by Matt Lincoln
Kingston Kidnappings
What Happens in Vegas book 3
Matt Lincoln
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
2. Charlie
3. Naomi
4. Charlie
5. Naomi
6. Junior
7. Naomi
8. Charlie
9. Charlie
10. Fiona
11. Naomi
12. Charlie
13. Naomi
14. Charlie
15. Naomi
16. Charlie
17. Junior
18. Naomi
19. Charlie
20. Junior
21. Miranda
22. Naomi
23. Junior
24. Charlie
25. Charlie
26. Junior
27. Naomi
28. Charlie
29. Charlie
30. Fiona
31. Naomi
32. Junior
33. Charlie
34. Naomi
35. Charlie
36. Miranda
37. Charlie
38. Charlie
39. Naomi
40. Junior
41. Charlie
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Prologue
I fell back onto the rocking chair on the front porch of the hotel and took a deep breath of the clean mountain air before taking a long sip of beer. A gentle breeze was blowing, rustling the overgrown blades of grass on the front lawn.
It was June, and Neva Pass had peaked at an unusually high eighty degrees today. For the rest of the United States, this might have seemed like a moderate, if slightly balmy, temperature for a summer day. However, up here in Alaska near the Canadian Yukon territory, eighty degrees was practically sweltering. Neva Pass tended to hover at around sixty degrees during the warmer months and would dip down into the negatives during winter. Today was the hottest summer day we’d had in a few years, and it was easily the hottest day I’d experienced since I’d retired and moved up here.
It was supposed to rain this afternoon, so I planned to enjoy the warm and sunny morning for as long as I could. I leaned back and closed my eyes, but only a few minutes had passed before I heard a huffing noise approaching me.
I cracked an eye open and spotted what looked like two backpackers, a boy and a girl. They were each loaded up with several layers of clothes and hauling large packs on their backs. It surprised me to see them. It wasn’t unusual for hikers to pass by my motel in the summer months, usually on their way to Denali National Park, but they’d always arrived in cars. They would stop for a snack or to recharge their phones and then set off again. I’d never had people just walk up to the motel out of the blue. There was nothing else for miles around, and I wondered if maybe their car had broken down somewhere down the road.
“Why is it so hot?” the boy moaned as he trudged his way up the porch steps. “Fairbanks wasn’t this hot. Every weather record I checked going back five years indicated that it should have stayed around sixty the entire time from Pink Mountain to Denali. I thought maybe it’d go up to seventy during the height of the day, but it’s eighty-two degrees! And it’s barely morning!”
“Well, let’s just get inside,” the girl suggested. “It’s probably air-conditioned. I hope, anyway. We can check the weather forecast and figure out what we want to do from there.
“It’s supposed to rain later, too,” the boy grumbled. “As if we’re not already soaked enough, carrying all this stuff.”
I suppressed the urge to laugh a little at their predicament. Normally, their layered clothes wouldn’t have been a problem, but they just so happened to arrive on the hottest day on record in years.
“Hey, is it open?” the girl asked her friend as she peered into the window by the front door. “All the lights are off. I don’t see anyone inside.”
“It’s open,” I replied. The girl shrieked and jumped back in surprise.
“Oh my gosh,” she gasped as she pressed her hand to her heart. “I didn’t even see you there. You scared me.”
“Sorry about that,” I chuckled as I stood up from my chair. “I don’t have much in the way of amenities or services, but you’re welcome to stay as long as you need. There’s coffee and charging ports in the dining room.”
“Oh, cool,” the girl responded. “I’m running on empty ever since we got lost in Tanana Valley and had to use the GPS to find our way out.”
“That seems like a pretty scary place to get lost,” I remarked. Tanana Valley National Forest was a massive, sprawling forest densely packed with trees. People liked to go fishing and camping there in the summer, but it was big enough that if you lost your way inside, it was possible you’d never come out again.
“Well, if someone hadn’t had the bright idea to take a shortcut through there, we wouldn’t have gotten lost,” the boy grumbled.
“Shut up, Mark,” the girl chirped. “Oh, we’re so rude. I’m Juniper, and this is my boyfriend, Mark. We’re hiking up to Denali.”
“Hiking?” I asked as I pushed open the door and gestured for them to come inside. “As in, you’re walking all the way there? How far have you two hiked?”
“Oh, my gosh, it feels so nice in here,” Juniper sighed as she stepped into the motel. “And yeah. We started in Seattle. We thought it would be fun to try to walk all the way across Canada and into Alaska. We’d been on the road for two months now. We started at the beginning of April.”
“Wow,” I remarked. “That’s pretty impressive. That’s a long way to go, even by car.” It had taken me a full week to move up here from Las Vegas, and that was driving for twelve straight hours every day. These kids had walked almost that entire distance.
“Thanks,” Mark smiled proudly. “It was still pretty chilly when we left, especially in British Columbia, so we were comfortable like this. It suddenly got so hot, though.”
“Well, at least too hot for all this gear,” Juniper shrugged.
“This is nothing,” I scoffed. “I was in the Caribbean once, a few years back, for a case I was working. Now, that was hot.”
“A case?” Juniper prodded, her eyes shining with curiosity. “Where you like, a police detective or something?”
“Something like that,” I smiled fondly as I remembered my time as an MBLIS agent. I could look back on those times nostalgically now, but at the time, some of those experiences hadn’t been so fun. The case I worked in Jamaica, for example, had been traumatizing for many reasons, not the least of which was the fact that a member of my own family had been targeted during the investigation.
“Can you tell us about it?” Juniper asked as she shrugged off her coat and the sweater underneath. “Or is it, like, classified?”
I chuckled at her question. It wasn’t the first time I’d gotten curious questions like these. Just a few months ago, I’d fielded some from my own grandkids as they excitedly asked me about my days as a federal agent.
“I think I can share a story or two,” I shrugged. “If you’ve got the time. I have a habit of rambling once I get started.”
“Yes!” Juniper answered immediately, turning to look at Mark. “What do you think? We can wait here for the sun to go down. It’ll be cooler by then, so it wouldn’t be such a pain to carry everything. The rain might help to bring the temperature down too.”
Mark looked a little unsure about her proposal but eventually relented.
“Alright,” he smiled as he, too, shucked off his coat. “I guess we can spare a few hours.”
“Alright, then,” I nodded as I
led them over to the dining room. “You two can leave your stuff wherever. Charging stations are over there against the wall.”
Juniper beamed before moving over to the row of outlets set into the wall. I’d had them installed about a year after moving up here when I’d noticed that running out of battery seemed like a common complaint among people who stopped here. We were out in the middle of nowhere, and since most people used their phones as navigation these days, it was common for travelers to be running low by the time they made it here.
I raised an eyebrow as I watched her pull a phone, a laptop, two tablets, and a handheld video game console out of her large backpack.
“She doesn’t know how to travel light,” Mark whispered as he noticed my expression. “And she’s addicted to technology. Way out here in the wilderness, and she still has to have her devices.” Mark spoke as if he were criticizing her, but there was a warm and loving look on his face as he watched her, and I could tell whatever he said was out of fondness.
“So, uh…,” Juniper trailed off as she approached our table. “How much is a room here? We probably won’t stay the night, but I could use a hot shower. I’m feeling pretty nasty after walking around in the heat for so long.”
“Don’t worry about that,” I replied as I stood up and beckoned them to follow me back into the lobby. “Get yourselves cleaned up. I wouldn’t feel right charging you a night’s stay just to have a quick wash.”
“Seriously?” Juniper’s eyes lit up as she beamed. “Oh Em Gee, thank you so much!”
“Yeah, that’s awesome of you,” Mark nodded in response.
“No problem,” I chuckled. They seemed like nice kids, and I couldn’t imagine they were very comfortable wearing heavy, sweaty clothes that they’d been walking around in for days now. I wasn’t expecting customers today anyway, so a few bucks wouldn’t make a difference.
I walked back behind the counter and pulled a key off the wall at random.
“Room fifteen,” I announced as I handed them the key. “Feel free to go back and get changed in there.”
“Ooh, how old fashioned,” Juniper cooed as she took the metal key from me and examined the long wooden tag hanging off of it. “That’s so cute!”
I smiled at her enthusiasm. It was true that most hotels these days used programmable electronic key cards, but my little roadside motel such little traffic that I didn’t see any point in updating to a more modern system.
“Let’s go back and get changed, babe,” Mark suggested before leading her away.
I watched them head down the hall before walking back into the dining room and toward the small kitchen. I didn’t have a lot back here, aside from coffee and some basic ingredients, but I could probably throw together some sandwiches for the three of us while I waited for them to get back.
I glanced out the kitchen window and sighed a little sadly. It had been shaping up to be such a relaxing and lazy morning, but I could already the telltale signs of rain as the wind picked up and dark clouds loomed overhead. So much for enjoying the rare sunny morning.
Still, it was nice having a visitor now and again. I enjoyed my privacy, and most of the time, I was perfectly content to go entire days without seeing anyone else, but a nice change of pace was welcome too. Especially from an energetic pair of kids who reminded me of my own youth. My knees and back weren’t what they used to be, and it was nice having the chance to reminisce about the days when I used to be able to sprint after suspects and take a bullet wound with hardly a flinch.
“Those days are long gone, you old geezer,” I chuckled to myself as I carried the tray of sandwiches back out into the dining room. I didn’t have any regrets about my life. I’d gone on so many adventures and had so much fun, and I was content to sit back and enjoy my retirement now.
The sandwiches looked a little bare on their own, so I decided to head back into the kitchen to find something for us to drink. Coffee would be the easiest and quickest thing aside from plain water, though I wasn’t sure they’d have the appetite for something hot after spending so long sweltering in heavy clothes. I brought the coffee pot out into the dining room just as they returned.
“Okay,” Juniper announced as she bounced into the dining room wearing a thin t-shirt and a pair of leggings. Mark trailed in behind her in similarly lightweight clothes. “Thank you again so much. This feels so much better. The last time we had a chance to wash up was two days ago at a rest stop outside of Moose Creek, and that was just using the sinks in the bathroom.”
“Well, I’m glad it was helpful,” I smiled.
“Whoa,” she gasped, her eyes wide as they roved over the tray of food on the table. “Is this for us, too? You shouldn’t have!”
“It’s no problem,” I shrugged. “I’m sure you kids are tired and hungry after your hike.”
“Heck yeah, we are!” Mark exclaimed as he took a seat at the table and snatched one of the sandwiches off the tray.
“Mark, you’re so rude,” Juniper sighed dramatically before turning to me. “Thank you very much, sir. You’re probably the nicest person we’ve met so far.”
“Yeah, thanks,” Mark echoed between bites of his sandwich.
“Like I said,” I smiled warmly. “It’s no problem. I wouldn’t say I’m an especially nice person, though. Treating a couple of kids to a hot shower and some sandwiches isn’t exactly a saintly deed or anything. It’s just basic decency.”
“Yeah, well, there’s plenty of non-decent people out there,” Mark muttered. “Like that guy in Birch Lake who was going around hassling people for ‘illegal camping.’ Remember that, Juniper?”
“Yeah,” Juniper frowned. “He wasn’t even a park ranger or anything. Just some busybody going around trying to boss people around.”
“Some people aren’t happy unless they’re hurting someone else,” I sighed. “It’s sad, but there are just some people in this world who are just rotten.”
“Speaking of which,” Juniper suddenly perked up. “You said you were going to tell us a story about when you were a federal agent, right? Let’s hear it.”
Mark turned his attention to me as he finished off his first sandwich. He must have been hungrier than I’d thought if he polished it off in the few minutes that we’d been sitting here. I snickered and pushed the tray closer to him before speaking.
“Well, where should I begin,” I hummed. “I guess it all started when my agency received a call about a murder involving a child.”
1
Daniel Weaver woke up to the cheery tune of his alarm and the enticing scent of coffee. He sat up in bed and stretched languidly before reaching over to pluck his glasses from where they were sitting on the nightstand by his bed. He turned off the alarm before swinging his legs over the side of the bed to stand up. After taking a minute to stretch, he walked across the hall and into the bathroom for a quick shower. Normally, he’d take a little more time getting ready in the morning, but today he was too full of anxious energy to move slowly.
After stepping out of the shower, he moved to the mirror to brush his teeth. As he did, he drew a smiley face on the steam-fogged mirror. He’d woken up in a good mood. Once he had finished grooming himself for the day, he stepped back into the bedroom and began to gather his work clothes.
“Megan!” he called as he stuck his head out the bedroom door. “Have you seen my good work shirt?” She was supposed to do the laundry the previous night, so if anyone knew where it was, it would be her. Daniel had other work shirts, of course, but he wanted to look his absolute best today. He was up for a promotion at work, and his boss had scheduled a meeting with him the day before. Daniel knew that this meeting would be pivotal, so even though it was a little silly and superstitious, he wanted to wear his lucky shirt.
“I left it in the dryer,” Megan replied as she walked into the bedroom.
“Go and get it for me, will you?” Daniel asked as he moved to the closet to pick out a tie.
“I’m cooking breakfast now,” Megan
responded slowly, enunciating each syllable. “I don’t want it to burn. Can you get it instead?”
Daniel turned toward her and leveled her an icy glare. Megan shuddered in fear before rushing off to the cellar where the washer and dryer were. Daniel felt a little guilty about scaring her, but she needed to learn not to defy him, especially after the last time. Still, he should try to make an effort to be kinder to her. Maybe he’d buy something for her on his way home today. If nothing else, it would keep her pacified for a little while.
Megan returned a few minutes later with the shirt, and Daniel resumed getting dressed. He made sure to check his appearance carefully in the mirror before heading downstairs. Maybe it was a little vain of him to worry so much about his appearance, but his father had always told him to dress for the job he wanted. If his boss was still uncertain about giving him the position, a nice shirt and tie could make all the difference in swaying his opinion.
The house was absolutely spotless as he made his way down the stairs and into the kitchen. It always was, ever since Megan had moved in. Daniel thought it was extremely relaxing being able to wake up in the morning and come home at night knowing that the house would always be clean and that a meal would always be ready for him. Maybe he had been a little too hard on her, but ultimately, it was important that she know her place here.
He sat at the small kitchen table, where he preferred to eat his breakfast. They had a large dining table that they used when they had their weekly dinner parties, but for everyday meals, he preferred sitting at the tiny two-person table. From here, he could smell the enticing aroma of whatever it was that Megan was cooking, and he could read by the light of the large picture window on the eastern wall of the kitchen.