Bayou Pirates Read online

  The second Haitian man raised his gun to shoot again, but Nina had a window between him and Josh now that the American had taken a couple of steps back to nurse his wounds.

  She trained the barrel of her gun on him and shot once, twice, three times. He fell to the ground, leaving only the original Haitian man left standing. Well, not quite standing. His dominant shoulder had been hit, and he was cowering at the foot of the stairwell leading up to the ship, holding his bleeding shoulder and muttering something in French.

  Nina got up and walked over to him, Josh, and Buck. She stooped to pick up one of the drug packets out of the open crate on the way. She studied it but still couldn’t figure out what that strange gel-like substance was, and she was going to have to wait to find out.

  “Here you go,” she said, handing the packet over to Buck.

  He took it from her and gingerly opened it, kneeling down on his knees to get a better look at the stuff. Then, to Nina’s surprise and horror, he pulled a crack pipe out of his jacket pocket and began to mix it all together in there, bringing it to a boil with a lighter when he was done.

  All those drugs mixed together. Her nausea turned to downright terror at the prospect of whatever it was making the rounds in New Orleans.

  When he was finished mixing the stuff, Buck walked over to the cowering Haitian man and forced it down his throat.

  He immediately began to convulse and spasm, his eyes rolling into the back of his head and foam dripping out the side of his mouth. Then he settled down and reopened his eyes.

  Except they weren’t his eyes. Not really. There were no pupils left, just enormous white bulbs, bloodshot to the point that Nina physically recoiled and felt her own eyes well up with tears just looking at them.

  Then, the man just kind of sat there. Buck knelt down and pocketed his gun, then grabbed him by the armpits and heaved him upward. The man just kind of went along with it, which told Nina that he was still conscious. But he didn’t seem to be in control of his own actions at all.

  “Alright,” he said with a shrug. “I guess it worked.”

  “Good enough for me,” Josh murmured, wincing in pain as he covered a hand over his wound. “Or at least I hope it is for Williams and Beck. Let’s load up and head back.”

  CHAPTER 11

  We had to fly commercial again to get to New Orleans. Holm grumbled about it a bit, but he still enjoyed the free peanuts.

  Before we left Miami, I ran back to my houseboat and quickly pocketed Grendel’s journal. You never knew when you could come across something interesting. Maybe there was someone in New Orleans who could help me try to decipher the journal’s contents or get back the parts that seemed to be lost. Or maybe I could just flip through it when I had the chance, hopefully coming across something helpful.

  I did this on the plane, crammed in against a left side window in coach with Holm. There was a screaming kid in the seats on the other side of the aisle from us, and his parents seemed uninterested in dealing with him, lost in their smartphones and sporting noise-canceling headphones.

  The rest of us did not have that luxury. As I tried to focus on the journal, a bedraggled-looking flight attendant tried to calm him down and get the attention of his mother, to no avail. Holm gave the family a dirty look as he worked his way through his bag of peanuts.

  “Why do they have them if they’re not going to raise them?” he grumbled, low enough that only I could hear.

  “Don’t ask me,” I muttered with a shrug, casting the family another annoyed look right along with what seemed like the entirety of the other passengers in coach. “I just can’t wait until we get our own plane back.”

  “Tell me about it,” Holm agreed. “Anything good in that thing?”

  He nodded in the direction of Grendel’s journal, which was spread open in my lap. Not that I’d been able to concentrate on it much with all the screaming going on.

  “Not really,” I sighed, looking back down at it. “Kind of like with the other pages I have, it gets to the point where it seems like the guy was losing his mind. It kind of starts out okay—the parts that I can read anyway—and then it just kind of devolves about halfway through.”

  It was true. The journal started out well enough, an unassuming log of the day-to-day activities on the Dragon’s Rogue, as well as some of Grendel’s personal thoughts, though these were usually the parts that were blacked out.

  Then things shifted. Even the handwriting changed as Grendel started to write stream-of-consciousness accounts of his thoughts and feelings. At this point, I could barely read anything for all the redactions, and what little wasn’t blacked out was almost impossible to decipher through the old pirate’s illegible scrawl.

  “You’ve already gotten to the halfway point?” Holm asked, raising his eyebrows. “Damn, Marston, you’re fast. That’s not a thin book.”

  “No, it’s not,” I said, looking down at it again and examining its spine. It was a thick enough book. Not in Bible territory or anything, but not short by any means either. “But no, I’ve just skimmed through parts of it. That’s not hard to do when so much of it is blacked out.”

  Holm grimaced. “That must be frustrating.”

  “Yes, well, maybe I’ll find someone who can help me,” I said, setting the book aside and pulling out my tablet from my carry-on bag. “Until then, I don’t see any reason to waste any more time on it, especially now.”

  I glanced back over at the hollering kid, who was practically screaming bloody murder now. He seemed to be upset about something to do with a candy bar. That was typical, though, I did feel bad for him that his parents didn’t seem all that involved.

  I opened my email to see that Tessa had responded to my message from the night before, the one informing her of the state of the journal and all the redactions that were inside it.

  “Ethan,” the email read. “I was sorry to hear that the journal wasn’t what we expected, but it does seem to confirm our theory that there’s something out of the ordinary going on with this museum. I talked to my friend George this morning, and he’s going to get in contact with them himself this time, to try to see what he can find out. He won’t mention anything outright about the redactions, but he’ll fish around for some info. In the meantime, he suggests that since you’re headed to New Orleans, you check out the shop listed below. He said to ask for Percy and tell him George sent you. This is an old friend of his, and he can be trusted.”

  She then listed an address for a shop on Bourbon Street in NOLA. I googled it and saw that it was an old book repairman’s shop, just what Holm had suggested I try to track down.

  “What is it?” Holm asked, peering over my shoulder at the email.

  “You had a good idea with that old book repairman thing,” I told him. “Tessa’s friend George, the one who told us about the museum in Virginia in the first place, knows a guy in New Orleans who I can talk to.”

  “Well, well, well,” Holm chortled. “It looks like all hope isn’t lost after all.”

  “I guess not,” I chuckled as I watched yet another flight attendant, this one older and sterner-looking, cross over to the family, the slightly panicked-looking younger flight attendant following close behind her.

  “Ma’am,” the older woman snapped at the boy's mother. “Ma’am!”

  She literally snapped her fingers in front of the woman’s face to draw her attention away from her iPad. Holm and I exchanged an amused look as the woman lowered her noise-canceling headphones and looked up innocently at the flight attendants.

  Her son was still screaming his lungs out. I was surprised he had any air left in there.

  “What is it?” the mother asked, as if this weren’t obvious.

  The older flight attendant just arched an eyebrow at her.

  “You can’t be serious,” she said deadpan.

  The mother’s eyes flicked over to her son.

  “Oh, he’s just sensitive is all,” she said, waving her hand dismissively in the air. “He’ll
tire himself out, eventually. He always does.”

  I had to stifle a laugh and cover it up as a cough as the flight attendant balked at the younger woman.

  “Well, young lady, he’s going to have to ‘tire himself out’ some other way,” she said dryly. “There are other people on this flight, you know. Even the pilot has complained. You wouldn’t want him to crash this plane because he can’t concentrate now, would you?”

  I couldn’t cover up my chortle this time, but I didn’t really care. I was far from the only one laughing now. The pilot’s cockpit was quite far from where we were seated, but I wasn’t surprised that they could hear the kid even up there. If his parents played their cards right, he might have a career in opera in his future.

  The mother’s eyes widened as she cast a wary glance in the direction of the front cockpit.

  “Really?” she asked, looking concerned now, though I doubted it was for anyone but herself.

  “Uh-huh,” the flight attendant confirmed, her hands on her hips.

  “C’mon lady, just give him something to shut him up,” Holm suggested, unable to keep the irritation out of his voice. “Then maybe invest in some parenting classes when you get home.”

  The woman gasped, making a show of being offended, but more than a few voices joined a chorus of agreement around us.

  She glowered at Holm and then bought the kid all the candy bars he wanted from the younger flight attendant. He shut up after that, looking more than pleased with himself.

  “I’m glad I don’t have any of those myself right now,” Holm muttered as we watched the kid rip open his first chocolate bar.

  “Just one of many reasons we don’t have them,” I chuckled.

  It’s not that I’d never thought about settling down myself. It was just that the opportunity had never really arisen, and I knew I could never quit my job. I loved the game too much to get out of it.

  I could almost feel the tension dissipate in the cabin as the kid settled down. The older flight attendant, looking pleased with herself, headed back up to the cockpit, while the younger one still appeared rather frazzled.

  “Don’t worry, you’re doing good,” I assured her, winking at her. “I’ll take a soda if you have the time.”

  She nodded and thanked me, looking grateful to have something else to do, and ran off to get my order.

  “So, we’re meeting with this Detective Barrett character when we get to NOLA,” Holm said, changing the subject. “I hope he’s as good as Diane made him out to be.”

  “I’m sure he is,” I said. “Diane’s hard to please.”

  “You could say that again,” Holm chuckled. “It took me forever to get in her good graces.”

  “You’re in her good graces?” I asked with a laugh, raising my eyebrows at him.

  He laughed and shook his head, punching me in the shoulder playfully.

  I turned my attention back to my computer and dug some more into this shop that Tessa and her friend had sent me to. There wasn’t much information on it online, but then again, I doubted most of their clientele spent a lot of time on the Internet.

  I couldn’t find any information about this Percy character, either. The business was licensed to someone by the name of Selina Frank.

  “When are you going to find the time to head down there?” Holm asked me, watching what I was doing. “I imagine we’ll have our hands full.”

  “I’ll make the time,” I said. “Even if it’s not until we’re finished with our mission. And besides, if you have the time to track down some crawfish, I’ll have the time to talk to this Percy character, whoever he is.”

  “Hey, we have to eat no matter what,” Holm said defensively. “And if we’re in New Orleans, it would be a crime not to take advantage of the local cuisine.”

  “Fair enough,” I chuckled.

  I had to admit that I was looking forward to the trip myself, and not just because I was itching to finish this case. New Orleans was a special kind of city with an unusual culture, and the food there was just the tip of that iceberg.

  Holm was right, though. There was no way we weren’t taking advantage of the best the city had to offer while we were there. We did have to eat, after all.

  The rest of the flight was uneventful in comparison to the first half. The kid remained quiet enough, working his way through his pile of candy bars and kicking the back of the seat of the poor person in front of him. The guy looked disgruntled but didn’t dare complain, most likely for fear of setting off yet another tantrum.

  Finally, the pilot came back on over the speaker telling us to prepare for our descent, and I couldn’t help but notice that he sounded a lot more tired than he had when we took off. Maybe that story about him complaining hadn’t just been to get the mother to deal with her kid.

  When the wheels hit the ground, Holm rubbed his hands together in excitement.

  “NOLA, here we come,” he grinned.

  “Just don’t forget that we have a job to do,” I reminded him, rolling my eyes.

  “How could I forget?” Holm asked, feigning offense. “We are in the middle of an actual horror movie, after all.”

  With that, all the images of those dead kids in the Dominican Republic flashed back through my head.

  “Yes,” I agreed. “How could we forget?”

  CHAPTER 12

  Holm and I rented a car at the airport and drove to where we were supposed to meet Detective Barrett at the New Orleans Police Department station near the French Quarter.

  The city was bustling with life, just like I remembered it. There were boats of all kinds sailing in the ocean and cyclists cruising down the streets. Street artists hung out below the brightly colored condos and apartment buildings, painting in chalk on the street and juggling bowling pins.

  Holm grinned as we drove past a particularly enthusiastic gaggle of high school kids watching a street band.

  “Man, I love this city,” he said, shaking his head as he watched.

  The police department was a dull-looking building in comparison, made of brown brick with a small parking lot in the back.

  We parked and headed through the clear front doors.

  Inside were desks carpeted with narcotics detectives hard at work on their cases. Holm and I headed over to a woman who looked to be a secretary at a slightly larger desk off to the side.

  “We’re Agents Ethan Marston and Robbie Holm from the Military Border Liaison Investigative Services,” I said, and Holm and I both flashed her our badges. “We’re here to meet with a Detective George Barrett about one of our cases that may be of interest to you.”

  “Oh, yes,” the woman, who looked to be about fifty and was decked out in a polka-dot blouse and wide pointed black spectacles, said as she shifted several files from one mound to another on her desk. “He’s been expecting you. You can meet him in an interrogation room right down the hall and to the left.”

  She pointed to show us the way, and we followed her directions until we got to a classic interrogation room with only a tired-looking man in a ratty old suit inside. He was about forty-five, but he appeared older than his age, with salt-and-pepper hair and a few lines already creeping their way in around his eyes. His head was buried in a case file, and he was picking at one of his eyebrows.

  We knocked on the door, and he jumped a little but came to let us inside.

  “Hello,” he said, and his voice sounded tired like the pilot’s had. “Are you Diane’s guys?”

  “We are,” Holm chuckled. “Though I wouldn’t exactly phrase it that way.”

  “I’m glad you’re here,” he said, motioning for us to sit down across from him at the interrogation room table.

  It was a small room with a one-way window on the wall that we could no longer see through now that we were on the inside. The walls and floor were made out of concrete, and the table was made out of some kind of cheap fake wood.

  Holm and I took our seats across from the guy and shook his hand.

  “We�
�re glad to be here,” I said. “We’re sorry it took us so long.”

  “No, I understand how it can be,” Barrett sighed, running a hand through his thinning hair as he retook his seat. “Sometimes, I feel like the biggest obstacle to good police work is all these guys stuck behind a desk getting in the way.”

  “You’re not wrong about that,” Holm agreed.

  “So we hear that some weird stuff has been going on down here,” I said. “How about you fill us in on all that?”

  “Alright, well, it all started about two weeks ago,” Barrett said, taking a deep breath as he began. “Something just didn’t feel right. Our regular drug busts went down in frequency, and it wasn’t because we weren’t catching them anymore. Then our confidential informants started getting a little dicey.”

  “Dicey?” I repeated. “What do you mean by that?”

  “And how do you know the dealers didn’t just find a new way to evade you?” Holm added.

  “Because we would’ve heard whispers about that,” he explained. “And because the number of overdoses on the regular drugs went down at the hospitals accordingly. Not a ton, but enough to be notable. As for the confidential informants, they started evading us more than usual. Even the good ones who can always be trusted to deliver.”

  “Diane told us that they’ve gone completely silent now,” I said, narrowing my eyes at this. It was a troubling development if it was true. There was no doubt about that. “That was recent?”

  “Yes, just this morning,” Barrett said, his lips pursed into a thin line. I could tell that he was deeply troubled by all this. “Last week, when I heard from Diane about what you found down in Haiti, that the cartel down there was setting up an operation with this new drug here in New Orleans, it all started to make more sense. They’ve been good at evading us, though.”

  “Nothing in the hospitals until today?” I asked, a little confused by this. He shook his head. “Diane told us when we were still in Haiti that you were pretty sure the drug was circulating here. So how did you know?”

  “A hunch,” he said. “And because there were some reports to the emergency line about people acting strangely, and not in the usual way.”