Bayou Pirates Read online

  So, I pulled out my new phone and dialed her number. I’d had the geek squad guy input all my old contacts into the new phone so that I wouldn’t have to mess with it.

  I checked the time. It was only 4:30. Most people were still working. But Tessa was a photojournalist and kept odd hours, so it was possible that she would pick up.

  She did, and on the first ring, no less.

  “Ethan!” she cried excitedly when she picked up. “It’s good to hear from you! I was just wondering how you’ve been doing.”

  It was wonderful to hear her voice. We’d corresponded briefly about the museum via email on my flight to the Dominican Republic last week, but this was the first time we’d spoken since I left New York. The sound of her voice never failed to bring a smile to my face.

  “Yes, I’ve been thinking about you, too,” I said honestly, unable to keep the smile off my face.

  “You sound tired,” she said, her usually cheerful voice now filled with concern. “You were on your way to a mission when we last talked. Are you back yet?”

  “You could say that,” I chuckled.

  And then I told her the story of everything that had gone down on the island of Hispaniola and everything that had yet to go down in New Orleans. She listened attentively and with bated breath as I moved through the story beat by beat.

  “Oh my,” she breathed when I’d finished the tale. “That is… something. Ethan, are you sure you’re not messing with me?”

  She laughed a little under her breath, a wonderfully cute sound as if she was confident that I was pulling her leg.

  “No joke,” I assured her. “I honestly wish it was one, though I’ll be talking about this mission for ages. I’m worried about people in New Orleans, and to a lesser extent, about the people back on the island who are going to have to deal with the fallout from all this. I’m confident they’ll have it handled, but it will be tough going for a while. There’s no doubt about that.”

  “Unbelievable,” Tessa said, and I could almost hear her shaking her head over the phone. “There’s a story in there somewhere. Everywhere, probably.”

  “Yes, there is,” I agreed with a chuckle. “But you’re not getting anywhere near it until this gets solved. It’s far too dangerous.”

  “Usually, I’d argue, but I think I’ll have to agree with you on this one,” Tessa relented. “Besides, I’m on another hot story right now, all the way up in Nova Scotia.”

  “Oh?” I asked, raising my eyebrows. “What’s that?”

  Tessa always had something interesting going on. It was one of the things I liked the most about her, one of the many, many things.

  “An influx of new wildlife,” she said, her voice growing more and more excited as she explained. She went on, but I didn’t quite understand. I just liked listening to the sound of her voice and hearing her be so passionate about something.

  “You’ll have to send it to me when you’re done with it,” I said honestly when she had finished with her explanation. “I can’t wait to see those pictures.”

  “I’ll be sure to send you a copy,” she said. “Just so long as you promise to keep me updated on whatever you’ve got going on down there. You’ve been holding out on me with this one!”

  “Well, it’s all happened very fast,” I said, running a hand through my hair. “I haven’t even had the time to think about anything but this case for the better part of a week.”

  “I can believe it,” Tessa laughed. “What with all the stepping off exploding ships and all, I’m surprised that you called me instead of heading straight to bed.”

  I yawned instinctively at the mention of this possibility.

  “Yes,” I said, doing my best to stifle it. “That would be the safer option. But I just had to talk to you, and to update you on something.”

  “Oh?” Tessa asked, clearly intrigued. “All the zombies and ghost ships weren’t enough for one week?”

  “Apparently not,” I chuckled. “When I got back to Miami, Grendel’s journal was there waiting for me at the office.”

  There was a beat of silence as Tessa took this information in.

  “Really?” she asked finally. “It just… showed up there?”

  “Yeah,” I said with a shrug, pulling out what remained of the packaging and examining it again. “The return address is from Virginia, but there’s no name. I assume it’s from the museum there. Strange that they’d just send it to me out of the blue like that when they were so difficult about the whole thing before. You didn’t have anything to do with it?”

  “No, nothing,” Tessa said, sounding more than a little wary. “In fact, I spoke with them just this morning, and they didn’t say anything about it. However, that’s not saying much. As soon as I told them why I was calling, they hung up on me.”

  “They hung up on you?” I repeated, raising my eyebrows again and leaning forward on the couch. “Why would that be? Did they say anything else?”

  “No, nothing,” Tessa confirmed. “As soon as they realized who I was, they slammed the phone down.”

  “Maybe it was because they already sent me the journal?” I asked, knowing that I was grasping at straws here. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense either way.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Tessa said, humming gently as she thought this over. “Hm… You’re sure it’s the journal?”

  I gave the book another look, thumbing through the pages. I would’ve read some of it, but the world was starting to swim pleasantly around me. Those pills were really kicking in, and I wasn’t sure that I was up to the task of searching through it right then. Especially not while I was also trying to focus on talking with Tessa.

  “It certainly looks like it,” I said, setting the journal aside again. “It’s the same handwriting and everything else that I remember, though I haven’t tried to read any of it yet. I wanted to call you first. I thought you should be the first to know.”

  I realized that this was part of why I hadn’t wanted to open the package back in the office. It felt right to include Tessa in all of this since she’d been in it with me from almost the beginning.

  “I’m flattered,” Tessa said, and I could almost see her tantalizing look. I wished I was with her more than ever at that moment. “Still, it seems strange that they would just send it to you like that after they’ve been giving us such a runaround. What was the return address again?”

  I read it out to her, and I heard Tessa jotting it down somewhere on the other line. There was the sound of waves in the background, and I realized she was probably on location in the middle of a photoshoot up in Canada.

  “Thanks,” she said when I had finished. “I’ll look it up later and maybe give the museum another call if you don’t mind. I know you’re busy right now, and I should have some downtime in the morning.”

  “That would be great, thank you,” I said, sinking back into the couch with some relief. “It’ll be good to have one less thing on my plate.”

  “You sound like you’re expiring,” Tessa said with a small laugh. “So I’ll let you go. But we’ll stay in touch, and I’ll get back to you tomorrow. And take care of yourself, okay, Ethan?”

  “I will,” I promised her. “And I’ll look through this journal. See what I can find.”

  “I’ll talk to you soon,” she said, before clicking away as the line went dead.

  I reached over to pick up the journal and start to thumb through it again, but the world had gone very blurry by then, my eyelids drooping down further with every passing second. I was asleep before I could even set my phone down.

  CHAPTER 4

  The next thing I knew, I was waking up sprawled across the couch, still in my street clothes from the day before. My new phone and Grendel’s journal were both on the floor, and daylight was poking in through the curtains above the window. The slow lap of water against my houseboat lulled me back into consciousness.

  I pulled my arm, stiff and stretched across the couch cushions, down to check my watch. I was a
ghast to find that it was morning already. I’d slept for over twelve hours. I couldn’t even remember a time when that had happened before.

  It was still early, however, so I had more than enough time to grab some breakfast and get into the office without missing anything.

  Seeing the journal on the floor, I quickly checked to make sure that it was undamaged and placed it gingerly on the coffee table in front of the couch.

  As I got up and made myself some cereal and toast, I realized that I felt a lot better. Not as good as new, but decent enough. I’d needed all that rest after all. I wasn’t as concerned about being sent out on another mission right away anymore. It turned out good old sleep was the best medicine after all.

  After eating three bowls of cereal—apparently, I’d worked up quite an appetite while I was asleep—I left my houseboat and headed back into the office, leaving Grendel’s journal behind to look through later. I had a feeling that I’d have more than enough to keep me busy at work that day without adding anything more to the mix.

  When I got back into the office, the same collection of agents were back at their desks: Holm, Muñoz, and Birn. I figured the rest of them were out on assignment or, more likely given how slow MBLIS had been as of late, not in yet.

  “So?” Holm asked without even saying hello to me, waggling his eyebrows in my direction the second I walked in the door. “Was there a map to buried treasure in that package? Does ‘X’ mark the spot?”

  I rolled my eyes at him.

  “Nothing that blatant,” I said as I took my seat across from him at my desk. “But yeah, it looks like it’s Grendel’s journal, after all.”

  “Really?” Holm replied, leaning back in his chair and giving a low whistle. “Damn. You’re gonna be rich, Marston.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I chuckled. “If we find anything, I might not even get to keep it.”

  “‘We?’” Holm repeated. “So, you’re taking me along after all?”

  “I meant Tessa,” I said, realizing that this was true as I said it. “She’s been with me since the beginning. She made me promise to take her with me when I finally find the Dragon’s Rogue.”

  “Hey, and I haven’t been with you the whole time?” Holm asked with a fake sense of offense. He grinned and winked at me to show that it was all in jest.

  “I’ll keep you in the loop, I promise,” I assured him.

  “Just so long as you buy me a drink when you get all that loot,” Holm added. “You are that Lord-What’s-His-Face’s descendent, after all. Who else is gonna get it?”

  “Fair point,” I chuckled. “Though I’m sure some bureaucrat somewhere will have something to say about it. We’re getting ahead of ourselves, though. I haven’t even read the thing yet.”

  “You haven’t?” Holm asked, incredulous. “Why wouldn’t you read the thing? I’d have thought that you’d spend all night looking through it.”

  “I planned to,” I sighed, leaning back in my chair and shrugging. “But then I took some of those pills that doctor back in the Dominican Republic gave me, and I went right to sleep. Well, after I talked to Tessa, that is.”

  “I’m actually glad to hear that,” Holm chuckled, giving me a wry smile. “I was worried that you were going to go headlong into our next mission with a concussion and no rest to show for it.”

  “Yeah, I guess I was, too,” I said. “It was a good thing. I never even made it to my bed. I don’t even remember the last time I slept that much. If we’re still here tonight, I’ll take a look through that journal, though. Tessa’s going to look into some things about it, too, this morning. That should help.”

  “What’s to look into?” Holm asked, furrowing his brow together. “You have it now, right?”

  “Yeah, it’s just that the package is… a little strange,” I admitted. “There was no name on the return address, and the museum never told me it was coming. There are just a few loose ends.”

  “Nothing ever comes easy with you, does it?” Holm asked, shaking his head at me. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, Marston.”

  “I guess not,” I chuckled. “It just seems a little too good to be true. Speaking of the mission, is there anything new?”

  As if on cue, I heard Diane’s voice come railing out from behind her closed office door. I couldn’t tell what she was saying, but it certainly didn’t sound pleasant.

  Holm shifted his eyes warily in that direction.

  “More of the same, it sounds like,” he said. “Though I just got here. Hey! Birn! What’s been going on in there?”

  He yelled to get Birn’s attention across the room, where he and Muñoz were discussing something over their own adjoined desks. Holm jerked his thumb back at Diane’s office for emphasis.

  “What do you expect?” Birn called back with a shrug. “More yelling at bureaucrats. Makes me never want to get promoted, I’ll tell you that much.”

  I had to say that I shared that sentiment. You could never take me out of the field if it killed me, but after seeing Diane trying to deal with all that nonsense with our funding, and now the slow roll to get us back up and running afterward, I was confident that no amount of money could get me to take a desk job.

  “Did she say anything before she went in there?” I asked the other agents.

  “She grumbled something about expecting a call back from that guy she was yelling at yesterday when I got in,” Muñoz explained. “Then she just locked herself in her office with some coffee. I think she was going to talk to that guy she knows in New Orleans, too, but I don’t think she’s gotten to him yet.”

  “Yeah, the first time we heard her talk, she was just yelling,” Birn said with a low laugh. “And she never does that with other cops. Just the pencil pushers.”

  I nodded. This was true enough, though Diane had far more patience for these types than I knew I ever would.

  “Nothing from Bonnie and Clyde?” I asked.

  “Haven’t seen them,” Muñoz shrugged. “Though I’m sure they’ll have something for you today.”

  “Hey, what are you working on?” I asked, nodding to the papers that she and Birn were huddled over. “Did you catch a case?”

  Both agents laughed in unison.

  “We wish,” Birn scoffed. “We’re just reading up on some of our old ones. Figured that you guys caught a case that way, so we might as well try it.”

  “We caught a case because a man was murdered,” I laughed, shaking my head at them. “And he just happened to be found by someone we knew from an old case. How are you going to manufacture something like that?”

  “Hey, we know we’re grasping at straws here, okay?” Birn shot back with a half-hearted smile. “Not all of us get the zombie case of the year thrown into our laps out of nowhere.”

  I laughed and shook my head at them again, then turned back to Holm.

  “Do you think we’ll really get sent down to NOLA?” I asked him.

  “I hope so,” he said. “I could use a good meal right now, and they’ve got the best there is. It’s been a while since I’ve been over there.”

  “You’ve got a point there,” I chuckled. “But it won’t just be fun and games. If we get sent there, that means this drug is circulating here in the States.”

  “I know,” Holm said, his expression darkening. “I’m just trying not to think about that part. Not after what we… what we saw back there on the island.”

  Holm’s voice faltered at the memory, and I knew exactly why. The image of dead skin eating itself alive, bursting with dried blood, and disintegrating like it had been injected with poison filled my head. It was the worst thing I’d ever seen, without a doubt.

  And then there were those who did survive taking the drug. They’d lost any semblance of control over their own bodies and actions. Holm and I had seen that in person, too, and it wasn’t any prettier. In a way, it was even more terrifying.

  Just then, Diane came huffing warily out of her office, slamming the door shut behind her. She
went to refill her coffee mug against the back wall.

  “Ah, Ethan, Robbie, you’re here,” she said, nodding absent-mindedly in our direction. “Good. I think the lab techs will want to see you soon. I’m waiting on a message for them to confirm, and then you should be good to go.”

  I sat up a little straighter at this.

  “Oh, good,” I said. “So, there’s news?”

  “Apparently,” Diane said. “I haven’t had time to look into it myself, but I’ll trust you to keep up on it. I’ve been dealing with… well, more of the same, unfortunately.”

  “I don’t get it,” Holm said, throwing his hands up in exasperation. “What’s the problem, exactly? Just send us down there and let us figure out what’s going on for ourselves. The New Orleans PD wants us there, right?”

  “Yes, it just isn’t the way it’s supposed to work,” Diane said, rolling her eyes and propping herself against one of the empty desks between us and Birn and Muñoz. “We’re supposed to have concrete proof of something going wrong somewhere, like a body or a drug bust. Then we send our agents out.”

  “But this is a special case,” I protested. “Solomon told us that they sent a shipment to New Orleans already.”

  “I know,” Diane said darkly, with a long sigh. “But, apparently, that’s not enough. And special cases mean more paperwork, which no one wants to do.”

  “They don’t want to do paperwork even more than they don’t want to yell and scream on the phone with you all day?” Muñoz asked, raising her eyebrows. “That’s commitment if I’ve ever seen it.”

  “Yeah, I’d hate to end up on the wrong side of you,” Holm agreed with a chuckle, averting his eyes from Diane in case he offended her.

  But he hadn’t, and she gave him a small smile back.

  “Apparently,” she said wryly. “Though I suspect that this one actually gets off on it. Some of these guys, they really go on power trips when they get the opportunity to. It livens up their dull days sitting in the office and doing nothing.”

  “Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me,” I said, my tone dry.

  I was really getting sick of all these government types. Between what we’d dealt with at MBLIS recently with our funding difficulties, the bickering politicians Holm and I had to deal with in the Dominican Republic, and this, I had been getting a real picture of the worst of bureaucracy as of late. I just wanted to get out there and save Americans from whatever this thing was, and we were being prevented from doing it for no good reason.