Maritime Caper (Coastal Fury Book 12), Matt Lincoln [good books to read for beginners TXT] 📗

was in character for me to run into trouble wherever I went, even if he was joking about it.

I briefly thought about telling Holm about the phone call but didn’t for some reason. Maybe I was afraid of jinxing it. I wasn’t sure.

“I should get going,” I told my partner, clapping him on the shoulder and heading toward my car. “I’ll see you soon.”

“Not too soon, I hope,” he called after me, echoing my own concerns, and that stuck with me as I drove all the way back to my houseboat.

7

Ethan

I hadn’t brought most of my things with me to the office, though I now wished I had. For some reason, even though I knew that Tessa was going to land at least an hour after I did, I was eager to get to the airport and well on my way to Virginia. Part of me worried the longer I stayed in Miami, the higher the chances of something going wrong with this whole thing with Grendel’s journal or with the Hollands.

This didn’t make any logical sense, of course, but I’d be lying if I said that Holm’s and my missions to Haiti and New Orleans hadn’t instilled me with a trickle of superstition.

There was a perfectly logical explanation for everything that happened there, of course. At least that’s what the MBLIS lab techs, Bonnie and Clyde, had said, with gleams in their eyes as they discovered the inner workings of this strange new drug. But still, I’d seen some things that’d stuck with me. You don’t exactly get over seeing a zombie, whether it was like the ones from the movies or not.

So when I got to my houseboat, I ran in quickly and gathered up my things in a small suitcase, including the fake version of Grendel’s journal.

I weighed the book in my hands, heavy with the thick leather-bound cover and the weight of time on its pages. Or the appearance of time, at least. That old book repairman Percy had said that someone had gone to great lengths to make the journal look old, but that didn’t mean that it actually was old.

I ran my thumb across the uneven pages on the book’s side, debating whether to open it and begin to comb through it again. But I shook my head and came back to my senses, throwing the journal on top of my clothes in the small suitcase. Ordinarily, I would’ve given more care to an artifact like that, but it was a fake, and I was pissed about that at that point. The journal was close to useless as anything other than proof that it had been sent to me in the first place, and if it got a little crushed in the middle of some in-flight turbulence, oh well.

I gave a little smirk at this thought. As much as I’d obsessed over the fake edition of the journal to no avail over the past several weeks, I kind of relished the idea of it getting knocked around a bit. Not enough to cause any real damage, but enough to be noticeable.

Not that the journal could feel pain, but still. It was a nice thought, at least.

Once packed up, I headed back out to my car and straight to the airport, only giving my little houseboat a cursory glance as I left it behind.

I had a while to wait once at the airport and passed my time by grabbing some lunch and looking out the window, and watching other passengers pass me by.

I didn’t pull the journal back out, to my own surprise. I decided that I’d obsessed over it too much with too little to show for it over the past few weeks. Now, I could just enjoy a bit of downtime as I waited for my airplane.

It didn’t last, predictably. It only took an hour for me to pull out my tablet and begin surfing the web for Chester and Ashley Holland. I let it slide, telling myself that at least I had taken a little time for myself, and I wasn’t combing through that dumb journal again.

I’d searched for the Hollands before, as had everyone else at MBLIS, no doubt. The couple had a small but not insignificant digital footprint, with a few social media profiles to sell their well-crafted personas.

I maneuvered to Ashley’s Facebook account and clicked through photographs of her and Chester on a beach somewhere, laughing and smiling and sipping Margaritas. They looked normal if a little too superficial and spray-tanned. As far as anyone else knew, they could be just about any upper-middle-class American couple on vacation.

Except they weren’t. A closer dig at the social media profiles revealed that these people seemed to be on some kind of endless vacation, traipsing around the world, and especially the eastern coast of the United States, lounging on beaches and basking in the hot sun wherever they could find it.

They never said where they were in their posts, but I was familiar enough with the ocean to be able to pick up on some clues. There were pictures on Little Torch Key. That one was all too familiar to me as I watched Chester in a video walk down the same beach that I had chased a gangbanger not so long ago while he wildly shot at me in the sand.

There were other shots that I recognized as in the Caribbean islands, along the Florida coast, and even on the Jersey Shore. There was one all the way out in Laguna Beach, too, though the Hollands weren’t known to have owned property there.

These pictures were the biggest keys we had to where the Hollands might be, or where they might be headed, now. They no doubt knew by now that we knew where they owned property under these names. So I thought that it was somewhat safe to cross those locations off the list of possibilities, though Diane had predictably balked at this when I brought it up.

“We can’t rule