by Matt Lincoln
Once safely on the ground, I glanced up to survey the scene, though now that all four of us were crouching down, the only light in the cave was coming from outside, and it didn’t stretch back far enough to see much behind the shipwreck.
“Cover me,” Penny whispered to me, holstering her gun and reaching down to grab her flashlight and shine it back across the cave again.
“Got it,” I muttered, immediately catching on to what she was thinking.
Penny’s flashlight beam illuminated the whole area. Both Holm and Muñoz were okay, having crouched down as well. Either it was even darker from the other side of the cave than it was here, or this guy was a bad shot.
My eyes scanned across the scene and then doubled back to land on what appeared to be a single trembling hand sticking up over the edge of the starboard side of the crashed ship.
“Hold back,” I instructed Penny. “Keep shining that light.”
She nodded, and I crept forward out into the shallow water where Holm had been just moments before.
I held up my gun, pointing it right where the hand was, holding a gun of its own.
“I can see you,” I informed him. “I have a gun right on you. You’d do well to back down. We can take you back to shore, get you some food and medical care. But it’s important that you cooperate with us.”
Two beady little eyes appeared above the gun briefly, and I ducked as it fired two more times, but there was a delay between his appearance and the gunfire, so I had time to duck down. Still right behind me, Penny kept her flashlight beam trained on our mysterious opponent without so much as flinching.
When the gunfire had ceased, I took two more steps forward until I was waist-deep in the water. I trained my gun right on the man, who had ducked back down behind his fallen ship.
I realized he must have been wounded in the right arm. Otherwise, he would be holding his weapon with both hands. That meant that he was a bad shot, but in some ways, that made him more dangerous. The gunfire could go almost anywhere in a small space like this.
My ears were still painfully ringing from the gunfire.
“Look, what’s the game plan here?” I asked the guy. “You’ve been stuck in this cave how long? A week or more? You must’ve almost run out of food and water by now. You’re clearly injured. You’re alone. Your shipmate’s already dead. No one else is coming for you, obviously. We’re your only shot out of here. It’s in your best interest to cooperate.”
There was a moment of silence, and then the hand with the gun in it disappeared behind the ship, followed by several more scuttling noises like we’d heard before.
I glanced back at Penny and the others, and almost as one, we all rushed forward to follow the noises.
The man reappeared in the light from the cave entrance, right next to Penny’s sailboat. Just like I’d predicted, his right arm was dangling at his side, mangled and covered in blood, and clearly dislocated at the shoulder. He was limping as well, but his plan was immediately clear. His only way out of this cave without our help was if he could manage to take our ship and sail it back to the Caribbean islands himself. And he was closer to that ship right now than we were.
He came to a halt in front of the sailboat and held up the gun in his left hand, pointing it straight at me.
But I had my own gun trained right back at him, though I didn’t dare pull the trigger in case he accidentally shot at me, or one of my companions, in the process.
“Think very carefully about what you’re about to do,” I warned him. “Do you even know how to sail a boat like that, let alone all the way back to your island? There’s not enough food and water on board to last you long, anyway. It’s a ship only for short tourism voyages.”
I didn’t actually know whether that was true, but that was neither here nor there. This guy didn’t need to know that.
The man’s entire body was trembling, and I doubted it was just because he was nervous. I could see even from so far away that there were massive bags under his eyes, and he was dangerously thin and bony. That meant he was weak, but it also meant that he probably wasn’t in a logical frame of mind, stuck in fight-or-flight mode from the ordeal he’d gone through for the past week to ten days.
“Make one move, and I shoot,” I warned him. I would, too, though I didn’t want to. Not only for fear of where one of his errant bullets would go next, but because it felt wrong to shoot someone who was already so crippled, even if it would become necessary to do so.
The man was blinking excessively, and I narrowed my eyes at him and tried to figure out what the problem was. Fortunately, Penny was on the case.
She stood up and shined her flashlight right in his eyes, and he cried out and dropped his gun, shielding his eyes with his good arm.
I rushed forward through the shallow water and picked up the fallen weapon, grabbing the man by the shoulder and dragging him over to the edge of the cave away from the sun. I quickly patted him down to make sure he didn’t have any other hidden weapons and realized that he was even thinner and bonier than he had appeared at first glance.
He continued to blink as Penny, Holm, and Muñoz all rushed over to us as one. I realized then what the sailor woman had been able to see. After days on end, stuck in the back of this cave, this man was blinded by the mere presence of sunlight when he walked out toward the sailboat at the cave’s entrance. Shining the flashlight in his eyes had been a brilliant move, exacerbating the problem and forcing him to drop his weapon to shield his eyes.
“Good move, excellent quick thinking,” I told her when she was next to me, giving her an approving nod and an appraising look. “I didn’t put two and two together myself. I thought he was just blinking because he was scared.”
“Well, you were busy dealing with having a gun pointed at your chest,” she grinned, though she looked rather pleased with herself.
She seemed to be enjoying a brief reprieve from the quiet life she claimed to love so much.
“Alright, my friend, what’s your name?” I asked, turning back to the guy.
“D-Dante,” he stammered, staring up at me and then rolling his eyes, seemingly inadvertently.
“When was the last time you ate, Dante?” I asked, shaking him gently on the shoulder to try to maintain his attention. “Can you tell us what happened to you in here?”
“He can lie down on one of the benches on the ship,” Penny said, taking a step toward her sailboat and beckoning for the rest of us to follow her. “He needs medical care quickly.”
“Agreed,” I said, nodding to her. Then, to the man, “I’m going to pick you up now, okay?”
I lifted the man easily and carried him through the shallow water and up the stairwell of the sailboat. Even despite the look of him, I was surprised at how light he was. It was almost like carrying a child, and his bony elbows and hips jutted into my chest and stomach as I walked. We’d found him just in time, and I wouldn’t be surprised if his delirium had contributed to his erratic behavior when we showed up.
“I’m going to take a quick look around, make sure we haven’t missed anything,” Holm said, as he and Muñoz had hung back at the foot of the sailboat’s small stairwell.
“Good idea,” I said, giving him a curt nod. “But be quick about it. This guy might as well be a matchstick for how much weight he’s probably lost since the crash.”
“Understood,” Holm said, darting off to examine the remains of the ship as quickly as he could.
“I’ll join him to make it go faster, but I’m going to call for help first, make sure there’s an ambulance at the bay when we get there,” Muñoz said, pulling out her phone and holding it up high in the air. “I have a very small bit of reception, I think.”
“Good thinking,” I said, nodding to her and then crossing to a bench to set the Jamaican man down there. He groaned, and his head lolled as I did so.
Penny pulled a couple of the cushions from the other benches along the perimeter of the sailboat and propped them up beneath the man�
��s head.
“Dante?” I said, sitting down next to the man and shaking him slightly. “Dante, this is Agent Marston. You need to stay with me, okay?”
He groaned again, and then his eyes flickered open, then shut again tightly from the force of the light at the mouth of the cave where we were. Seeing this, Penny quickly got to work preparing the sails for our journey, which had the effect of blocking some sun out of our guest’s eyes.
“Dante?” I repeated, shaking him again, a little firmer this time. “Dante, can you tell me what happened to your ship?”
“Storm,” he murmured without opening his eyes.
“Right, and how many other people were on the ship with you?” I asked, glancing back over to where both Holm and Muñoz were now sifting through the wreckage of the other ship. Muñoz must’ve either given up on getting a signal or already called for an ambulance in the time it had taken Penny and me to set Dante up on the sailboat.
“Just me and Aidan,” he murmured, his eyes flickering open and shut again as he spoke.
“Okay, I’m sorry about your friend,” I said kindly. “Can you tell us what you were doing here? Who were you trying to get the drugs to?”
The man just shook his head slightly and swallowed hard.
“Look, Dante, we’ve already got you,” I said, not unkindly. “You’ve already been through a huge ordeal. You survived when almost no one could’ve managed it. Don’t make it even worse for yourself than it already is.”
He swallowed again, and then his eyes flickered back open and lingered on mine for a moment before he shut them tight again and gave a weak, curt nod.
“Okay, okay,” he muttered. “I’ve never run a shipment here before. Aidan was the one who was in charge. All I know is that I was supposed to meet some guy named Daniels on the south shore.”
“Alright, thanks for telling me,” I told him, patting him on the shoulder. “Is there anything else you can think of? Anything you can tell me? Another federal agent has been taken by these people, just so you know. This is a very important case, and a lot of people are going to get in a lot of trouble no matter what happens.”
“A federal agent?” Dante asked, his eyes opening again, wide and scared this time, so I could see just how bloodshot they were. “I don’t know anything about that, I swear.”
“No, I don’t think you would,” I assured him, shaking my head. “This would’ve happened after you got stranded in this cave. I’m just telling you what’s on the line here.”
“I… I swear I don’t know anything,” Dante muttered, his head lolling and his eyes closing again, and it was clear that he was waning.
“Dante,” I said, a little louder this time. “Dante!” But he was asleep then, and no prodding would rise him.
“We need to get him to shore,” I told Penny as Holm and Muñoz made their way back over to us, having heard me yelling at the Jamaican man.
Penny nodded and sat down at the steering wheel as Holm and Muñoz climbed aboard, and then the sailor took us back out into the open ocean that had already claimed so much from our new Jamaican friend in the past several days.
12
Ethan
We all sat in silence until the first cave we looked in had passed us by and was far behind us, pondering what had just happened.
“I can’t imagine trying to survive so long in conditions like that,” Muñoz said at last, shaking her head as she peered over at Dante’s limp form.
“Yeah, I know,” I said darkly. “The sea can be a dangerous place. There’s no doubt about that. And its tides can turn on you in an instant.”
“Most people wouldn’t have survived that long,” Holm said quietly, also watching the Jamaican man closely.
“He still might not,” I said, pursing my lips. Then, looking up at Muñoz, “An ambulance will meet us near the dock when we get there?”
“They’re already on their way,” Muñoz confirmed with a nod.
“I’m glad you were able to get a signal, then,” I said, smiling at her, and she nodded.
“He didn’t say anything about Birn, did he?” she asked hopefully, but I could tell by the expression on her face that she already knew the answer to this question.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “He was in there long before Birn showed up. But he did say he and the dead guy were supposed to meet someone named Daniels on the south shore? Does that mean anything to either of you?” I looked between Muñoz and Penny, but the other MBLIS agent shook her head.
“Doesn’t mean anything to me,” she said, her brows furrowed together in thought.
“The south shore…” Penny said thoughtfully, scrunching her face up as if this confused her. “That’s mostly private property… It didn’t occur to me that someone local could be in on this, especially not in that area.”
“That area?” I repeated. “What do you mean by that?”
“Well, it’s mostly wealthy retirees, and maybe one resort,” she said, shaking her head uncertainly and frowning slightly. “That is where I ran into those three guys and tried to talk to them that one time, though, and they wouldn’t tell me anything, now that I think about it.”
“Huh,” I said, thinking this over in my head. “You said before that the locals pretty much all know each other. Can you think of anyone who might be involved in something like this? Someone named Daniels, even?”
“No, not that I can think of,” Penny said, shaking her head more definitively this time. “I don’t know anyone by that name, though maybe a property sold and someone retired down here recently. With the rise of Airbnbs and all of that, it’s sometimes harder to keep track of that kind of stuff than it used to be. But if they’d been here more than a couple of months, I would know.”
“A couple of months is about the amount of time you said that increased activity had been going on,” Holm pointed out. “So that timeline would seem to line up if we’re on the right track with this.”
“That’s true,” Penny said, nodding slowly. “I’ll have to ask around, see if there’s anyone new in town. Discreetly, of course.”
“We would appreciate that,” I said, smiling at her.
I reached down to check Dante’s pulse, pressing two fingers over his wrist. It was faint, but there.
“How long do you think until we reach the shore?” I asked the sailor woman, my brows scrunched together in worry.
“I’d say about twenty minutes,” she said, checking her watch. “We’re about halfway there.”
I nodded and looked out across the sea. The sun was finally starting to set, and the water was calm. The moon was bright and full, though still faint, and I could see some stars starting to poke out in the sky. I could already tell that once it was fully dark, there would be more stars than I would ever be able to catch sight of in a crowded, light-polluted city like Miami.
“You were saying something right before we got to that second cave about an old pirate ship?” Penny asked, glancing over her shoulder at me. “I’d be interested in hearing that story.”
Holm bellowed out in laughter and shook his head.
“Don’t ask him about that, or he’ll never stop talking,” he chuckled.
“I wouldn’t mind that,” Penny said, shooting me a sly smile, and I had to notice how her hair and eyes glistened in the early evening skylight.
“Alright, then,” I laughed. “I’ll have to tell you the whole story some other time, but the short version is that an ancestor of mine had a great ship commissioned for him centuries ago, and then it fell into the hands of an old pirate and hasn’t been seen in a long time. It’s kind of family tradition to try to find it, and the treasure that’s rumored to have sunk along with it.”
“Now, that does sound like quite a story,” Penny chuckled, raising her eyebrows at me. “Old sunken pirate ships? I’d think you were pulling my leg if I didn’t know any better.” She shot me a wink, and I couldn’t help letting a wide smile spread across my face.
“I promise y
ou, every word of it is true,” I assured her.
“And that’s not even the half of it,” Holm pointed out. “We’ve found a couple more old pirate ships on MBLIS missions in our day, most recently Jean Lafitte’s.”
“Jean Lafitte?” Penny repeated, raising her eyebrows. “You mean that guy from New Orleans all those nautical types are always talking about?”
“Nautical types,” Muñoz said, her voice deadpan as she gestured from me to Holm and then back again, and she and Penny both burst out laughing.
“I’ll have you know that we actually did find Lafitte’s ship,” Holm said defensively.
“Haven’t people been looking for that thing for over a century?” Penny asked, arching a skeptical eyebrow in Holm’s direction. “And you expect me to believe that you just happened upon it on a mission?”
“It’s true,” Muñoz said quickly, shaking her head and smiling slightly. “I know it sounds difficult to believe, but you wouldn’t believe these guys’ luck. It’s insane. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“I’d like to consider it our own ingenuity, instead of just luck,” I chuckled. “But point taken.”
“Hey, if we were really just lucky, don’t you think he would’ve found his own ship by now?” Holm pointed out.
“Fair enough,” Muñoz said. “Though I thought before Birn and I left Miami that you’d gotten that old journal from that museum you’d been harassing all that time. Didn’t Diane say something about a package arriving at the office for you?”
“Oh yeah,” I said, not loving that the conversation, and therefore my thoughts, had turned back to Grendel’s journal right when I had been starting to get it out of my mind. “That turned out to be a fake. Long story. Agonizingly long.”
“Ah, I’m sorry to hear that,” Muñoz said, and she seemed genuine.
“Yeah, I’d like some of that luck of mine to go my way with the Dragon’s Rogue,” I said, shaking my head and looking down at the ground. “I’ve been obsessing about it a bit, to be honest, though this is the first time I’ve really thought about it since we got on this case. Birn’s way more important right now, honestly.”