Bayou Pirates Read online

  “Weird,” Holm breathed, shaking his head. “How do you get yourself wrapped up in all this stuff, Marston?”

  “Don’t ask me,” I chuckled. “I’m just continuing what my grandfather started.”

  “So, you didn’t find anything in the journal?” Holm asked, looking more than a little disappointed. It was nothing compared to how I felt.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “Quite the opposite, actually.”

  I then told him all about how large portions of the journal appeared to have been redacted, always when Grendel was about to say something about the geographic aspect of the Dragon’s Rogue’s journey at sea.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Holm said, shaking his head in disbelief. “Someone just went in and colored over everything in the damn journal? They messed with a historical artifact like that.”

  “It appears so,” I said darkly and wondered if there was any way to reverse the damage. I doubted it.

  “Can’t have been anyone in the museum, then,” Holm mused. “Those types would die before messing with a piece of history like that.”

  “You might be right,” I said. “But there’s something weird going on at that museum. Even so, it wouldn’t surprise me if there was someone on the outside messing with things, given that the manager and her intern didn’t even know the journal was gone in the first place.”

  “It just doesn’t make any sense,” Holm said. “If whoever did this didn’t want you to find the ship, why did they bother to send the journal to you in the first place? It seems like the museum was doing a good enough job of giving you the run around on their own without anyone else’s help.”

  “That’s a fair point,” I reasoned, running a hand through my hair as I considered this. “I’m not sure. I hadn’t thought that far into it yet, to be honest. It was late when all this happened. I was just so upset to find that the journal was destroyed that I didn’t even think through why it might have happened in the first place.”

  “Destroyed?” Holm repeated, taken aback. “Why do you say that? There has to be some way to undo it. I mean, the words are just covered over, right? So there has to be some way to, I don’t know, uncover them or something.”

  “How do you figure?” I asked. “I don’t know anything about old books.”

  “Neither do I,” Holm admitted with a chuckle. “But there are people who do, people who specialize in this kind of stuff, right? Maybe you can talk to one of them.”

  This was true enough. I hadn’t thought about it before. There were all kinds of people in all kinds of odd niche professions, and maybe one could help me.

  “Maybe,” I said, sitting up a little straighter as I latched on to this newfound hope. “Maybe there’s one here in Miami who I can get ahold of. Or in New Orleans, if we end up going there.”

  “We’d better end up going there,” Holm huffed. “This is our case, and it needs to be worked.”

  “No argument from me,” I said, giving him a small smile.

  Diane came back out not long after that, an excited expression on her face.

  “The FBI’s going to help us?” I asked, leaning forward on my desk in anticipation.

  “Better,” she said, parking herself in front of my desk again. “I left a message for the FBI guy but haven’t heard back from him yet. It’s George I talked to.”

  “There’s been a victim,” Holm asked, his expression equal parts excited and concerned. I felt similarly. As much as we wanted a reason to work this case, we didn’t want anyone to get hurt.

  “Yes,” Diane said grimly. “But she’s still alive. Been through hell, no doubt, but still alive. She came in early this morning to the ER, where one of George’s doctor friends was working. Someone just dropped her off there, apparently, and then fled. The doctor ran Bonnie and Clyde’s tests, and here we are.”

  “What did she look like?” I asked, remembering James’s strange appearance and demeanor when he took the drug. “Did he say?”

  “He didn’t give any details, no,” Diane said, shaking her head. “But he did say that the doctor was pretty spooked. Said he’d never seen anything like it in his entire career.”

  Holm and I exchanged a knowing look across our desks.

  “Sounds familiar,” I said, thinking back to how that’s almost exactly how everyone, including ourselves, had described it on our last case.

  “So, we can head over to NOLA now?” Holm asked eagerly.

  “Not so fast,” Diane said, a sour expression on her face. “I still have to convince my bureaucrat friend.”

  “That shouldn’t be hard now,” I reasoned. “We have a victim.”

  “You would think that, wouldn’t you?” Diane asked, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “But I won’t put anything past this guy.”

  She moved to head back into her office to make the call, but I reached out and gently took her wrist before she had a chance to.

  “Wait,” I said. “Why don’t you make the call on speakerphone? Then we all can make our case.”

  Holm cracked a smile.

  “I like the way you think, Marston,” he said, pointing at me approvingly.

  Diane gave me a skeptical look.

  “I’m not convinced that you two wouldn’t do more harm than good,” she said dryly.

  “What can it hurt?” I asked with a shrug, releasing her wrist. “You’ve already been screaming at him for two days straight. What’s a couple more voices to join the chorus?”

  Diane looked between Holm and me several times and bit her lip as she tried to decide what to do.

  “Fine,” she relented at long last. “But you don’t say a word unless he gives us some serious pushback. He may just let me send you over there.”

  “Okay,” I said, holding up my arms to show that I would abide by her wishes. “Not a problem.”

  “Who is this guy, anyway?” Holm asked.

  “His name’s Sheldon, because of course it is,” Diane explained, rolling her eyes. “He’s just some idiot the government hired to keep track of all this stuff. He’s been on the job for a few months now, and it’s really all gone to his head. The guy before him wasn’t quite as bad. Pair that with him being emboldened by all our funding difficulties, and well… you get the picture.”

  “I do,” I said dryly. I’d known far too many Sheldons in my time. “Get him on the line, then.”

  Diane still looked rather hesitant about this plan, but she pulled out her phone and dialed the number with one last look of warning to Holm and me.

  “Diane,” a painfully pompous voice drawled after letting the phone ring several times. “It’s so nice to hear from you. And so soon after we last spoke.”

  Diane clenched her teeth.

  “Sheldon,” she said curtly. “We have some news on the New Orleans situation. Detective Barrett, my contact down there, has a confirmed victim. A young woman who ingested the drug and sought medical care early this morning.”

  “Is she dead?” the man asked as if he were inquiring about the weather this morning.

  “No,” Diane said through gritted teeth, and I could tell that she was making an effort not to explode on this guy already. “She’s not. She’s being treated now. But it’s undeniable that she took the drug. We have the tests to prove it.”

  “Interesting,” Sheldon said, without offering any more commentary.

  “So,” Diane continued airily after taking a deep breath. “That means that we now have undeniable confirmation that this ‘Haitian zombie drug,’ or whatever we want to call it, is in circulation in New Orleans. I’m assuming that means that our agents will be on their way there soon.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Sheldon said, his voice light and almost bored.

  “You’ll see what you can do?” Diane repeated deadpan. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Well, considering that there hasn’t been a death…” he started to say, but I’d had it with this guy at that point.

  “Hold up. You�
��re saying that you want to wait for a body to wash up before sending us out on a case?” I asked, standing up and hollering straight down at the phone so he would be sure to hear me. “That’s not how this works!”

  “And who is this, Diane?” Sheldon asked curtly, though still with a false sense of sweetness in his tone.

  “This is Agent Marston,” she said coolly.

  “I see,” Sheldon said, matching her tone now. “Well, Agent Marston, I don’t know that you are in any position to be the one who decides ‘how this works,’ now, are you?”

  “I’m in a better position than you,” I snapped. “You’re just some guy sitting at a desk on a power trip. My partner and I actually go out there and risk our lives to keep people like you safe. We almost died ten times over last week, and now here we are trying to get back out there and do it again. Only to run into the likes of you.”

  There was a long pause as Sheldon let this sink in.

  “Now, Agent Marston, I know that you have a certain way that you like to do things at MBLIS,” he began again, but this time Diane had had it.

  “Listen here, Sheldon,” she snapped, practically spitting out his name. “Agent Marston’s right. If we waited for a body to turn up for every case, we’d never have cases! It’s rare that something like that happens. But now we have a literal zombie drug circulating in this country, and no one is doing anything about it. So I’m sending my agents to New Orleans, and I’m sending them now. If you have a problem with that, you can explain the situation to your superiors.”

  There was another long pause.

  “I control whether and when you get money for plane tickets,” he began.

  “I have a car,” I spat. “I can drive it.”

  “Fine,” Sheldon said after another pause, and I could practically hear him pursing his lips and tsk-tsking at us. “I’ll send your request through shortly.”

  “You have fifteen minutes,” Diane sneered before hanging up on him.

  “Now that is how you do it,” I said, grinning at her and holding up my hand for a high five.

  She begrudgingly slapped it as she headed back to her office.

  “That was a onetime thing, Ethan,” she called over her shoulder as she left. “It won’t happen again.”

  “Understood,” I chuckled, retaking my seat and watching her disappear behind her office door. Then, turning to Holm, “Man, that was satisfying.”

  “I can imagine,” he laughed. “It was satisfying to watch.”

  “Well,” I said. “Looks like we’ve got a case.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Nina wasn’t sure what to make of this new assignment. She’d been undercover trying to get a read on the growing drug situation in New Orleans for three months now, but this was the first time that her superiors in the gang had trusted her enough to send her to collect product for them.

  She had heard rumblings about a new deal going on in Haiti for about ten days now. Or maybe it was Puerto Rico. She wasn’t sure. Most of her focus so far had been on the influx of cocaine from the Gulf of Mexico.

  She told her director at the FBI that there was something more going on down in NOLA but hadn’t heard back from him yet. Then, early that morning, hours before the sun would come up, some guy knocked on her door, pulled her out of bed, and dragged her out into the bayou, saying she was getting a promotion.

  Who was she to refuse? The higher up she climbed in the gang’s ranks, the closer she and the rest of law enforcement got to taking these guys down.

  “What are we doing, exactly?” she asked the guy, Buck, for what felt like the hundredth time. He had yet to answer.

  Nina and Buck were standing with a handful of other gangbangers Nina did not know at the edge of a river on New Orleans’ southernmost shore, which she knew led out to the ocean somewhere out there. There was nothing else around except tall grass, water, and the occasional alligator. And that distinctive swampy smell.

  “Shh,” Buck shushed her. “They’re almost here. Look.”

  He pointed off to the left, where the river stretched back around the bend until it disappeared off in the distance in more of the tall grass.

  Nina squinted to see what he was pointing at. It was still pretty dark, but she finally saw it... a ship.

  She arched an eyebrow at him.

  “Drug smuggling by sea?” she asked. “Isn’t that… I don’t know… pretty nineteenth century or something?”

  “Still happens,” Buck shrugged. “And this is different.”

  “How’s that?” Nina asked, putting her hands on her hips. “You’re gonna have to clue me in at some point, you know.”

  She looked around at the other gangbangers, all male. They were looking uncomfortable now that the ship had appeared, where they had been chatting and laughing before. They were almost afraid, shifting on their feet and looking off to the side anxiously.

  She turned back to Buck with a pointed expression on her face.

  “Okay, okay,” he said quickly, bringing his voice down to a whisper and coming in close to her, bringing the stench of the previous night’s drink along with him. “You know this new drug people have been talking about?”

  There it was. She’d been worried it was something about this. And she was excited, honestly. Cocaine got old after a while. She could use something new for once. Maybe it was a new molly variant. Those were popular as of late.

  “I’ve heard a few whispers,” she said, shrugging nonchalantly. “Nothing much.”

  “Nothing much yet,” Buck hissed, his eyes gleaming with excitement now. “But just you wait, this is gonna be big. Bigger than anything we’ve ever seen, maybe.”

  She arched an eyebrow at him.

  “What can it be?” she asked. “It’s not like we can reinvent the wheel or anything. Drugs are drugs, and there’s always going to be the same old mainstays.”

  “Just wait till you see it,” Buck said, flashing her a lopsided grin. “You’ll be eating those words.”

  “See it? See what? I don’t do any of this shit, remember?” she reminded him.

  Nina had made it very clear from the beginning that she wasn’t going to do any drugs while undercover. She’d known too many cops who got hooked that way and didn’t know how to readjust when they got back to their daily lives.

  So, she’d found a way to convince the gang that she just dealt the drugs, but she didn’t do them. It was uncommon, but it wasn’t unheard of. She even thought the gang liked her more for it, as they moved her more quickly up the ranks. She was always available, after all, and never too high for a job.

  It did make it harder to fit in with the other gangbangers, though. That was the downside. Buck was the closest thing she had to a friend undercover, and that wasn’t saying much.

  “I remember,” Buck smirked. “Who could forget that you’re no fun? Still, they’ll illustrate. Just to prove it to us.”

  “Prove what?” Nina hissed back. “You’re not making any sense.”

  But by then, the ship was on them, and everyone else was standing at attention, looking straight ahead at the ship, including Buck. Nina looked around at them and then followed suit.

  She wished she’d gotten that message in to her superiors at the FBI earlier. That way, they’d know there was something going on, know to track her phone, so they could send someone in if things went south. Not that she wouldn’t do everything she could to prevent that from happening. The longer she could hold out before the agency acted on what information she’d been able to accumulate during her time undercover, the more dirt they’d have on these scumbags.

  The ship was your average white fishing vessel, like all kinds of people sent off the coast on weekends in the area. A bit larger than most, sure, but nothing special. Nina wasn’t surprised that the Coast Guard hadn’t bothered them.

  Then three black men came down a short staircase at the front, carrying a large crate and a crowbar. They set it down in the mossy area by the shore and pried it open without say
ing a word to reveal several packets of what looked to be heroin and cocaine.

  Nina couldn’t help but be a bit disappointed. Just run of the mill hard drugs, after all. Nothing to write home about, or the FBI. Not urgently, anyway.

  One of the other gangbangers stepped forward to examine the contents of the crate. He opened one of the packets, which seemed to contain another series of packets of the other drugs. There was the cocaine, the heroin, and… something else.

  Nina squinted to try to make out what else was in there, but whatever it was, it was small, and in the dark, she couldn’t see it without getting closer. She took a cautious step forward but didn’t dare do anything more for fear of overstepping her bounds. She’d just been invited to this party, after all. She didn’t want to get kicked out before it even got interesting.

  “There’s more where this came from?” the gangbanger asked the other three men, gesturing down at the crate.

  The men all looked at each other, and Nina thought they appeared even more nervous than the gangbangers, somehow.

  “Ten more,” one of them said, and she immediately detected a thick accent there that she knew to be Haitian. Nina had spent enough time in New Orleans to recognize a Haitian accent when she heard one.

  “Ten?” the gangbanger repeated, raising his eyebrows. “I can’t go back to Mr. Williams and Mr. Beck with ten. We agreed on thirty.”

  “There’s… been an issue,” the same Haitian man admitted, wincing as the words came out. He averted his eyes from the American man’s. “We ran into some trouble with one of your law enforcement agencies.”

  “One of ours?” the gangbanger asked, looking back at Nina and the others with a slightly panicked look on his face. “Not the FBI?”

  No, it couldn’t possibly have been the FBI. Nina would’ve heard about it if it were. This had to be the CIA, or even worse, one of the smaller agencies. The different branches of law enforcement never communicated with each other as much as they should. Not even close. And if one of the other agencies was already tangled up in all this, Nina’s own job just got a hell of a lot harder. Other agents could sweep in and ruin her whole case without having any idea they were doing it.