Stolen Child (Coastal Fury Book 13), Matt Lincoln [ebooks children's books free TXT] 📗

us, but the timetable would be tight. We do know that the ship didn’t end up in NOLA until after we were on the case, though.”

A Little Torch Key bartender’s account of events would place Beck in the Keys a couple of weeks before Holm and I were in Haiti. But other accounts presented a slightly hazier picture.

“They could’ve known about you even before that, though, right?” Birn asked. “I mean, these people are everywhere, and we have a lot of drug cases.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” I admitted, a chill running up and down my spine at this thought. “They’ve known someone in law enforcement was looking for the Dragon’s Rogue for years now. I guess word spread about me through the nautical community. Though their thug, Joey, said that they didn’t know about me specifically until Haiti.”

“I don’t like any of this,” Holm said, leaning back against the booth and rubbing his stomach uncomfortably. “I feel like I’m going to throw up. I hate the idea of these people following us around on our cases.”

“You sure it’s just that, and not the fact that you mowed down nearly five pancakes covered in chocolate, syrup, and powdered sugar?” I asked, cocking an eyebrow at his plate, and everyone but Holm laughed.

“You could maybe say that it’s a combination of factors,” he admitted, cracking a half-grin and chuckling along with us, then.

“Everything going alright here, guys?” Buddy asked, walking over to our table.

“It was all excellent, thank you,” I said, smiling up at him. “We’ll be back for sure. Often.”

“I knew I shouldn’t have shown you our secret spot,” Birn complained, shaking his head at me, though he was still smiling.

“I’ll be right back with your check,” Buddy told his cousin, and the jovial man meandered back over to the front counter to chat with another one of his waitresses.

“He seems happy,” I remarked, nodding in the diner owner’s direction.

“He is,” Birn confirmed. “I told you, retirement is where it’s at. But not complete retirement. Everybody’s gotta have a second act, even you, Marston.”

“Wait, he’s retired?” I asked, still watching Buddy.

“Former Marine,” Birn grinned. “Don’t tease him for it, though. I know we’re all Navy guys here.”

Buddy didn’t take long to come back over, and he handed a single check to Birn. I reached for my wallet.

“Don’t even think about it,” Buddy said, clapping me on the shoulder and gesturing with his other hand at Holm and me. “Yours were on the house. Just make sure to come back and see me some time, okay? And catch all those bad guys for us.”

6

Ethan

I left Buddy and his staff an enormous tip as thanks, and Holm did the same. One thing was for sure: that diner wasn’t just Birn and Muñoz’s secret anymore. They’d have to put up with us showing up there at least as much as they did when we weren’t in the office.

After eating, we drove around for a little while, letting the food settle and our minds wander, before heading back into the office, dreading the piles upon piles of files and paperwork still left for us to go through.

I couldn’t speak for the others, but I dreaded our FBI companions a little less now than I had that morning before going into work for the first time that day. We’d duked it out, but it seemed like we may have finally come to some kind of understanding. At least we were all united against the common enemy of Interpol now.

When we got back into the office, Diane was still locked away at her private desk. I could hear her muttering something on the phone but couldn’t make out any distinct words.

“Took you long enough,” Agent Smith called to us when we walked back in, but he was smiling instead of smirking now. I thought that maybe I was right, and things were turning up on that front, at least. I figured we were due for a break somewhere.

“Where’d you go?” Dobbs asked.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Birn grinned at him and gave all the FBI agents a mischievous wink, which elicited several confused looks and cocked heads.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Smith asked, but no one answered him. I got the sense that while he was okay with sharing with his fellow MBLIS agents, there was no way that Birn was going to stick a bunch of FBI agents on his cousin’s diner. I couldn’t blame him.

“What’d we miss?” I asked the other agents as Birn and Muñoz exchanged a mischievous look.

“Not much,” Forrester said with a shrug. “Just more paperwork. Diane was yelling on the phone with Interpol some more. That was kind of fun.”

“Oh?” Holm asked, raising his eyebrows. “I can’t believe we missed that.”

It was always fun to watch Diane rage at people on the phone. She’d been a real force to be reckoned with when MBLIS was having funding difficulties, but I wondered what had happened to playing nice with Interpol. That plan seemed to have gone down the drain.

“Did you get any idea what it was about?” I asked. “I mean, she said she was going to play it cool with them for a while, didn’t she?”

“An hour is a while for Diane,” Holm pointed out, and I chuckled and had to admit that he wasn’t wrong about that.

“She didn’t say,” Corey said, shaking his head. “Something about Scotland, obviously. Hunt listened through the door. Maybe he remembers better.”

Somehow, I didn’t like the image of the FBI agents listening in on Diane’s private conversations. It wasn’t like Holm and I weren’t guilty of doing the same before, but we worked for her. These guys… well, sometimes it was hard to tell when they were operating in good faith, is all.

“I think it just escalated,” the usually silent Hunt said with a shrug. “She was trying to convince them to let Marston fly to Scotland, but I guess they didn’t respond well. She kept getting madder about it, and then there was