Page 60 of Jonah’s Lure

He put the call on speaker. Frank Holt answered on the second ring, his voice carrying the clipped efficiency of a man who ran a working waterfront and had no use for wasted words.

Miguel identified himself. Kept it direct: they had reason to believe Jonah was being held in the Holt Marine North Annex. He needed to know the layout.

Silence.

“No.” Something in Frank’s voice shifted. Not dismissal, something slower and heavier. “No one uses that building. It’s been locked up for⁠—”

“Dad.” Clara’s voice came from the background. “Jonah said the water system needed to be checked.”

The line went quiet.

Angus watched Miguel’s face and saw nothing in it change, but he felt what the silence meant. The silence of a man standing in a room that had just rearranged itself around him.

“The lower chamber,” Frank said finally. “There’s a lower chamber beneath the main floor. Old sluice works. Built for the original processing operation. Water comes in at high tide if the seals fail.” He stopped. “Jonah flagged the seals. Said the engineer’s report hadn’t been actioned. Said water could come in fast.”

“Is there another way in?” Miguel asked. “If the main door is compromised?”

“There’s an old manual release. A service hatch on the north wall of the lower level. But it might be rusted shut.” A pause. “If he’s in the lower chamber, the door may not open once the water’s against it.”

“Why?”

Frank’s answer came rougher. “Because Jonah told me that.”

Miguel met Angus’s eyes.

“We’re on our way,” Miguel said. “Stay where you are.”

* * *

The office was already in motion when Miguel ended the call. Rawlings had EMS on the line. Another deputy was pulling up the building layout in the county records system. Miguel crossed over to Jeanine and spoke quietly. She nodded and reached for the radio.

Angus stepped outside and called Murphy.

She answered before the second ring. He gave her the short version: North Annex, possible flooding, Jonah in the lower chamber, high tide at 7:42.

“Angus.” Her voice was level, but underneath it was something else. “Don’t go in alone.”

“I won’t.”

“I mean it.”

“I know you do,” he said. “I won’t.”

He ended the call and stood for a moment in the parking lot. The afternoon was ordinary and cold, the harbor visible at the end of the street, a gull riding the wind above the waterline. The town had no idea. Fishing boats were coming in. A van was making a delivery outside the hardware store. The world was running exactly as it always did, and somewhere beneath a building at the end of the Holt Marine dock, the tide was moving.

Miguel came through the door behind him.

“Fire rescue is rolling. EMS is behind them. Tammy’s statement is probable cause. Jonah’s life is the warrant.” He looked at his phone. “Three hours and forty-seven minutes to high tide.”

Miguel drove. Angus sat in the passenger seat and said almost nothing as he watched the town go by—the diner, the post office, the turn onto Harbor Road, the lobster co-op with its stacked traps, the smell of salt and diesel carrying a weight it didn’t have on ordinary days.

He thought about Jonah in the dark.

He thought about Frank saying, “because Jonah told me that” and the specific pain of a man understanding something far too late.

He did not try to take the wheel. He watched the road and let Miguel drive, holding onto what he’d said in the office, “I’ll tell you what I know. You decide what to do with it.”

That was not nothing. That was, in fact, everything it had taken him the length of this case to understand.