Stolen Child (Coastal Fury Book 13) Matt Lincoln (chrysanthemum read aloud .txt) 📖

“You still haven’t given us your name,” Nina said simply, staring straight at him.

The man was almost exactly as I’d imagined, bulky and with an almost swollen face. He had a small dent of a scar above his right eye, right near the temple, with a mat of dark brown hair and an indent on his chin. He looked like a typical goon. Or a linebacker. An old linebacker, as he looked to be in his early to mid-forties.

He looked from Nina to me and back again, as if trying to work out a way out of this. I could almost smell the fumes from the gears in his head working on overdrive, though he didn’t seem to find a solution and continued to just sit there, staring at us dumbly.

“You’re not going to find a way out of this one, my friend,” I said coolly, gazing into his eyes.

There was another period of silence. He didn’t seem to be working a way out of this anymore, however, and his broad shoulders slumped in resignation as he stayed silent.

“Alright, let’s start with your friend’s name, then,” Nina suggested. “You called him Rudy before?”

The guy stared at Nina, then nodded weakly before averting his eyes.

“What about a last name?” she asked.

“He’s not my friend,” was all he said in response.

“Colleague, then?” I asked, searching for an answer in his body language.

“I guess that’s one way to put it,” he said, shifting uncomfortably in his seat.

I glanced over at Nina, and the darkness that was washing over me at that moment was mirrored back at me in her eyes. This was organized, then. An organized crime ring of some kind. Human trafficking, even. Things were not looking good for little Mikey.

“Colleagues in what?” I asked, a little harsher than I’d intended, and the man flinched. I didn’t particularly care.

“I… uh…” he stammered, looking around the room wildly as if searching for an escape, though he found none.

“Look, bub, you’re stuck with us,” Nina said, leaning forward on the table and peering over at him with a piercing expression. “So you might as well cooperate. Let’s be honest, you’re going to have everything in the book thrown at you anyway, but you might as well not hurt yourself anymore in the process.”

The man’s eyes widened again at this, but he still didn’t say anything.

“Look, she’s right, you know,” I said with a shrug as if to say that I would help if I could, but there was nothing to be done. “You can only make things worse for yourself at this point, and who wants that? You’re smarter than that, right? I can tell you are.”

This couldn’t be further than the truth, but he seemed to relax a little at this, thinking that I may not hate him quite as much as Nina did.

“I… I… my name’s Justin Harper,” he stammered at long last.

“Hi, Justin,” I said, nodding to him in thanks. “Thank you. Now, why don’t you tell us what happened today down at the bay?”

The man hesitated one last time but then launched into a retelling, having worked out that the only way out of this thing was through.

“Well, Rudy and I were waiting for you guys,” he explained. “Looking around to see what you knew, if anything. Then, when we found out that you knew about the boat, well… well, Rudy kind of panicked, you see, and then you heard us, and then he shot at you. I didn’t shoot at you, I swear…”

He looked between us again, appearing to be rather panicked himself. It wasn’t lost on me that he blamed pretty much everything that had gone wrong on his dead companion, who could no longer defend himself. I knew it wasn’t lost on Nina either.

Sure enough, she said, “You sure shot at me a few times. Bad shot, though, if I do say so myself. Didn’t leave a scratch on me, even scared yourself when you did it.”

I realized that this must’ve been the screaming I’d heard as I chased the other goon, Rudy. Nina and I hadn’t had much time to debrief about what had happened away from Justin’s earshot.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Justin muttered, starting down at the table and not even attempting to get himself out of this one. “But I didn’t start it. You get that I didn’t start it, right?”

“Sure,” I relented with a curt nod. “We’ll make sure that the record reflects that.”

Not that it would make much of a difference. This guy was going away for a long, long time, and probably for a good while after that.

“Good, good,” Justin murmured, more to himself than anyone else by my estimation, staring back down at the table after glancing briefly up at me.

“So how about we talk about what happened at the mall?” Nina suggested. “Let’s go back to the beginning, shall we? Why’d you take the kid?”

“It—it wasn’t my idea,” Justin said quickly, looking wildly between us yet again. “It was Charlie’s. It was all Charlie’s, I swear. You have to believe me.”

“Charlie?” I asked, arching an eyebrow at him. “Was that the other man at the mall?”

“Yes, yes, that was him,” Justin said eagerly. “In the brown jacket. His name’s Charlie Black. You can look him up. He’s got a long record in Durham.”

“Durham?” Nina repeated. “You’re from Durham?”

“Yes, all three of us,” Justin said, nodding anxiously. “Charlie’s the only one with a record, though. Well, Rudy was arrested for petty theft a couple of times, and I was in a bar fight once, but other than that.”

“What’s in Durham?” I asked. “What do you three do there? You said before that you’re colleagues.”

“I… uh…” Justin stammered, clamming up at this question and shifting uncomfortably some more, which proved difficult because of the handcuffs.

“What is it?” Nina asked suspiciously, narrowing her eyes at him. “Whatever it is, it’s going to come out. You can minimize the damage by coming clean now.”

Justin groaned audibly and threw his head back, staring