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  Just then, my phone vibrated, and I received a string of texts from Nina.

  “She’s already at the bar!” I said, jumping up from my seat in my excitement. “We should head down there now, she says. There are lots of people there from the gang.”

  “Beck?” Barrett asked, jumping up as well and staring at my phone with a newfound intensity.

  “She doesn’t say,” I said, shaking my head as I went back over the messages. “But, we should head down there quickly.”

  With that, we all rushed out with our respective cars to head back down to the hotel. Barrett grabbed that other detective, whose name I thought was Lucas something, and brought him along for backup.

  It didn’t take long to get there, and I pumped on the gas to make us go faster. I still didn’t like the idea of Nina going back undercover, and now that things were escalating and we were going to make another bust, I liked it even less. Even so, I reminded myself that she was a professional, just like the rest of us, and she knew what she was doing.

  When we got to the hotel and bar, Holm and I pulled back into the parking lot and headed into the lobby, closely tailed by Barrett and Lucas-whatever-his-name-was.

  The same manager was standing there, gaping at us in his themed jacket.

  “You can’t be serious,” he huffed as we approached him. “Didn’t you make enough of a mess yesterday? I practically had to give my rooms away to keep the guests from checking out after that, and free room service for everyone! It’s like they think I lay their breakfast eggs myself.”

  He waved his hands in the air flamboyantly as he said all this.

  I blinked at the man and gave him a quizzical look.

  “You really don’t have your priorities straight, do you?” Holm asked him, giving voice to exactly what I was thinking myself.

  “What are you doing here?” the manager asked, his tone almost whining as he dropped his arms to his sides.

  “Look, the jig’s up, buddy,” Barrett said as he and the other detective caught up with us. “I’m Detective George Barrett. This is my partner Lucas Ryan, and I think you’ve already met the MBLIS agents.”

  He gestured between us and placed his hands on his hips as he gazed at the manager.

  “Yes, we’ve met,” he said, giving Holm and me the side-eye. “And what do you mean exactly by that?”

  “He means we know you’re running a drug operation above your bar,” I said shortly. “And we’re about to bust it. So how about we all drop the pretense, and you give us the keys?”

  I crossed my arms and joined Barrett in staring the manager down.

  He huffed again in response like this accusation deeply offended him. But his reaction said it all. His eyes darted around the hotel lobby, and he didn’t ask what we could mean by that, either.

  “Care to explain?” I asked when he didn’t respond any further, arching an eyebrow at him.

  He looked from Barrett and Ryan to Holm and me and back again as if deciding whether he was more afraid of us or whoever else he was tangled up with.

  Finally, he leaned in close to me and whispered, “I swear I wasn’t involved in anything. I just suspected. And it was only confirmed today, so you can’t prove I wasn’t going to tell, anyway.”

  I sighed and looked him over again.

  “If what you’re telling us is true, we might be able to cut you a deal,” I relented. “Might.”

  “Okay, okay,” he said eagerly, leaning in even closer to me now and looking like he was about to dish the latest gossip on a celebrity instead of revealing information on a major crime syndicate in the city. “They’ve been coming and going for a few months now, and I think my bosses are in on it.”

  “Your bosses?” I repeated, raising my eyebrows at him. “Who are they?”

  “They’re an old-money family here in NOLA, the Walters,” he said, still speaking in a low whisper. “Rumor has it that they’ve been searching for Jean Lafitte’s long lost treasure for decades, and they think these people will lead them to it.”

  I blinked at him again.

  “Treasure?” I repeated. “You can’t be serious.”

  “That’s what I heard,” the manager said, pressing a finger to his lips as if he didn’t want me to tell anyone. “That man, Clifton Beck, he was talking to them about it in the bar one night after work. I overheard part of it, but not much. Just that he would lead them to it if they helped him.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t know for sure about any of this until today,” I said, crossing my arms and giving him a skeptical look.

  “I didn’t!” he cried, holding up his hands in the air as if in self-defense. “Not for sure! Today they came in, and I heard them talking about some new drug. After what happened the other day, well, I’ll just say I can put two and two together.”

  I heaved a sigh. I didn’t exactly believe him on his timeline, but he’d been helpful enough.

  “Alright, maybe we can cut you a deal,” I muttered. “Maybe. And only if your story lines up with all the evidence and there’s no indication you were involved in any actual crimes in any way, and that includes aiding and abetting, not just doing it yourself.”

  “Of course, of course,” he said, holding up his hands again. “I wouldn’t dream of lying to you.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, arching an eyebrow at him and turning back to my colleagues.

  “I have more guys on the way in case we need back up,” Barrett said, nodding in the manager’s direction. “They can take care of him.”

  I nodded.

  “They’re above the bar now?” I asked the manager.

  “Last I saw,” he chirped. “But be careful, they’re armed!”

  Somehow, he didn’t sound all that concerned.

  I pulled out my phone and checked it again. I didn’t see anything new from Nina.

  “Should we head up there?” Holm asked. “Or wait?”

  I glanced back at the manager.

  “No, let’s go now,” I said definitively, leading the group away from the manager who looked all-too-eager to overhear our private conversation, and into a dark corner of the lobby beneath a painting of Lafitte’s ship. “We’ve already been seen. There’s no use giving them more time to flee.”

  Holm nodded, and so did Barrett.

  “What’s the game plan, then?” Ryan asked, looking between us. “Are we expecting another shootout?”

  He looked nervous like he hadn’t caught a case quite this big before.

  “We’re expecting everything,” I told him. “Because we could get anything. But what we really want is more information. If we can get it out of these guys where the source of their distribution center for this drug is, we’ll be able to cut it off at the source. And we still need to find Solomon.”

  “Huh?” Barrett asked, and I realized that I’d never found time to tell him about my call with Alejandra the night before.

  I quickly brought them up to speed.

  “Pirates from far-off lands and long lost treasure,” Barrett said, shaking his head and pursing his lips. “This is shaping up to be one hell of a case.”

  “You could say that again,” Holm chuckled. Then, turning to me, “Do you really think these guys could have Lafitte’s treasure?”

  “No idea,” I said. “I doubt it, but then again, stranger things have happened. And recently, too.”

  I thought back to how I’d found the long-lost pirate ship the Searcher’s Chance and the treasure it held a few months back. Indeed, stranger things had happened and continued to happen in my cases as of late. And they were getting stranger still.

  CHAPTER 21

  It had been a weird day so far for Nina.

  She was “released” from police custody early that morning with a couple of the other gangbangers she had come in with, just to keep up appearances and prevent suspicion from being drawn to herself.

  Then, she’d headed back to where she’d been staying on Rusty’s couch, only to get drilled by a couple of
the higher-ups about what she told the police, and what they told her, and why she’d been released.

  She knew after talking to them that the other guys who’d been released had faced a similar line of questioning, so she wasn’t too concerned about that. But things had just gotten dicier from there.

  After her drilling at the hands of the higher-ups, they’d asked her to show up to the bar connected to that hotel about an hour later. That immediately drew her suspicions, considering what went down at the hotel the day before. She’d tried to duck away to call Ethan, that MBLIS agent, a couple of times about it but couldn’t get away far enough or long enough to get anything through to him. So, she stayed the course.

  When she arrived at the bar, she approached a grouchy-looking bartender and inquired about the meeting. He immediately knew what she was talking about and led her to an upstairs apartment above the business.

  There, she was greeted by several goons she knew to be higher-ups, who said that Rusty had vouched for her, and she was the new Rusty now since he was stuck behind bars for the time being.

  Okay, then. This whole undercover thing was working out, after all.

  But it turned out it wasn’t that easy. Because that would just make her life too simple, and the universe didn’t like letting her off like that. Oh, well.

  Apparently, there was a whole slew of initiation rites involved in this whole thing. First, they tried to get her to take drugs, but she refused, saying Rusty must’ve told them she didn’t do any of that stuff. She liked to keep her mind sharp in case anyone tried to double-cross her. They seemed to buy that, and they kind of liked that she took herself so seriously. It meant she’d be good for moving high-risk product.

  The whole thing had been nerve-wracking, to say the least. Every time they asked her another question, Nina thought this was the one she would flub, that would reveal who she truly was and get her killed, and this mission blown. But somehow, she made it through.

  Finally, when she was just about to duck away and send a message Ethan’s way, there was a bang at the door, and more people showed up. In walked two gangbangers and a very beaten-up man who Nina thought she vaguely recognized, but she couldn’t really tell because of how swollen his face was from the beating he’d taken.

  “This is the one?” one of the gangbangers who’d been questioning her, a hulking man who, much to Nina’s amusement, unironically called himself Ice, asked the two new men.

  “Yep, he’s the one,” one of them said, thrusting the bleeding and whimpering man down on the floor in front of him.

  It was a dingy apartment, but a fairly spacious one. There was a kitchen with a long counter to host guests and a dusty old puke green couch in the middle of a wide and open room in front of the kitchen. But that was it. There was nothing else in the place, not even a TV. So Nina had been sitting on the floor until she got up to try to sneak into the bathroom to send Ethan a message, but now her seat was covered in the strangely familiar man’s blood.

  “Please,” the man sobbed at Ice’s feet. “I didn’t have anything to do with it. I didn’t know he was going to be so stupid, I swear.”

  Nina knew who it was now. A guy named Buddy who had helped welcome her into the gang. He was a fairly high-level dealer, and along with Rusty, he’d been a good friend to her, as much as a gangbanger could be a friend to an undercover FBI agent, that was.

  She cursed internally. If any of these guys had to be made an example of for the gang higher-ups, Buddy was the last one who deserved it. Jail time, sure, he deserved that. But he’d been kind to her, and that had been scarce these last few months undercover.

  “You were stupid enough to sell to him,” Ice said, leaning down and grabbing Buddy’s chin and yanking it upward, causing him to holler out in pain. “That makes you pretty stupid in my book.”

  Nina winced at the ongoing sounds of Buddy’s cries and wished she could do something without blowing her cover or putting herself in imminent danger.

  “Yeah, pretty stupid,” the other gang leader, who called himself Bruise, said as he paced back and forth behind the couch, grinning maniacally down at Buddy. “What is it we say about choosing our customers wisely? Were you sick that day or something, ‘cause I kind of remember beating that into you.”

  “I’m sorry,” Buddy sobbed, managing to wrench himself out of Ice’s grip and rest his chin on the floor. “It won’t happen again, I swear.”

  “You better bet it won’t happen again,” Bruise growled, stopping his pacing and staring right down at Buddy. “How about we teach this idiot a lesson, huh, Ice?”

  “Sounds good to me,” Ice said, cracking his knuckles and sneering at the poor man.

  Alright, Nina had to do something. This had gone too far.

  She looked down at her phone to see that Ethan had messaged her, and the gangbangers’ attention was divided, so she sent a quick series of texts back when she realized he was asking about this very apartment. Perfect. The MBLIS agents and Detective Barrett would come put a damper on this rousing party. But in the meantime, there was still Buddy to worry about…

  She took a deep breath, pocketed her phone, and stepped between Buddy and Ice.

  “Wait,” she said, already bracing for a bad reaction. “This one’s a good guy. I can vouch for him. So can Rusty, when he gets back. And he will get back because we have a good operation running here. There’s no use adding another body to it. That’ll just get the police sniffing around here even more.”

  She had to force herself not to wince or to close her eyes as she braced herself for what was bound to be a terrible reaction from Ice and Bruise. She imagined the latter got that name for a reason, after all.

  But instead, they looked at each other and then started to laugh.

  She blinked at them and then looked back at the other two gangbangers, the ones who had brought Buddy in. They looked just as confused and terrified as she was, though she hoped she wasn’t showing it on her face as much as they were.

  “Uh, what?” she asked at long last after this had gone on for several minutes, Ice and Bruise just hanging on each other and laughing their asses off.

  “You’ve got spunk, girl!” Ice cried, pointing at her and grinning.

  “Perhaps Rusty was right about you, after all,” Bruise chortled, holding his stomach as he continued to laugh.

  “Um, thank you?” Nina said, her voice trailing off as if to ask a question at the end there. She wasn’t sure how else to react to all this.

  “We like you,” Bruise said after several more minutes of this had passed, clapping Ice on the shoulder and nodding in her direction. “We think you’ll make a good addition to our team. Perfect for replacing this one.”

  He gestured in Buddy’s direction, and the poor man just started to whimper again. Blood was seeping out onto the old wood floor around him.

  “What’d he do?” Nina asked, afraid that she already knew the answer.

  “Sold to an idiot who got us caught,” Ice explained, his expression suddenly dark and humorless again. “Put a girl in the hospital.”

  “Would’ve been better if he just killed her,” Bruise added, shaking his head. “Stupid man, wouldn’t know how to commit a real crime if his life depended on it.”

  “Kind of does, now,” Ice shrugged.

  “He’s not our problem anymore,” Bruise said. Then, turning his attention back to Buddy, “He is. Sorry, Princess, I like you, but your friend is gonna have to go. Have to send a message to the rank and file somehow.”

  Nina groaned and rested her head in her hand.

  “Couldn’t you just…?” she started to protest, but Ice cut her off, holding up an enormous hand in front of her face.

  “Sorry, sweetheart,” he said, with an actual apologetic look on his face. “But if you want to keep that pretty face of yours, you’re gonna have to move.”

  Before Nina had a chance to decide what she was going to do next, there was another loud knock at the door.

  “Ne
w Orleans Police Department, open up,” a voice that Nina vaguely recognized as belonging to Detective Barrett called through the door.

  Almost as one, everyone in the room froze, even Buddy, who stopped his whimpering on the floor and lay very still.

  There was another knock, and then another command to open the door, both louder this time.

  “Who tipped them off?” Bruise hissed.

  Everyone shook their heads vigorously as if to say that they had nothing to do with it.

  “Alright, we’re coming in,” the detective called, and he and the MBLIS agents, along with another detective who Nina remembered from that morning was called Ryan, kicked in the door.

  It wasn’t hard to do, honestly. The wall looked like it’d been there for centuries and just needed a good kick to cave it in, and the door was no better.

  “Hey, you got a warrant?” Ice cried when he saw the law enforcement officers.

  “On its way, though I’ve got more than probable cause, I can assure you that,” Barrett said, glancing around the room and soaking in the scene. His eyes landed on Buddy sprawled across the floor. “It seems you’ve been busy.”

  “Oh, we’re always busy,” Bruise sneered, and Nina had to stop herself from rolling her eyes.

  “That so?” the other MBLIS agent, Agent Holm, asked, crossing around the room with his gun held comfortably at his side to survey the area. He nodded to Ryan and Marston, indicating that they should follow and check any other rooms for more people.

  Nina knew they wouldn’t find anything, though. If there was anyone else in this apartment, she would’ve known about it in the hours she’d spent cooped up in here answering all these questions.

  Sure enough, Ryan and Marston came back to nod that they were in the clear.

  “How did you find us?” Bruise growled. He looked like he wanted to hurl the lot of them all the way to the sun.

  “Some idiot bought your product, used it on a girl, led us here,” Marston explained with a nonchalant shrug. “The trail led us here.”

  “The trail…” Bruise sneered, growling down at Buddy again and then making a lunge for him.