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  “I believe you,” I promised the detective, meeting his eyes again in the rearview mirror. “Don’t worry. We’ve seen it all. This doesn’t even clock in the top fifty.”

  “Okay,” Martin said with a nervous half-grin and a laugh, his shoulders seeming to relax at this. “Good to know.”

  “So, are you going to transfer to one of the bigger Keys at some point?” Muñoz asked the guy. “Your boss seemed to think you were headed in that direction.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Martin said with a shrug, looking away from her and out the window. “Don’t get me wrong. I’d like to be somewhere where there’s more action. But Rollins has to retire at some point, and where else am I going to get an opportunity like that this young? Plus, I like the quiet sometimes. This is home.”

  “You’re from Little Torch originally?” I asked, a little surprised to hear this.

  “Yeah, I grew up here,” he said. “Not many of us do, but there are a few of us who are locals, born and bred. I never thought I’d stay forever, but hey, why not? Most people think it’s paradise after all.”

  “It is paradise,” Holm corrected.

  “See?” Martin asked with a chuckle, pointing at Holm. “Most everybody would think I was crazy to give that up. I got away for a little while when I served in the Navy. And anyway, it looks like things are finally getting interesting around here. Not that, um, I’m glad this is happening.”

  He muttered the last part and stared down at the floor of the car as if embarrassed to have revealed so blatantly his excitement at the recent turn of events on the island.

  I exchanged an amused look with Muñoz and saw that she was trying to stifle a laugh herself, so she hadn’t taken any offense either.

  “It’s okay, Martin,” I assured him, letting myself betray a laugh of my own. “We get what you mean. And it’s pretty clear you were dying of boredom before we showed up, so you don’t have to worry about hiding anything from us.”

  “We’ve been there,” Muñoz added. “More often than you might think. There’s only so much sitting around the office you can do before you’re itching for a little action.”

  “I doubt you guys ever have to just sit around the office,” Martin scoffed. “You’re federal agents, after all. You’ve probably got a huge waiting list full of cases.”

  “Give us more credit than that,” Muñoz laughed. “We finish cases, get rid of these drug lords, and then that makes less work for ourselves in the future! Or that’s how it’s theoretically supposed to work, anyway.”

  “Think of it this way,” I said. “When you were in the Navy, it wasn’t like you were fighting bad guys all day and taking out the bad guys like it is in the movies, was it?”

  “No, nothing like that,” Martin chuckled, shaking his head. “We got up, went to bed, and played cards just like everybody else.”

  “Exactly,” I said with a nod. “It was the same for Holm and me in the SEALS, and it’s the same for us in MBLIS. Sure, we have more than our fair share of exciting times, especially lately. But we get downtime too, like everyone else.”

  “You were in the SEALS?” Martin asked, his eyes widening. Somehow, I knew that was coming.

  “Yeah,” Holm chuckled. “Though I have to say, our second careers have turned out to be even more exciting.”

  “Take a right up here,” Muñoz said, pointing to where the road lining the ocean forked off and up toward a series of grotesquely large mansions lining the beach up ahead. “It’s supposed to be the sixth and seventh from the right once we get there.”

  “Thanks,” I murmured, following her directions to the letter as I steered the car away from the ocean and back toward some semblance of civilization.

  Muñoz directed me past several of the mansions, which were all pretty well spaced out from each other, and then up the long and winding dirt driveway to the sixth one we saw. I didn’t notice any lights on in the windows as we approached.

  It was a vast house, stretching three stories high and about a quarter as long as the enormous resort where Muñoz, Holm, and I had been staying. It looked harmless enough from the outside, with a mundane beige paint job and a well-kept lawn on the non-waterfront side of the property.

  “Alright, then,” I said, putting the car in park and unbuckling my seatbelt. “Martin, does this look like the house we should be at?”

  “Yep, this is the one,” he confirmed. “Came here a while back to check it out after Nick’s report.”

  “After what Derek told us, I’m comfortable saying we have cause to go inside,” I told the others. “Even so, let’s try to play nice, scare them into cooperating. Stay on alert as always, though.”

  I said all this mostly for Detective Martin’s benefit, as opposed to the other MBLIS agents, who I knew already knew all this. Martin probably did, too, at least in theory. But I doubted he’d ever even had to draw his gun on a case down here before, and reality was often very different from theory. I wanted to avoid him getting spooked and digging us into a deeper hole in our search for Birn.

  I exited the car and beckoned for the others to follow me up the long pathway through the lawn to the doorway. Instead of the usual sidewalk, there were round stone steps with smaller stones embedded intricately throughout on top spread at regular intervals up to the door. Someone had put a lot of effort into making this place look presentable.

  At the doorway, I shielded my eyes from the sunlight and pressed my forehead to the screen door, trying to squint through the little window at the top of the door behind it to try to see inside. But there still didn’t seem to be any lights on, and I wasn’t able to make out anything except what looked like an umbrella stand sitting beside the inside of the door.

  I opened the screen door and knocked loudly on the wooden one with the large metal door knocker, which was painted black. No one answered. I knocked a second time and then dropped my hand to the doorknob, at which point I realized that the door itself was hanging slightly open.

  I looked back at Muñoz, who, based on the confused expression on her face, seemed to have noticed the same thing. I pushed the door open, and though it wasn’t fully closed, it still took an effort due to its size and weight.

  “Hello!” I called into the vast house from the small wooden-floored hallway right inside the doorway. “Law enforcement! Your door was open.”

  There was only silence in response from the house.

  I motioned for everyone else to follow me inside, and they did so. I kept my gun at the ready at my side, though the house appeared to be empty.

  We made our way through the small hallway at the front of the house and back into a kitchen area, where we were greeted by a sight that couldn’t have been more different from what we saw outside.

  While the outside of the house was pristine and presentable to its core, the inside was, to be blunt, trashed. There were bags of open trash all over the kitchen as if someone had hastily attempted to clean up and then abandoned the project midway through. There was food strewn all over the counters, and dishes were piled high in the sinks.

  The rest of the ground floor was an even sadder story. There were old pizza boxes all over the living and dining rooms, some with moldy half-eaten slices still in them. Soda and beer cans littered the place, and there was a distinct, mildewy stench that I associated with college frat houses that permeated throughout the place.

  It was a distinct contrast to the decor, which was notably upscale, with fancy art over the walls and marble counters throughout the house. There were steel appliances, and there was fresh finishing on all the cabinets.

  “Wow,” Holm said, his mouth hanging slightly ajar as he took in the scene. “Are we sure the spring breakers weren’t staying here?”

  “Good question,” Martin chuckled, which seemed to just make the bad smell more pungent for him. He gave a sharp intake of breath and pinched his nostrils shut.

  “How long do we think they’ve been gone?” Muñoz asked, gingerly prodding one of the piz
za boxes near her on a counter and peering inside, as if hoping to judge how old the cheese was just by looking at it.

  “Don’t know,” I mumbled, looking back around at the trash bags. “Looks like somebody tried to clean up before they made a run for it, but they didn’t have enough time.”

  “What spooked them, do we think?” Holm asked. “The situation with Birn?”

  “Abducting a federal agent would be grounds for making a run for it in my book,” I murmured, though something about this whole thing still didn’t quite sit right with me.

  “You could say that again,” Holm muttered, but just as he was speaking, I heard a creaking noise coming from upstairs.

  We all froze, and, looking around at the other MBLIS agents and Martin, I knew that they all had heard it, too.

  Cautiously, I took a step toward a long staircase off to the side of the TV room, where most of the pizza boxes were strewn about. I peered upstairs but still didn’t see any lights coming from there. In fact, the only light in the entire house that I could see came from the sunlight in the windows.

  I waited there, thinking that maybe the creak we had heard was just one of the everyday sounds of a great big house like this one. But then it happened again—several creaking sounds in short succession, one after another, like footsteps across the ceiling.

  I motioned for the others to come forward.

  “Wait down here,” I whispered to Muñoz and Martin. “Holm and I will go up and see what we’re working with. You protect our flank.”

  Muñoz nodded and cast a wary glance in Martin’s direction. He was gripping his gun tightly, and I could see the whites of his knuckles.

  “Hey, think back to your training,” I said, gripping his shoulder. “I’m sure you’ve been in worse situations abroad. This is what you’ve been trained to do.”

  He nodded nervously and gave me a weak smile, but the white in his knuckles diminished, and his shoulders relaxed slightly.

  “Alright, come on,” I said, turning to Holm and motioning for him to follow me up the staircase.

  Together, we climbed as softly as we could up the stairs. This effort was helped by the presence of a rug with an ornate pattern on it lining the middle of the hardwood staircase, so as long as we kept the soles of our shoes on the middle of the carpet, we were able to soften the sounds of our footsteps.

  At the top of the staircase was a small hallway that wrapped around the second floor and led to a second staircase leading to the third floor.

  There was more carpet on this floor to match that on the stairs, a thin line stretching around the hallway and falling squarely in the middle of the otherwise hardwood floors. Holm and I continued to move carefully along the middle of the floor in order to muffle our footsteps.

  We stopped before we reached the first room, the door to which was closed. I strained my ears, listening carefully for any more sounds. But there was only silence. I knew from how loud the sounds had been that they must have come from this floor, but whoever made them had piped down by now.

  I glanced around at the other rooms circling the hallway around the open staircase. Most of the doors were open, except for one that was only partially closed, the door resting against the wall. There was a second door right next to Holm and me that was shut tight.

  I didn’t see any light coming out of the open rooms, except for what I determined was natural sunlight. I bent down to try to peer under the cracks in the other two rooms and didn’t see any light coming out of there either.

  I pressed a finger to my lips and held up my other hand to indicate that Holm should stay put as I inched over to the first shut door, the one that wasn’t completely closed.

  Once on that side of the house, I pressed my back against the wall and crept up to the door from the left-hand side, my right hand firmly on my gun at my side and my left reaching out to push open the door with one quick motion.

  It wasn’t too hard because the door wasn’t completely shut. I was afraid that it would creak when it opened, but it didn’t, swinging open softly to reveal an empty half bath. The hinges must have been new for them to be so quiet. The whole house was new, from what Nick and Martin had told us.

  I breathed a sigh of relief that the room was empty and slowly made my way around the rest of the rectangular hallway the same way, peering into each open room to make sure it was empty along the way.

  I thought back to what I remembered from outside the house, not wanting whoever was inside to be able to escape through a window. This room was pointing toward the front where we had parked, and I didn’t remember seeing anything outside that would’ve cushioned someone’s fall from a second-story window, which would be quite high. I doubted anyone could escape that way without us hearing the impact when he reached the ground.

  With this in mind, I rapped my knuckles on the shut door.

  “Police, we know you’re in there!” I barked in a low, gravelly voice that I reserved for situations such as this. “Drop any weapons and put your hands up and open this door if you know what’s good for you.”

  I dropped my hand and trained my gun at the shut door, as did Holm. No one responded to our message, and there was a long period of silence in which I really did start to wonder if we had only heard the normal creaking of a large house, or maybe some cat somebody had left in there creeping around, blissfully unaware of the seriousness of the situation.

  Then, another shuffling noise came from inside the room, followed by the banging sound of flesh hitting the wall. Someone cried out in pain.

  I glanced back at Holm, and he gave me a curt nod.

  “We’re coming in, hands up and weapons down!” I bellowed, kicking the door open with one swift motion, Holm following closely behind me.

  Inside the room, we found three guys hidden out on a tiny futon in the corner of what looked like a study meant for one person. An even more pungent scent than the one downstairs wafted out into the hallway, and I noted the presence of even more pizza boxes and soda and beer cans inside. Did these guys ever clean?

  One of the guys had his head out the window and was clutching his forehead with his hand, meaning he must’ve bonked himself when trying to climb out. Not that that was a great plan, to begin with, for the reasons I’d already gone through myself.

  All three of the men looked to be Jamaican, and I wasn’t entirely sure if they knew English.

  “Hands up, weapons down!” I repeated, holding up my gun and motioning as if to place it on the ground, mirroring what I wanted them to do.

  “We are not stupid,” one of them spat in a heavy accent. “We heard you the first few times.”

  “I beg to differ,” Holm chuckled. “If you weren’t stupid, you would’ve listened to us by now.”

  The guy scowled and pulled a gun out of the front of his sweatpants, training it on me. The other two followed suit, and I groaned internally. Of course, these guys were going to make us do this the hard way.

  “Look, you’re all young,” I said in one last desperate attempt to change their minds. “I don’t know what you’re doing here or who your bosses are, but do you really want to get yourselves killed for this? Because there are three highly trained federal agents and one police detective in this house, and all four of us are former military. This isn’t going to end well for you, no matter what you choose to do in the next few minutes. You might as well make it to tomorrow.”

  Two of the guys looked at each other and snickered, while the third looked back down at the drop from the window hopefully as if expecting the distance to have lessened since he’d last checked.

  “Sorry, kid,” I told him apologetically. “That’s not going to work out too well for you either.”

  He looked from me to the ground and then back to me again and then shrugged. Then, to my surprise, he made as if to leap out of the window.

  Holm, it seemed, had been expecting this and fired a warning shot into the wall since it was in bad form to shoot a man who had his back turned to us. T
hat just wouldn’t be fair.

  The guy hit his head again in shock on the top of the window and cried out in pain again, stumbling back inside and crumpling to the ground holding his ear with one hand, which must be pulsing and ringing like mine from the shot, and the back of his neck with the other. I could already see a large bruise and a red mark forming in between his fingers.

  “See? Stupid,” Holm said, shaking his head and looking over at me with mock mournfulness.

  “Look, guys, this isn’t going to end well for you,” I warned yet again, training my gun on the guy nearest to me. “You might as well cooperate.”

  I could hear footsteps coming up the stairs behind me. Muñoz and Martin had no doubt heard the shot and came to see what all the fuss was about.

  “See, our reinforcements are coming now,” Holm said, nodding behind us. “You should do as he says, come down with us to the police station, and see if we can work something out from there.”

  The guy nearest to me panicked at this thought and lunged for my legs as if expecting to knock me off balance and escape… in the direction of Muñoz and Martin? I wasn’t sure what he was hoping to get out of this, but he did it anyway.

  I did go off balance briefly, not having expected this, and the guy ran past me and out into the hall, gun in hand. Holm shot after him, but he was already around the corner by then, and the bullet landed in the wall across the stairwell from us, leaving a gaping hole in its wake.

  I didn’t want to turn my back on the other two guys, but I didn’t want to fail to warn Muñoz and Martin either as they came up the stairs.

  “Watch out!” I cried, but it was too late.

  Two more shots rang out, along with two mangled cries of pain from distinctly different voices. I had to stop myself from running out to see. It was clear that Martin had been hit along with the goon.

  “Everything okay down there?” Holm yelled when the ringing in our ears from the indoor shots had dissipated slightly, his tone as tense as I’d ever heard it.