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

bribe of a long lost pirate ship found by the Hollands in return for allowing drug kingpins to take refuge in their properties.

This wasn’t surprising, however. It would’ve been surprising if they weren’t there, actually. We’d grown accustomed to sharing our offices in recent weeks, though we still weren’t exactly happy about it or used to it.

I elbowed past several agents, grunting good mornings to them that were largely not reciprocated, to make my way over to my desk right next to my partner’s, Agent Robbie Holm. Holm was already there, sipping from a to-go cup of coffee and glaring at the other agency’s operatives with something resembling disdain.

“Morning,” I grunted to him, straightening my jacket from all the jostling amongst the many occupants of what I now considered a far too small office.

“Morning,” Holm grunted back, seeming to be in no better mood than I was.

“What’s got you all sour?” I asked him as I took my seat and gratefully accepted a second to-go cup of coffee from him that he must’ve picked up for me on his way there.

“What do you think?” he asked, rolling his eyes in the direction of the FBI agents, who had taken over a cluster of desks near the door, though they rarely seemed to sit down, opting instead to congregate in the entryway in the most annoying manner possible.

“What did they do now?” I sighed, unable to contain my annoyance either.

“They exist,” Holm spat, and I sighed again.

The close quarters were really starting to get to everyone, and tensions were rising between the agents from each agency. And they hadn’t exactly been great, to begin with, with several of the guys making fun of Holm and spilling coffee on him on their first day in Miami. According to Holm, anyway. I had been in Virginia when that happened, but Diane, our boss, had begrudgingly confirmed that his account of events wasn’t exaggerated.

“We’re supposed to be working together on the biggest case in all of our lifetimes,” I reminded him. “It’s incumbent upon us to be the bigger people here. We’re hosting them, after all.”

I was pretty much verbatim quoting Diane here, with all her pep talks to us over the past several weeks, trying to keep our spirits up and our focus on the task at hand. It certainly sounded when she said these things that she was trying to convince herself as much as she was us, and I felt much the same when I parroted her words back to Holm.

“Oh, not you, too,” he scoffed. “I bought you coffee.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” I relented with a shrug. “I’m getting fed up myself.”

“I just don’t get why they couldn’t stay in the police station,” Holm complained for the umpteenth time. “There was plenty of room there.”

“We couldn’t keep infringing on the local police’s space after that specific case was closed,” I reminded him.

“Ugh, why do you have to keep being the voice of reason?” he asked, though he flashed me a grin.

While I had been in Virginia looking for the journal of a pirate who was last known to be in possession of an old ship I’d been searching for most of my life, following my grandfather before me, things had gotten really interesting at MBLIS in Miami.

Holm and Diane had been attacked late at night in the office by a hitman who had been working for the Hollands, who at that point knew that we were on their tail following a case they were involved with in the Florida Keys.

The hitman got away at first, though Holm and Diane turned out fine, and a manhunt ensued involving MBLIS, the FBI, and the local police. But once the man was found, we couldn’t exactly keep using the police station as a base of operations.

This brought us to now, with our small office constantly being invaded by agents who oftentimes seemed determined to crack this case without us.

“We’ll get to the bottom of this eventually,” I assured Holm, though I was beginning to doubt this myself.

We’d been looking for the Hollands for nearly three months now, and things were not going well. We hadn’t had many leads since the couple was spotted going through security at the Atlanta airport, or at least not any that panned out.

As far as we knew, the couple could be anywhere in the world by now. We had reports out to every intelligence agency in the world, and they were both on the FBI’s Most Wanted list by then. We got a flood of tips every day, which kept us more than busy, but at a certain point, it was easy to give up hope when all of them turned out to be dead ends.

“Anything new from that list of people that New Orleans couple gave you?” Holm asked hopefully.

I sighed yet again. That list had proved… frustrating. I wasn’t sure what I had been expecting, but it wasn’t constantly being blown off and ghosted by everyone in the community of nautical enthusiasts in which the Hollands immersed themselves.

“Not yet,” I grumbled. “None of them lead to anything so far. We’ll see, though. I’m still working on it.”

So far, none of the people on the list had been interested in talking to me, beyond explaining that they had no idea the Hollands were like this and had even less of an idea of where they could be now and that they themselves had nothing to do with any of the couple’s criminal activity.

I bought this in some cases, but not all. Both the Hollands and the hotel owners from New Orleans proved that there was a seedy underbelly to the nautical community about which I had been blissfully ignorant until recently.

The whole thing was weird and kind of exciting if I were honest with myself. I was used to being the only one who cared about any of this stuff. That there were people out there willing to kill to get some of the stuff that I