by Matt Lincoln
“This place is fancy,” Holm remarked as he looked around the bar. “Can you imagine Mike hiring servers to take orders like this?”
“I just thought that,” I chuckled in response.
“Who’s Mike?” Gabriella asked curiously as she leaned her elbows onto the table.
“One of our friends back home,” I explained. “He owns a bar in Miami. It’s nothing like this, though.”
“What’s that like, working in Miami?” she asked, her eyes sparkling with interest.
“It’s fun,” I replied. “Warm, sunny, not that different from Italy, to be honest. Though the city looks completely different.”
“What kind of crimes do you see there, if you don’t mind me asking?” she prodded further as she looked around at everyone again. “I mean, you said earlier that you thought the security at the police station was poor. Do you do a lot of dangerous things back home?”
“Yes,” all four of us replied almost in unison.
“It’s just part of the job for us, to be honest.” I smiled.
“So, do you all work together?” she asked. “In the same office, I mean?”
“Holm and I do,” I replied as it occurred to me that we had never actually specified what branches we were from. It wasn’t like it was really necessary. We were all MBLIS agents, after all. “Hills and Chapman work at the Las Vegas branch.”
“Las Vegas?” Gabriella repeated, her eyebrows shooting up as she turned to look at the agents. “Wow, I’ve always wanted to go there. There’s a lot of gambling and partying there, right?”
“Yeah,” Hills muttered. “And drugs.”
“You don’t have to say it like that.” Chapman frowned at his partner admonishingly before turning to look at Gabriella. “It’s actually really cool. There are a lot of things to do there… there are a lot of drugs, though.”
“It seems like all the cases we’ve been on lately revolve around drugs,” Hills grumbled as he folded his arms over his chest. “Including this one.”
“Well, it’s better than some of the other stuff we’ve had to deal with.” Chapman cringed as his eyes went vacant, likely remembering something unpleasant.
“Like what?” Gabriella asked eagerly before biting her lip awkwardly. “If you don’t mind sharing, I mean. Sorry, I wasn’t trying to be rude.”
“It’s fine,” Chapman assured her. “All those experiences only made us stronger, after all. Though there were some close calls.”
“The tiger,” Hills mumbled, barely audible over the sound of the music.
“Tiger?” Holm repeated out loud, coughing around the gulp he’d just taken, his eyebrows rising up toward his hairline. “Did you say tiger?”
“Tigers, actually,” Chapman snorted. “And a lion. And a bunch of other ones I can’t remember. There were definitely a few tigers, though.”
“Where?” I asked incredulously, curious as to what they were talking about.
“A cruise ship,” Chapman replied with a nod. “Multiple cruise ships, actually. It’s a long story. That was our first case, though. It was a pretty crazy way to start, but because of that, nothing really fazes us anymore, so it worked out.”
“No, wait a minute,” Holm retorted with a shake of his head as Chapman took a sip from his drink. “You can’t just pretend like you didn’t just tell us you fought a tiger and move on like that. I need some details.”
“Well, Charlie was the one who fought the tiger,” Chapman amended. “And it was pretty drugged up, so I don’t know if I would have even called it a fight, per se.”
“It was the spotted leopard that was too drugged up to fight,” Hills corrected him before taking a swig of his beer. “I remember because the thing was huge and white. Never seen anything like it. The tiger was the one that attacked Miranda on the ferry.”
“That was a panther.” Chapman frowned at him. “Or… was it? No, wait, the tiger was the one in the cage! In that first warehouse that I raided with Naomi. Scared the absolute crap out of me when I turned on the light, and it was inches from my face.” He shuddered at the memory before turning back to look at Holm. “Sorry. Anyway, though, there were these smugglers who were illegally trafficking exotic animals into the United States. I had no idea that was even a thing until this case. We had a lot of close calls on that one. I actually have a pretty cool scar from where a puma scratched me on the arm.”
He rolled his sleeve up to show off the long, jagged scar that stretched from the crook of his elbow up past the hem of his sleeve toward his shoulder.
“Wow!” Gabriella gasped as she looked at the faint, white scar before turning to look at Holm and me, her eyes sparkling with excitement. “What about you? Have you done anything exciting and dangerous like that?”
“We took down some international drug kingpins,” Holm replied proudly. “They’d managed to make our lives a nightmare up until that point, too. But we got them in the end.”
“The Hollands, right?” Chapman interjected. “The ones you told me about on the plane?”
“That’s them,” Holm confirmed. “That wasn’t the first time we’d taken down a drug lord, but they were one of our most notorious cases. They were insane. They even went out of their way to mess with Marston personally.”
“How do you mean?” Gabriella asked as she turned to look at me.
“It’s kind of a complicated story,” I replied as I thought about where I should start to make it as non-confusing as possible. “So, I’ve been searching for this pirate ship for a long time, the Dragon’s Rogue—”
“A pirate ship?” Gabriella asked, her eyes going wide with marked interest. “An older one, you mean? Like an antique? Not like the one that sunk a few days ago?”
“Yes, an older one,” I clarified. “It was built in the 1700s. My grandfather actually spent his life searching for it before he died and passed the mantle onto me. Actually, Holm and I discovered during one of our cases that the ship belonged to my ancestor, Jonathan Finch-Hatton.”
“Really?” Gabriella gasped. “That’s amazing. How did you realize that?”
“We found a body in a cave during our investigation,” I explained. “One of our lab techs analyzed it and managed to recover some DNA that proved he was my ancestor. Anyway, the Hollands found out that I was searching for this ship and began to fabricate all of these fake clues for me to find just to mess with me.”
“That’s insane,” Gabriella replied, her expression twisting into one of both shock and disgust. “But what about this ship? Have you found it?”
“Not yet,” I replied, unable to keep the disappointment I felt about that fact completely out of my voice. “I’m still looking.”
I was about to say more on the matter when the server returned with our drinks. After distributing them to everyone, she walked away, and by that point, the topic was forgotten. It wasn’t until almost an hour and a few more drinks later, with Holm engaged in a heated discussion with Chapman, that Gabriella leaned over to speak to me.
“You were saying something about that ship earlier,” she murmured. “What did you call it? The Dragon something?”
“Dragon’s Rogue,” I replied.
“Yes, that.” She smiled. “You were interrupted earlier. You seemed really excited when you were talking about it, so I wanted to ask you more.”
“I seemed excited?” I smiled at her, both concerned that I’d made my emotions so evident but also pleased that she’d been paying attention enough to pick up on it.
“Yes,” she replied. “Your eyes lit up, and you looked like you wanted to smile. I could tell it was something you were really happy about, so tell me more about it.”
Since everyone else was otherwise occupied, I decided to tell her the story of my quest for the Rogue—all the clues we’d found, every case we’d been on that had somehow managed to lead me further on my journey. By the time I’d finished, Holm and Chapman had finished their conversation and had started to listen in on the story as well.
“He’s got you listening to the story behind the Rogue, huh?” Holm teased.
“It’s interesting!” Gabriella replied, a wide grin on her face. “I had no idea that ships like that still existed. I suppose it makes sense since they couldn’t just disappear, but I always assumed that most of them just sank or something.”
“Well, most of them did,” I sighed. “Hopefully, the Rogue isn’t one of them…”
“Oh, I didn’t mean it like that,” Gabriella hurried to say. “Sorry, that was mean of me to say.”
“It’s fine,” I chuckled as I took a sip of my beer. “It is what it is. What I really want is just to find it. Figure out where it is once and for all.”
“I hope you do,” Gabriella replied. “It would be—”
“Hello.” A woman with thick, dark hair suddenly leaned against the table, cutting Gabriella off as she spoke in thickly accented English. “You’re all foreigners, right? Where are you from?”
Her ample chest was threatening to spill out of the thin, form-fitting dress that she wore as she leaned over the table. I noticed at once that her gaze lingered on all the men at the table, but she hardly spared Gabriella a glance.
“Is this seat taken?” she asked when no one responded to her question, already sitting down before anyone could answer her. “It’s not often I see such a group of handsome men. What, uh… what are you doing here in Italy?”
There was something strange about how she spoke that last sentence, a sort of nervous stutter in her voice that immediately gave me pause. My first thought had been that this woman must just be a very clumsy prostitute or just drunk. There’d been hesitation in the way she asked what we were doing here, though.
“Do you need some help, ma’am?” Chapman asked the woman at the same moment that Hills bluntly asked her what the hell she wanted.
“I’m just looking for a good time,” the woman replied as she reached over to stroke Chapman’s arm. He pulled it away at once as though he had been scalded. The woman’s awkward smile slipped for just a second before she trudged on. “You’re not locals, are you? So you probably don’t know the best places to go for a good time.”
“Is she high?” Holm whispered to me, though the woman was sitting so close that I was certain she must have heard him, anyway. I couldn’t blame him for asking, though. The woman’s behavior was bizarre.
She frowned as soon as he asked me that, indicating that she had, in fact, heard him. She smiled again right away, though.
“I’m just wondering where such handsome men came from,” she insisted.
It was so awkward that I wanted to laugh. I almost did, too, until I spotted the man standing by the bar.
He was hovering around the right end of the bar top a few feet away, pretending he was focused on something in front of him. He didn’t have a drink in his hands, though, or even anywhere near him. He also kept looking around the bar, acting as though he was admiring the decorations or something before his gaze landed on our table. His eyes met mine, and he looked away immediately, his back going stiff.
“So… you must be American, right?” The woman brushed a lock of hair away from her face in what was probably meant to be a seductive manner. “I can tell by your—”
“Over by the bar,” I cut her off, careful to keep an eye on the man without looking directly at him. “The man in the black shirt.”
That was all I needed to say for Gabriella and the other agents to understand what I was talking about. In the blink of an eye, the atmosphere at the table dropped several degrees as everyone realized something nefarious was up.
“Who are you?” Hills grunted at the woman, his voice barely more than a murmur but still dripping with contempt.
“I-I… well, I’m not—” the woman stuttered nervously. Surely, she could tell by the sudden change in all our attitudes that she was in trouble. She looked each of us in the eye before suddenly shooting to her feet. “I think I’d better go.”
“I don’t think so,” Hills snapped as he got to his feet as well.
My eyes shot back to the man at the bar, who was no longer making any attempt to be sneaky. He stared straight at us now, his face pale and his eyes wide, though with fear or shock, I couldn’t determine. His gaze met mine again, but this time he didn’t just look away. He bolted entirely.
“He’s running!” I yelled to the rest of the group before taking off through the bar.
“We’ll stay with the woman!” Chapman called back. “Go get him!”
Holm and Gabriella were next to me a moment later, the three of us dashing between tables and past confused patrons as quickly as we could. The man was fast, but his haste and panic made him clumsy, and he collided several times into furniture and other people as he attempted to escape.
Gabriella was the first to catch up to him.
“Stop!” she yelled as he clasped one hand around the man’s arm. He spun around to face her, his face twisted in a vicious snarl. He lifted his fist to strike her, but before he could, I descended upon him, punching him square across the jaw. He howled with pain as he swung his fists wildly in an attempt to hit either of us.
I caught one of his hands as he brought it down toward me and quickly forced it behind him, shoving him down onto one of the tables in the process.
The woman sitting there screamed as the man fell onto the edge of her plate, cracking it and sending her drink flying to the ground as well.
He struggled to get up, but Holm and Gabriella were by my side just a moment later. Holm held the guy down while I pulled his arms behind his back so that Gabriella would be free to cuff his wrists together.
Once he was securely restrained, I pulled the man backward off the table and onto his feet. As I did, Gabriella knelt down to check on the woman whose food and drink the suspect had landed on. She was shaking and had tears in her eyes, and Gabriella spoke softly to her as Holm and I wrangled the man toward the entrance at the front of the bar.
“Just stop,” I heard Hills’ voice grumble as Holm and I stepped outside with the suspect between us. I didn’t see Hills, though. I turned to look at Holm in concern. We’d definitely left him and Chapman back at the table to watch the woman, so why was he out here?
We followed the sound of his voice and found him and Chapman in an alleyway just around the side of the bar. The woman was there too. Her hands were cuffed behind her back, and Hills was holding onto her arm.
“Let go!” she screeched as she attempted to pull her arm away from him. Hills, however, seemed completely unfazed. His grip remained firm regardless of how she twisted and squirmed, and his face stayed impassive.
“What happened?” I asked as I pushed the male suspect to stand against the wall. “Why are you out here?”
“Lady tried to make a run for it,” Hills snorted as he turned to look at Chapman, who was standing off to the side, his hand cupping his cheek. “She scratched Junior pretty good and then took off running out the back.”
“Are you okay?” I asked Chapman. It was pretty dark in the alley, so it was difficult to determine just how bad the injury was.
“It’s fine,” he replied sheepishly as he moved his hand away from his face. Even in the darkness, I could see that it was slick with blood. “I shouldn’t have let my guard down like that. Fiona’s going to freak out, though…”
“She’ll still like you even if your face is screwed up,” Hills snickered as he repositioned his hold on the woman’s arm. She was still struggling, twisting her arms around in ways that had to have been painful.
“That’s not why she’s going to be upset!” Chapman replied indignantly, his face scrunching up in dismay at his partner. “You know how she worries about stuff. Dang, this is actually starting to hurt.”
“Good!” the woman spat as she contorted around in Hills’s grip to yell at Chapman. “I hope it leaves a scar! Let me go!”
“Shut up,” Hills grumbled as he roughly shoved her down into a sitting position on the ground, “and just ho
ld still. Geez, a guy can’t even enjoy a beer without some crazy crap happening.”
I spun around at the sound of rapidly approaching footsteps, still on high alert after the squabble in the bar. I relaxed when I realized it was only Gabriella.
“There you are,” she sighed as she stepped into the alley. “I was worried. I came outside and didn’t see anyone. I thought maybe they’d gotten away again.”
“Not a chance,” I scoffed as I looked down at the two suspects. “It’d be pretty pathetic if we’d managed to lose them between the five of us.”
“That’s good,” Gabriella replied. “I’ve already called for backup. The police should be here soon to collect these two. The patrons inside the bar are fine as well. I’ve already spoken to the woman who was startled during the altercation.”
“Is she okay?” I asked. She hadn’t looked physically injured, but that kind of violence wasn’t a normal thing for civvies. She could very well be in shock.
“She’s alright,” Gabriella replied, to my relief. “She was just frightened by what happened. The owner offered to pay for her meal as recompense.”
“That’s nice of him,” Holm remarked. “It wasn’t even his fault that these two decided to do whatever it was they were doing.”
“Speaking of,” I muttered as I turned to look at the woman, “what was that little act all about? Exactly who are you two?”
“Don’t say a word!” the man yelled at the woman before she could even open her mouth. “You talk, and you’re dead!”
Gabriella yelled something in Italian to the man in response. She crouched down and got in his face, her finger pointed at him as though she was scolding a child. Whatever she said, it caused the man to grit his teeth and look away, his chest rising and falling as he huffed angry breaths.
“Stay quiet if you want,” Gabriella sneered at him as she stood back up. “We’ll talk again when we get back to the station.”
The look that the man aimed at her was venomous, but Gabriella just glared back, unmoved by his intimidating expression.