Bayou Pirates Read online

I’d sustained the injury when a particularly robust Haitian gangbanger tweaking out on something unpleasant head-butted me hard in the forehead when he attempted to get away from Holm and me. We’d ended up killing him in the process and then stealing his car afterward so we could find our way to the ghost ship on the island’s coast.

  Holm filled the other two agents in on our exploits on the island of Hispaniola as quickly as he could.

  “Zombie powder?” Muñoz scoffed at one point in the story, shaking her head dismissively. “No way.”

  “I thought Diane was pulling our leg on that one,” Birn mused, giving a low whistle.

  “We wish,” Holm grinned, though he looked rather pleased with himself to be coming back with such a crazy story to tell.

  “Well, that really is something,” Birn said when Holm finished his retelling, with only a few small, self-aggrandizing embellishments along the way. Then, turning to me, “Is all of that really true?”

  “More of it than you would expect,” I chuckled. “All the craziest parts are, anyway.”

  “Holy moly,” Birn said quietly, giving another low whistle. “I never would’ve believed it.”

  “I still don’t,” Muñoz said, leaning back in her chair and crossing her arms. But she shot me a smile.

  “Are Bonnie and Clyde back yet?” I asked.

  The two MBLIS lab techs who had joined us in the Dominican Republic had taken another flight back since their schedule was wrapped up with the hospital’s, and Diane had trouble finding four tickets for all of us on the same plane. With my excursion to the mall with Holm, they very well could’ve made it home ahead of us.

  “Yeah, they stopped in about twenty minutes ago to check in with Diane and drop some stuff off at the lab,” Birn said. “But they didn’t last long. Said they were beat and went home, though they didn’t look half as bad as you.”

  “Well, they didn’t jump out into the middle of the ocean off an exploding old ship now, did they?” Holm asked with a laugh.

  “I suppose not,” Birn chuckled.

  “When did that start?” I asked, jerking my chin in the direction of the yelling coming from Diane’s office.

  “Right after Bonnie and Clyde left, I think,” Muñoz said, eyeing Diane’s office door with concern. “I’m not sure who she’s talking to, exactly. Probably one of those pencil pushers who’ve been holding this whole thing up for a while now.”

  After my little excursion to take down the New York City mafia with my colleagues and restore MBLIS’s funding, things had been a little slow getting back up and running. We hadn’t had a mission for weeks until Alejandra called me about the body of an American man turning up on the Haitian-Dominican border, and it felt like all Diane had done all day before that was argue with these insufferable bureaucratic types. It made me glad that I was still out in the field instead of stuck behind a desk.

  “Hey, did Diane say anything about a…” I began, meaning to ask about the book-shaped package she had told Holm would be waiting for me when she got back. I hoped that it was Grendel’s journal.

  But just then, Diane came huffing out of her office, slamming the door shut behind her with such force that I could feel the vibrations from the blow running through my wooden desk.

  “Everything okay there, boss?” Holm asked her.

  “Oh, you’re back,” she said, giving Holm and me a half-hearted glance.

  She looked winded, and her usually perfectly straight hair was a bit disheveled. She was wearing one of her characteristic dark pantsuits, and for once looked to be almost her true age, around forty. Usually, she came off as quite a bit younger.

  “Just got in,” I said. “What’s the story?”

  I nodded back in the direction of her office, where she had been yelling on the phone just moments before. She rolled her eyes.

  “Just that same guy from before,” she said, clearly still annoyed. “The one who was trying to hold us up from sending you down to the Dominican Republic in the first place. I don’t know what his deal is.”

  “Who is he?” Holm asked, leaning forward on his desk with concern.

  “No one important,” she said dismissively, waving away the notion. “Just another pencil pusher who doesn’t want to do any more paperwork than he has to and gets mad when I try to get him to do a little more. Doesn’t care if it would actually help law enforcement for him to do it, apparently.”

  “Ah, one of those types,” I said, nodding knowingly. “That would be frustrating.”

  “You have no idea,” Diane said in a droll tone, leaning back and resting against the side wall of the office for a moment.

  “Did Bonnie and Clyde drop off the drug sample, then?” Holm asked. “These guys told us they beat us here.” He jerked his thumb in Muñoz and Birn’s direction.

  “Yes,” Diane said with a sigh of relief. “That’s the good news. We have the sample of the drug, and we’re working with the Navy to excavate the sunken ship off the coast of Haiti as we speak. If all goes well, we’ll have another sample to compare it to, which will go far in helping authorities identify if anyone’s taken it in New Orleans.”

  Bonnie and Clyde had managed to reconstruct the new zombie powder drug out of ingredients confiscated by the Dominican authorities on a drug bust a couple of weeks prior to our arrival on the island. If they could just also have a sample of the version Solomon claimed to have sent to the United States, we would be ten steps further toward ending this whole thing.

  The issue was that there were several versions of the drug already. There was the one that was originally introduced in Haiti some months ago, which, according to Solomon, had a forty percent mortality rate for those who ingested it. Then there was the Dominican version, with a mortality rate of around twenty-five percent. The American version was supposedly the best yet, with a death rate of around five percent.

  Solomon and his men had worked hard to lower that death rate as they introduced their drug to new markets. It was easier for them to get away with a higher death rate in their home country of Haiti, where the government was weak and easily influenced. It was harder, but still not all that difficult, to get away with it in the neighboring Dominican Republic, which was why they worked to lower the death rate before introducing the drug there.

  They got it down to five percent for the American market, knowing that so many mysterious deaths would no doubt alert the authorities here to the existence of the drug. But even so, five percent was still far too high. And then there was the issue of the other ninety-five percent, who would lose control of their own minds and bodies after ingesting the stuff.

  The good thing was that because Alejandra called me, MBLIS already knew about the drug. And Diane had a contact she had been talking to with the New Orleans Police Department, so they had at least a general idea of what to look out for.

  We were on the case, though. Solomon was already a good few steps behind where he wanted to be because of that, and because he lost his standing in Haiti and the Dominican Republic when the ghost ship was destroyed and Bonnie and Clyde taught the authorities in those two countries how to identify the drug.

  “That’s good to hear,” Holm said. “Hopefully, they’ll come up with something.”

  “Do you think we’ll have to head down to NOLA?” I asked, a little too eagerly. As tired as I was from our last mission, after the weeks-long dry spell our office had had before that, I would jump on any case I could get my hands on.

  “I hope not,” Diane said, pursing her lips. “But I wouldn’t doubt it. I’ve been talking with my contact down there, Detective George Barrett. He’s still keeping his eye out and his ear to the ground, but he needs more to go off before he finds anything out for sure. That’s why we need the excavation of the sunken ship to work out for us so badly.”

  “We’re good to go down there,” I assured her. “We can just take the night to get some rest and then head out tomorrow morning.”

  Diane gave me a skeptical look.

&n
bsp; “Ethan, you look like you were hit in the head with a brick,” she said simply. “It would be malpractice for me to send you out in the field right now.”

  “I’m fine,” I promised her, waving away the concern. “I just need a night to rest up, is all, and then I’ll be good as new.”

  Truthfully, I was tired as a dog. But there was no way I was going to let another team of agents sweep this case out from under Holm and me.

  “He’ll be fine, Diane,” Holm said, reaching across the space between his desk and mine to clap me on the shoulder. “I’ll vouch for him.”

  “Forgive me if I’m not impressed,” Diane said, turning her skeptical look on Holm now, arching an eyebrow at him. “But it is true that you’ve been on this case from the get-go, and you two know more about it than anyone, except maybe Bonnie and Clyde. So I promise that if this turns into another mission, it’ll be yours. Don’t get too excited, though. If they can handle this themselves in NOLA, that’s the best outcome for everyone.”

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  “Thanks, Diane,” I said, nodding to her. “We appreciate it.”

  “Yeah, we appreciate the vote of confidence, boss,” Holm said wryly, but he was smiling at her.

  “Hey, we’re always game to go if they can’t,” Birn offered with a mischievous grin in our direction, gesturing between himself and his own partner.

  “No way you’re grabbing this one out from under us,” I shot back.

  “Yeah, we’ve got real-life zombies going on here,” Holm added with a smirk. “This is the case of a lifetime.”

  “Can’t blame me for trying, then,” Birn said, holding up his hands to show he’d given up.

  “Still, we’re always here,” Muñoz reminded Diane with a wink.

  “Oh, I’m aware,” Diane said dryly. “Everyone wants in on this case, apparently. The other lab techs all practically pounced on Bonnie and Clyde when they got back. I, on the other hand, just want this headache to be over.”

  I pressed two fingers to my forehead at the mention of this. My own head pounded from my injury back in Haiti, though I’d done my best to ignore it. The Dominican doctor had sent me home with some pills to take for the pain. I’d need to remember to take some that night because who knew when I’d have an event-free night alone again.

  “Anything else for us here?” I asked Diane, not wanting to miss out on any potential leads. “Bonnie and Clyde didn’t say anything else?”

  “No, not for now,” Diane said, heaving a long sigh and leaning her head back against the wall. “This has been a difficult case for everyone. Probably best to take a night and recover, at the very least.”

  That was just what I had been hoping to hear. Though I was itching to get to the bottom of the next part of this case, and even more concerned that this drug was circulating in New Orleans without our knowledge, I could use some rest.

  “I suppose we could take a few hours off,” Holm said, propping his feet up on his desk, lackadaisically, and giving an exaggerated yawn. “We have been busy.”

  “That’s an understatement,” I murmured, fingering my forehead wound again.

  “Did you really jump off an exploding ship?” Birn asked, his eyes gleaming with something between excitement and aversion at the idea.

  “Yep,” Holm confirmed with a low belly laugh. “As I said, it was one for the record books.”

  “You could say that again,” I muttered. “Hey, Diane, what’s this Holm told me about a package that arrived while we were away?”

  I’d almost forgotten again about Grendel’s journal. This case had been so eventful and outlandish that my lifelong pursuit of the lost pirate ship he captained, the Dragon’s Rogue, had all but shifted to the back of my mind. My grandfather, who raised me after my parents passed away, had been obsessed with finding it. And one day off the coast of Miami, I happened upon a lead in the remains of the man for whom it was built, Lord Jonathan Finch-Hatton.

  DNA evidence revealed that Finch-Hatton was actually a distant ancestor of mine. All of a sudden, my grandfather’s obsession with the ship had become more clear, and my own desire to locate it was strengthened even further. This was only partially because the ship was thought to have sunk along with a lot of treasure.

  In the time since happening on Finch-Hatton’s remains, I’d found numerous other clues as to the ship’s whereabouts, including pages pulled out of an old journal that turned out to be Grendel’s, the pirate who took over the Dragon’s Rogue at some point. Finding the rest of it would no doubt be the key to unlocking many of the mysteries around the old pirate ship.

  Diane gave me a knowing grin.

  “Yes, it’s right here,” she said, walking back into her office and retrieving a small book-shaped package from it. “I kept it safe until you got back.”

  I jumped up eagerly from my desk and took it from her. I still wasn’t certain that it was what I hoped it was, but just holding the possibility in my hands was enough to get my heart racing.

  I balanced its weight in my hands, just to be sure that it was real. It was. And it bore a return address in Virginia, though there was no name attached to it.

  “Thank you,” I said, giving Diane a genuine smile.

  She raised her eyebrows at me.

  “Is that what I think it is?” she asked.

  “You’d better bet it is,” Holm said, rising from his desk and clapping me on the shoulder with a grin.

  “Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” I reminded Holm, though I was also reminding myself as my excitement grew at the prospect of finally getting what I’d searched for after so long. “I don’t know yet. And the museum was being difficult about getting it to me in the first place, so I don’t see why they would just up and send it like this.”

  This was true enough. My attempts to contact the museum had been frustrating, to say the least. They didn’t want to give up what they saw as their property, even if I was a descendent of Finch-Hatton’s.

  “Well then, open it and see,” Holm urged, gesturing at the package.

  I looked down at it again. It was a simple brown package with no adornments, with the addresses—both my own and that of whoever had sent it to me—written on it in black sharpie. It seemed so… unofficial. And anti-climactic, in a way.

  I reached up to pop the top off, but my hand faltered, and I looked away from it, shaking my head.

  “No, not now,” I said apologetically. “I just need to get home and get some rest.”

  “Really? Okay,” Holm said, clearly disappointed.

  It must’ve seemed strange to him that after so long a wait, I would want to wait more. Hell, it was strange to me. But something made me want to do this alone. And my head really was killing me.

  “I’ll talk to you later, then,” I said, waving goodbye to Diane and the other agents, stifling an exaggerated yawn of my own, and heading out the door.

  CHAPTER 3

  I drove directly back to my houseboat without stopping for food or anything. That crap Holm had fed me at the mall was still sloshing around in my stomach, and paired with my head pain, I wasn’t in the mood for anything else right then.

  I had another address officially on record, but my houseboat was my true home. Why would I want to live anywhere but the water after the life and career I’d had? It was where I was at my best.

  I headed inside and took a long, hot shower, washing off the last of the grub from our trip to Hispaniola. Then I grabbed some water from the kitchen sink to take those pills before plopping right down on the couch with the parcel from Virginia in hand.

  I took my pills and downed the whole glass of water in several gulps. Then, I leaned back on the couch and stared at the thing, still not quite sure whether I wanted to open it or not.

  My reporter friend, Tessa Bleu, and I had met with an old man back in New York to discuss the journal pages that I already had. He told us about the museum in Virginia and seemed certain that it held all the answers I sought about
the Dragon’s Rogue, so much so that he predicted I would find the ship in short order after receiving the journal.

  Ever since then, I had been focused on finding the journal and set all my other musings on the old pirate ship aside. And then, when Holm and I caught this crazy case down in Haiti, everything that wasn’t about this strange zombie drug had been moved to the back-burner by necessity.

  Now, finally faced with the potential key to finding what I’d searched for, I was strangely hesitant, and I wasn’t sure why. Maybe part of me was afraid that Grendel’s journal wouldn’t hold the answers I wanted so badly. Maybe I was afraid that it would, and it would lead to nothing. Perhaps I even didn’t want the search itself to end since it had been such a big part of my life for so long.

  Finally, my fingers almost shaking, I pried open the package and pulled out what was inside. It was now or never. For all I knew, Holm and I could be shipped off to New Orleans on another mission of a lifetime the next morning.

  As I pulled the package open, I was overcome by another wave of tiredness, but this time with some relief from my pain. The pills were kicking in. But I didn’t care much about that right then. I wanted to know what was inside.

  It was a book, alright, brown and leather-bound, with crumpled old yellow pages covered in black ink. I flipped through it enough to see that it was, in fact, a journal and that the handwriting matched that of the few pages I already had.

  I couldn’t help myself. I was overcome with excitement and relief at finally having the journal in my possession. I realized that I had been most afraid that the package wasn’t what I thought it was in the first place, but now that I knew, I couldn’t have been more glad.

  And I wanted nothing more than to share my victory with Tessa.

  Tessa Bleu had been with me when I found Jonathan Finch-Hatton’s remains, and she had been a key player in many of my discoveries since. She’d even helped with my attempts to sway the museum in Virginia to give me the journal, attempts that I now knew had been successful.

  It didn’t feel right not to include her in this.