Page 4 of Rogue Wave

—It’s science

Hank

A quarter of a million dollars.

Eight bricks, each roughly a kilogram of cocaine inside of them. Hazel had found more than a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of cocaine on the beach this morning.

Shit.

I hadn’t known what to expect when she first called me, but that certainly wasn’t it.

The beach was now swarming with people—crime scene techs, Drug Enforcement Administration, the Navy, Coast Guard, news crews, and nosy onlookers being held at bay by my deputies.

The first call I’d made after Hazel called me was to my neighbor, Dougie. I knew he was home, which meant he could get down to the beach faster than any of my deputies or other agencies to help preserve the scene.

Dougie—whose real name was Jake Douglas, but everyone called him Dougie—was a Navy veteran and worked for Naval Criminal Investigative Service.

“Why are you waking me from a nap?” Dougie grumbled into the phone.

“I need you to get down to the beach,” I responded before telling him what Hazel had just called to inform me.

“Put your leg on and get your ass down to the beach before anyone fucks that evidence up, including Hazel, who’s probably put her fingerprints all over it by now, simply out of morbid curiosity.”

I rolled my eyes, knowing that was exactly what she likely did. That woman was too curious for her own good.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m going,” Dougie’s annoyed voice sounded before he hung up.

Dougie was an amputee and either used his high-tech wheelchair to get around or his prosthetic, which was fitted on his left leg from the knee down.

One night while we were drinking on his front porch, he’d told me the story about how that had come about. He was damn lucky to be alive.

I knew being in the prosthetic for long periods of time was uncomfortable, but you’d never know it looking at him now on the beach. He’d been out here with me for hours, and I greatly appreciated the extra set of hands.

Deputy Kingston and I had arrived at the same time. I’d tasked him with taking the lead on Hazel’s interview, but I also wanted to listen in on the basics before the rest of the crew got there, just so I knew what to expect.

“Miss, can you tell me what you were doing at the beach?” Kingston asked her.

“I was looking for shells and other creatures after the storm.”

“You do this often?” Kingston looked puzzled, but I already knew the answer. She did this all the time.

I’d watched her out my kitchen window many times trucking back and forth with bags of stuff she’d pulled from the beach.

“Yes. I’m a marine biologist over at the Foggy Ridge Research Aquarium. I go out to the beach after every storm and at low tide to see what washes ashore.”

“How did you find the drugs?” Kingston asked.

“I thought the…drugs,” she said, waving her hand in her face uncomfortably, “were a really pretty seashell. A rare one. So, I picked it up. Then I realized what it was and picked up a few more to be sure.”

Jesus. What was she thinking?

Sure, if it had been me to discover it, I would have picked them up and inspected them too. The difference was that I was the sheriff and had dealt with drugs and illegal substances far more than she had.

“And why did you pick them up in the first place?” Kingston asked.

The sassy, mildly crazy, and annoyingly sexy woman let out a frustrated huff. “I just answered that,” she replied, throwing her hands up.

“Sorry. I just want to make sure I wrote it down correctly on my notepad,” Kingston explained.