Bayou Pirates Read online

  “Nothing from your guy in NOLA?” Holm asked, hopefully.

  Diane shook her head. A ding came from her pants pocket.

  “Not yet,” she said, checking her phone, which was the source of the noise. “I’m going to call him now. But you two should head down to the lab. They’re ready for you.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Holm and I took the elevator down to the bottom level of our office building, where the lab techs practically resided in the basement. Our two trusty lab techs, Rosa Bonci and Joe Clime, were both huddled up down there in their lab coats and goggles, completely oblivious to our arrival.

  It wasn’t often that Bonci and Clime were referred to around MBLIS by their real names. Ever since they started working together, they’d become practically inseparable, and we’d been calling them Bonnie and Clyde ever since.

  Bonnie and Clyde had flown down to the Dominican Republic to help us with our last mission once it became apparent that there was no way they were going to be able to complete all the lab work that needed doing from Miami.

  The Dominican forensics investigators and hospital personnel who had been trying so desperately to figure out what this mysterious Haitian zombie drug was and how it was hurting people made almost no headway before Bonnie and Clyde showed up. But once they did, it wasn’t long until they cracked the case.

  It turned out that an old witch doctor named Samuel had crafted the drug from an ancient family recipe that was circulated generations ago in Haiti. The concoction mostly contained natural ingredients, which was why the Dominicans had such a hard time identifying it when they ran blood tests on the victims.

  When Bonnie and Clyde landed in Santo Domingo, Holm and I were already hard at work trying to crack the criminal side of the case near the Haitian-Dominican border. So the lab techs got to work on their own, and they quickly found a way to identify the drug in the victims’ systems, even with its unusual characteristics.

  Then, when Holm, Alejandra, and I interrogated a former Haitian gangbanger and sent him to speak with the lab techs themselves, we learned that the cartel mixed the new drug with other hard drugs like cocaine and heroin in order to conceal it better in the bloodstream. Law enforcement never noticed this because they assumed that the victims had just taken a litany of other drugs instead of considering that it was all part of the same concoction. Suffice it to say that without Bonnie and Clyde, MBLIS never would’ve cracked that case.

  “Hello there,” I called when Holm and I entered the lab, rapping my knuckles on the side of the wall to get Bonnie and Clyde’s attention. “Anyone home?” It wasn’t unusual for the lab techs to get so wrapped up in their own work that they neglected to pay attention to what else was going on around them.

  “Oh, Ethan!” Bonnie cried, looking rather flustered as she whirled around to face Holm and me, grabbing Clyde’s elbow and pulling him unwittingly along with her. “We didn’t see you there.”

  “I gathered,” I chuckled. “You got in alright, then?”

  “Oh, it was okay,” Clyde said dismissively. “We were just glad to get back and get straight to work on this thing. This is the case of a lifetime.”

  He grinned on this last part, like a child surrounded by new toys on Christmas morning.

  “You’re telling us,” Holm laughed, raising his eyebrows. “Chasing down zombies and ghost ships? This is the stuff kids dream about.”

  “Except we get to live the dream without getting blown up,” Bonnie pointed out.

  “Exactly my point,” Holm said, latching on to this. “We agents get to have more fun.”

  “Alright, alright,” I chuckled, holding out my hands to show everyone that it was time to get down to business. “What’s going on back in the Dominican Republic and Haiti? Do we know? Is there an update?”

  I was eager to know what was going on with our friends back there. After what Holm and I had seen, they were in dire straits, especially on the Haitian side. And I didn’t think I would ever stop worrying about Alejandra. She had a knack for getting herself in trouble while trying to save the day, though she was often successful in her attempts to do this. Her people were lucky to have her.

  “I talked to our contacts down there this morning,” Bonnie said, pulling off her lab gloves and goggles and propping herself against a nearby table, indicating that Holm and I were welcome to sit down across from her. Clyde remained to hover over whatever the two of them had been working on, unwilling to abandon it for boring old conversation just yet.

  “And?” Holm asked. “Are there any new cases?”

  “A couple,” Bonnie confirmed with a sad nod. “But that’s to be expected. The drug will be circulating for a while down there until the authorities can catch all the last dealers who have it, but it seems like it’s not being distributed anymore for now. There are two deaths and a few new cases of ingestion, all of whom survived the incident.”

  “Good, that’s good,” I muttered, nodding approvingly. “So they’re still talking with you down there about their cases?”

  “Oh yeah,” Clyde confirmed with a nod. “They’re sending us all of their data for us to double and triple check. They don’t want to make any more mistakes or miss anything else. They lost enough time doing that the first time.”

  “They’re good people down there, really,” Bonnie added. “They just don’t have all the same training or resources that we do. It’s the least we can do to keep helping them while they’re going through this.”

  “You’ll get no argument from me,” I said, giving her a small smile. “We came away with a similar assessment of the law enforcement side. They were just in a bit over their heads, is all. Hell, we were in over our heads when we first got there, and we’re supposed to be the best in the business.”

  “They’re doing better, though?” Holm asked, hopefully.

  “Oh yes,” Bonnie confirmed with a cheerful nod. “The cases are already going way down in the past couple of days. And the hospitals and authorities are better able to identify who’s had it now that they have the testing criteria we came up with, which means they’re able to talk to survivors and track down the remaining dealers. It’s a win-win for everyone.”

  “Except the dealers,” Clyde added with a humorless laugh.

  “Yeah, well, we’re not too worried about them,” I chuckled. “So what about this excavation Diane was telling us about yesterday? Is that why you called us down here?”

  With everything that had happened with Grendel’s journal and talking with Tessa again the night before, I’d almost forgotten all about the ghost shipwreck and the team we sent down there right after it happened to try to excavate it and find the evidence we’d thought sunk. Solomon, the leader of the Haitian drug cartel, had abandoned and blown up his ship in an attempt to erase any evidence of the drug’s manufacturing and distribution. He’d seemingly been successful, too, when Holm and I were unable to get away from the scene of the crime with a sample of the new version of the drug that Solomon claimed was already in circulation in New Orleans.

  “Yes,” Clyde said, his eyes practically gleaming with excitement now. “They recovered a crate from the ocean late last night. The only one they were able to find. They shipped the contents straight to us by helicopter after they found it.”

  He held up a large, compact ziplock-like bag. It was shut tight and contained an assortment of smaller bags. One held a clear liquid I knew to be heroin, another a powder that was no doubt cocaine, and a third, smaller container held a clear gel-like substance that I immediately recognized, as well.

  “Unbelievable,” I grinned, getting up and crossing over to grab the bag from Clyde, just to make sure that it was real. “They actually found one of them.”

  It was no doubt one of the packages of the drug that had been stored on the ghost ship before it sank. I knew because I had popped open one of the crates myself when Holm and I first came aboard before we’d met Solomon. I’d pocketed one of the samples with the intention of bringing it b
ack to Bonnie and Clyde for testing but lost it in the ocean along with my cell phone after the explosion.

  “Yep!” Clyde beamed. “And it’s definitely the new version, too. It’s a little different from the one from the airport bust that Bonnie and I already studied back in Santo Domingo.”

  Clyde was referring to the first “package” of the drug that we had come across on our last mission. Ricardo, the gangbanger that Holm, Alejandra, and I had interrogated, told us that the drug was packaged in such a strange manner in order to deceive the Dominican authorities and make them think that it was just a plain old coke and heroin drug bust. The gel-like substance that we now knew to be the basis of the old witch doctor’s original recipe was relatively unassuming in comparison to the other drugs, and it wasn’t much of a surprise that law enforcement overlooked it.

  So it was a good thing that Bonnie and Clyde had asked to see what the Dominicans had confiscated from a particularly nasty drug bust at an airport surrounding a flight to Puerto Rico. It was also helpful that Ricardo had been able to coach the lab techs through “putting the drug together” until they got it in its final form, the one that caused so many people to die such painful deaths.

  “How is it different?” Holm asked, crossing from his own seat to join Clyde and me by the lab table. Bonnie followed closely behind him, squeezing in past my partner and me to stand next to Clyde again.

  “It’s subtle,” Clyde said, biting his lip as he considered this. “I’m trying to think of how to explain it best… Maybe consider it the difference between regular and extra-strength Tylenol or something like that. You wouldn’t know the difference unless you really looked at it chemically, but the average person can still tell that it’s a better product when they take it.”

  “How could they tell?” I asked. “How does it affect them differently?”

  “Well, we can’t exactly test it out,” Bonnie explained with a nervous laugh. “That would break all kinds of ethical rules, obviously. But we can look at it chemically and see that there are several small, subtle differences that change the chemical composition enough that the entire compound becomes more stable.”

  “The differences are in the gel part,” Clyde explained, seeing that Holm and I still looked confused by this. “The part the witch doctor provided to the cartel. The rest of the stuff is the same. But the differences make the compound itself more stable. Here, I can show you.”

  “Show us?” I repeated. “How? I thought you said that you couldn’t test it out.”

  “Not on people,” Clyde laughed, shaking his head at the notion. “But, we can test it on skin.”

  “Skin?” Holm asked, taking an immediate step back and looking a little green. “You’re not bringing that stuff anywhere near me, bud.”

  Clyde and Bonnie looked at each other, and then both burst out laughing. I couldn’t help but join them.

  “I don’t think they meant you, Holm,” I chuckled, shaking my head at him, though I understood his squeamishness.

  What this stuff did to the human body was unspeakable, and Holm and I had both seen it up close and personal. And what it did to skin was the most noticeable of all, peeling it apart and practically causing it to eat itself from the inside. Just the memory of it turned my stomach and made me think of losing my breakfast.

  “No, nothing like that,” Bonnie confirmed, winking at Holm. “We’re not talking about anyone's actual skin, but skin we grow ourselves here in the lab. Or cadaver skin. We’ve done some of that, too. Both give us a slightly different look at the chemical compound we’re dealing with here.”

  “Of course, it would be better if we could have some live subjects,” Clyde said, taking a step toward Holm with a sly smile on his face. “It would really help us get to the bottom of this faster. Care to volunteer?”

  Holm took another step back until he practically stumbled over the table that he, Bonnie, and I had all been sitting at moments before.

  “Uh… uh… no thanks,” he stammered, his eyes wide.

  Bonnie, Clyde, and I all laughed at him again.

  “You can’t actually think I’m serious, can you, Holm?” Clyde asked, grinning and punching him playfully on the arm.

  “Oh,” Holm said sheepishly, rubbing his arm where Clyde had hit him absent-mindedly. “Of course not. I was just uh… playing along.”

  “Sure, man,” Clyde said, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

  Bonnie and I exchanged a knowing look, and both laughed again despite ourselves. There really was never a dull moment with Holm as my partner. I was sure he would say the same about me, albeit probably for different reasons.

  “Alright, how about you just show us what you’ve got cooking here,” I said, turning back to the lab table. There was nothing on it but some scattered petri dishes that I could see, with some kind of mush inside. I figured there must be more to it than how it looked.

  “Sure thing,” Clyde said. “But here, put these on first. Just in case.”

  He handed Holm and me each a pair of oversized lab goggles to match Bonnie’s and his own. Bonnie put hers back on as Holm and I did. Clyde had never taken his off, opting instead to just prop them on his forehead as we spoke. He pulled them down over his eyes now.

  “Alright, here we go,” he said, taking one of the petri dishes in hand and pulling it forward under a microscope.

  He held out his hand, and Bonnie pulled a dropper out and inserted it into a flask containing a gel-like substance that I knew to be the “put together” Haitian zombie drug, as Ricardo liked to refer to the finished product. This one looked slightly clearer than the one I had seen Bonnie and Clyde construct in the Dominican Republic, less muddied and more refined. It appeared that Solomon had been telling the truth about a different version of the drug being shipped to New Orleans for distribution in the States.

  Bonnie handed the now-full dropper off to Clyde, and he carefully placed two small droplets into the petri dish.

  “Here,” he said, quickly ushering me over to take his place at the microscope. “Watch closely.”

  I pressed my goggled eyes to the microscope and watched as the skin particles inside the petri dish began to change. It crackled at first, almost smoking and emitting a popping sound. I felt Holm lurch beside me and take a step back, and had to stifle another laugh. Good old Holm.

  But then, the skin started to change again. I watched, horrified, as the seemingly healthy cells began to turn on themselves, practically melting into the plastic dish and emitting an almost putrid smoky smell. It was a microcosm of what Holm and I had witnessed in that poor teenage girl at the Dominican hospital when we first arrived in Santo Domingo.

  Finally, the reaction began to subside, and the smoking and popping and crackling simmered down into a dull hum.

  “Damn,” I said, taking a few steps back from the microscope and removing my goggles to wipe away a bead of sweat that had formed on my forehead. “That was… pretty odd.”

  “Here, let me see,” Holm said, stepping up to the microscope himself.

  “Let me make another one first,” Clyde said, pushing him aside and recreating the reaction in another petri dish. Then, he waved Holm forward again.

  I didn’t watch this time, opting to stay a safe distance away, but I could hear the sizzling and smell the faint smoke even from the next table over. When the sounds subsided again, Holm stepped back to lean beside me against the other lab table.

  “Well, I can’t say that was as bad as what we saw back on the island,” Holm said, swallowing hard. “But it still wasn’t pretty.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” I agreed, shaking my head. “But what does it mean?”

  I turned my attention back to Bonnie and Clyde, who were both still watching the last remnants of the reaction in the petri dish.

  “It means that this version of the drug certainly still has the potential to be deadly and vicious,” Bonnie summarized. “Even beyond its intended effects.”

  “The intended effects being vi
rtual mind control,” I said.

  She nodded gravely.

  “Unfortunately, yes,” she confirmed. “But this is far worse, I suppose. To die like this, with your own body practically eating itself alive… I can’t even begin to imagine what that would be like. And I don’t want to have to. I don’t want anyone to have to ever again.”

  “We’re in agreement on that,” I said. “So what can we do? What have we learned from this that’s different from what we learned from the first version of the drug?”

  “Well, technically, the Dominican version was the second version, and this is the third,” Clyde corrected me. “We don’t have access to the first version, the one that started circulation in Haiti all those weeks ago. Though we’re working on that.”

  “Would it help you to have it?” I asked, kind of surprised at this. “They’re not distributing it anymore, right?”

  The Haitian version of the drug was a more primitive version, according to Solomon. He told Holm and me that it had a mortality rate of around forty percent. For the cartel, the more deadly the version of the drug, the less desirable it was to sell. The point wasn’t to brutally kill their victims, after all. It was to control them. And the more people randomly died after taking the drug, the more the authorities in each of these countries would focus on finding it and stamping out the cartel’s distribution system.

  “It could be helpful, yes,” Bonnie said with a nod. “Just so that we can see the way the drug has evolved over time better. This could help us understand the current version more, or even predict any future versions the makers may come up with.”

  “Future versions?” Holm repeated, aghast. “There could be more?”