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

in my pocket just then, as we were walking past the boat rental place for the second time. I pulled it out to see that Diane had messaged me. I had sent her a text earlier about the boat, as well.

“It’s Diane,” I told them. “She’s informed all our international contacts on nearby islands of the boat’s name and description.”

“I hope some poor bloke didn’t borrow it from this Samuels fellow,” Holm remarked, chuckling at the thought. “Otherwise, he’s in for a scare the second someone sees him.”

“Yeah,” I sighed, shaking my head. “If the shop owners don’t have anything concrete for us or can say for sure that it was stolen, we should probably release this to the media. As much as I don’t want to give away this lead, I also don’t want the boat to go unnoticed just because we didn’t want to do that.”

“Fair point,” Nina said, biting her lip. “I’ll tell Osborne to prepare for that if push comes to shove.”

She began typing away on her phone again at this.

“Alright, what’s next?” Holm asked, coming to a halt in front of the shop’s doors and putting his hands on his hips as he gazed out at the path behind us, which was just an asphalt bike path around the shore. The parking lot was up above us a bit, on a hill that began right at the edge of the asphalt.

“There’s no phone number on the door,” Nina remarked, gazing at the shop’s doors. “I guess we could try to get an address for one of the owners from the police.”

“Maybe we should just head back then,” I suggested. “I don’t want to miss anything else waiting around here.”

I checked my watch. It had been more than an hour now, and Samuels and his nephew weren’t back from lunch yet.

“I’ll message the police about them, too,” Nina said, continuing to type. “There’s no use heading back if we’ll just have to turn right around.”

“There might be news, though,” Holm said hopefully.

“If there was news, we’d be the first to know about it,” I pointed out, though I was sure my partner knew this already.

We were all getting more than frustrated with the lack of progress, and the summer heat wasn’t exactly helping matters.

“We have a lead, though,” I said with a vigorous nod, more to convince myself than anyone else. “That’s something. We have some movement we can report back to the parents. No specifics, though, unfortunately. We still can’t rule them out entirely.”

The more we worked this case, though, the less of a suspicion I had about any of the three parents being involved with all this. There was just too much going on, and they all seemed genuine to me, if a bit flawed, though who wasn’t, really.

“Let’s go,” Holm suggested again. “There’s no one out here, and I don’t really want to be here anymore.”

There was sweat glistening on his brow, and I couldn’t help but notice that my own clothes were growing heavier by the second. He wasn’t wrong. We weren’t good to anyone in a puddle on the ground.

“Alright, we can go drive around a bit,” I said. “Nina, you said there were private beaches around here, right? Like the one we found those college kids at? Maybe someone’s on one of those.”

“Ugh, we’re knocking on doors again?” Holm sighed, though even he knew there wasn’t much else to be done. “Fine.”

“Sure,” Nina said with a shrug, not sounding too enthusiastic about this, either.

We were all facing the hill bearing the parking lot by then, with our backs to the rental shop doors.

Then, I heard a rustle back over my shoulder, off to the side or even behind the shop.

The noise was too loud to be an animal, and we hadn’t seen any animals while in the bay. We also hadn’t seen any other people, and the lights in the shop were dark, with no sign of life inside.

I exchanged a look with Holm and then with Nina. Judging by the way they had each tensed up, they heard the same thing that I did.

“Is anyone there?” Nina asked in a loud voice, instinctively reaching to her side where her gun was holstered. “FBI! Put your hands up and step out from behind the building immediately.”

There was a long period of silence, to the point where I was beginning to think that I imagined things or that the three of us had some kind of collective hallucination in the heat.

Then, just as I was starting to think that it was really nothing, after all, the noise repeated itself, further to my left this time, but still behind me.

I looked at the other two again and saw that they, too, had heard the second noise.

Almost as one, Holm and I whirled around with our guns out while Nina pulled out her own weapon and covered our backs.

“Federal agents, put your hands up!” Holm, who was closest to where the noise had come from, hollered.

Before I even knew what was happening, a shot rang out behind us, then another that came from right next to me. The next thing I knew, Holm was on the ground, and a man was sprinting out away from him, while more rustling sounds came from behind me and to my right now.

“I’ll go this way, you go that way,” Nina said quickly, nodding in each direction, and with that, I darted off after the running man while Nina turned to inspect whatever that second noise was.

I jumped over Holm, not having time to duck down and make sure he was okay. I heard him groan, signifying that he was still alive, at least, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw blood drifting out to color the asphalt, though I wasn’t sure where in my partner’s body it was coming from yet.

The man was fast but not as fast as I was. He was bogged down by far too many clothes, I realized as