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

No, we needed to find Mikey, so that didn’t happen. Too many broken families had to suffer that fate of uncertainty. If we didn’t find him alive, we had to at least find a body to give his family some closure. They deserved that much, at least, and so did he.

One way or another, we would have to bring this boy home. There simply wasn’t any alternative. Not one that I could live with, anyway.

22

Ethan

We finished eating earlier than we expected, our appetites killed by the talk of what may have happened to Mikey already, and even further dampened by unspoken thoughts of what he might be going through now. Wherever the boy was, he was no doubt terrified and wishing he was anywhere else in the world.

“Looks like the ship’s going to be an hour late,” Nina sighed when she checked her phone as we walked out of the restaurant. “They want to look at some caves on the way in, check and see if they might be there.”

“That’s good, that’s good,” I said, covering up my mutual disappointment that our trek out to look for Mikey ourselves would be delayed. “Whether we’re there or not, the point is that we find them.”

“True, but I’m itching to get out there,” Nina said, flashing me a grin. “I’ve only been out on the water on a case once, and that was in New Orleans with you. Good times.”

“If you’re talking about when we all almost got killed by nearly a dozen goons who ambushed us in the dark, uh, yeah, good times,” I chuckled, though I did look back on that case fondly since it was the first time I’d met Nina. The case was now colored in my mind by the knowledge that the Hollands were orchestrating things behind the scenes, unbeknownst to us at the time.

“So what do we do now?” Nina asked, throwing her hands up in the air weakly. “We’ve turned this whole town up and down, and there are still police and detectives out looking. Neighboring towns, too. I don’t want to just sit around until the Coast Guard shows up.”

“Agreed,” I said, just as my phone buzzed in my pocket. Pulling it out to squint at the tiny screen in the waning daylight, “It’s Holm. He wants an update.”

“We could go see him,” Nina suggested. “Can’t hurt to throw around a few ideas, see what he thinks.”

“And we’ll be able to tell the parents that there are still three agents working on the case,” I added. “Not a bad idea. The hospital’s not far from here, I remember. I’ll tell him we’re on our way.”

The first thing I noticed when we got to the hospital was just how small it was. There were barely any cars in the parking lot of the one-story, boxy white building, and the ones that were all seemed to be in staff parking lots.

When we walked through the front door, the woman sitting behind the front desk seemed to know who we were immediately, even though I’d never seen her before in my life.

“You must be the other agents,” she said quickly, practically jumping out of her chair to greet us. “Are you here to see Agent Holm?”

“Sure are,” Nina said. “Can you give us his room number?”

The woman directed us down a nearby hallway to the third door on the right, where the door was standing open to reveal Holm lying in bed, his arm all bandaged up where he had gotten shot, and some nasty bags under his eyes. Even so, he grinned with his whole face the second he saw us.

“I was beginning to worry that you all forgot all about me,” he scolded in a tone of mock disappointment. “Like I get one bullet lodged in me, and I’m not even important anymore.”

“Did they get it out, then?” I asked, narrowing my eyes at the covered wound.

“Yeah, didn’t take much,” he said, shrugging it off. “Doc says the real problem was all that blood I lost lying there. They fixed that up too, though.”

He gestured up to an empty bag hanging above his IV, traces of red remaining in the clear packet from his last blood transfusion.

“How many of those did you have to have?” Nina asked, furrowing her brow at it.

“Just two,” he said dismissively, and Nina and I exchanged a look. Two was one more than he probably should’ve had to have, which meant that his condition was likely more serious than he’d led us to believe. He looked better now, though.

“Well, we’re just glad you’re going to be okay,” I said, reaching out and squeezing his good shoulder gently.

“The real question is what’s been going on with you,” Holm said quickly. “You haven’t texted in a while, ‘till you said you were coming here.”

Nina and I quickly caught Holm up on everything we’d learned from both the elder and younger Daniel Samuels and the Coast Guard.

“Whoa,” he sighed when we finished, giving a low whistle. “That’s a lot for a couple of hours. So now we don’t even think this guy could’ve fled to an island somewhere?”

“Not unless he picked up another boat along the way,” I said with a nod.

“So either he doubled back when he realized he couldn’t make it and found his way to shore undetected, or he’s hiding in one of these caves somewhere along the coast, or…” Holm surmised, his voice trailing off before he got to the worst-case scenario.

“Yes,” I said curtly. “Those are the three options as we see them. Unless, as I said, he somehow got ahold of another boat.”

“That would mean that he would have to get back to shore, and then find another boat somehow, then head right back out on the water without anybody seeing him,” Holm said, shaking his head. “Seems like a lot of work for a guy in a state of panic and who doesn’t seem to be in the right headspace to