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

they heard anything, and Nina was starting to think that they were alone, and whoever had been there was long gone.

But they weren’t. After a few moments, they heard a soft child’s voice ringing through the cave, giving it a natural echoing quality.

“Mister, I’m getting thirsty again,” the boy said, and Nina and Marston stared at each other.

It was Mikey. Who else could it be? It was a boy’s voice. He was alive. Mikey was alive.

“Shut up,” a snide man’s voice clapped back at the boy. “I thought I told you to go to sleep.”

“I want to go home,” the boy whined. “When do I get to go home? You said I get to go home.”

“I told you, I’m working on that,” the man snapped.

“How are you going to get to Atlanta, though? We can’t take this boat to Atlanta, can we? You said you would take me back to Atlanta,” the boy complained.

“I told you, I’m working on it!” the man cried. Then, muttering as if to himself, “I just need to figure out a way to leave you there without anyone seeing.”

“I promise you, I won’t tell anybody about you,” the boy assured the man. “If you just take me home, I’ll tell them I took a bus or something. That’s all.”

“Oh, shut up,” the man said again. “I can’t trust you to do that. But I can’t afford to not take you home, either. Oh man, I’ve done it this time. I should’ve listened to Justin…”

Nina stared at Marston again, unblinking. Charlie wanted out, she realized. He knew now how reckless his actions had been, and instead of killing Mikey in another impulsive act, he was biding his time, trying to find a way to return the boy to Atlanta without getting arrested.

Well, good luck with that. That’s all she could say about that plan, though she was glad he had realized killing Mikey wasn’t going to help him any.

His first plan had probably been to take the boat to one of the foreign islands, sell Mikey to another trafficking gang or even a lone-wolf predator there, or barring that, throw him overboard. But then he realized the boat, Lucy, wasn’t going to get him there, and he was stuck creeping along the North Carolina shore. If he killed the boy here, there was no doubt that someone would find the body, and Charlie himself would probably be recognized anywhere he went from all the news reports, local and national.

In short, Charlie was screwed, and now he was literally stuck in the corner of this cave without anything to do.

Nina and Marston looked at each other again. Nina motioned toward the sound of the voices with her gun as if asking a question. Marston nodded. By now, they were in sync. He understood her perfectly.

And with that, Nina tossed him her flashlight, and he turned it on along with the boat’s motor while she held up her gun with both hands.

“FBI!” she screamed. “We have you cornered. Come out here with your hands up and your weapons down, and hand over the child at once.”

There was a moment of silence, a loud plopping sound as if something dropped into the water, and a curse as Charlie realized what was happening to him.

“We know you want out, Charlie, and this is your way out,” Marston called out to him. “We know you want to return the boy, so just hand him over and be done with this, okay? This can all be over if you just give him to us.”

“Wh-what’s going on, Mister?” the boy’s voice stammered. “Are they police?”

“That’s right, Mikey, we’re the police,” Marston said, his tone suddenly kind and warm. “The man’s going to give you to us now, and we’re going to take you back to your family, okay?”

“Is that…?” Mikey started to ask, but Charlie cut him off.

“Shut up!” he cried again.

“Charlie…” Nina began in a tone of warning, motioning for Marston to inch the boat forward. “Don’t do anything you might regret. We’ve already been through that a few times in the past couple of days, and it hasn’t worked out so well for you so far, has it?”

They rounded the corner to reveal the edge of the cave with the flashlight beam. Charlie and Mikey had managed to park their boat in a relatively dry area against the back of the cave, away from the open water. It looked like they’d been holed up there for a while, and the whole area stunk of sweat, stale food, and fear.

Mikey sat huddled in the left-hand corner of the cave with his legs scrunched up against his chest, his arms wrapped around his knees, and a blanket covering most of the rest of him. He was dirty and trembling but otherwise looked no worse for wear, with the same clothes on that he had been wearing when he was taken.

Charlie, on the other hand, looked like he was about to combust. His eyebrows were all patchy like he’d been picking at him, and his pock-marked cheeks looked even more hallowed now than they had on the security video. He was wearing that brown jacket that had become his main identifier, and he was almost entirely covered in mud from head to toe. Nina surmised that he’d probably taken a tumble somewhere in the shallow water. He was hunched up in the opposite corner of the cave from Mikey, which meant that he was closer to the agents and their boat than the boy was.

Charlie stared at Nina as if he was trying to figure out a way out of this one and kept coming up empty.

“Come on, Charlie, don’t do anything rash…” Marston started to say, just as Charlie reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a gun.

Nina had to stop herself from groaning.

“Come on, man, we’ve already killed Rudy, and Justin’s told us everything,” she told him. “Then your gang got very mad and took him off to God knows where.