Bayou Pirates Read online

  “Smart woman,” I told her with a small smile. She scowled back at me.

  “You okay there, Detective?” Holm asked Barrett.

  “Yes,” he said, though he grimaced as he tried to move his wounded arm. “I’ll just need to get patched up later.”

  I nodded in the direction of the still-closed door behind which Holm and I had heard noises when we first entered the suite.

  “There’s still somebody in there,” I muttered, so that hopefully whoever was behind it wouldn’t hear, not that it mattered much considering that we actually did have him surrounded now. “I think it might be Williams.”

  Barrett nodded, and Holm and I took a step toward the door, but the detective shook his head and held out a hand to stop us.

  “If you don’t mind, Agents, injured or not, I’d like to make this particular arrest myself,” he said, stepping past the officers and heading toward the door. “I’ve been after him for a long, long time.”

  I wasn’t one to begrudge a fellow officer of his long-sought prize.

  “Understood,” I said, nodding to him. “We’re right behind you.”

  Holm and I followed behind Barrett as about half of the officers lined up behind us, weapons drawn and at the ready. The other half hung back around the fallen gangbangers to make sure they stayed right where they were. I redrew my own weapon and held it at my side.

  Barrett rapped on the door with his good arm.

  “New Orleans Police Department, open up,” he said in a low, sharp voice. “We’ve got you surrounded and taken out your guys. You’d do well to cooperate.”

  Not a sound came from the room. Barrett looked around at Holm and me.

  “On the count of three?” he asked. We both nodded. “Alright, Williams, have it your way. We’re coming in.”

  Together, Holm and I stepped forward and prepared to kick the door in since we were uninjured.

  “One, two, three,” Barrett counted, and we rammed our way inside.

  It only took three kicks for the door to cave in, revealing a messy, empty bedroom with dirty clothes scattered across the floor. There were lines of coke next to a hotel business card on the bedside table.

  I looked around wildly and then saw that the window was wide open, the curtains flailing in the wind, the muggy climate of New Orleans wafting into the air-conditioned room.

  I looked at Barrett and Holm and nodded in the direction of the window. They understood, and the three of us moved as one in that direction, our firearms at the ready. The line of officers followed close behind us.

  When we reached the windowsill, Barrett peered over the side and then burst out laughing.

  “Williams,” he guffawed, shaking his head in disbelief. “Did you really think we wouldn’t check this way?”

  I leaned over after the detective to see a half-naked man in a hotel bathrobe hanging from the side of the hotel window, unable to reach an awning a long drop below without risking breaking his neck.

  “Well, I was hoping that the drop would seem closer down here than it did up here,” the man, Daryl Williams, grumbled as he continued to just hang there, chest hair blowing in the wind.

  Holm and I both reached over and grabbed either one of the man’s arms, pulling him up over the windowsill. He was a burly man, so it took some effort, but we made it there.

  Holm confiscated a handgun from the man’s bathrobe pocket once we had him propped against the wall below the window in a sitting position, grimacing as he did so at the prospect of getting so close to the man’s naked body.

  Barrett chuckled as he stood over Williams, his hands on his hips and his suit jacket poking out to either side of his hands.

  “I can’t believe I finally got you, Williams,” he said, shaking his head. “After all these years and all those busts, I find you dangling from a windowsill. Kind of lackluster, if I do say so myself.”

  “You didn’t catch me red-handed,” Williams sneered. “You can’t prove a damn thing. I didn’t shoot at you now, did I?”

  Barrett arched an eyebrow at him.

  “And you don’t think your friends out there are going to squawk, after the beating we just gave ‘em?” he asked with another chuckle. “Daryl, come on! We beat you. No judge in the city’s going to let you walk after this, no matter how much you try to pay him off with. It’s too clean a case!”

  “We’ll just have to see about that,” Williams grumbled, his head lolling to the side.

  I realized with some humor that he was high, which wasn’t exactly surprising given the idiocy of what he just tried to pull and the state of his bedroom, but still. You expected more from a kingpin like this.

  Holm seemed to be thinking similarly.

  “This guy’s your big criminal mastermind?” he asked, raising his eyebrows skeptically as he turned to Barrett.

  The detective laughed again.

  “I don’t know about ‘mastermind,’” he said with a shrug. “But he is Clifton Beck’s right-hand man, and he’s got friends in high places. He’s managed to evade us this long through a combination of luck and connections, and with Beck protecting him.”

  “So Beck’s the real brains behind the operation,” I gathered.

  Barrett nodded.

  “Yep, and this one’s the brawn,” he said, kicking at Williams’ foot with the toe of his boot. The drug dealer seemed too high to notice. “Anyway, now that we’ve finally got him, it shouldn’t be long until we’re able to track down Beck himself.”

  “Alright, Williams,” I said, leaning down, so I was eye level with the kingpin. “I get that your attention is probably waning here, but you’re going to need to tell us everything you know about this new drug from Haiti. You understand me?”

  I snapped my fingers in front of his face to get his attention, and he blinked at me stupidly, his expression vacant. I got the sense that this wasn’t just because he was high. He didn’t sound like the brightest bulb in the New Orleans criminal underworld.

  “How do you know about that?” he asked me finally, his words slurring together.

  “Oh, we know all about that,” I assured him. “My partner and I are federal agents. We just busted that entire cartel down in Haiti, rooted the drug out of the Dominican Republic. So you might want to save us all some time and tell us what you know because we all know that’s where we’re headed eventually, anyway.”

  “Alright,” Williams groaned, slamming his head back against the wall and wincing at the impact. “All I know is that we got a new shipment this morning, but it wasn’t what we expected. I was needling those guys for the details before you showed up. It’s their damn fault, I sent them to get what we were owed, and they might as well have come back empty-handed with the measly batch they brought back.”

  Williams nodded lazily in the direction of the suite’s front room, where the other gangbangers waited for us, flanked by a few police officers.

  With that, the burly kingpin promptly closed his eyes and drifted out of consciousness.

  Barrett leaned down and slapped him across the face several times, but it was no good.

  “Well, he’s out,” the detective said, pursing his lips. “We’ll take the lot of them to the hospital, get ‘em patched up, then interview the ones we can back at the station. That should tell us more.”

  “Another shipment, though,” Holm said, shaking his head. “That means a brand new influx of the drug onto the streets could be on its way.”

  “Let’s just take it one step at a time,” I told him. I didn’t even want to think about that yet.

  CHAPTER 16

  Nina somehow managed not to reveal her identity as an undercover FBI agent the entire time she and the other gangbangers were facing off against Detective George Barrett and those MBLIS agents.

  She knew that firing her weapon on a police officer, even while undercover, was a terrible idea for all kinds of reasons, so she pretended to be scared—or solely focused on her own self-preservation, depending on how the officers i
nterpreted her actions—and hide behind that damn loveseat.

  It took everything she had in her not to intervene on behalf of her fellow law enforcement officials, but she bit her lip and hunkered down. If at any point, she had really thought they needed her help to get out of there, she would’ve blown her cover. But barring those most extreme of circumstances, she wasn’t about to throw away months of hard work just because another agency decided to get involved in her case.

  And it was her case. It wasn’t her fault MBLIS got all messed up in it. How long had they been on the scene, a couple of weeks, tops? She had months sunk into this, and she wasn’t about to let them step in and take the credit for all of her hard work.

  She’d heard of MBLIS before. They did good work, especially for an agency with so few resources compared to heavy hitters like the FBI and the CIA. She’d never worked with them, though, and wasn’t quite sure what to make of the whole situation.

  Nina mulled through her options as one of the officers arrested her, put her in handcuffs, and drove her away in his police car. She knew she was going to have to come clean to Detective Barrett sometime soon, but she wanted to be away from any of the other gangbangers when she did so. Even after all that, she still wanted to go back undercover. She still had work to do.

  She’d heard good things about Barrett from the other gangbangers. Well, they thought they were bad things, which made them good things as far as Nina was concerned. He was tough and ruthless in pursuit of the dealers and kingpins, and he had a reputation that reflected it. She was sure she could get him to go along with her plan if she could just explain everything to him…

  “Come on, hurry it up,” the officer said, and Nina shook herself out of her daze to realize that the car door was open again, and he was trying to drag her out and into the police station near the French Quarter.

  “Right, sorry,” she grumbled, following his orders. “Can I get my phone call?”

  “Yeah, yeah, hold your horses,” the officer said, rolling his eyes as he ushered her and two of her gangbanger buddies inside.

  Everyone else had gone to the hospital to get their injuries treated. Well, everyone except Nina, these two imbeciles next to her in handcuffs, and the MBLIS agents, who followed behind the police car.

  Before she said anything to them, she had to talk to her boss at the FBI, Agent Peel. There was no way these MBLIS agents would believe her tall tale of undercover work without someone to back it up.

  But before she knew it, the officer was leading her into an interrogation room instead of letting her make that phone call. It wasn’t like she wasn’t expecting as much. If she was working this case, there was no way she would let such important suspects and witnesses get the word out to their buddies before questioning them first. But still, it irked her, and she’d hoped she would be able to confess to Barrett instead of these two federal agents on her own. She wasn’t sure why, but she felt like a local detective would be more amenable to her story. Federal agencies didn’t tend to like sharing cases.

  At least she was alone now. She’d worried that they’d try to question her and the others together, at first, to get a sense for their dynamic. But they opted for the separation route, which she had to admit was another smart move. These agents were far from dumb. That much had been clear from the get-go. Separating them would make any one of them more likely to crack, and it would be easier to pick out differences between their stories.

  It wasn’t long before the MBLIS agents showed up. They must not have questioned anyone before her. Yet another smart move, considering that she was the one to tell the others not to shoot at the officers and to disengage from the battle before things got ugly. They must think she was scared, and therefore easier to crack, or smart and selfish, and more likely to turn her friends in for a good deal.

  The interrogation room was small and cramped, and painfully gray, the chair hard and uncomfortable to match this aesthetic, and this all somehow exacerbated Nina’s anxiety and the burning thirst in her throat. It had been a long day, and she hadn’t had much time to take care of her basic needs. She’d never been on this side of the interrogation table before, but she had to admit it was more intimidating than she had imagined.

  “Hello,” one of the agents, a handsome man with dark hair and a chiseled jawline, said, giving her a warm smile as he sat down at the interrogation room table across from her. “I’m Agent Ethan Marston, and this is my partner, Robbie Holm. We’re with MBLIS. That stands for…”

  “The Military Border Liaison Investigative Services,” Nina finished for him with a wry smile to match his warm one. “I know who you are.”

  He blinked at her, clearly not having expected this. She had to chuckle under her breath at this reaction.

  It was true that she hadn’t wanted to come clean so soon, but now that she was here, she figured she might as well get it over with.

  The other agent, a burlier fellow with kind eyes, did a double-take and then gave a low, nervous laugh.

  “Uh, you’ve heard of us?” he asked, raising his bushy eyebrows at her.

  “You could say that,” she chuckled, deciding to have a little fun with these guys. She moved to cross her arms and then realized that this was a little difficult with the handcuffs on, and then awkwardly let her hands fall to her lap.

  “Here, let me get those for you,” the kind one, Marston, told her, getting up and pulling a key out of his pocket to undo the handcuffs.

  She knew this was supposed to look like a spontaneous gesture of goodwill, but it was all planned. Why else would he have gotten the key from the officer? Nina had utilized similar tactics herself more times than she could count.

  His touch was warm against her calloused skin, and she couldn’t help letting her gaze linger on him as he undid the handcuffs and pulled them away. He really was a good looking man, though she tried not to focus on this fact, to push the thought away.

  She rubbed her sore wrists when they were free and nodded to him in thanks.

  “Appreciate it,” she mumbled.

  He nodded and smiled at her again.

  “No problem,” he said as he crossed back over to his own side of the table, the warmth of his touch lingering behind him. “We can see you’re not a threat.”

  Nine raised her eyebrows at this and really did cross her arms this time.

  “And why’s that?” she asked, giving each of them a pointed look.

  They both became flustered at this, knowing that she was insinuating they believed this because she was the only woman in the group of gangbangers.

  “No, it’s not that,” the burly one, Holm, rushed to say, running a hand through his hair nervously.

  “It’s just that you didn’t shoot, and you tried to convince your friends not to,” Marston said hurriedly. “That’s all. We could tell you have a level head on your shoulders.”

  She let them sweat for a few more seconds and then burst out laughing.

  “Don’t worry, I’m just messing with you,” she laughed, grinning at them and shooting a wink in Marston’s direction.

  He blinked at her again and exchanged an uneasy look with his partner. Then they both started laughing along with her, though cautiously at first.

  “Okay,” Holm said. “How about you tell us how you heard of MBLIS again? Is the gang talking about us?”

  Ah, Nina realized what they were doing here now. She was mad at herself for failing to see it before. MBLIS were the ones who busted the cartel down in Haiti, and these guys were the agents those Haitian gangbangers had been talking about.

  She gave them an approving look. They must be good to have taken down a whole drug cartel on their own. She’d assumed it was one of the bigger agencies, with more agents and resources than MBLIS had, but she had to admit she had some begrudging respect for them now, even though they were crashing her case.

  “No, nothing like that,” she chuckled, shaking her head. “Though now that you mention it, some things are making more sense
now that you’ve shown up. Anyway, I’d be a terrible agent if I didn’t know all the agencies and what they do, even the smaller ones like yours.”

  She gave them a crooked grin on that last part, teasing them a bit. It was all in good fun. The different agencies liked to make jabs at each other, but they all knew they were on the same team at the end of the day. She still didn’t like them sweeping in on her big case, though.

  Both MBLIS agents did a double-take now.

  “Uh, what?” Holm asked, his mouth hanging open.

  “Look, you guys haven’t let me make my phone call yet, so I can’t prove it to you right now, but my name’s Agent Nina Gosse,” Nina explained, leaning forward on the table on her elbows. “I’m with the FBI, and I’ve been undercover with this street gang for a couple of months now. That’s why I didn’t shoot at you, not because I’m a coward who’s only looking out for my own neck. And you guys are messing with my case. You know that?”

  Marston and Holm exchanged a look again. Now they both looked shocked. Neither of them seemed to be able to muster the words to respond, so she continued.

  “But you’re here, and I get the sense that you’re already pretty deep in this, too, so we might as well work together,” she said with a shrug, leaning back in her seat again and recrossing her arms.

  The MBLIS agents just stared blankly back at her for a few moments, and she couldn’t help but snicker.

  “Look, are you boys still in there because otherwise, I’m going to have to ask to take my phone call now,” she said with a shrug. “I’ll get Agent Peel on the phone—that’s my boss at the FBI—and get him to confirm my story with your boss at MBLIS. Then we can get going on this thing, ‘cause we’ve got bad guys to catch.”

  Marston shook his head as if to clear it and gave her yet another bewildered look.

  “Uh, we’re definitely going to have to confirm that story,” he said, giving another low, nervous laugh. “But I guess you wouldn’t have any reason to lie. It’s not like we’re not going to check up on it and find out if you were lying.”