“Well, in my defense, it was never exactly supposed to be a vacation,” I qualified. “Not a typical one, anyway. But your point is taken.”
“Don’t I remember one of your stories being about some shore leave you and Holm took turning into a James Bond film, basically?” Mac, the lone woman in the group, asked dryly.
“A good point,” Mike said approvingly, grinning and arching an eyebrow at me. “What do you say to that, Marston?”
“That one I have to give you,” I admitted, cracking a smile myself now. “No qualifiers there.”
“Remind me, Virginia’s the one where you ran into that creepy old house to save the kid, right?” Mike asked, narrowing his eyes as if trying to remember.
“Yeah, that’s the one,” I confirmed with a nod. “That was a pretty wild night. It just never seemed to end.”
“You could say that again,” the third guy, Ty, murmured with an excited lean across the table. “It was crazy! You found all that old stuff from the Dragon’s Rogue, including Grendel’s journal!”
“That’s right,” I laughed. “It took a damn long time to comb through that stuff. Then I had to go straight to New Orleans to re-interview those hotel owners who I thought might know our suspects.”
The whole affair in Virginia had originally been about getting the journal of the pirate who was last in possession of the ship that once belonged to an ancestor of mine into my possession, in the hopes that its contents would lead me to the Dragon’s Rogue’s current location.
Things had all gone astray, however, when my photojournalist companion and I realized that the director of the museum that we thought had the journal had been intimidated into silence, and then several goons showed up to take us out. In the end, it turned out that the Hollands, a couple known by MBLIS and the FBI for their drug crime ring, who’d also doubled as nautical enthusiasts, not unlike myself, were behind the attacks.
“You didn’t learn anything in New Orleans, though, right?” Mac asked. “That’s what you said last time.”
“Well, not quite,” I said, narrowing my eyes at this. “They didn’t know anything directly about our case, but they were able to give us the names of some people who might.”
“And?” Ty asked with characteristic eagerness. “Did any of those leads pan out?”
“All will be revealed in time,” I said, peering at him over my glass as I took a sip of my drink. I knew this frustrated him, but I found it endearing. Mac seemed to just find it funny.
“That kid was okay, though, right?” Mike asked, pointing at me thoughtfully. “I don’t remember you saying anything about a dead kid, anyway. It seems like something you would’ve mentioned.”
“Yeah,” I said with a low laugh. “I probably would’ve. And yeah, he was fine. Shaken, but fine. Stupid kid, running out in the middle of the night trying to catch the bad guys himself without permission.”
“Sounds to me like he’d make a good agent one day,” Mike argued. “Sounds exactly like you most days of your career.”
“Har, har,” I said sarcastically, though I had to admit he kind of had a point. “The main difference being that I’m a trained operative ignoring the need for the all-clear from my superiors every once in a while, and this was a little kid disobeying his parents. But he had guts. I’ll give him that.”
The poor boy had overheard Tessa and me talking to his parents about the strange occurrences at the house next door, which was occupied by the Hollands’ lackeys at the time. All he had to hear was the word “pirate” for him to think it was all a game. He was held hostage briefly, but we got him out safe and sound in the end.
“So?” Charlie asked eagerly, looking slightly annoyed that we had to tread through all this old territory just because Mike hadn’t heard the story in a while. “What happened next?”
“You all have a one-track mind,” I laughed, taking another sip from my drink slowly, just to watch them squirm a little. Even Mac leaned a little closer to the edge of her seat between Mike and Ty. Then, glancing back over at Mike, “You see what you’ve gotten me into? These kids are in here all the time, it seems, making me tell them stories and drinking my alcohol.”
“Face it, Marston, you love this,” Mike laughed, and I couldn’t deny that, either.
“Yeah, you love us,” Jeff teased gently. “Why else would you keep spending all this time with us?”
“Oh, you know me,” I joked as Rhoda came to deposit some nuts on our table. “Anything to keep my nose off the old grindstone.”
“Anyone who knows you knows that that can’t be further from the truth,” the bar girl said, giving me a stern look.
“High praise from one of your employees,” Mike pointed out, raising his eyebrows approvingly at her.
It was. I always thought that the bar girls probably liked me well enough, given that there wasn’t much turnover for such a transient type of job. I almost never had to hire new help. But it was still nice to get the praise to my face.
“Thanks, Rhoda,” I told her, nodding to the nuts but thinking of more than just that.
“Well, go on,” she said, hovering near our booth and placing her hands on her hips. “What happened next?”
I laughed again. I’d noticed the bar girls listening in on my stories more and more lately, and they all seemed to know the sequence of events just as well as these kids, even though they all rarely worked on the same night. They must’ve been filling each other in on my exploits, I realized.
“Alright, alright,” I chuckled, setting aside my drink for the time being and glancing up at the small metal ornament hanging on the wall next to an old nautical telescope. “Actually, this case has something to do with
