Page 19 of Jonah’s Lure

The office absorbed it. Nobody said anything. That was answer enough.

He went home and called Murphy.

* * *

She arrived forty minutes later, still in her work jacket, having left a case she’d been in the middle of when he called. She came through the door, read his face, and sat across from him at the kitchen table without asking what had happened. He told her anyway—the call from Kovak, the withdrawal, the account he’d opened with Renee twelve years ago and never closed, the leave beginning Monday.

She listened without interrupting. When he finished she was quiet for a moment.

“Someone has been inside your financial records,” she said.

“Yes.”

“That’s not a grudge. That’s not someone acting on impulse.” She looked at him steadily. “That’s someone who has been building this for a long time.”

“I know.”

“Do you know who?”

He looked at the table. “I have a direction. I can’t prove it yet.”

She accepted that without pushing. She sat with him in the kitchen while the morning light moved through the window, and she didn’t offer reassurance because she knew him well enough to understand that reassurance wasn’t what he needed.

What he needed was someone who wasn’t going to leave. She didn’t leave.

After a while, he made coffee, and she wrapped her hands around the cup, looking at him across the table.

“Monday,” she said.

“Monday.”

“Then you have Saturday and Sunday.” She looked at him with meaning. “Use them.”

He nodded.

Outside, a gull crossed the window in a long, smooth arc and was gone. Below, the harbor sat, indifferent as it always was—the way it had been long before Weyport existed and would be long after. Angus looked at it for a moment. Then he opened his journal.

He had Saturday and Sunday.

Chapter Twelve

Six days.

He knew it the way he knew everything in here—by the light under the door, by the cycling of dark and gray and bright, by the exhaustion that had seeped into his bones somewhere around day three and never quite lifted. Not the exhaustion of effort. The exhaustion of stillness. Of a body that had nothing to do and nowhere to go, and had started turning its energy inward in ways that weren’t always useful.

He’d been awake since before the gray came, lying on his side with the blanket pulled up, watching the dark line under the door and thinking about nothing in particular—which was its own kind of thinking.

His wrists had stopped hurting in the acute way they had during the first days. Now the pain was a dull, constant presence—the zip ties tight enough to remind him with every movement, but not tight enough to do real damage. He’d learned to move carefully, using both hands together for everything. To sleep on his back with his hands on his stomach rather than on his side, where the pressure builds.

Small adaptations. The kind the body makes without consulting the mind.

* * *

The slot opened in midmorning.

Not water. Not food. The phone again—cheap, prepaid, sliding across the concrete before he could get to his feet. He reached for it awkwardly with both hands and straightened himself against the wall.

The voice from the other side of the door was flat, without inflection, as though the words were being read from a list rather than spoken by someone who meant them. “Call your father. One minute. Could be your last. Don’t waste it.”