knew that it would really hurt but likely wouldn’t kill him. He crumpled to the ground, and I ran out to grab and unload his gun just in case he was still conscious. He wasn’t.
Just then, I heard a cry from the main room, a man’s voice. I ran back out to find Tessa standing there over one of the other goons. He had seemed to survive my first shot and then made a grab at her as she tried to escape the house with Miles.
Tessa had grabbed the dead guy’s gun and mangled the living one over the head with it. If he wasn’t dead before, he sure was now.
“And you thought I wouldn’t be able to handle myself,” she grinned at me.
27
Ethan
“You should consider a second career in law enforcement,” I told Tessa as I stepped over the first dead goon, the one I had killed, and made sure that the second one was really dead this time. He was.
“Ooh, sorry, no can do,” she said, making a show of wincing at the thought. “I’m a little too invested in my current career, and I feel like I wouldn’t be able to report on as much as I want to if I worked for the US government.”
“That’s probably true,” I chuckled, giving her an appraising look and an approving nod.
The little boy, who I had almost forgotten was there since he’d gone silent when shots started firing, whimpered and moved back over to Tessa, wrapping his arms around her waist and burying his face in her stomach.
“Oh, it’s okay,” she said soothingly, running her hands through his hair. “It’s okay now. We’ll get you back to your parents real soon.”
I knelt down, so that I was close to eye level with the eight-year-old.
“It’s Miles, right?” I asked, and he nodded weakly, peeking his eyes out from behind the folds of Tessa’s shirt to get a glance at me before burying his face in her stomach again as she continued to stroke his hair. “I’m Ethan. I was in your house before, talking to your parents.”
“You’re the agent,” he said quietly, taking another peek. “The one who’s after the bad guys.”
“That’s right,” I said with a small laugh. “Now, you did a very dangerous thing coming over here before. Do you understand that?”
“I was just trying to help,” he explained as he nodded.
“I know,” I said kindly. “But there’s a reason people like me have to be older to do this kind of job. You get that now, right?”
He nodded again, and I figured that sufficed, at least for now. I had a feeling that experience had been the best teacher in this particular situation. Additionally, I had a feeling that there would be hell to pay for him when he got home when the relief at having him back safe and sound washed away to reveal the anger that was lurking beneath his parents’ fear.
Just then, sirens and flashing lights began to blaze around us, and I stepped outside to find a police helicopter landing in the backyard of the Hawthorne house. It would be difficult to get a car around here, I imagined, and it would be quicker to get to us this way.
Sergeant Wallace came running out of the helicopter when it landed—or more, jogging. I didn’t get the sense that he was a big runner anymore. But he gave it his best shot, and Officer Bauer came running after him in short order, closely followed by Tyson and Alice. Their little girl must’ve been left behind at their home in the care of some more officers.
More police and a forensics team came piling out of the helicopter after the Carltons, weapons out until they saw Tessa, Miles, and I all standing in the empty doorway of the house in one piece. Medical professionals followed them.
“Agent Marston,” Wallace said when he reached me, out of breath from his jog across the vast yard as he held his hand out in greeting. “I see you’ve already taken care of things here.”
As I shook his hand, his eyes drifted to the two corpses lying behind us, and they widened as he gave a nervous laugh.
“Yes, I think so,” I said with a nod. “There’s a man in the back who’s still alive but seriously wounded. I’d like to interrogate him here at the house if you don’t mind. As long as that’s medically possible.”
Wallace raised his eyebrows at this request.
“Uh, I guess we can see about that,” he said, running a hand across the back of his head uncertainly and motioning for the medical team to come forward. “You heard the man, get to it.”
“Miles!” Alice cried, rushing for her son, taking him from Tessa, and clutching him to her. Tyson followed closely behind his wife and encased them both in his arms.
“Thank you,” he managed, looking up at me with tears of gratitude in his eyes. “Thank you.”
“No problem,” I breathed, elated to see the family together again.
“You, uh, you see anything fishy in this house?” Wallace asked, looking past me with an apprehensive look on his face.
“Just your everyday human criminals,” I assured him with a clap on his shoulder. “Not to worry, my friend, there are only human terrors in here.”
It took a while for the team and I to case the whole house, given how large it was, but no other goons were found on the premises. Flashlight beams now filled the whole place from every corner, illuminating it all but for the occasional corner left untouched, still shrouded in darkness.
When we were finished, I made my way back to the kitchen area where I had left the head goon to be tended to by a team of medics. More than anything, I wanted to go back to the main room and look through all those old papers Tessa had found on the table. Was Grendel’s journal in there? Something else that could potentially lead me to the real Dragon’s Rogue?
I was itching to find out, but that would have to wait. I had a real living, breathing person to talk to first if he was able.
I had a couple of reasons for wanting to talk to the goon in the actual Hawthorne house. First of all, I wanted him to be able to point out to me exactly where important documents might be, instead of giving me some vague notion to figure out for myself before he was shipped off to prison. Second, I just wasn’t ready to leave the place yet. Sure, I could always come back. But for now, I wanted to be right there, where all the stuff was, where I could watch and make sure that nothing was moved out of place before I could find it.
I knew that this was probably selfish a
nd unreasonable of me. These guys were professionals, and they would do their jobs well. Nothing would be out of place if I were to return at a later time. Still, the idea made me uncomfortable. After so long obsessing over that fake journal and stalking the nautical museum’s website, I was finally here, and I wasn’t about to let any potential leads on the Dragon’s Rogue’s location or the Hollands slip through my fingers this time.
“Can he talk now, or do you need to ship him to the hospital for treatment?” I asked the medics when I arrived in the kitchen where they were knelt down next to the goon, who was propped up against the kitchen island and appeared to be awake.
He glowered at me with perhaps even more animosity than he had before I’d shot him if that was even possible.
“I think he’ll be alright,” the medic to his left said dryly, giving him a scathing look of her own. I noticed that her finger was bleeding out of what looked like a bite mark.
“You bit her?” I asked the man, arching an eyebrow at him. “You bit your doctor? How stupid are you?”
“Very, apparently,” the goon said, his voice coming out mangled and low, compared to his booming presence from before he was wounded.
“Well, at least you’re honest,” I said, crouching down in front of him.
“Do you need us to stay?” Officer Bauer asked from where he and a couple of other officers had been stationed to make sure the goon didn’t try anything funnier than biting his doctor.
“Oh, I think I can take care of myself,” I assured him.
Tessa had gone back with the Carltons to their house for the time being to help them get settled there since they seemed comfortable with her and were more than a little shaken up. She’d promised to come back as soon as she could and made me promise not to find anything too interesting without her.
Yes, talking to the goon would have to do for now, though my mind kept drifting back to that table covered in old papers. Old papers that looked suspiciously like the few pages I already had from Grendel’s real journal, old and yellow and covered in black ink.
“So what do you want to know, boss?” the goon asked dryly, narrowing his eyes at me as the police officers and all but the medic he’d bitten dispersed, giving me the space I needed to conduct my interview properly.
“We can start with your name,” I suggested, and he gave a low huff.
“They call me Knuckles sometimes,” he said, practically spitting the words out at me, but I made a point not to flinch. The battle of muscles with this one may be over, but the battle of wits appeared to just be getting started. And I liked my odds even better for this one.
“Nice try,” I said dryly. “What’s your real one?”
He had a soft Brooklyn accent beneath all that bravado, and he had olive skin, so I wasn’t surprised when he gave me an Italian name.
“Joey Rossi,” he said, and he looked unhappy enough as he said it that I believed him.
“Alright, Joey,” I started to say, but he cut me off.
“You can call me Knuckles,” he said with a sneer that brought me back to when he was lunging at me with those guns and those biceps of his.
“No,” I said bluntly. “As I was saying, so Joey. How about you tell me how you came into the Hollands’ employment?”
There was another flicker of annoyance in his expression as I said his bosses’ names.
“Oh, is that not the name they were using here?” I asked airily. “I’ve forgotten since they have so many. Their parents must’ve had trouble deciding. Answer the question.”
“I came on about five years ago,” Joey admitted after a moment of hesitation. “I moved up the ranks pretty quick.”
“I can imagine,” I said, giving him a disdainful look. “Brains and brawn, I’d guess, though not enough of each, apparently.”
“Har, har,” Joey quipped, scrunching his face up at me as he mocked me.
“And what do you know about where the Hollands are now?” I asked him. “Are they here in Newport News? Or are they somewhere on the other side of the world by now?”
“Okay, now I really need to stop talking to you,” Joey said, banging his head back on the side of the kitchen island with some force.
“Watch it!” the medic snapped at him, reaching up and steadying his head for him. “You’ve lost enough blood already, not that I’ll shed any tears for you.”
I chuckled and gave her an approving look. I was beginning to like this woman. Joey, on the other hand, I liked less and less with each passing moment.
“Look, my friend, you’re going to have to start talking if you know what’s good for you,” I said sternly.
“If I know what’s good for me?” he repeated, and he looked genuinely aghast at this. “I do know what’s good for me, Bub, and it’s not talking to the likes of you.”
“Oh?” I asked, arching an eyebrow at him. “And how’s that?”
“How do you think?” he asked. “You just found out about these guys what, a couple of weeks ago? Compared to how long I’ve been working for ‘em, and how long they were around even before that? You really think that I’m just going to throw my hat in with you guys when you haven’t shown any way of protecting yourselves from the Hollands, let alone me?”
He had a point there. The couple had eluded law enforcement for a disturbing amount of time, amassing quite the operation over God knows how many years. That being said, I did have one thing going for me.
“Look, that may be true, but who finally found them?” I argued, jutting a finger into my own chest. “I did. And who caught you in less than forty-eight hours of being here, huh? I’m not just any old cop.”
“Oh yeah? And how long you been working for this Military Border whatchamacallit?” Joey shot back. “I guarantee you’ve run into a case that had something to do with the Hollands before.”
“I have,” I agreed. “A couple of months ago in New Orleans, and right before that in Haiti, given that the two were related. And I realized something was up. Then when I ran into another case down in the Keys that raised my hairs, I put two and two together, and here we are.”
“You really expect me to think that in all your years as an agent with them, you never ran into the Hollands before this year?” Joey sneered. “They’re all over the border. And border is in your acronym, right?”
He had a point there, as well, though I hated to admit it. Diane had even said something to this effect herself before I left Miami, remarking that we had better go through all our old case files when things died down a bit and make sure that we hadn’t run into the Hollands before and not known it.
Even so, part of me was certain that Holm and I had never dealt with a Holland case on one of our missions before. We would’ve noticed it, far too thorough and seamless as a team not to if there was something to be found.
“No,” I said, certainty in my voice now as I shook my head. “I’m sure you’re right that someone at some MBLIS office somewhere has come across your bosses before, but not me and my partner. We’re too thorough. We know what we’re doing.”
The man’s eyes lit up at the mention of Holm, and he averted his gaze from mine, even though he had held his gaze steady up until then.
I arched an eyebrow at him.
“Speak up,” I ordered. “What do you know?”
He scowled, clearly annoyed that I’d noticed the subtle change in his expression.
“That’s right. I know what I’m doing,” I continued when he didn’t answer right away. “You can be sure of that.”
Joey looked me up and down as if appraising me. Then, he seemed to decide that the devil in front of him was better than the one waiting in the shadows. A smart choice, if I do say so myself.
“Alright, alright,” he said at long last, scowling again. “My buddy Charlie went after your guy in Miami. The Hollands sent him. The target was your boss, that broad…”
“Diane,” I interjected, not liking him speaking of her in that way.
“Yeah, yeah, wha
tever,” he said, waving a hand flippantly in the air before continuing. “Anyway, your partner messed the whole thing up, so I guess the two of you can’t be that bad at your jobs. Charlie’s damn good at his, I know that.”
“Right,” I said dryly, pulling a small notebook and pen out of the inside of my jacket and beginning to jot some of these details down. “And what’s Charlie’s last name?”
The man scowled again but answered anyway.
“Walzer,” he said in a dejected tone as the medic continued to bat at his shoulder wound with gauze, rather roughly by my estimation. She seemed to enjoy it when he winced.
“Alright, and where is Charlie now?” I asked.
“The hell if I know,” Joey scoffed, and I could tell that he was honest. “Somewhere in Miami still, probably. I know the Hollands refused to get him out when he failed to ‘live up to his potential,’ as they call it, so he went dark, and now he’s on the run without their help.”
“Ah, so there’s another reason for you to tell me everything, then,” I pointed out, giving him a sly smile.
“What do you mean?” he asked, narrowing his eyes at me, though I suspected that he already knew what I meant and just didn’t want to admit it. He wasn’t a stupid man, after all.
“Well, it looks to me like you failed to ‘live up to your potential’ even more than your buddy did,” I explained with a chuckle, waving a hand around me to indicate the scene of the house, crawling with police officers and forensics specialists. “And my guess would be that this is way more important to the Hollands than taking out my boss.”
Joey scowled again, but his expression told me that I was right.
“So,” I continued, giving him a small smile. “How about we talk about what’s going on here?”
Another scowl.
“Let’s start with the museum, shall we? Did you come here just to harass them?” I asked, continuing with specific questions when the goon offered up nothing of his own accord.
“No, that was way after,” Joey said with a shrug, prompting me to raise my eyebrows in genuine surprise.
