Kingston Kidnappings
What Happens in Vegas book 3
Matt Lincoln
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
2. Charlie
3. Naomi
4. Charlie
5. Naomi
6. Junior
7. Naomi
8. Charlie
9. Charlie
10. Fiona
11. Naomi
12. Charlie
13. Naomi
14. Charlie
15. Naomi
16. Charlie
17. Junior
18. Naomi
19. Charlie
20. Junior
21. Miranda
22. Naomi
23. Junior
24. Charlie
25. Charlie
26. Junior
27. Naomi
28. Charlie
29. Charlie
30. Fiona
31. Naomi
32. Junior
33. Charlie
34. Naomi
35. Charlie
36. Miranda
37. Charlie
38. Charlie
39. Naomi
40. Junior
41. Charlie
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Prologue
I fell back onto the rocking chair on the front porch of the hotel and took a deep breath of the clean mountain air before taking a long sip of beer. A gentle breeze was blowing, rustling the overgrown blades of grass on the front lawn.
It was June, and Neva Pass had peaked at an unusually high eighty degrees today. For the rest of the United States, this might have seemed like a moderate, if slightly balmy, temperature for a summer day. However, up here in Alaska near the Canadian Yukon territory, eighty degrees was practically sweltering. Neva Pass tended to hover at around sixty degrees during the warmer months and would dip down into the negatives during winter. Today was the hottest summer day we’d had in a few years, and it was easily the hottest day I’d experienced since I’d retired and moved up here.
It was supposed to rain this afternoon, so I planned to enjoy the warm and sunny morning for as long as I could. I leaned back and closed my eyes, but only a few minutes had passed before I heard a huffing noise approaching me.
I cracked an eye open and spotted what looked like two backpackers, a boy and a girl. They were each loaded up with several layers of clothes and hauling large packs on their backs. It surprised me to see them. It wasn’t unusual for hikers to pass by my motel in the summer months, usually on their way to Denali National Park, but they’d always arrived in cars. They would stop for a snack or to recharge their phones and then set off again. I’d never had people just walk up to the motel out of the blue. There was nothing else for miles around, and I wondered if maybe their car had broken down somewhere down the road.
“Why is it so hot?” the boy moaned as he trudged his way up the porch steps. “Fairbanks wasn’t this hot. Every weather record I checked going back five years indicated that it should have stayed around sixty the entire time from Pink Mountain to Denali. I thought maybe it’d go up to seventy during the height of the day, but it’s eighty-two degrees! And it’s barely morning!”
“Well, let’s just get inside,” the girl suggested. “It’s probably air-conditioned. I hope, anyway. We can check the weather forecast and figure out what we want to do from there.
“It’s supposed to rain later, too,” the boy grumbled. “As if we’re not already soaked enough, carrying all this stuff.”
I suppressed the urge to laugh a little at their predicament. Normally, their layered clothes wouldn’t have been a problem, but they just so happened to arrive on the hottest day on record in years.
“Hey, is it open?” the girl asked her friend as she peered into the window by the front door. “All the lights are off. I don’t see anyone inside.”
“It’s open,” I replied. The girl shrieked and jumped back in surprise.
“Oh my gosh,” she gasped as she pressed her hand to her heart. “I didn’t even see you there. You scared me.”
“Sorry about that,” I chuckled as I stood up from my chair. “I don’t have much in the way of amenities or services, but you’re welcome to stay as long as you need. There’s coffee and charging ports in the dining room.”
“Oh, cool,” the girl responded. “I’m running on empty ever since we got lost in Tanana Valley and had to use the GPS to find our way out.”
“That seems like a pretty scary place to get lost,” I remarked. Tanana Valley National Forest was a massive, sprawling forest densely packed with trees. People liked to go fishing and camping there in the summer, but it was big enough that if you lost your way inside, it was possible you’d never come out again.
“Well, if someone hadn’t had the bright idea to take a shortcut through there, we wouldn’t have gotten lost,” the boy grumbled.
“Shut up, Mark,” the girl chirped. “Oh, we’re so rude. I’m Juniper, and this is my boyfriend, Mark. We’re hiking up to Denali.”
“Hiking?” I asked as I pushed open the door and gestured for them to come inside. “As in, you’re walking all the way there? How far have you two hiked?”
“Oh, my gosh, it feels so nice in here,” Juniper sighed as she stepped into the motel. “And yeah. We started in Seattle. We thought it would be fun to try to walk all the way across Canada and into Alaska. We’d been on the road for two months now. We started at the beginning of April.”
“Wow,” I remarked. “That’s pretty impressive. That’s a long way to go, even by car.” It had taken me a full week to move up here from Las Vegas, and that was driving for twelve straight hours every day. These kids had walked almost that entire distance.
“Thanks,” Mark smiled proudly. “It was still pretty chilly when we left, especially in British Columbia, so we were comfortable like this. It suddenly got so hot, though.”
“Well, at least too hot for all this gear,” Juniper shrugged.
“This is nothing,” I scoffed. “I was in the Caribbean once, a few years back, for a case I was working. Now, that was hot.”
“A case?” Juniper prodded, her eyes shining with curiosity. “Where you like, a police detective or something?”
“Something like that,” I smiled fondly as I remembered my time as an MBLIS agent. I could look back on those times nostalgically now, but at the time, some of those experiences hadn’t been so fun. The case I
