“Well,” Diane said in a huff when I finished. “I guess I can’t complain about letting you take time off in the middle of such an important case, after all.”
“I guess not,” I laughed. “As you said, trouble has a way of finding me, even when I’m not looking for it.”
“Oh, please,” she scoffed. “You’re always looking for it and don’t for a second try to convince me otherwise.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” Holm agreed with a chuckle.
“Alright, alright,” I sighed. “Whatever. So what do you think about all this?”
“What do I think?” Diane repeated with a long sigh of her own. “I don’t know, guys, this one’s tricky. It seems these people are way ahead of us.”
“Is there anything new on your end?” I asked. “Other than what Holm already told me about the aliases, I mean.”
“Well, it looks like a few officers ran across the guy who attacked us, hanging out in the parking lot of a gas station just north of the city,” Holm explained. “Lines up with what your guy told you, too. He said his name was Charlie, at least. We’re waiting on them to get back, and then we’ll question him some. Hopefully, he can give us some more, but I doubt he knows more than your guy if he was telling the truth about being the Hollands’ right-hand man.”
“Still, Joey’s been locked up in the Hawthorne house for months,” I reasoned. “It’s possible that this Charlie guy is more acquainted with recent events, even if he’s lower ranking. He might have a better idea of where the Hollands might be.”
“That’s true enough,” Diane mused. “A good point, though I wouldn’t count on it. Anyway, I want to talk to this Joey character myself.”
“I imagine everyone will,” I chuckled. “Everyone at MBLIS, at the FBI. He already figured as much himself. But he’s in the hospital now. They airlifted him after I talked to him, and they updated me that he needed some minor surgery on his shoulder. Once he’s recovered, maybe they can send him down to Florida somewhere for housing, and we can have regular access to him.”
“He’ll need to be on maximum security,” Diane sighed. “By the sound of it, the Hollands would manage to sneak someone in to kill him in a regular prison. Witness protection might be the best course when this is all over for him.”
“Yes, I was thinking similarly,” I agreed with a smirk, remembering how little Joey had liked this idea himself.
“Well, it looks like you weren’t wasting time looking for old pirate ships after all, eh, Marston?” Holm asked, and I could hear his grin even over the phone. “You were working a real case this whole time after all.”
“I don’t know about the whole time,” I chuckled. “They’ve only been tailing me since Haiti.”
“Yes, let’s get back to that, shall we?” Diane asked, the original worry now seeping back into her voice. “I don’t like the sound of that at all. What do they mean by tailing? Could they be listening in on us now?”
“No, I don’t think so,” I said quickly, shaking my head even though I knew that Holm and Diane couldn’t see me. “Joey said that they didn’t even know I hadn’t dropped my whole search for the Dragon’s Rogue until I called the museum manager the other day. That means that they didn’t even know Percy had told me the first journal was a fake.”
“Good, that’s good,” Diane said, a fair amount of the anxiety leaving her voice then. “The question remains how they found out in the first place, though.”
“Well, we know that the Hollands were working with Clifton Beck, who was working with Solomon,” I explained. “So I’m betting there was someone in Haiti that Holm and I ran across who was paying attention to what we were talking about, spying on us even. And he and I talked about the Dragon’s Rogue a fair amount, if only in passing. We had no reason to think that anyone else would care.”
“Yes, that is possible,” Diane murmured, deep in thought. “They had someone down there watching the drug activity and started tailing you when they realized you were agents. Then they lost track of you after that. That makes sense, though, and it would mean that they’re not listening in on everything you’re doing. We need to be more careful, though, in the future. These people know what they’re doing, perhaps better than anyone we’ve been up against before. We can’t take this lightly.”
“Don’t worry, there’s no chance of that,” I said darkly.
“So,” Holm said. “What’s next?”
“Well, I’m going to be here for a few days helping the police clean up this mess, if that’s alright,” I told them. “Then I was hoping I could head back down to New Orleans for a couple of days to talk to those hotel owners again, the ones who climbed into bed with the gang on the promise of Lafitte’s ship. I think maybe they know something about the Hollands.”
“And you want to go see that old man again and make sure you’ve got the real journal this time,” Holm teased, knowing me far too well for my liking at that moment.
“Um, well…” I said, not sure how to respond to this with Diane on the line. I didn’t know how much she would like the idea of me using agency time to look for the Dragon’s Rogue, even though my search for the ship was now at least somewhat related to an MBLIS case.
“Don’t worry,” she assured me, a sly smile in her voice. “I won’t exactly let you spend all of your time looking for this old ship of yours now that it’s related to the Holland case, but I’m not going to complain about it either. Consider yourself cleared to fly to New Orleans when you’re done in Virginia. But make sure you come back to Miami as quickly as you can. We’ll need you here with us.
