by Matt Lincoln
Stolen Child
Coastal Fury book 13
Matt Lincoln
Contents
Prologue
1. Nina
2. Ethan
3. Ethan
4. Ethan
5. Ethan
6. Ethan
7. Ethan
8. Ethan
9. Ethan
10. Ethan
11. Nina
12. Ethan
13. Ethan
14. Ethan
15. Ethan
16. Ethan
17. Ethan
18. Ethan
19. Ethan
20. Ethan
21. Ethan
22. Ethan
23. Ethan
24. Nina
25. Ethan
26. Ethan
27. Nina
28. Ethan
29. Ethan
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Prologue
It had been only three days after my gaggle of fans’ last trip to my bar to hear one of my stories from my MBLIS career when Mike, the bar’s former owner, walked in to pay me a visit.
“Fancy seeing you around here,” I grinned at him as he made his way over to where I was wiping down a booth and slid into a seat. “I thought I bought this place off you.”
“And look what a dump you’ve turned it into!” he cried, spreading his arms wide to indicate the whole of the bar, which was stocked full of old nautical memorabilia. “Tacky, if you ask me.”
“I didn’t,” I quipped back as I slung the bar rag over my shoulder, though I knew that my old friend was just ribbing me. “Besides, it’s way less tacky than the way it looked when you ran the place.”
This was, by all accounts except Mike’s own, very true. Back then, my bar was known as “Mike’s Tropical Tango Hut,” and he’d decked it out in all manner of Hawaiian tiki gear. I’d never liked it, though my MBLIS partner Holm and I had still spent more than a little time there because Mike himself was such good company. A former federal officer himself, Mike always knew what to say to us after a long workday or a particularly tough case.
“C’mon, you wouldn’t have spent so much time here if you didn’t like it,” Mike protested, flashing me a grin.
“Oh no, that couldn’t have had anything to do with the company,” I laughed, clapping him on the shoulder approvingly. “It had to be all those damn coconuts. That was the real draw.”
Mike rolled his eyes, but I could tell he was pleased with the compliment. Even long after my law enforcement career ended, I still loved catching up with the older man. Especially on a slow day like this.
I surveyed the rest of the bar to make sure that no one needed me anywhere else. Just one of my bar girls, Rhoda, was in that day, but it was no matter. I didn’t need anyone else. It was a slow, lazy weekday late in the afternoon. There were only two customers in the place, and there had only been a small handful all day long. If the previous night was any indication, the pace would only creep up a bit after five. Maybe a few of the guys from the nearby retirement home would stop in to give us some of their business, or a couple of locals needing a drink after a long day. Nothing more.
But it was alright. Business had been booming on the weekends as of late, more than making up for the slow roll of customers the rest of the week. I had more than enough time to catch up with Mike.
“You good?” I called to Rhoda, who was washing up some dusty old glassware behind the bar since there was nothing else to do after attending to the customers we did have.
“All good here, boss,” she called back with a chuckle, surveying the near-empty bar and shaking her head at the notion that I had to even ask the question.
“Alright, then, how have you been?” I asked, sliding into the booth across from Mike.
“Oh, you know, I sit around and read or watch TV, and then I might go to the beach,” the old bar owner admitted with a shrug and a half-grin. “Same old, same old.”
“Sounds like a dream come true,” I laughed, though I knew how many in law enforcement resented the idea of retirement for this very reason, myself included at one point. Mike didn’t look too upset about it, though. He’d always planned to retire.
“Sometimes, sometimes,” he said with a nod as Rhoda bustled over to us bearing drinks.
“Thanks,” I said, nodding gratefully to her. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“Oh, I have a feeling you’re going to be here for a while,” she said, nodding in the direction of the door.
I realized that the kids from the local base were making their way inside, and Mike gave me a bemused look as Rhoda ran back to the bar to grab the usual round of drinks for my fans.
“Those kids still hanging on your every word?” he asked with a chuckle.
“Hey, the whole thing was your idea,” I reminded him. “Don’t go getting jealous on me after all this time.”
“Jealous? Me?” Mike asked, pointing at himself with mock incredulity. “Never. If I were telling my old stories from my glory days, they wouldn’t be giving you a single second of their time.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said dryly, though I didn’t doubt that Mike had a few tales to tell of his own.
“Back so soon?” I asked as the kids meandered over to us. “It was only last weekend that you were here last.”
“Yeah, well, someone couldn’t wait to hear the next part of your story,” Jeff said, glancing over at Charlie and rolling his eyes.
“Hey, you were the one who suggested we come in the first place,” the shorter man protested, punching his friend playfully in the shoulder.
“Come on, kids, sit down,” Mike said, gesturing at the booth beside him, and they all piled in as the two of us scooted down to make room for them.
Rhoda appeared not long after with drinks for everyone. All the bar girls knew everyone in this group’s order by now.
“Alright, then, where’d you leave off?” Mike asked as he sipped his own drink once everyone was settled.
“I told them the story about Tessa and my trip to Virginia,” I explained.
“Ah,” he breathed, nodding knowingly. “That’s a good one. It really showcases your ability to get into trouble wherever you go, even on vacation.”
“Well, in my defense, it was never exactly supposed to be a vacation,” I qualified. “Not a typical one, anyway. But your point is taken.”
“Don’t I remember one of your stories being about some shore leave you and Holm took turning into a James Bond film, basically?” Mac, the lone woman in the group, asked dryly.
“A good point,” Mike said approvingly, grinning and arching an eyebrow at me. “What do you say to that, Marston?”
“That one I have to give you,” I admitted, cracking a smile myself now. “No qualifiers there.”
“Remind me, Virginia’s the one where you ran into that creepy old house to save the kid, right?” Mike asked, narrowing his eyes as if trying to remember.
“Yeah, that’s the one,” I confirmed with a nod. “That was a pretty wild night. It just never seemed to end.”
“You could say that again,” the third guy, Ty, murmured with an excited lean across the table. “It was crazy! You found all that old stuff from the Dragon’s Rogue, including Grendel’s journal!”
“That’s right,” I laughed. “It took a damn long time to comb through that stuff. Then I had to go straight to New Orleans to re-interview those hotel owners who I thought might know our suspects.”
The whole affair in Virginia had originally been about getting the journal of the pirate who was last in possession of the ship that once belonged to an ancestor of mine into my pos
session, in the hopes that its contents would lead me to the Dragon’s Rogue’s current location.
Things had all gone astray, however, when my photojournalist companion and I realized that the director of the museum that we thought had the journal had been intimidated into silence, and then several goons showed up to take us out. In the end, it turned out that the Hollands, a couple known by MBLIS and the FBI for their drug crime ring, who’d also doubled as nautical enthusiasts, not unlike myself, were behind the attacks.
“You didn’t learn anything in New Orleans, though, right?” Mac asked. “That’s what you said last time.”
“Well, not quite,” I said, narrowing my eyes at this. “They didn’t know anything directly about our case, but they were able to give us the names of some people who might.”
“And?” Ty asked with characteristic eagerness. “Did any of those leads pan out?”
“All will be revealed in time,” I said, peering at him over my glass as I took a sip of my drink. I knew this frustrated him, but I found it endearing. Mac seemed to just find it funny.
“That kid was okay, though, right?” Mike asked, pointing at me thoughtfully. “I don’t remember you saying anything about a dead kid, anyway. It seems like something you would’ve mentioned.”
“Yeah,” I said with a low laugh. “I probably would’ve. And yeah, he was fine. Shaken, but fine. Stupid kid, running out in the middle of the night trying to catch the bad guys himself without permission.”
“Sounds to me like he’d make a good agent one day,” Mike argued. “Sounds exactly like you most days of your career.”
“Har, har,” I said sarcastically, though I had to admit he kind of had a point. “The main difference being that I’m a trained operative ignoring the need for the all-clear from my superiors every once in a while, and this was a little kid disobeying his parents. But he had guts. I’ll give him that.”
The poor boy had overheard Tessa and me talking to his parents about the strange occurrences at the house next door, which was occupied by the Hollands’ lackeys at the time. All he had to hear was the word “pirate” for him to think it was all a game. He was held hostage briefly, but we got him out safe and sound in the end.
“So?” Charlie asked eagerly, looking slightly annoyed that we had to tread through all this old territory just because Mike hadn’t heard the story in a while. “What happened next?”
“You all have a one-track mind,” I laughed, taking another sip from my drink slowly, just to watch them squirm a little. Even Mac leaned a little closer to the edge of her seat between Mike and Ty. Then, glancing back over at Mike, “You see what you’ve gotten me into? These kids are in here all the time, it seems, making me tell them stories and drinking my alcohol.”
“Face it, Marston, you love this,” Mike laughed, and I couldn’t deny that, either.
“Yeah, you love us,” Jeff teased gently. “Why else would you keep spending all this time with us?”
“Oh, you know me,” I joked as Rhoda came to deposit some nuts on our table. “Anything to keep my nose off the old grindstone.”
“Anyone who knows you knows that that can’t be further from the truth,” the bar girl said, giving me a stern look.
“High praise from one of your employees,” Mike pointed out, raising his eyebrows approvingly at her.
It was. I always thought that the bar girls probably liked me well enough, given that there wasn’t much turnover for such a transient type of job. I almost never had to hire new help. But it was still nice to get the praise to my face.
“Thanks, Rhoda,” I told her, nodding to the nuts but thinking of more than just that.
“Well, go on,” she said, hovering near our booth and placing her hands on her hips. “What happened next?”
I laughed again. I’d noticed the bar girls listening in on my stories more and more lately, and they all seemed to know the sequence of events just as well as these kids, even though they all rarely worked on the same night. They must’ve been filling each other in on my exploits, I realized.
“Alright, alright,” I chuckled, setting aside my drink for the time being and glancing up at the small metal ornament hanging on the wall next to an old nautical telescope. “Actually, this case has something to do with a kid, too, though it was even more harrowing if that’s possible…”
1
Nina
Agent Nina Gosse of the FBI had been working on the Holland case before they pulled her on a run-of-the-mill criminal case. When she’d gotten the call from her supervisor, she hadn’t exactly been pleased. The Holland case was the biggest one she’d seen in a while, even if MBLIS was the agency on record. Besides, she had been on one of the related cases down in New Orleans before they knew that the Hollands had anything to do with the new drug circulating down there. MBLIS agents had even been on that case, too, which was how she’d met Ethan Marston and Robbie Holm, both of whom had since become friends.
All that went to say that she was more than just grumpy about being sent off to solve some petty crime, or so she thought. Then she’d learned that there was a missing kid involved, and she set all that aside. Cases like this were no laughing matter, and they were more important than some pissing contest about who got the most interesting work or high profile case files.
So this was how she found herself in the parking lot of a dingy old mall in a small colonial town along the coast of North Carolina. The place had its charm, she decided. Well, not the mall, but the surrounding town, at least. It had interesting architecture and a lot of history. Ethan Marston would love it, she thought. She found her thoughts drifting to him more than once in a while since their first meeting a few months back.
Nina sighed and headed into the mall. She didn’t expect to find much there, but it was where the boy was last seen, so it was a place to start. They were working on a time clock since it had been nearly five hours since his disappearance, and the kid’s mom was a government employee at some agency. Transportation, maybe? Nina didn’t remember. They were on vacation, staying in some cabin down here before it happened. The police barely existed in a small place like this, too. Between that, the family’s higher profile, and the fact that the kid was from across state lines, the FBI had been called.
They didn’t know much yet. Just that two men had been seen on security footage stealing the kid away after he wandered outside a shop while his parents were buying lunch at the food court. They’d only turned their backs for a moment, but sometimes that was all it took—still a healthy dose of bad luck.
Nina hadn’t met the parents yet. She was told they were hysterical, understandably, and freaking out about what was going to happen to their kid. She reviewed the security footage and opted to let the therapist who the FBI sent with her deal with the family. The people side of the job wasn’t exactly Nina’s strong suit, after all. Ethan was better at that kind of thing.
Nina groaned as she stepped over some police tape to walk through the large front doors into the food court area of the mall. The food court itself was empty but for several police officers, forensic techs, and a couple of mall security guards. But Nina was more concerned with the area beyond the security guards, a hallway lined by shops.
There was a throng of people there, way more than she would expect for a town with a population of five thousand. Most of them must be tourists, she realized based on their attire, there with the intent of enjoying the beach, some small-town charm, and the warming late spring weather.
But they weren’t on the beach now. In Nina’s experience, people responded to situations like this in one of two ways. The first was to retreat and isolate themselves, not wanting anything similar to happen to them or their families. The other was to flock to the scene out of some sick but altogether human sense of voyeurism, intent on finding some spectacle in addition to the sunny weather outside.
Clearly, the second impulse had won out for a fair portion of the town’s visitors, and no doubt a few locals, too. She did no
tice that there were no families in what she could only call the audience, though. Those tourists would be hiding away with their children.
“At least some of them are smart,” Nina muttered under her breath to herself as she shook her head, stood up a little straighter, and reluctantly made her way toward the crowd and the police officers, who stood near the security guards and seemed unsure what to do with the situation at hand.
“Hey, who are you?” one of the officers, a thirtyish guy with abnormally large ears, asked, eyeing her with wariness. “No one’s supposed to come in that way.”
“Sorry,” Nina grumbled, pulling out her FBI badge and flashing it at him. “Agent Gosse with the FBI. I was told you knew I was coming.”
“Oh, right,” the man said, the ears sticking out of either side of his head turning beet red in an instant. “Sorry.”
“No worries,” she said coolly. “What’s going on here?”
She eyed the crowd with some distaste. A teenager tried to hop the caution tape between the food court and the rest of the mall, but it didn’t exactly work. One of the security guards tackled him and carted him away in cheap mall handcuffs.
“Look, we tried to shut the place down, but there are just so many of them…” another officer, a balding redheaded man, explained with a pained expression on his face.
Great. These people weren’t all that competent, after all. Nina was willing to bet that the biggest crime they’d had here in the past year was some kids smoking pot. Still, there was a silver lining.