Cayman Crackdown (Coastal Fury Book 18)

by Matt Lincoln

  Whatever their goal was, there was no way that this was a random coincidence. We would get to the bottom of this.

  22

  Charlie

  “Fiona’s going to freak out,” Junior muttered as he used his phone’s front-facing camera to look at the large bandage that he’d put over his cheek after cleaning it up with some of the disinfectant he carried in his first aid kit. “Maybe I should just avoid video-calling her for the rest of the mission. I’ll wait until we get back home to show her. Maybe by then, it’ll be all healed. She might think it’s weird, though, if I suddenly stop calling her…”

  “It’s really not that bad,” Charlie replied flatly. “Only a tiny bit even bled.”

  The two of them were sitting in one of the interrogation viewing rooms of the Sorrento Police Station. Officer Russo was busy dealing with the paperwork involved in having the Sorrento and Naples police station cooperate, and the Miami agents were calling their director to give her an update. As a result, Charlie and his partner remained alone to wait for everyone else to be ready to begin the interrogation.

  “I know it’s not that bad,” Junior muttered. “But Fiona is a worrier. Remember that time I got shot during the Toronto case? I was wearing a bulletproof vest, and she still panicked over the bruise I ended up with.”

  “She’s a big girl,” Charlie grunted. “I’m sure she can handle it. You seem like you’re making a bigger deal out of it than she will.”

  “You think so?” Junior asked as he turned off his phone and put it away.

  “I do,” Charlie replied immediately, eager to change the subject. He loved his partner, but damn, the kid could ramble. “What was the name of the suspect again?”

  “Uh… Julio Vargas,” Junior replied as he flipped through the files they’d received earlier from Fiona when they’d asked her to run a search on the man’s prints. “A few priors for domestic assault and shoplifting. Oh, one armed robbery, too.”

  “Guy sounds like a real peach,” Charlie muttered sarcastically as he looked through the two-way glass into the empty room. The suspect wouldn’t be brought in until Russo and the other agents were ready.

  “Don’t they always?” Junior scoffed as he looked through the rest of the file. “I wonder how people come to that decision. To become pirates, I mean. A lot of criminals commit little petty crimes, but how does one escalate from that to taking to the seas and becoming an international smuggler?”

  “Money?” Charlie replied as he closed his eyes and attempted to put himself into the mind of one of the pirates. It wasn’t a feeling he liked. “Power? Stupidity? There has to be something wrong with their rational thinking abilities. If they put half the effort into getting a real job as they did into killing and stealing, they’d be able to make a living doing something respectable.”

  “Then we wouldn’t have a job,” Junior retorted as he set the folder of files down and stretched his arms behind his head. “If people stopped committing crimes, we’d become redundant.”

  “That wouldn’t be so bad,” Charlie muttered as the door on the left side of the interrogation room suddenly creaked open. The suspect, Vargas, stepped inside, his hands behind his back. He was guided by a police officer, who sat him down in one of the chairs and secured one of his ankles to a bolt in the ground before un-cuffing his hands from behind his back. He immediately tried to stand, and Charlie shot to his feet, ready to assist the officer.

  He seemed to have it under control, though, because he pushed the man back down with little effort before yelling at him.

  He said something in Italian to Vargas before roughly cuffing his hands together in front of him and spinning on his heel to leave the room.

  Vargas released a guttural growl the moment the officer left, his shoulders heaving as he looked around the room frantically as if in search of an escape.

  “Not going to happen, buddy,” Charlie snorted derisively as he sat back down. “Keep trying, though.”

  A moment later, the door leading into the viewing room opened. Charlie and Junior both turned and found Officer Russo standing in the entryway.

  “There you are,” she said as she walked into the room, the Miami agents close behind her. “We were wondering where you’d gone.”

  “Just enjoying the show,” Charlie replied as he turned to look at the suspect. The man pulled experimentally against the chain that bound his ankle to the floor, groaning in frustration when it held tight.

  “He’s riled up,” Marston noted as he watched the suspect. “Vargas, right?”

  “Yep,” Junior replied as he held the folder up to the Miami agent. “Typical small-time criminal. A few priors, but nothing as insane as pirating.”

  “So, we’re certain he’s one of the pirates then?” Gabriella asked.

  “Well, the prints were run through the Colombian database,” Junior replied with a shrug. “It would be one heck of a coincidence if he wasn’t.”

  “We’ll conduct the interrogation based on that assumption then,” she replied before looking around at the rest of the people in the room. “Who will be doing it? I have to be present as a police officer.”

  “Charlie can go this time,” Junior replied. “I did the last one, and my face still hurts, to be honest.”

  “Fine by me,” Charlie replied as he got to his feet. He preferred being in the thick of the action.

  “I’ll go too,” Marston spoke up.

  “Okay,” Russo replied. “Agents Holm and Chapman can watch from here, then. Let’s go.”

  She led the way out of the viewing room, the two agents right behind her. Charlie could hear Vargas in the adjoining room, groaning and huffing and generally having a tantrum over not being able to get free.

  So, the guy was a bit of an amateur. At least, that was what Charlie could conclude from his behavior so far. Someone with more experience wouldn’t lose their cool that quickly. Either that, or he was just the type of person who couldn’t control their emotions. Either way, it seemed like causing the guy to panic would be the best way to get him to talk.

  With that in mind, he stepped into the room behind Russo and Marston.

  Charlie noticed that the suspect went quiet as soon as the three of them stepped inside. He clenched his jaw and stuck his chin out at them defiantly, his nostrils flaring. He was trying to put on a tough guy act, which meant that he either cared about the way they perceived him or honestly thought he could intimidate them.

  I was right, Charlie thought to himself. This guy doesn’t have any idea what he’s doing.

  That also meant he’d probably be easy to manipulate. One of Charlie’s favorite interrogation tactics was to bluff. Lying to a suspect and getting them to believe that there’s no hope for them was a great way to cut through the crap and get the answers he wanted. However, if the suspect was even slightly intelligent, they wouldn’t fall for the bluff.

  “Julio Vargas,” Marston greeted the man coldly as the three of them sat down at the table across from him. “That was an intense interaction we had earlier inside the bar. Do you want to tell me what that was about?”

  “Screw you!” Vargas barked at him in response. Charlie noted that his eyes had gone infinitesimally wider when Marston had said his name. He’d been shocked and had tried to hide it. Had he really thought they wouldn’t be able to figure out his identity?

  “That’s a nice tattoo on your arm,” Marston continued calmly as he nodded toward the ugly green and black snake that was encircled around the man’s bicep. “Does it mean anything special?”

  There was a knowing tone in his voice as he spoke, as though he was just daring Vargas to play dumb about what they all knew was a gang tattoo belonging to the pirate group. Vargas picked up on it as well. It was obvious from how he swallowed and went still for a moment that Marston’s question had struck a chord.

  “What’s it to you?” Vargas replied. He was trying to act nonchalant, but his voice had gone up slightly in pitch as he spoke, as though it was about
to crack. “It’s a snake. You know what a snake is?”

  “Cut the crap already,” Charlie sneered. Honestly, he wasn’t a patient man, and all this coy back-and-forth was beginning to grate on his nerves. “We all know what that tattoo means. You’re a part of the Viboras, right?”

  It didn’t escape Charlie’s notice how the man’s fists tightened ever so slightly on top of the table in response to his accusation.

  “I’ve never heard of—” he attempted to retort before Charlie cut him off again.

  “Never heard of the gang that you’re a part of?” he scoffed sarcastically. “You don’t honestly expect us to believe that, do you? Exactly what do you think is going on here? Do you think we’re asking you these questions because we don’t know who you are and what you’ve been doing? We know, Vargas. What we’re doing right now is trying to decide just how severe your punishment should be, depending on how well you cooperate with us.”

  Charlie was pleased to see that his intimidation tactic seemed to be working. Vargas’s jaw had gone slack, his mouth hanging open slightly. He was sweating now, too, and he was pointedly looking anywhere but into Charlie’s eyes.

  “I… I don’t know—” Vargas stammered weakly.

  “Oh, don’t say that you don’t know what I’m talking about,” Charlie snickered, smirking back at the man disdainfully. “We all know that’s not true, Vargas. And if you’re just going to sit there and play dumb, we can just call it a day. We’ll turn you over to the authorities, and since we have no other suspects, everything will be pinned on you. Personally, I don’t think that’s fair, but if that’s the way you want to play, then—”

  “No, wait,” Vargas interjected. He was breathing heavily now and looked back and forth between the three people in the room pleadingly. “It wasn’t even my idea. I’m just a worker. Yeah, I just help load the stuff, you know? It-it wasn’t my idea to attack the ship or anything. It was them! It was all them!”

  “Who?” Marston asked calmly.

  Charlie had to fight to keep a smile from settling onto his face. Honestly, the guy had been so easy that it was almost unfair. Just a bit of pushing, and he’d immediately turned on his friends and started pointing the accusing finger, throwing others under the bus to save his own skin.

  “The bosses,” Vargas replied quietly. “The ones in charge of the boats. They’re dead now, though. Everyone is, except the three other guys that managed to grab one of the life rafts and me.”

  “Who are the ‘bosses’?” Marston prodded as he leaned his elbows onto the table in front of him.

  “They’re the ones that give the orders,” Vargas replied as he fidgeted with his hands. “There’s Viper, then we got the bosses, each ship has a few of them that are in charge. They’re the ones that Viper talks to, and then they tell the rest of us what to do.”

  “And you said it was their idea to attack the ship?” Marston asked.

  “Yeah.” Vargas nodded. “We were confused because it seemed like a bad move to attack the ones that were giving us guns, right? Some of the guys got to talking. One of them, Paolo, he said that he heard the bosses talking. They had this big plan to take over.”

  “Take over?” Marston raised an eyebrow at him. “What do you mean? Taking over the Viboras?”

  “Yeah,” Vargas snorted. “I don’t know all the details, but Paolo said they wanted to take down the Italians’ ship so it would cut off Viper’s supply. Then when our boat had all the guns, they would try to fight Viper for control. They didn’t tell us nothing about it, just told us where to go and what to do. A-and, I couldn’t say no, right? They would have killed me. I had to do it. S-so, that’s why I said that it was all them. They made us attack that ship.”

  Charlie wanted to roll his eyes. Vargas was pulling off some pretty impressive mental gymnastics to reach the conclusion that the attack being someone else’s idea somehow absolved him of responsibility. He’d still held a rocket launcher and attacked a cargo ship full of people. And if he hadn’t chosen to become a pirate in the first place, none of this would have happened.

  Normally, had he been conducting this interrogation on his own, he would have just said all of that aloud. Marston seemed to be doing well with him, though, and as satisfying as reaming Vargas out would feel, he didn’t want to ruin the interrogation.

  “Right,” Marston muttered in response. “You said that all the bosses died when the boat went down, though. So who forced you to come to the bar tonight?”

  Vargas fell silent at Marston’s question, his face turning a sickly pale shade.

  “Well, I…” he murmured before suddenly snapping his head up. “It was the other guys! That’s right, they threatened me. They said they would kill me if I didn’t find out who you were and how much you knew.”

  “How did you even know we were at the bar?” Marston asked coldly, his eyes narrowed in suspicion at Vargas.

  “There was a woman,” he replied, his face twisting into an expression of disdain. “When we finally made it to shore, this crazy old nag started screaming at us. We tried to just walk away, but the hag kept following us, screaming about how we must be murderers and criminals and how she was going to call the police.”

  Charlie almost wanted to laugh. The shrill woman they’d met back at the station, as annoying as she’d been, had actually been right on the money in her assessment of the men. It was too bad she had such a rampant history of crying wolf. The police might have been able to apprehend the men much sooner if they’d actually thought her accusations were credible.

  “So, what did you do?” Marston asked.

  “We followed her,” Vargas replied, his mouth twisting into a contemptuous sneer as he recalled his encounter with her. “Once she finally stopped following us, that is. She went to the police like she said she would. We want to kill—I mean, uh, they wanted to kill her. Keep her quiet. But she was making such a racket and drawing everyone’s attention no matter where she went. There was no way we’d get her alone. Then she got on the train and took off somewhere. We decided to keep an eye on the police station just in case something happened, and then we saw you show up.”

  “So, you followed us?” Marston surmised.

  “Yeah,” Vargas replied quietly as he looked at the wall, his hands fidgeting anxiously. “We, I mean they, wanted to find out what you knew, so they made me hire that prostitute. I told her to go over, find out who you were and what you knew. Dumb bimbo couldn’t even do that.”

  No kidding, Charlie thought to himself.

  The woman’s arrival and behavior had been so bizarre that Charlie hadn’t known what to make of it back at the bar. He’d assumed, by how she’d suddenly shown up and started shoving her chest in everyone’s faces, that she was a prostitute, but even so, her behavior had been odd. In hindsight, it was evident that she’d been nervous about the task that Vargas had given her, but at the moment, he’d been entirely convinced that she was on something, or just not entirely there, to begin with.

  “Where are these men now?” Charlie asked. “The ones who… forced you to hire a prostitute to ruin our evening?”

  “In an empty apartment building,” Vargas replied, frowning at Charlie and the way he’d sarcastically called him out on his ridiculous claims. “About a mile from here.”

  “Tell me exactly where,” Officer Russo added as she pulled a small notepad from a pocket on her belt. “The street name, if you know it. Any landmarks.”

  Charlie waited as Vargas relayed all the details of the apartment building’s location with her.

  “I’ll get this to the police as soon as we’re done,” Russo muttered as she finished jotting down the information and tucked the notepad back away. “They can go and round up the rest of the men.”

  “What about me?” Vargas asked, his voice barely more than a whisper.

  “What about you?” Charlie scoffed. The guy was so pathetic that he almost felt bad for him.

  “Well, I won’t get in as much trouble now, r
ight?!” Vargas yelped as he looked at Russo and the agents frantically. “I told you, none of this was my idea! It was all them! They made me do it!”

  “You cooperated,” Gabriella sighed. “So, I suppose I might be able to request some leniency. Assuming, of course, that you continue to assist us.”

  “But what else do you want to know?” Vargas whined before gritting his teeth in frustration. “I already told you everything!”

  “Tell us how to find Viper,” Marston interjected. “And the rest of the Viboras.”

  “I don’t know!” Vargas replied, his voice rising in pitch as he clenched his hands until the knuckles turned white. “How am I supposed to know where they are?”

  “If you can’t help us with that,” Charlie grumbled as he feigned to stand up, “then there’s no point in helping you.”

  “No, wait!” Vargas yelled as he suddenly stood as well. Charlie spun around, but Vargas was powerless to move more than a few inches due to the chain that was securing his ankle to a bolt in the floor. “I think I know how you can find them!”

  “I thought you said you didn’t know where they were?” Marston questioned him as he folded his arms across his chest.

  “I don’t,” Vargas replied as he slowly sat back down. “I don’t… but I know how you can make them come to you.”

  “And how is that?” Marston asked, leaning forward with interest.

  “There was supposed to be a raid,” Vargas explained. “On this big British ship carrying a bunch of car parts. Our ship was supposed to meet up with another one tomorrow night. Well, before the bosses went nuts and decided to betray Viper. Anyway, there’s no way they’d miss attacking this ship. Car parts are big money. They’ll come if they think they see the ship.”

  “So, you’re suggesting that we set a trap?” Charlie asked. “Make them think we’re the cargo ship they’re after, so they attack us?”

  “It’s a good plan, right?” Vargas asked, his voice desperate. “It’ll work. You’ll find them. Come on. This is good information.”