“Whoa, dude, you’re a little weird about this stuff, aren’t you?” he asked, giving me a bewildered look. “You remind me of them.”
“Them?” I repeated, shaking my head in confusion as I was barely paying attention to him anymore, my mind with the ship I had sought for so long.
“Yeah, them,” Joey said blankly. “The Hollands.”
“Oh, right,” I muttered, the words bringing me straight back to reality. I definitely didn’t like the sound of that.
“As for your question,” Joey continued, relaxing a bit now as he saw that I had done the same, “No, the ship isn’t here. We looked forever, but it’s not here. Then you turned up, and we shifted our focus to the museum.”
“Well, do you know where it actually is?” I asked him, more than a little annoyed by this new piece of information. I hadn’t dared hope that the Dragon’s Rogue might actually be here, but I was disappointed despite myself. So close, yet so far once again.
“Nah, but we were hoping that book will tell us,” he sighed. “I guess it’ll tell you now.”
“What book?” I asked, my disappointment suddenly dissipating. “The journal? So you did take the real one from the museum? Is it the real one?”
“Whoa, man, you need to chill out,” Joey said, leaning back as far as he could away from me again. “And yeah, we have it. It’s with the other pages. It’s the real one, as far as I know, and we had a guy check to be sure. He is some expert the Hollands are friends with. He helps them with all this stuff.”
“What’s his name?” I asked sharply.
“I don’t know,” Joey said, shaking his head. “I never met him. No one did. The Hollands are super cagey about the whole thing. I don’t know anything about him, other than that he’s a him.”
“Okay,” I said, breathing a sigh and attempting to calm myself from this new burst of information, too. “So let’s go back to the journal. When did you take it from the museum?”
“Just last week,” Joey said. “I did it myself. We didn’t dare take anything before then, but we thought you’d moved on, and the Hollands wanted the journal for themselves.”
“You thought I’d moved on?” I repeated, arching an eyebrow at him. “So you didn’t know that I knew the journal was a fake?”
“No, we didn’t,” Joey said, shaking his head. “Not until you called the old broad from the museum. Then we knew. It got really important that we focus on that ship after that.”
“Right, let’s talk about that a bit,” I said, almost as interested in figuring out what was up with the fake ship as I was about the journal. “What’s the deal with that? Was that for my benefit?”
“Yep, that was the plan,” Joey sighed, shaking his head dejectedly. “Fat lot of good all that work was for now.”
“Wait, but you said that you didn’t start tailing me until Haiti,” I pointed out, eyeing the goon with more than a little suspicion now. “But according to your neighbors, you’ve been building that thing for a while yet. How’s that work out?”
“Well, we didn’t know it was you specifically,” Joey explained with a shrug, without missing a beat, which told me that he was likely being honest. “But we knew that there was at least someone else on the ship’s tail. There’ve been whispers for a long time about some law enforcement dude asking questions about it, and before you, it was some old dude. But that was before the Hollands’ time, I guess. He never found it, though.”
My blood boiled as I realized that the goon must be talking about my grandfather, who had passed down his interest in the Dragon’s Rogue to me. He was long dead, but I nonetheless hated the idea of people like the Hollands tarnishing his memory. I hated the idea of them stealing away his life’s work even more.
“Alright, then,” I said, running a hand across my face wearily. “So you started making the ship to mess with me, or the person who turned out to be me, at least.”
“You shouldn’t feel bad,” Joey said, shooting me a grin. “They’ve been trying to figure out who you are forever, and they only just found out recently. That’s more than most people could say, I’ll tell you that.”
“Thanks,” I said dryly, though if I was honest, that did make me feel a little better about the whole thing. “I guess that’s another reason for you to trust me over them, then.”
“Another good point,” Joey mused, frowning as he considered this. “Are you done with me yet, then?”
“Just one more question,” I told him. “What about Henry, the old appraiser for the museum? You took him, didn’t you?”
“Ah, nah, he’s fine,” Joey said, waving away the notion that the goons would hurt him. “The old geezer’s a genius, sure, but he’s fading. When we shipped him off to his grandson’s babbling about pirates, the grandson never thought twice about it.”
“So that was really his grandson who talked to Martha that day?” I asked, more than a little surprised at this.
“Oh, hell no,” Joey said, shaking his head. “That was Buck. You killed him earlier. We just drove him to his grandson’s, took his key card, and changed his email password so he wouldn’t have access to it. The old geezer’s fine unless he’s croaked of natural causes by now. It wouldn’t surprise me, honestly. He was really old. I was shocked that they still let him work.”
“You know I’ll be confirming everything you’ve told me,” I warned him, narrowing my eyes at him and meeting his gaze firmly, searching for any sign of dishonesty there or that he was holding anything back from me.
“Oh, I got that,” he assured me, rolling his eyes. “Look, I’m betting I’m going to be doing a lot of these interviews for a long time. Some of
