Cayman Crackdown (Coastal Fury Book 18)

by Matt Lincoln

  “You don’t waste time, do you, Marston?” he snickered.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I replied coolly.

  “Hm? Are we talking about the googly eyes that Marston and the liaison have been making at each other all day?” Hills snickered under his breath.

  “See? No point in playing dumb,” Holm snorted. “It’s not like I’m surprised or anything. I’d be more surprised if you didn’t, to be honest.”

  “So, this is standard behavior?” Hills smirked. “You just fraternize with every woman you work with?”

  “Yes,” Holm replied in the same moment that I replied, “No.”

  Hills laughed, which caused Chapman to narrow his eyes at him.

  “Should you really be laughing, Charlie?” He raised an eyebrow at his partner. “Because if I recall correctly, you also have a habit of—”

  The door creaked open then, signaling the immediate end of that particular conversation.

  “Okay,” Gabriella stated as she rejoined the group. “I’ve told the captain about what the witness said. Given her history of making outlandish claims, he advised us to be careful but does think we should look into it. We can head down to the train station now. It’s a bit far, but it might be better if we walk. There won’t be many places to park nearby.”

  “I think we’re all fine with that,” I replied. We were all federal agents, after all. A little hike wouldn’t hurt us. Besides, a walk might be a nice opportunity to see some more of the city.

  “Let’s go then,” Gabriella responded before leading the way out of the police station.

  As we headed toward the train station and further from the coast, I noticed that the surrounding buildings gradually began to look more modern and industrial. Nevertheless, the old-world Italian architecture was still present, visible in buildings interspersed here and there as we walked through the busy city center. The dichotomy was especially noticeable once we arrived at the train station itself: a large, sleek glass structure surrounded on three sides by tall, grandiose Romanesque buildings, painted in soft pastel colors and adorned with metal balconies. It was an odd sight, but very pretty. It definitely wasn’t the kind of thing you saw every day.

  “The next train to Sorrento leaves in twenty minutes,” Gabriella informed us after checking the timetables. “It takes about eighty minutes to get there, so in total, we will be there about two hours from now.”

  “That’s not bad,” I replied as she led us through the busy train station toward our platform. “I think that’ll leave us with plenty of time to speak to the police and maybe check out the scene before it gets too dark.”

  When we finally arrived at our platform, the area around the train was already crowded as people shuffled around and pushed past each other, eager to get either off or onto the train. Gabriella shoved her way through with practiced ease, and the rest of us followed her lead. After all of us were on the train, we managed to snag five seats, all adjacent to each other, just as a large group of people got up and left the train at the same time.

  “That was lucky.” Gabriella grinned. “It’s sometimes difficult to get a seat at all on this train, let alone so many all together like this.”

  “Is it usually this crowded?” Chapman asked as the seats quickly filled, and more people began to pile into the crowded car.

  “Oh, yes,” Gabriella scoffed. “These smaller trains aren’t like the Frecciarossa, the high-speed bullet train. They cost more, but you get a reserved seat. The Frecciarossa doesn’t go to Sorrento, though. It’s too close to be worth it. On the normal train, if you’re not one of the first ones on, you’ll have to stand.”

  “Sounds like a New York subway,” I muttered in response as I watched people cram into what little space was left on the train. All the seats had filled just moments after we’d managed to find ours, and everyone else was left to either hold on to the handrails or the straps that were dangling from the roof of the train. I’d hate to have to do that for the hour and a half that it was going to take us to get to Sorrento.

  Nevertheless, no one left standing seemed to mind all that much. Pretty much everyone on the train was talking animatedly with their companions. A pair of children stood a few feet away, trying to see which one could reach higher on the handrail. At the very end of the car, a group of young men wore what looked like some kind of sports jersey, laughing and chanting something excitedly.

  Overall, the atmosphere inside the train felt very upbeat and happy, despite how crowded it was and how hot it was rapidly becoming.

  Just a few minutes later, the train doors closed, and the train gave a short, harsh stutter before it started to move. The two kids I’d noticed earlier squealed with excitement, this time trying to see how long they dared to go without holding onto the bar between them.

  I spent the train ride chatting idly with Gabriella and watching the scenery pass by through the train window. We were heading through some rough terrain up into the mountains. The train made several stops before finally arriving at our destination, by which point it had cleared out significantly to where no one was standing anymore.

  The Sorrento train station wasn’t as grand or impressive as the one in Naples, but the scenery outside the station was still striking. Large green palm trees flanked the entrance. To the right, I could see lush, rolling hills across the horizon, while to the left, I could see the towering buildings of the city, all superimposed over a cloudless blue sky. It was also a little hotter here than it had been in Naples, but not unbearably so.

  “The station is only six minutes from here,” Gabriella informed us as she looked the address up on her phone. “We can walk there. This way.”

  As we journeyed through the city, Chapman dove into another long explanation about the history of the city’s architecture.

  “In some ways, Sorrento is even more culturally rich than Naples is,” he explained excitedly as we passed a line of colorful buildings. They towered above us and were all painted in soft blue and pink pastel tones. “It was a Grecian state first, and it actually changed hands a lot during its almost thousand-year history. Oh, and those houses built up against the side of the cliff? That kind of architecture is hard to create today. The fact that they were able to produce such impressively constructed buildings in the twelfth century is nothing short of astonishing.”

  “That is pretty cool,” I muttered as I looked up at the buildings jutting out of the side of the hills. They were almost flat against the edges of the cliffs, hanging above us as we walked down the street. I could also tell that we were near the water. I’d lived in Miami for long enough to recognize the sounds of waves and the scent of seawater on the breeze, even from a distance.

  “Of course, not all the city still looks the way it did a thousand years ago,” Chapman continued as we entered a less ostentatious-looking part of the city. The closer to the station we got, the more ordinary the buildings looked. “In fact, a lot of it looks like the kind of town you’d find anywhere else in the world. Of course, the town square is still the most popular spot for tourists since that’s where all the old architecture is.”

  The Sorrento police station itself wasn't as grand or imposing as the one in Naples, which had basically looked like a miniature castle. It was housed inside an understated, pale yellow building tucked into a quiet corner of the city. If it hadn’t been for the tall iron fence encircling it and the sign that read “Polizia Stradale Sorrento” on the front, I might have just assumed it was an apartment building and passed it by.

  “They should be waiting for us,” Gabriella remarked as we walked toward the door at the side of the gate. A small booth was positioned next to it, manned by a single police officer.

  The man eyed us warily as we approached the tiny booth.

  “Ciao,” Gabriella greeted him as she gestured toward the badge on her uniform. “Agente Gabriella Russo della Polizia di Napoli. Dobbiamo parlare con il Capitano Riva.”

  The man’s eyes roved ov
er all of us for a moment before he shrugged and pushed the button to open the gate and let us through. As we stepped inside, I tossed a glance over my shoulder and noticed that the man was staring down at his phone, seemingly unperturbed.

  “What did you say to him?” I asked Gabriella once we were out of earshot. It had struck me as a little odd that he’d let us in with just a single sentence.

  “I just said that we needed to speak to the captain.” She shrugged. “He saw I was an officer, so I guess that was good enough for him. Why?”

  “Seems like pretty lax security,” Hills grunted as we stepped up to the entrance of the police station. “He saw a single person dressed as a cop among a group of strangers and just lets them waltz in? What’s stopping someone from just renting a police uniform and busting into the station with a bunch of thugs?”

  “This isn’t America, Agent Hills.” Gabriella frowned at him as we stepped through the front door of the building.

  The inside was small and sparsely furnished. A uniformed officer sat behind a desk near the front door, and behind him, I saw a few more desks and a staircase that led up to the second floor of the building.

  “People here don’t do crazy action movie things like that,” she continued. “At least, that’s what I would say, normally, but here we are chasing after pirates, for goodness’ sake. Even in Naples, the worst we usually have to deal with are pickpockets and petty street fights. In Sorrento, there’s hardly any crime at all, as far as I know.”

  “Must have been quite shocking, then,” Chapman added, “for the people here to watch that attack.”

  Before I could respond, the officer sitting at the desk just behind the entrance looked up at us with curiosity.

  “Can I help you?” he asked slowly, in heavily accented English.

  “Dobbiamo parlare con il Capitano Riva,” Gabriella replied at once. The man looked relieved to hear her speaking in Italian. I could understand how he felt since it had been frustrating having to rely so heavily on our liaison the entire time we’d been here.

  “Riguardo a cosa?” the man asked, his hand hovering over a phone on the desk next to him.

  “Il mio capitano avrebbe dovuto chiamare, da Naples,” Gabrielle answered. “Una donna è arrivata prima con una storia su alcuni uomini sospetti. Abbiamo alcune domande su quello che è successo.”

  “Oh,” the man scoffed, a chuckle slipping past his lips as he picked up the phone. “Quella donna.”

  There was something derisive about the way the man had said that last bit, and even if I couldn’t understand exactly what he was saying, I could tell whatever it was hadn’t been very nice. Gabriella, too, looked a little annoyed at him but stayed quiet as the officer spoke to someone on the phone. Eventually, he hung up, and just a few moments later, someone descended the staircase at the end of the room.

  “Hello,” he greeted us as he walked toward where we stood by the front desk. “I am Captain Riva. I received a call from the station at Naples a few hours ago. You are agents from the United States, correct?”

  “That’s right,” I replied as I moved forward to shake the man’s hand. He was slightly shorter than I was but muscular, with dark hair and a thick dark mustache and beard to match. “We wanted to speak to you about a woman that was here yesterday. She made some claims about some men she claimed to have seen on the beach.”

  “I know who you are talking about,” he replied with a short nod. “She’s a bit of a… regular here, I suppose is a good way to put it. She’s an older woman, you understand, lonely. She comes and makes stories like this up for attention. Normally, we just humor her until she gets tired and leaves, but when she threatened to go all the way to Naples to bother the polizia there, I thought it would be wise to send a warning.”

  “But you didn’t actually investigate her claim?” Hills asked sharply. It was impossible to miss the disapproval in his voice.

  “I can hardly blame my officers for not believing her claims,” Riva bristled at Hills’s harsh tone. “She has a clear history of lying and telling tall tales. Of course, we assumed she was lying once again.”

  “We understand,” Gabriella interjected before either man could get any more riled up. “But right now, it looks like her claims might have been true. We need to look into it, so we need to know exactly where she claimed to have seen the men.”

  “Over by the Marina Grande,” he replied right away. “She’s always down there, yelling at youngsters for playing music too loudly. She said she was standing on the pier when she saw them climbing off the boat. There is only one pier at Marina Grande.”

  “Thank you,” Gabriella replied. “And no one else called to make a similar report? She said that the men were covered in tattoos and wearing bloody clothes. No one else saw them?”

  “No one’s called us about it.” He shrugged. “Honestly, there are probably a lot of them like that down there. It’s a fishing port. Many men are working down there in dirty clothes, probably plenty with tattoos as well. Even if she did see some men like that, there’s no proof they were pirates. Dirty men on a boat at a fishing port is not an unusual sight.”

  “We’ll go and have a look, anyway,” I replied, annoyed with his rude and dismissive tone. That being said, I could see where he was coming from. The woman had painted a frightening scene indeed, but it was starting to sound less credible now that we had context.

  “Of course, if you do find something, please let us know,” Riva quickly added. “We want to keep Sorrento safe.”

  “We will,” I replied, though I got the feeling that the captain was eager to get us to leave. He hadn’t invited us back to his office to talk, so we’d just had this entire conversation in the middle of the entryway. I didn’t feel confident about how helpful he might actually be if we did end up contacting him. “Let’s go check out that marina, then.”

  I led the way back out of the station, the rest of the group trailing out behind me.

  “Well, that was helpful,” Hills snorted sarcastically. “He was practically kicking us out the door the moment we arrived.”

  “You think he was hiding something?” Chapman raised an eyebrow at him.

  “Nah,” Hills scoffed as we stepped back out through the gate. “Just an idiot.”

  “He was probably embarrassed,” Gabriella sighed as she crossed her arms over her chest pensively. “He realized when a bunch of American agents showed up that he’d ignored a real claim and didn’t want to face it.”

  “If that’s true, then he should have tried to fix it,” I grunted, “instead of digging his heels in and acting like they didn’t screw up. No point in focusing on that, though. What’s done is done. Right now, we should get down to that marina and see if we can find any traces of those men or their boat.”

  “Or a witness,” Chapman added as we made our way down the street and back toward the center of the city. “Riva said they didn’t get any reports, but that doesn’t mean that nobody else saw the men. Maybe they did, and they just didn’t realize what they’d seen.”

  “We can hope so,” Gabriella replied. “The sooner we find those men, the better.”

  20

  Ethan

  As much as I hated to admit it, Riva had been right. The moment we arrived at the marina, I spotted several men that might potentially fit the description that the witness had provided to the police. Just like he’d said, multiple men were scattered along a stretch of what couldn’t really be called a beach because there wasn’t really sand as much as there were rocks and dirt.

  Some had tattoos, more than a few were sweaty and covered in dirt from having worked on and around boats that entire day, and you might even call a few “scary” as the woman had claimed: big, muscular, and not very friendly looking. Still, none of them were sporting the distinctive snake tattoos I’d seen on the corpses in the sunken ship.

  The marina itself was curious, unlike any I’d seen before. A semi-circle of tall, brightly colored buildings spanned the perimeter of the
marina, just feet away from the water. Just above the first line of buildings, more were built into the side of the hill itself, stretching all the way up the side of the mountain that towered above the marina below. It was a sight to behold, and I found myself wondering how those buildings stayed stable. They looked like they might topple over during a bad storm or a sudden earthquake.

  “There’s the pier he mentioned,” Holm remarked as he pointed up at the structure in question. It was wooden and painted stark white, and it jutted out through the middle of the marina, surrounded on both sides by boats of various shapes and sizes. As we approached, I could see people standing around on it. A few sets of couples stood at the very end, leaning against the railing and wrapped in each other's arms as they stared out into the water. A group of kids was playing further down, running up and down the length of the pier while their mother attempted to wrangle them. A few feet from the rambunctious kids, a pair of teenage girls were sitting on the edge of the pier, one of them crying while the other patted her friend’s back consolingly. Both had their legs dangling through the bars of the railing and phones in their hands.

  “Anyone see anything?” I asked as we stepped onto the pier where the woman was supposedly standing when she saw the group of suspicious men. I could see plenty of boats from here, but none matched the description of the orange emergency raft that the witness had described.

  “No,” Hills grunted in response.

  “She said that she confronted them,” Gabriella mused out loud as she slowly stepped back off the pier and onto the short stretch of dirt that led to the water. “She started yelling at them, and they ignored her and walked off toward the city. That would be that way.” She pointed through a large opening between two of the buildings encircling the marina. “Unless they walked all the way around, there’s no other way to leave the marina.”

  “That was yesterday, right?” Chapman sighed. “Technically, they could be anywhere by now.”