Bayou Pirates

  PROLOGUE

  It was only a few days later that Ty, Jeff, Charlie, and the rest of my gaggle of young regulars at the Rolling Thunder came back in to see me. I chuckled when I saw them.

  “Hey, kids,” I called as I was in the middle of wiping down the bar. “Back so soon?”

  It was still early, and there were only a couple of other customers in the place, both older gentlemen sitting alone on opposite ends of the bar. I was the only one working since my bar girl Nadia was late getting back from her lifeguard shift at her other job.

  “We couldn’t wait to find out what happened with that drug,” Jeff, an over-eager young pilot-in-training with curly hair and refined muscles, piped in before he and his friends had even approached me. “Did it really ever make it into New Orleans? You dodged all our questions before.”

  “Yeah, and what about the Dragon’s Rogue and Grendel’s journal?” Charlie, an up-and-coming All-American kid in the military, asked as the youngsters all piled around me on the empty bar stools. “You wouldn’t tell us anything about that, either.”

  “Wouldn’t tell you anything?” I repeated, laughing again as I arched an eyebrow at them. “I told you one of the craziest stories from my entire career in excruciating detail. And I told you about how I found the biggest clue yet in my search for that old pirate ship, to boot!”

  “Yeah, but you left us hanging,” Ty complained. Ty was Charlie and Jeff’s shorter, more brazen companion. “You took down that whole cartel in Haiti and got the zombie drug out of the Dominican Republic, but the head honcho got away after he’d already shipped the drug to the States! And you didn’t get so far that you actually got the rest of Grendel’s journal and read it. You just hinted that it was coming soon.”

  “Yeah, you’re holding out on us, Chief,” Mac, the only woman in the group, said, flashing me a grin. I returned the gesture.

  “Alright, alright,” I relented, holding up my hands in defeat. “I’ll tell you the next part of the story. But you’ll have to wait for my bar girl to come in; I can’t leave the bar unattended. And I think I was expecting a friend tonight…”

  As if on cue, the bar’s former owner, Mike Birch, came crashing through the front doors with a sloppy grin on his face.

  “Marston!” he cried, holding out his arms as he approached us at the bar. “And if it isn’t my favorite band of misfits.”

  In fact, it had been Mike’s idea to get me to start telling these kids about all my adventures in the first place. As much as I begrudged the idea at first, I had to say I’d taken a liking to it. Reliving my glory days and passing on my knowledge to the next generation turned out to be almost as rewarding as people liked to say it was, after all.

  Mike sidled his way between Ty and Jeff and reached across the bar to shake my hand.

  “Long time, no see, my friend,” I said, taking it and shaking it heartily. “Where’ve you been hiding the last few weeks?”

  “Oh, same old, same old,” Mike grinned. “You know me. I love a good fishing trip.”

  “I do,” I chuckled.

  “So, where are we this time?” Mike asked, looking between my gaggle of young fans and me. “What part are we at?”

  “I just got finished telling them the story about our run-in with that zombie drug and the ghost ship down in Haiti earlier this week,” I explained. “Though I’m surprised they remembered any of it considering how drunk they were when they came in here. It’s spring break, you know.”

  “Spring break?” Mike asked, raising his eyebrows as he cast his gaze on each of the kids in turn. “You don’t say? Now those were the days… What are you all doing cooped up in here with this old guy when you could be out there with all those college kids?”

  “It was the zombie story!” Ty cried as if this said it all. “And there was a ghost ship!”

  Mike chuckled and clapped the young man on the shoulder. “Right you are. That was one of your better adventures, wasn’t it, Marston?”

  “It was,” I agreed as I finished cleaning down the bar and draped the dirty rag beneath it. “And I haven’t even gotten to the best part yet.”

  “Ah,” Mike breathed, his eyes sparkling mischievously at this. “You haven’t told them about New Orleans yet?”

  “Not quite,” I said dryly. “We were just getting to that part.”

  I glanced up at the wall where a small voodoo doll hung above the plank from the sunken ghost ship from Haiti. The kids’ eyes all followed mine as they hung on to my every word.

  “Now, come on, you can’t leave us hanging,” Ty complained, impatient as ever.

  Just then, Nadia came blustering through the doors, her clothes still damp and clinging to her. Her lifeguard job did require an outfit change, but she’d apparently rushed over here before properly drying off. The kids all stared at her despite themselves until Mike slapped Jeff upside the head.

  “Eyes up here,” he reminded him, but there was humor in his eyes.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Nadia said, rolling her eyes good-naturedly at the cadets. “Things were pretty crazy today at the beach. Spring breakers and all. You know the drill.”

  “Oh, we know,” Ty said, nodding and grinning slyly at her.

  She rolled her eyes again, but I caught her smiling as she turned around the bar to join me behind it.

  “What are we up to tonight?” she asked.

  “Oh, it’s been pretty slow so far,” I said. “Still early, and we’re not exactly a spring break hot spot over here. How about you just get these guys some drinks and settle in for the story?”

  “Another story?” she asked, raising her eyebrows. “I could go for that.”

  “Then pull up a chair,” I told her. “Metaphorically, of course.”

  I winked at her as she rushed off to fill our drinks. By now, all the bar girls knew the orders for our regulars, not to mention Mike and me.

  “You’re actually going to let us drink this time?” Ty asked, hopefully.

  “You didn’t let them drink?” Mike asked me, incredulous. “Marston, how are you ever going to stay in business?”

  “You should’ve seen them, Mike. They were practically tripping over their own toes,” I explained. “Someone had to sober them up.”

  “Well, they look alright tonight,” Mike said, giving each of the kids another once over.

  Nadia came back with our drinks, handing each of the kids a beer, and Mike and me bourbons, neat.

  “So?” Mac asked, raising her eyebrows at me. “Were you going to tell us what happens next?”

  “Yeah, did you ever get your hands on Grendel’s journal?” Jeff asked eagerly.

  “And what about this zombie drug?” Ty asked again. “Why haven’t we ever heard of it before, if it made its way into New Orleans?”

  “Okay, okay,” I chuckled, leaning forward on the bar and taking a sip of my liquor. “All of your questions will be answered. It all started right when Holm and I got back from the Dominican Republic after taking down the cartel…”

  CHAPTER 1

  I was so excited at the prospect of finally getting my hands on Grendel’s journal that I didn’t think I’d be able to stay still for the duration of the plane ride back to Miami from the Dominican Republic. But my body got the best of me, and I fell asleep practically the second I sat down in the middle seat in the back of our commercial flight.

  Our agency, the Military Border Liaison Investigative Services, MBLIS for short, had run into some trouble with its funding lately, so Holm and I had been stuck flying coach on our last few missions. We hoped that catching such a high profile case as the one we just finished would go far toward moving things along and getting things back to normal again.

  We were close to that goal, especially after a few of us a
t the agency went rogue and took down the mafia that was behind our funding problems a few weeks back, but bureaucracy always found a way to get in the way of our good work.

  I’d suffered a minor concussion and a few other small injuries on our last mission, so I was beat. It was a bit of a miracle that I’d gotten out of it as close to unscathed as I had at the end of the day. Holm and I had been shot at more times than I could count, and then we ended up stuck on an old sinking ship that a drug lord set to explode on us. It was only by the grace of God and a healthy dose of dumb luck that we’d made it out of that mess in one piece.

  The next thing I knew, Holm was shaking me awake.

  “We landed,” he hissed. “Don’t black out on me now, Marston.”

  “Oh,” I said groggily, shaking my head to clear it. “Already?”

  It felt like I’d been sleeping for quite some time, but I could tell I would’ve happily gone on far longer without waking.

  I glanced out the window on Holm’s other side to see that we were, in fact, on the ground at the Miami International Airport, the hot Florida sun beating down on the runway.

  The plane rolled into the gate, and Holm and I meandered our way out to where we’d left my car.

  “Home? Or back to the office?” Holm asked as I opened the driver’s door, stifling a yawn on the back of his hand.

  “What do you think?” I asked, raising my eyebrows at him as I ducked down into the driver’s seat and motioned for him to do the same on the passenger side.

  “I know, I know,” Holm complained. “But you have to admit that it would be nice to take a day or two.”

  “I can’t disagree,” I sighed, pulling out of the parking lot. My muscles still ached from that long and arduous swim through the ocean after the ghost ship exploded, and the rest hadn’t helped much. “But we have work to do. There’s no telling whether Solomon was telling the truth about this shipment being sent into New Orleans before we got on the scene.”

  Solomon was the drug lord who turned out to be behind all that messy business with the drug cartel in Haiti. He’d commissioned an old witch doctor named Samuel to repurpose an old, legendary recipe for a “Haitian zombie powder” and give it a modern spin. It was a spin that killed up to forty percent of the people who consumed it in a slow, painful manner while their own skin and internal organs practically ate themselves alive.

  Holm and I had seen these effects for ourselves, and they were nothing to laugh at. The other agent had even lost his lunch when he saw one of the mutilated bodies for the first time.

  While we were on the ghost ship before it sank, we also saw the effects of the drug when it didn’t kill someone. And as we found out, this was nothing to laugh at, either. The poor Haitian man who had been forced to take it as punishment for speaking with Holm and me became a mere shell of his former self, his eyes glazing over until they were all white with no irises to be seen, and his body lurching and convulsing before us.

  The man had little control over his own body after he ingested the drug. But he was more than open to suggestion from others, which was perhaps the most dangerous part. We already knew that this thing was being marketed as a high-class date rape drug, among other things. The thought of it making its way through my own country’s streets sent an unmistakable chill up and down my spine.

  “Alright, but can we at least stop and grab some food on our way?” Holm asked. “I’m starving.”

  “Sure,” I said, flipping my turn signal to head in the direction of the nearest mall. “I need a new cell phone, anyway. Diane will kill me when she finds out I lost it.”

  I had lost my phone to the ocean when Holm and I jumped out of the ghost ship to avoid being blown up. That left me with no way to communicate with my coworkers back in Miami, not to mention everyone else I wanted to keep in touch with, like the reporter, Tessa Bleu, who had helped me track down Grendel’s journal, and the Dominican president’s daughter, Alejandra, who had been so instrumental in the success of our last mission.

  “No kidding,” Holm chuckled. “So you go to Best Buy, and I’ll grab us something to tide us over until dinner.”

  I pulled into the mall parking lot and got out with Holm, locking the car behind us. We parted ways at the entrance, and I went to find some geek squad guy to get me a new phone. I didn’t need anything fancy, just something to make calls with. I figured it wouldn’t take long to pick one out.

  As soon as the bespectacled worker at the geek squad counter saw me, his eyes widened, and he took a startled step back.

  “Are… are you okay, Sir?” he stammered, giving me a half-concerned, half-frightened look.

  I realized that I must look like I walked straight out of a horror movie, with the giant bump on my head, blood poking through the surface-level gunshot wound on my shoulder, and the deep bags I assumed I must have had under my eyes from all the stress and lack of sleep. Which, to be quite honest, was kind of true when I thought about it. What with all the talk of real-life zombies and ghost ships and all, I almost felt like I’d been stuck in one of those Halloween blockbusters without realizing it.

  “Oh, I’m fine,” I said, waving a hand dismissively at him. “Just a rough day is all. It’s a long story.”

  “Uh-huh,” the guy, who looked to be in his early to mid-twenties, said with a cursory nod.

  He didn’t look too convinced by this explanation, and I couldn’t blame him, but I took a seat on the stool across from him at the desk, anyway.

  “I need a new phone,” I said. “I lost mine in… well, as I said, it’s been a rough day.”

  “Um, sure,” the kid said, shaking his head as if to clear it and returning his attention to the smart tablet on the desk in front of him. “My name is Clark, and I’m going to be helping you today. What kind of phone would you be interested in?”

  I told him, and he led me to the back of the store, where we picked one out for me. Then we headed back to the geek squad counter, and I gave him all my account information so I wouldn’t have to change numbers. All in all, it took under half an hour.

  “Thanks for all your help,” I told the kid, waving at him as I turned to leave the store with my new phone in tow.

  “Uh-huh,” he said again, eyeing my injuries one last time, ashen-faced, as I departed. I chuckled under my breath. If he only knew.

  Holm was waiting for me on a bench overlooking the busiest mall hallway just outside the Best Buy. He was holding two giant sugary drinks and a soft pretzel for each of us.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I laughed as I took my portion of the food from him. “This isn’t exactly nourishing.”

  “It’s nourishing for the soul, Marston,” Holm said as he clapped himself on the chest and took a long slurp out of his straw. “That’s what counts.”

  “I’m not sure our Dominican doctor friends would agree,” I said, but I smiled and enjoyed the food, anyway.

  Before leaving the Dominican Republic, Holm and I had both been checked out by physicians in a Santo Domingo hospital. One of them had chided me for getting myself in so much trouble in the first place, but here I was heading back to work already. At least I’d gotten some guilty pleasure mall food to tide me over.

  “I wonder where Solomon is now,” I mused as I pulled a piece off my pretzel. “The cartel may be pulling out from Haiti and the Dominican Republic, but he had to have gone somewhere. And this whole operation he’s supposedly getting going here in the States, I doubt he would abandon that so easily.”

  “I don’t know,” Holm shrugged absent-mindedly, wholly focused on his food. “I suppose we’ll find out. But it could all be fine. For all we know, he was lying about all that, anyway. He was a weird little guy, after all.”

  “He was, wasn’t he?” I chuckled. “And maybe. I just wish we could be sure. If only we knew his real name, or anything about him really…”

  My voice trailed off as I thought back on the whole ordeal, which already felt like a lifetime ago even though I knew that
it had been just the previous day. Solomon had been odd, nothing like I would’ve expected. He was short, and almost cowardly, for a gangbanger. He abandoned his ship and sent it flying sky high with explosives when faced with the prospect of squaring off with Holm and me on his own, without any of his goons. And after that, he was nowhere to be found.

  “Well, we had better head back,” I said when I finished off the last of my drink, tossing what remained of my pretzel in a nearby trash can. After all that sugar, I didn’t have the stomach left for any more.

  “You could’ve at least shared,” Holm said, gawking at the wasted food.

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Come on,” I said, beckoning for him to follow me. “We have work to do.”

  CHAPTER 2

  When we got back to the MBLIS office, there were just two other agents there at their desks. I could hear Diane, our boss, yelling on the phone before I even opened the door.

  “What’s going on?” I asked the agents when Holm and I stepped inside.

  Diane was nowhere in sight, but the other agents all sat tensed at their desks, eyeing the door to her private office, which was shut tight. I realized that the yelling was coming from there.

  “She’s arguing with the higher-ups again,” Sylvia Muñoz, a former USAF pilot with black hair and warm brown eyes, groaned, rolling her eyes as she stood up to greet Holm and me. “Something about this crazy mission you’ve been on without us.”

  “Yeah, how about you fill us in on all that?” Muñoz’s partner, a tall, muscular former pilot named Lamar Birn, asked us. “You look a little worse for wear.”

  He and Muñoz both crossed the room to shake our hands.

  “Do we?” I asked dryly as I crossed over to my own desk. “I hadn’t noticed.”

  I fingered the wound on my forehead, as had become a bit of a habit over the past twenty-four to forty-eight hours. It was dressed pretty well at the Dominican hospital, but it still throbbed and pulsed every once in a while, and I could feel the presence of the goose egg when I walked.