“Oh, damn,” I said, sinking down into my own desk chair several paces from Birn’s. “That’s bad timing.”
“What do you mean?” Birn asked, arching an eyebrow at me.
“I was just going to take some time off since you were coming back today,” I explained with a shrug. “I was going to head up to Virginia with Tessa and see if I can get to the bottom of this whole thing with Grendel’s journal. But I don’t want to miss out on a break in the Holland case. We’ve been waiting forever on that already, it feels like.”
“You and your old pirate stuff,” Birn said, grinning and shaking his head at me. “You’ll never take a real vacation, will you, Marston?”
“I guess not,” I chuckled.
“Oh, well, better cases for the rest of us, then,” Birn smirked, and I shot him a look.
“No way,” I protested. “I’m not letting you and Holm get the best case of the decade and work it without me. Not a chance.”
“You’re one to talk about the best case of the decade!” Birn shot back. “You and Holm got to chase after literal zombies.”
“They weren’t literal zombies,” I grumbled, rolling my eyes. “Not like out of the movies, anyway. Don’t believe everything that Holm tells you.”
“Still,” Birn said with a hollow laugh. “You guys get to chase after some new drug while I get kidnapped by a bunch of boring old cocaine dealers in a tent. Never say Diane doesn’t play favorites again. I’m not even kidding…”
“It’s not like Diane knew you were going to get kidnapped,” I laughed. “Or that the zombies were going to turn up, literal or not. Anyway, how are you feeling? Rested up? You weren’t gone for that long, considering.”
“Ah, I’m fine,” Birn scoffed, waving a hand in the air dismissively. “I was just sedated for a few days in that tent, anyway. They barely left a scratch on me.”
“If I remember correctly, you were allergic to the sedative, though,” I pointed out, thinking back to just how zonked out the poor guy had been when we found him alone in the woods. I’d thought he might actually be dead at first, but the guy who had been holding him there told us that he’d reacted poorly to the drug they gave him when they first took him.
“Uh, we don’t talk about that,” Birn said, looking down at his desk, and I could’ve sworn that his cheeks turned a shade darker.
“Ah, don’t be embarrassed,” I laughed. “You can’t help what you’re allergic to.”
“Yeah, well, Muñoz won’t let me hear the end of it,” Birn said bitterly. “She keeps talking about how a big-time agent like me shouldn’t be allergic to a regular old sedative.”
“She’s just messing with you,” I chuckled, knowing that he already knew this. “Anyway, Diane said something about Muñoz coming back today, too?”
“Yeah, I think she’s coming in this afternoon,” Birn confirmed with a shrug. “She didn’t last very long on vacation, either. We’re a sorry bunch, the lot of us, I guess.”
“No argument from me,” I said, as another stream of argumentative language from Diane came from behind the office door.
“We’ll be covered, then, between Holm and us, so don’t worry about taking some time off,” Birn told me earnestly. “If there really is a break in the Holland case and we need you, I’m sure Diane will let you know right away.”
“You’re not getting off that easily,” I said, narrowing my eyes at him. “The Holland case is just as much mine and Holm’s as it is yours and Muñoz’s.”
“Hey, we were there first,” Birn said, pointing at me, though his tone was good-natured as always.
“Yeah, but you were allergic to a garden variety sedative,” I laughed, and his cheeks turned rosy again.
Then, the door to my right swung open, and Diane came stomping out of her office.
“What’s going on?” Birn asked quickly. “Is it the Hollands?”
“Yes,” Diane sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose and looking more than a bit frustrated. “Though there isn’t as much information as we would’ve hoped.”
“Whatever it is, it’s better than the nothing we’ve been dealing with for two weeks,” I said excitedly, leaning forward in my chair in anticipation. “What’s going on? Was that Sheldon? Or the FBI?”
“Oh, God, no, it wasn’t Sheldon,” Diane said, rolling her eyes at the mere mention of the man she detested so much. “And yes, it was one of my contacts with the FBI. We’re being good about sharing this case, at least. Things have been better between agencies since the New Orleans case.”
This was true enough. Agencies like MBLIS and the FBI tended not to love the idea of working together. Kind of like the various branches of the military, we respected each other a lot, but there was more than a healthy dose of rivalry thrown in there, too. Plus, let’s face it. MBLIS was important, but we didn’t exactly have the clout of the FBI, publicly or privately. If they got their hands on a case of ours, it might as well be gone.
And that’s what had technically happened when Holm and I ran into Nina Gosse, an undercover FBI agent, in New Orleans. I couldn’t deny that she’d been a huge help, though, and that we probably wouldn’t have solved the case without her.
Ever since then, Diane had been in close contact with Nina’s supervisors at the FBI about the lasting effects of the case. And she’d been communicating with them at my request about what they were doing with Lafitte’s ship after they confiscated it and hauled it away in the Bayou, but we hadn’t had an update on that in a while.
I myself had stayed in sporadic touch with Nina. Just like she predicted, she’d been sent to train some new recruits at the FBI academy in Virginia for some rest and recuperation after her long stint undercover.
Thinking of this reminded me that
