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

any new information before anyone else. As much as I liked my partner and appreciated all the times he’d had my back, I was getting a little tired of him getting all the glory around here. I wasn’t just any old sidekick. Breaking the Holland case would go a long way toward proving that to myself and everyone else.

Muñoz had come in early that afternoon, still looking a little tired and haggard, but enthusiastic as ever to get going on her next case. Even more than Birn, she was a workaholic, a lot like Marston. The word ‘vacation’ was barely even in her vocabulary, and since her partner had been abducted, she’d been even more furious in her pursuit of the bad guys than usual.

You could say that for the four of us who had been involved in the case down in the Keys, the Holland case was personal. We didn’t want the FBI breaking this one, though we were thankful for their help. Chester and Ashley were ours, and we wanted to be the ones to find them.

When Diane came out of her office to pour herself some more coffee around eight in the evening, I started pestering her about Atlanta again, just as I had all day, no doubt to her chagrin.

“Why can’t we just…?” I started to ask, but he held up a hand to stop me as she sipped what must’ve been lukewarm coffee by then.

“I don’t want to hear any more about it, Robbie,” she said sharply. “I’m not sending you to Atlanta. There're no ifs, ands, or buts about it. No more. I have better places to put my energy than going round in circles with you for hours on end. Got it?”

“Okay, okay,” I muttered, staring down at my desk, which bore the Holland file that I’d inherited by default when Marston left for Virginia. “I’m just saying. They could come back there. Or there could be clues about where they went.”

“And the FBI will do their job and figure that out,” Diane said shortly, just as she had at least half a dozen times before. “This isn’t our territory, Robbie, you know that. You see any oceanfront property the last time you were in Atlanta?”

“Okay, okay, you’ve gotten your point across. Again,” I reiterated. Then, before she could walk away and because I just couldn’t help myself, “But if they get a lead to somewhere that is in our jurisdiction, and we weren’t a part of it, they could steal the whole case right out from under us!”

“You’ve made this point several times already,” Diane said, giving me the death glare as I bit my lip, having regretted the words as I was saying them. “The FBI isn’t going to steal this case from us. I won’t let them. There’ll be hell to pay if they so much as try. We’re the ones who discovered the Hollands in the first place. This is our case.”

“We? That was Marston, Muñoz, and me,” I shot back. “And Birn, when he wasn’t zonked out in the woods on tranquilizers.”

“My point exactly,” Diane said cooly, and I knew that I was done. “Seriously, Robbie, sometimes I wonder about your priorities.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I complained as she turned to leave.

“What do you think?” she asked, heaving a sigh and swiveling on her heels to face me again. “The point should be that these horrible drug lords who’ve been messing with our country for God knows how long end up behind bars and facing justice, not who put them there.”

“Right,” I said, ashamed of myself again as I looked away from her. “But come on, you can’t say you don’t worry about our case count. You just said there would be hell to pay if the FBI tried to take this one away from us! And I know it bothers you that they got credit for the New Orleans case, probably even more than it bothered Marston and me.”

I bit my lip again. I really couldn’t keep my mouth shut, could I? But Diane broke out into a wide smile and laughed.

“You’ve got me there, Robbie,” she admitted, shaking her head in wonder at me. “But still, it’s a good reminder for all of us. The important thing is that these guys get caught, not who puts them there. Even though you’re right, it’d better be us. Otherwise, I don’t know what I’ll do to those guys at the FBI…”

She narrowed her eyes and grimaced, as if the individuals in question were standing right there in front of her, waiting for her to rip them a new one for messing with her agency.

“I thought you said they’ve been nice and cooperative lately,” I pointed out. “After Marston and I worked with that Nina Gosse woman and helped take down Solomon.”

“Yes, they have been cooperative since they stole our own case out from under us,” Diane admitted, practically growling the last words. “Like they’re trying to appease us little guys when they know they wronged us.”

“I don’t know that they wronged us,” I said, thinking that the tables had quickly turned in this conversation. “I mean, Nina had been undercover there for months when we got there. She just didn’t know about the zombie drug yet.”

“Whatever,” Diane said, rolling her eyes. “I still don’t have to like it, even if Marston manages to make googly eyes with every woman you run into on your missions.”

“I guess he does do that,” I chuckled, as it hadn’t escaped my notice either that every woman we ran into seemed to take a special interest in my partner. Tessa, Alejandra, Nina, Penny, and countless others had crossed our paths over the years. Sometimes it bothered me, but most of the time, I just found it amusing, and I loved to tease him about it. Mercilessly.

Diane rolled her eyes.

“Anything new show up in that file?” she asked wryly, gesturing at the thick manila folder sitting between my elbows on my desk, opened