Key Raiders

by Matt Lincoln

  “Oh yeah, I almost forgot about that,” Holm chuckled. He followed me as I climbed out of the car, grabbed our luggage from the trunk, and headed toward the clear front doors, which were glistening in the sunlight. “You wouldn’t really peg this place for a drug den now, would you?”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” I agreed as I held the door open for my partner. “Though I don’t know that she referred to it as a drug den, specifically. We’ll have to ask Muñoz for more details.”

  Speaking of Muñoz, she was sitting right there in the sunny lobby waiting for us on a leather couch and surrounded by blown-up underwater photographs of sea creatures hanging on the walls.

  Yes, Holm was right. This didn’t look anything like a drug den. But then again, that hokey hotel full of old pirate memorabilia in New Orleans turned out to be a base of operations for the gang there, so you could never really tell for sure with these things.

  Muñoz was wearing her hair in a characteristic ponytail, paired with beach shorts and a polo shirt to blend into the touristy crowd. She didn’t look nearly as relaxed as the surrounding vacationers, however. Her thin brows tucked into a line across her forehead, and her usually warm brown eyes radiated worry.

  “Good, you’re here,” she said quickly when she saw us, standing up and crossing over to us before we even had a chance to reach the couch. “You must be hungry. Follow me.”

  “We should check in first,” I said, holding up a hand to slow her down. She really was nervous.

  Holm and I crossed over to the main desk and checked in. The manager gave no indication that he knew what we were doing there, taking us to be yet another set of spring tourists.

  Once we had our room keys, we followed Muñoz to the elevator.

  “There’s a restaurant on the first floor,” she explained. “It’s usually not too busy this early. We can grab something there and talk about how to proceed.”

  “Sure, we’ll meet you down there once we drop our stuff off in our rooms,” I said as the elevator doors swung open, and we walked through, gesturing toward the small suitcase in my hand.

  “Oh, right,” she said, shaking her head and staring straight ahead as Holm pushed the appropriate buttons inside the elevator. “I keep getting ahead of myself, sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I assured her, studying her face closely as the elevator climbed up to our rooms on the third floor.

  Her eyes were bloodshot as if she hadn’t slept in days, and her face had more lines on it, making her look a bit older than usual.

  “Are you okay?” Holm asked as the elevator dinged, and the doors slid back open, clearly noticing the same things I had.

  “I’ll be fine when we find my partner,” she said curtly as Holm and I exited with our luggage, and the doors started to slide shut behind us. “I’ll wait for you downstairs and get an order in for some appetizers.”

  “Sounds good,” I said, waving to her with my free hand before following Holm down the hallway toward our rooms.

  “She doesn’t look so good, does she?” Holm asked as I took a step into my room.

  “What do you expect?” I asked, shaking my head. “We just need to find Birn. I’ll see you downstairs in a few.”

  Holm nodded to me and disappeared behind his own door.

  I threw my stuff down, washed my face, and headed back downstairs, where Muñoz was already sitting there. Holm was only a few steps behind me in the second elevator.

  “Hey,” I said, sliding into the booth across from Muñoz.

  She nodded to me in response, and Holm slid in next to me as a waiter rushed over to give us glasses of water.

  The restaurant had low lighting and was situated around a collection of fake palm trees in the center. There were smaller versions of the underwater photographs hanging on the walls above each of the booths, which stretched around the perimeter of the restaurant. There were no regular tables in the place, just the booths. We were the only ones on this side of the palm trees, and the employees tended to keep to the opposite corner of the restaurant where the kitchen was. It was the perfect place to debrief.

  “I ordered us some calamari and chips and artichoke dip to start us off,” Muñoz said, sipping on her water. “After this, I thought we could head down to where Birn was last seen and check it out again together.”

  “That sounds like a good plan,” I said, giving her a warm smile. “You should really try to get some rest, though.”

  “I’m fine,” she said in a sharp tone, waving her hand dismissively in the air and refusing to meet my eyes as if she didn’t want me to keep noticing how bloodshot they were. “I’ll sleep after we find Birn.”

  Holm and I exchanged a worried look.

  “You’re no good to us a zombie,” Holm murmured, not unkindly.

  “Is that some kind of pun on your last case?” she asked, shooting him a small smirk.

  “Not intentionally, but I guess it works,” he chuckled, and I was glad to see that she was smiling again.

  “How was your last case?” she asked. “Diane said something on the phone about you guys finding some old pirate ship again?”

  “Some old pirate ship,” Holm scoffed, shaking his head as he looked over at me. “Can you believe her?”

  “It’s more than some old pirate ship,” I laughed. “It’s maybe the most sought-after sunken ship in American history, Jean Lafitte’s old ship. And yeah, we did find it. The gang had revitalized it for some reason and was using it as a base for its drug operation.”

  “Sorry,” Muñoz said, holding up her hands and grinning in mock defensiveness. “Didn’t mean to offend. Anyway, good on you for taking those guys down. That situation could’ve gone real bad fast if you weren’t there.”

  “Yeah, you could say that again,” I said, shaking my head at the thought of what would’ve happened had Holm and I not gotten the go-ahead to pursue the case in New Orleans in the nick of time. “We’re glad to be back, though, and not to have to go around chasing zombies and crazy witch doctors anymore.”

  “Though it’ll always make for a good story,” Holm added, winking at me as he took another sip of his drink.

  “I have no doubt you’ll make us listen to it over and over again,” Muñoz said, rolling her eyes at him.

  “And it might not be over yet,” he said, pointing at her. “Before he died, one of the gang leaders told Marston here that he found Lafitte’s old ship here in the Keys. We could still be working this thing.”

  “Our first priority is finding Birn, though,” I reminded him sternly. “We’re not even so much as thinking about Lafitte’s ship until that happens. Then, we might take a look around and ask a few questions, but not before.”

  “Of course,” Holm agreed with a deferential nod in Muñoz’s direction, and she gave me a grateful smile.

  “An interesting connection, though,” she said thoughtfully. “I wonder what that ship was doing here in the Keys.”

  “Who knows?” I asked with a noncommittal shrug. “There have been all kinds of crazy theories over the years about Lafitte and his ship, and I wouldn’t be surprised if at least one brought the Keys into the mix. Either way, as I said, I don’t even want to think about it until we find Birn.”

  Just then, the waiter came back with our appetizers, heaping piles of fried calamari and spinach and artichoke dip.

  “Looking pretty good,” Holm said gratefully, practically licking his chops as he followed the plates all the way to the table with his eyes.

  We then gave the waiter our regular orders and thanked him as he headed back to the kitchen. I got a gourmet hamburger and some fries.

  “I could get used to this,” Holm said as he loaded a plate with ample servings from both appetizers.

  “It is pretty nice down here,” Muñoz said with a small smile. “We were actually kind of enjoying ourselves until… well, you know.”

  “How about you tell us what happened,” I told Muñoz gently, loading my own plate with a smaller portion of
each of the appetizers and motioning that she should do the same. Who knew when she ate last, let alone slept.

  “Well, we’d caught this guy red-handed trying to sell hard drugs to a few of the college kids down here for spring break,” Muñoz said as she reluctantly piled a few of the calamari onto her plate. “We caught him in the parking lot when we were headed back in for the night, and then we took him down to the police station for interrogation. Right in the middle of that, I got a call from Penny.”

  “Penny…” I said, my voice trailing off as I tried to remember who this was. “Oh, is this the woman who works on the beach?”

  “Yeah, she gets up before the sun most days, apparently,” Muñoz said with a small laugh. “It was what, three in the morning when she called? Anyway, apparently, she didn’t notice the cocaine at first since it was so dark, but then a bird went flying off with the stuff in its beak, and she noticed all the drugs floating around the bay. Since I was making progress with the witness, Birn volunteered to go down there and check it out and, well, you know the rest.”

  There was a period of silence as the three of us ate and thought about what had happened to Birn, hoping beyond hope that he was out there somewhere, alive and at least something resembling well.

  “So, what did you do today?” I asked quietly after my plate was almost clear, and Holm was already loading his own plate up with a second helping of each of the appetizers.

  “Well, today I talked to Penny again,” Muñoz sighed. “And then a bunch of other people who live or work near that area of the beach, but no one heard or saw anything, which isn’t exactly surprising given how late—or early, I guess—it was, but it was still disappointing.”

  “The sailor woman, even she didn’t see anything?” Holm asked, sounding a little skeptical about this. “I thought you said she got up really early.”

  “I guess Birn sent her home,” Muñoz said, shaking her head and pursing her lips. “She’s former military, so she offered to stay with him, but he said no.”

  “Classic Birn,” I groaned. “Not wanting any help.”

  “He probably thought it was nothing, too,” Muñoz said with a shrug as she finished off the last of her calamari. “This case hasn’t exactly been complex. We had no reason to expect something like this would happen.”

  “What went on before you caught that guy in the parking lot?” Holm asked. “Diane didn’t give us a ton of background on the case. She just wanted us to get right down here and hear it from you directly.”

  “I appreciate that,” Muñoz said with a nod. “I’m glad that you guys are here. Anyway, yeah, we got sent down in the first place because some seventeen-year-old kid down here on vacation with his parents showed up in the emergency room overdosed on cocaine.”

  “Was he okay?” I asked quickly. The last thing Holm and I needed was another dead kid after our last two cases, in which the drug lords targeted young people to test out the new Haitian zombie powder drug.

  “Yeah, he turned out fine,” Muñoz said with a nod. “They’re back home in Tampa now, though they’re pretty rattled by the whole thing. I guess the kid was trying to buy some weed, and the dealer convinced him to try something a little harder, said it’d be a good story to brag about to his friends when he got home. You know, typical slimy peer pressure bull.”

  “Oh, we know,” Holm said, shaking his head and grimacing.

  “Obviously, this out-of-town kid from a rich family overdosing made the authorities here turn more attention to the issue, which had been going on for a while before that,” Muñoz said. “We thought we’d solved the case when we caught the same dealer in the parking lot red-handed, but then all those drugs showed up in the bay, and here we are.”

  “You know it’s the same dealer?” I asked, leaning forward on the table in anticipation.

  “Yeah,” Muñoz confirmed, nodding again and taking a sip of water to wash down the appetizers, which we’d cleaned out by then. Well, mostly Holm. “He confessed. He laid low for a while after the kid OD’d, but I guess Birn and I stayed under the radar enough to make him feel safe enough heading back to his old stomping ground.”

  “We should probably talk to him again,” I said, exchanging a look with Holm to confirm. “Have you spoken with him since Birn disappeared?”

  “No,” Muñoz said, shaking her head. “I wanted to canvas the area first, and then I was waiting for you. The police have been talking to him, though. They say he’s insisting he doesn’t know anything about the new drugs that turned up, that he’s just a small-time street dealer. But they’re not the best interrogators over there from what I’ve seen.”

  “Diane said it’s a small department,” I said sympathetically.

  “Yeah, they don’t have the kind of resources to deal with something like this,” Muñoz confirmed. “They do their best, and they seem like good guys, but there’s also a kind of lackadaisical culture around here that’s hard to penetrate.”

  “That good old island lifestyle,” Holm said with a grimace.

  “Yep,” Muñoz agreed, nodding to him. “That’s exactly it. And to be fair, they don’t get a ton of crime down here. Yeah, there are drugs coming in from the Caribbean islands and other islands around the Keys, but it’s not usually enough to warrant a big investigation like this. And as for violent crime, it’s pretty much unheard of on the smaller Keys like this one.”

  “That makes sense,” I said as I sipped from my own water glass. “I imagine Key West has a pretty big operation with how much traffic they deal with over there, with tourists, the navy base, and a bigger general population.”

  “They do,” Muñoz nodded. “But these little ones? Not so much.”

  The waiter returned with our food then, and I could barely fit my hamburger in my hands since it was so big. Holm chomped down on a juicy cheeseburger, while Muñoz picked at a healthy portion of some kind of seafood soup.

  “Looks good,” I said, nodding to it. I thought I saw all kinds of sea creatures floating around in there and almost wished that I’d ordered it myself.

  “I guess so,” she said, sipping at a spoonful.

  We spent most of the rest of our meal silently eating as more customers flowed into the restaurant.

  “Diane said this hotel is kind of a base for the drug activity?” I asked when I was about halfway through my hamburger. “Anything other than that one incident?”

  “There are lots of reported incidents over time, but there’s been an uptick recently, mostly linked to that one dealer,” Muñoz explained. She’d made some progress on her food, but not a ton. Holm was already done with his plate, somehow.

  “I can imagine there’s more activity, but they care more about the big tourist area,” I surmised as I watched a large family pile into a long booth not far from us, every one of them decked in Hawaiian shirts. Mike would be proud.

  “Yeah, that’s my impression, as well,” Muñoz said with a nod, setting down her spoon and seeming to give up on the food. “We should get going. I’m not sure what time Penny heads home in the evening. Probably early, considering how early she shows up in the morning.”

  I nodded and waved the waiter over so I could pay for our meals.

  “I’ll meet you guys in the lobby in ten, then,” I told the other two MBLIS agents. “We can take my car. I think it’s high time that Holm and I met this mysterious sailor.”

  9

  Ethan

  It was still light out as I drove Holm and Muñoz down to the shore, Muñoz giving me directions as I did so. We’d had an early meal, and I got the sense that Muñoz had suggested it because she hadn’t eaten all day. Knowing how tough she was, I knew she must be going crazy inside about her partner’s whereabouts to be showing so much of her distress outwardly.

  The part of the shore Muñoz directed us to was pretty remote, but gorgeous. There was a small sandy beach, and a couple of ships docked right by a long wooden dock in the middle of the area. I recognized it immediately from the lab techs’ des
cription of what was found at the scene. This must be the dock where they found that blood. Next to the ships was a small building with a sign on it advertising boat tours of the area.

  We parked close to the beach and then walked down there. There wasn’t anyone there except one woman, about middle-aged, though she didn’t quite look it, tying one of the ships to the dock. She was wearing overalls and had some dirt on her hands, but when she turned to face us, I immediately saw that she was very attractive, with long dirty blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail.

  “Hello, Agent Muñoz,” she called out to us as she waved, stopped just short of the dock with her hands on her hips to wait for us. “Who are these guys?”

  “These are my colleagues from MBLIS, Agents Ethan Marston and Robbie Holm,” Muñoz said when we stopped in front of the woman, gesturing to my partner and I each in turn. “They’ve come to help after what happened last night.”

  “Penny Truman,” the woman said gruffly, holding out her hand for both Holm and me to shake.

  “Muñoz told us you were with the Navy?” I asked. “For how long?”

  “Served a couple of tours,” she said, squinting into the sunlight. “Then taught at the naval base academy on Key West for a long time. I retired a few years ago to do this.”

  “Ah,” I said, more than a little impressed. “That’s quite a resume.”

  “You guys serve?” she asked, looking at both Holm and me.

  “We were both in the SEALS,” I said with a nod.

  She gave us each an appraising look.

  “Pretty impressive yourselves,” she said with a nod and a grin. “So what brings you back down here? Not that I can’t guess, mind you, given what’s happened. I guess the better question is, what can I do for you?”

  “You can go over what happened last night one more time for my friends here,” Muñoz explained. “They’d just like to hear it for themselves. Also, if there’s been anything else you’ve seen today or anything you’ve thought of since we last spoke…”