Stolen Child (Coastal Fury Book 13) - Matt Lincoln (ebook reader library .txt) 📗

came back from lunch?” Danny asked his uncle with characteristic exasperation.

“I remember anything that has to do with my boats!” Mr. Samuels reiterated before turning his attention back to me. “I’m telling you, Lucy’s a good old boat, but she’s still old. There’s no way that guy’s gonna get to the next island over in her in one piece. He’d have to stop in a cave somewhere or travel along the shore if he doesn’t want to drown.”

“Really?” I asked, raising my eyebrows at this and exchanging an excited look with Nina. “Would he know this just by riding in it for a while?”

“If he knows anything about boats, yeah, which he should,” Mr. Samuels said. “Everybody should know about boats if you ask me. And you should ask me.”

“I don’t disagree,” I chuckled.

21

Ethan

As Nina and I headed back up to the parking lot and her rental car, I checked my watch. It was getting to be around dinner time.

As eventful as the day had been, I was worried that we were running short on time. Mikey could be anywhere on this great big ocean, and while we knew a lot more about what had happened to him after he was taken from the mall, I couldn’t help but feel like we still weren’t doing enough to figure out where he was now.

“I should call my contact with the Coast Guard,” Nina said, pulling out her phone as we stopped in front of her car, and I leaned back against its side.

“Agreed,” I said with a nod, pulling out my notebook and handing the description of Lucy over to her. “And ask them… ask them if they’d be willing to pick us up in a little while.”

“Pick us up?” she repeated, arching an eyebrow at me.

“I think it’s time we go straight out there and look for Mikey ourselves,” I explained. To her credit, she didn’t miss a beat with this.

“Alright, then,” she said, stepping off to the side as her phone rang.

I didn’t try to listen in on the conversation. She’d tell me what it was about. I just took a moment to lean back and breathe in the ocean air, enjoying the sun beating down on me for once.

“They’ll be here in an hour,” Nina’s voice said, cutting into my brief reprieve in not too long. “They’ll have a boat for us to take out, and they could send one guy with us if we want. Otherwise, they’ll let us branch off so we can cover more ground faster.”

“Yeah, that’ll work,” I said, nodding and squinting at her in the sun. “We can grab a bite to eat in the meantime, so we don’t have to worry about it later.”

The owner of the restaurant we’d been going to didn’t look surprised to see us.

“Hey, where is your friend?” he asked when we walked in. “Everything alright, I hope?”

“Yes, he’s just… elsewhere,” I said, not wanting to say that Holm had gotten shot. The rumor mill in this town was running wild enough as it was.

“We’ll take whatever you have on hand,” Nina told the man. “We’re in a hurry.”

“Coming right up!” he cried, disappearing right into the back.

There were only two other occupied tables in the restaurant, at the height of dinnertime.

Before Nina and I could even get settled at our usual table, the man returned with two heaping plates full of seafood pasta to keep us both full, along with some of those biscuits for good measure.

It was delicious, and my pasta was full of garlic and butter, and crab and lobster bits. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was after that gunfight until all the food was right in front of me.

“What do we think about this boat?” Nina asked me when we were both about halfway through our plates, working quickly to try to get done before the Coast Guard arrived.

“I’m thinking that either Mikey and this Charlie guy are hiding out somewhere, or they drowned trying to make it to one of the islands on such a small, old boat,” I said darkly, wiping some cheese sauce off of my upper lip.

“Do we think that he would know enough about the boat to get it back somewhere in time to avoid drowning?” Nina asked. “The Coast Guard said they originally spotted them in international waters.”

“I know,” I said, as I had been turning this around in my head ever since our conversation with Mr. Samuels and his nephew. “It wasn’t far out, though, and the witness didn’t give an exact location since he didn’t realize this Charlie guy was a wanted man until he got back to shore. They could’ve turned back around.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” Nina pointed out. “Do we think this guy would have enough knowledge to do that, even?”

“I don’t know,” I said honestly, pursing my lips. “We just don’t know enough about this guy, just that he works for a human trafficking organization and that he’s a little strange. And honestly, even if he had the knowledge, I’m not really sure that he would have the presence of mind to turn around anyway, given the situation.”

“I was afraid you were going to say that,” Nina sighed, setting down her fork and peering out the window toward the ocean in the distance.

“I mean, he was panicked enough to take this kid in the first place and then steal the boat,” I continued. “We don’t even know if he knows a thing about boats! Does he know how to refuel? Does he even have enough fuel to make it very far? Would he even know?”

“So basically, for all we know, he could already have killed Mikey, or they could both already have drowned, or they could be hiding out in a cave somewhere biding their time, or they could’ve come back to shore without us realizing it yet,” Nina summarized, her mouth set in a thin line.

“Yeah,” I said, letting out a long breath. “Not sounding so great, is