1
Ethan
I sat across from Holm in our little MBLIS office in Miami, raking once more through all the files from our mission to the Florida Keys, during which we’d rescued one of our colleagues, Lamarr Birn, from the drug lords who had kidnapped him one unassuming night on one of the resort Keys mostly used for tourism.
“You’re looking through that again?” Holm complained, giving my paperwork the side-eye. “What do you think you’re going to find that you didn’t read the last hundred times you went through it?”
“Well, I won’t know until I find it, will I?” I shot back dryly, not bothering to look up at him from the thick file in my hands.
“You’re not going to find anything,” my partner grumbled. “Just like Diane said, we just have to wait until these guys turn up again. Once we get another hit, we’ll go track them down. But until then, it’s not helping anybody to obsess over it. And we all know that you’re one to obsess over pretty much everything.”
I gave him a pointed look now, barely raising my eyes from the file to complete the gesture. But before I could respond verbally, Diane came stomping out of her office on the back wall toward our desks in the middle of the open floor plan.
“Did I hear my name?” our director asked, coming to a halt in front of our desks.
“Yeah, I was just reminding Marston here that obsessing isn’t going to catch the Holland couple any faster,” Holm explained with a low laugh.
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Diane said dryly, arching an eyebrow at him. “The way Ethan does it, I’d bet that his obsession could help us more than hurt us.”
“Thank you,” I said, nodding to her.
“I don’t know that it was a compliment,” she chuckled, turning the same skeptical expression on me. “Sometimes I think you need to get a life, Marston, get your head out of those files. But don’t stop obsessing until after we catch the Hollands. We need to do that first. But Holm’s right that there’s not much to do until we get another hit on them.”
Chester and Ashley Holland were the real estate mogul couple whose investment properties on Little Torch Key we had found out were being used as drug dens for Caribbean drug kingpins and cocaine smuggling on our last mission for MBLIS.
Unfortunately, though the Hollands owned property in the Keys, they didn’t actually live there. We’d been trying to track them down ever since, even enlisting the help of the other federal agencies like the FBI and CIA in our search, but we’d come up empty-handed so far. This was infuriating, considering that it had been weeks since our return at that point.
“You talked to Birn at all?” Holm asked Diane. “How’s he doing?”
We’d found Birn tucked away on Pye Key, a small island several miles west of the Little Torch Key that was largely used for Boy Scout trips. Apparently, for some time, it had also been used as a campsite for the drug lords while they followed instructions from the Hollands to try to excavate Lafitte’s ship around Pye Key and two other nearby islands, Crab and Melody Keys. The Hollands had even gone so far as to purchase Melody Key from the celebrity who privately owned it to assist in keeping their excavation plans on the down-low.
The celebrity didn’t know anything. He was just some washed-up reality star who went bankrupt and had to get rid of his private island quickly and easily. The first thing Holm and I had done when we got back was to interview the guy. I think I actually lost brain cells during that conversation.
“Yeah, he’s doing well,” Diane said, her face breaking out into a genuine smile at the mention of our colleague. “He’s enjoying his well-earned vacation. I’ll tell you that. Gets back sometime in the next couple of days, though.”
“That soon?” I asked, a little surprised. “You’d think after what he’d been through that he’d take longer than a couple of weeks. He was in the hospital for the first half of that, too.”
“I told him as much,” Diane said with a shrug. “But he wants to get back to work. I’m starting to think that the whole office needs a mandated vacation if getting kidnapped and held hostage for a week doesn’t get us to take some real time off.”
“Hey, Marston and Bonnie took some time off a few months back,” Holm pointed out, referencing that time that I dragged one of the MBLIS lab techs along with me on an unofficial mission to take down the New York mafia that was tying up our agency’s funding channels.
“That doesn’t count, and you very well know it,” Diane said, her tone deadpan as she gave him a piercing glare.
“Alright, alright,” Holm relented, shaking his head. “Muñoz took some time off too, at least.”
Sylvia Muñoz was Birn’s partner and had had almost as rough a time of it in the Keys as he had. She’d been shot twice and went through the wringer, worrying about her partner and trying to figure out what had happened to him. After getting patched up at the hospital for a second time, she’d taken some well-deserved time off to lounge on a beach somewhere for a few days.
“Yes, well, she’s coming back early too,” Diane laughed, shaking her head. “She’ll be in this afternoon if you can believe it. She lasted five days doing nothing before she just had to come back and get to work tracking down this couple. I swear everyone in this office has some kind of complex.”
“And when was the last time you took a day off?” I asked her, looking up and giving her a sly smile.
“That’s different,” she scoffed, immediately averting her eyes from mine. “I’m the director.”
“Oh, okay,” I laughed, meeting Holm’s eyes across the desk from me and stopping myself from laughing some more.
“Anyway, now that Sylvia and Lamarr are coming
