by Matt Lincoln
Maritime Caper
Coastal Fury book 12
Matt Lincoln
Contents
Prologue
1. Ethan
2. Ethan
3. Ethan
4. Ethan
5. Tessa
6. Ethan
7. Ethan
8. Ethan
9. Holm
10. Ethan
11. Ethan
12. Ethan
13. Ethan
14. Ethan
15. Ethan
16. Ethan
17. Ethan
18. Tessa
19. Ethan
20. Ethan
21. Ethan
22. Ethan
23. Holm
24. Ethan
25. Tessa
26. Ethan
27. Ethan
28. Ethan
29. Ethan
30. Ethan
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Prologue
I stared at the clock on the back wall of the bar as I listened to the sounds of the surrounding crowd. It was a good night for the bar. It had been a good series of nights, actually, and we’d made more in the past couple of weeks than we usually did in a month.
And yet, somehow, I wasn’t feeling it.
“Why the long face?” one of my bar girls, Rhoda, asked as she passed me with a tray full of drinks to deliver to a group of retirees in the corner.
“No long face,” I said dryly. “Just tired is all.”
“They’ll be back in,” she grinned, winking at me as if she knew exactly what I was thinking. “They’re never able to stay away for long.”
I sighed. Apparently, it was obvious what I was thinking, no matter how much I hated to admit it to myself. As busy as the bar had been lately, and as great as it was serving all of my regular customers, old and new, something had been missing for the past few weeks. Or rather, someone.
My gaggle of fans that Mike, the former owner of the bar, had introduced to me what I realized was a while ago now hadn’t been around in weeks. Mike had gotten me to start telling the group of young naval cadets stories from my career in law enforcement after I retired from the Navy SEALS myself, and they’d taken to my tall tales mightily.
The last time the kids were in, I’d told them the story of how my partner and I had been sent down to the Florida Keys to rescue another missing agent after he’d been abducted by an international drug syndicate. They’d seemed more than interested in that story, and one of those old retirees sitting in the corner had even listened in.
I waved to the man, and he waved and grinned back at me, beckoning me over to his booth.
“Hey, son,” he said when I arrived, always smiling when he saw me. “I’ve been telling my friends here all about your stories! Half of ‘em can’t even believe it. Heck, I don’t know if I do myself!”
“Thanks, Mark,” I said with a laugh. “And we really do appreciate all the business you’ve been bringing into the bar lately.”
“My pleasure,” he chuckled. “Now I haven’t seen your little friends around here since that first night. Do they not come in all that much?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said with a shrug, trying to play it off as if I hadn’t noticed the kids’ absence. “They’re busy with camp. And I’m sure there are more hip bars around where they could spend their free time.”
This was true enough. My bar wasn’t exactly a hot spot for the younger crowd and tourists, and that was by design. I liked keeping it more of a local place, keeping my life nice and quiet. Still, I had to admit that I was wondering where Jeff, Ty, and the rest of their crew had been lately.
I glanced out the front doors as if I expected to see the motley crew of military trainees making their way inside, begging to hear what happened next in my long and hectic career with the Military Border Liaison Investigative Services, or MBLIS for short. But no one was there.
I shook my head to clear it and turned back to Mark and his buddies.
“Do any of you guys need a refill?” I asked them, and a couple of them passed me their empty glasses.
I grabbed them and made my way back to the bar to get the refills, passing Rhoda again on my way.
I turned my back to the doors as I deposited the used glasses into a pile of dirty dishes and filled new ones for Mark and his friends from the retirement home. Then I returned to the table with fresh drinks in hand.
“Thank you very much!” Mark said as he took his from me, holding the glass up as if to toast me. “I don’t know what I’d do if I hadn’t found this place. I was going crazy holed up in there, I’m telling you.”
“Hey, it’s not so bad,” one of the other old men said defensively. “We have a pool. And bridge!”
“Bridge,” Mark scoffed, shaking his head at me. “Can you believe these guys?”
“I don’t know,” I chuckled, shaking my head right back at him. “You guys let me know if you need anything else, okay?”
“Sure thing,” Mark said as I started to walk away. “Hey, look, here they are!”
I spun around at the old man’s excitement to see none other than Jeff, Ty, Mac, and Charlie pushing through the front doors to my bar and laughing amongst themselves.
I’d be lying if I said that my spirits didn’t lift at the sight of them. But I didn’t tell them that, of course.
“Hey guys,” Mark called to them, waving them over. “Long time no see.”
The kids all meandered over to the booth where Mark and his friends sat, characteristic wide grins on their youthful faces.
“Yeah, well, we’ve been stuck on the base the past couple of weeks,” Jeff explained with a shrug. “This is the first time we’ve been able to get out in ages.”
“Well, we’re glad to see you,” I chuckled, secretly relieved that the kids hadn’t been choosing some other bar over me. “Why don’t you guys take a seat, and I’ll grab you some drinks?”
Everyone who worked at the bar knew their orders by now, considering how often they came in and how long they stayed when they did.
“Hey, it’s pretty busy in here,” Ty said as he slid into the long booth across from Mark and his friends.
“Watch it!” Mac hissed, elbowing her friend in the ribs as she slid in next to him in turn.
“Don’t worry about it,” I laughed as Jeff and Charlie filled in the rest of the booth. “I’m well aware that we’re doing more business than usual lately. No small thanks to Mark for that, no doubt.”
I gave the man a wink, and he laughed as well.
“I don’t know that I can take credit for all of it,” he chuckled, spreading his arms wide at the almost full bar. “I guess word’s getting out about you guys.”
“I guess so,” I said with a shrug. “I’m not going to complain. Anyway, I’ll be right back with your drinks.”
“No, don’t go!” Charlie cried, his tone almost whining. “We want to know what happens next! Did you ever catch that crime ring couple from the Keys? And what about the Dragon’s Rogue and Lafitte’s ship?”
“It’s a little busy in here, guys,” I pointed out, glancing out across the packed bar full of thirsty customers. “I don’t think Rhoda can keep up on her own.”
As if on cue, there was Rhoda, standing right next to me.
“Nadia and Joey are both coming in,” she said quickly. “I just called them.”
“Oh?” I asked, arching an eyebrow at her. “They just agreed to give up a free evening like that?” I snapped my fingers to illustrate my point.
“They’re not the only ones who like a good story,” the bar girl said, flashing me a lopsided grin as she zoomed off to go
get the kids their drinks. “Be right back.”
I chuckled, more than a little amused. I’d started to notice the bar girls paying more attention to my stories when the kids came in as of late, but had written it off as me reading into things. I guess they really were paying attention.
Maybe Mike was right, and I didn’t give my stories as much credit as they deserved. I had had an interesting career. I wasn’t going to deny that. I supposed I just never considered that it might be of interest to the next generation, who I’d always thought to be more interested in their cell phones than anything some old guy like me had to say.
“Alright, then,” I said with a bemused shrug. “I guess I’ve got a little time to kill.”
Ty pounded on the table in anticipation, and a goofy grin spread across his face.
“Alright!” he cried. “I can’t wait.”
“We’ve been meaning to get back here for a while now,” Jeff explained apologetically. “It’s been killing us, not knowing what happens next.”
“Some more than others,” Mac said, giving Ty the side-eye as he continued to bounce around in his excitement.
“Well, I’m glad to be of service,” I chuckled, sliding into the booth next to Mark.
Rhoda returned in not too long bearing the kids’ usual orders as well as a neat whiskey for me.
“You sure you’re good?” I asked her one last time as she set the glass down in front of me.
“Yeah, they’re right here,” she said, nodding in the direction of the front doors through which the other bar girls, Nadia and Joey, were now spilling, laughing amongst themselves as they did so. “So we should be good for the rest of the night.”
“Thanks again,” I said, saluting her with my glass as she made her way over to the other bar girls. Then, calling to the other two, “And thank you, girls, for coming in on short notice!”
Nadia and Joey both smiled and waved to me, and I couldn’t help but notice that as they worked, all three of the bar girls lingered near our booth as much as they could, not wanting to miss any more of my story than they had to while they fulfilled the other customers’ orders.
“So?” Ty asked when they were gone, his eyes practically bugging out of his face in anticipation. “What happened next? Did the FBI ever get back to you about what was going on with Lafitte’s ship? Did any of that treasure and stuff you found in it have to do with the Dragon’s Rogue? What about that tent on Pye Key, with all that old nautical stuff, did any of that have to do with the Dragon’s Rogue?”
“Hold on, hold on, hold on,” I chuckled, holding up both of my hands on the table to slow him down. “One question at a time.”
“I don’t know if he’s capable of that,” Mac said dryly, shooting her friend a sly smile.
“So?” Ty asked, unable to contain his excitement to such a degree that he would’ve knocked over his drink if Mac hadn’t rescued it from his wildly flying arms. “What happened? What was that ship in a bottle? It was Lafitte’s ship, right?”
“Oh yes, it was Lafitte’s ship,” I confirmed. “As for who made it, well, that’s the story that I’m going to tell you today.”
“You got another case chasing after that couple from the Keys, the ones who were behind the drug ring there, didn’t you?” Ty asked, looking around at his friends eagerly. “I knew it, I just knew it.”
“Not quite,” I chuckled, enjoying that someone was getting so excited about my life story. “I think I told you before about the old pirate Grendel’s journal, and how I’d been trying to get my hands on it?”
“That’s the one for that old ship your gramps spent so much time trying to dig up?” Mark asked, having not been there for all of my stories leading up to the last one.
“That’s the one,” I confirmed with a nod. “The Dragon’s Rogue. So you’ll remember that my friend Tessa Bleu and I were trying to track it down at this museum in Virginia, but they’d been giving us the runaround.”
“And then they sent you a fake!” Charlie finished for me.
“Well, someone sent me a fake,” I corrected. “Once I got home from the Keys, you could say that I was more than interested in getting to the bottom of all that…”
1
Ethan
I sat across from Holm in our little MBLIS office in Miami, raking once more through all the files from our mission to the Florida Keys, during which we’d rescued one of our colleagues, Lamarr Birn, from the drug lords who had kidnapped him one unassuming night on one of the resort Keys mostly used for tourism.
“You’re looking through that again?” Holm complained, giving my paperwork the side-eye. “What do you think you’re going to find that you didn’t read the last hundred times you went through it?”
“Well, I won’t know until I find it, will I?” I shot back dryly, not bothering to look up at him from the thick file in my hands.
“You’re not going to find anything,” my partner grumbled. “Just like Diane said, we just have to wait until these guys turn up again. Once we get another hit, we’ll go track them down. But until then, it’s not helping anybody to obsess over it. And we all know that you’re one to obsess over pretty much everything.”
I gave him a pointed look now, barely raising my eyes from the file to complete the gesture. But before I could respond verbally, Diane came stomping out of her office on the back wall toward our desks in the middle of the open floor plan.
“Did I hear my name?” our director asked, coming to a halt in front of our desks.
“Yeah, I was just reminding Marston here that obsessing isn’t going to catch the Holland couple any faster,” Holm explained with a low laugh.
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Diane said dryly, arching an eyebrow at him. “The way Ethan does it, I’d bet that his obsession could help us more than hurt us.”
“Thank you,” I said, nodding to her.
“I don’t know that it was a compliment,” she chuckled, turning the same skeptical expression on me. “Sometimes I think you need to get a life, Marston, get your head out of those files. But don’t stop obsessing until after we catch the Hollands. We need to do that first. But Holm’s right that there’s not much to do until we get another hit on them.”
Chester and Ashley Holland were the real estate mogul couple whose investment properties on Little Torch Key we had found out were being used as drug dens for Caribbean drug kingpins and cocaine smuggling on our last mission for MBLIS.
Unfortunately, though the Hollands owned property in the Keys, they didn’t actually live there. We’d been trying to track them down ever since, even enlisting the help of the other federal agencies like the FBI and CIA in our search, but we’d come up empty-handed so far. This was infuriating, considering that it had been weeks since our return at that point.
“You talked to Birn at all?” Holm asked Diane. “How’s he doing?”
We’d found Birn tucked away on Pye Key, a small island several miles west of the Little Torch Key that was largely used for Boy Scout trips. Apparently, for some time, it had also been used as a campsite for the drug lords while they followed instructions from the Hollands to try to excavate Lafitte’s ship around Pye Key and two other nearby islands, Crab and Melody Keys. The Hollands had even gone so far as to purchase Melody Key from the celebrity who privately owned it to assist in keeping their excavation plans on the down-low.
The celebrity didn’t know anything. He was just some washed-up reality star who went bankrupt and had to get rid of his private island quickly and easily. The first thing Holm and I had done when we got back was to interview the guy. I think I actually lost brain cells during that conversation.
“Yeah, he’s doing well,” Diane said, her face breaking out into a genuine smile at the mention of our colleague. “He’s enjoying his well-earned vacation. I’ll tell you that. Gets back sometime in the next couple of days, though.”
“That soon?” I asked, a little surprised. “You’d think after what he’d been through that he’d
take longer than a couple of weeks. He was in the hospital for the first half of that, too.”
“I told him as much,” Diane said with a shrug. “But he wants to get back to work. I’m starting to think that the whole office needs a mandated vacation if getting kidnapped and held hostage for a week doesn’t get us to take some real time off.”
“Hey, Marston and Bonnie took some time off a few months back,” Holm pointed out, referencing that time that I dragged one of the MBLIS lab techs along with me on an unofficial mission to take down the New York mafia that was tying up our agency’s funding channels.
“That doesn’t count, and you very well know it,” Diane said, her tone deadpan as she gave him a piercing glare.
“Alright, alright,” Holm relented, shaking his head. “Muñoz took some time off too, at least.”
Sylvia Muñoz was Birn’s partner and had had almost as rough a time of it in the Keys as he had. She’d been shot twice and went through the wringer, worrying about her partner and trying to figure out what had happened to him. After getting patched up at the hospital for a second time, she’d taken some well-deserved time off to lounge on a beach somewhere for a few days.
“Yes, well, she’s coming back early too,” Diane laughed, shaking her head. “She’ll be in this afternoon if you can believe it. She lasted five days doing nothing before she just had to come back and get to work tracking down this couple. I swear everyone in this office has some kind of complex.”
“And when was the last time you took a day off?” I asked her, looking up and giving her a sly smile.