Page 30 of Jonah’s Lure

He turned the page.

One more RC entry. The last one, two days before Jonah disappeared. A Thursday. No time recorded, just a location Angus didn’t recognize—not the coffee shop on Harbor Street, not the south dock.

RC—warehouse end of Pembrook Road.

He sat back.

Pembrook Road ran along the northern edge of town, past the old cannery buildings that had been empty for years, down to a stretch of disused waterfront that predated the working harbor by several decades. Not a place that featured in the ordinary life of Weyport. Not a place you went to discuss business over coffee.

A place you went when you didn’t want to be seen.

He wrote the address in his journal. closed the planner, and sat with what he had, feeling the slow, cold pressure—the sense of something tightening around a specific point, drawing closer, and being on the outside of it with no badge, no authority, and a crossed wire where his judgment used to be clean.

He thought about Logan.

Not with grief this time. With something more uncomfortable than grief—the precise, practical awareness of what his brother could do that Angus couldn’t. The resources that moved outside the system. The ability to trace an encrypted message source in forty-eight hours. The knowledge of how to find a man like Cobb in the spaces official records left empty.

The thought stood between him and the planner on the kitchen table. Solid. Patient. Impossible to ignore.

He opened his journal and uncapped his pen and before he’d decided to do it he’d written two words.

Call Logan.

He stared at them.

His chest was tight in a way that had nothing to do with the cold. He knew what those two words meant—not just the act of making the call but what the call would confirm about who he was becoming in this kitchen on this Monday afternoon. He knew the argument he’d make to himself if he let the thought continue: that he had no choice, that the system had been turned against him, that a man was missing and nine days was already too long, and the planner on the table contained information the official investigation didn’t have. That someone needed to move faster than the review process allowed.

He knew the argument because he’d heard it before. In a different voice, from a different man, in a fish-processing plant on a cold night that felt like another life.

He drew a single line through the words. Pressed hard. The ink bled into the page and the words disappeared beneath it but the shape of them stayed—the ghost of a thought he’d had and crossed out and wasn’t willing to pretend he hadn’t had.

He didn’t tear the page out.

That was the line. Tearing it out would have been the beginning of something he couldn’t come back from—the first act of a man rewriting his own history to make the next step easier. He left it there, visible beneath the crossing-out, because he needed to be honest with himself about what this afternoon had produced.

He closed the journal.

* * *

Pembrook Road. The cannery end. A location Jonah had written down and nobody else knew about.

He didn’t need a badge to drive down a road.

He said it to himself and heard Logan’s voice underneath it—the same logic, the same reasonable framing, the same way of standing at a line and telling yourself you haven’t crossed it yet. He heard it and didn’t like it, but got his jacket anyway because Jonah Holt had been missing for nine days, the planner on his table had an address in it, and he was the only person who knew.

Scout appeared in the kitchen doorway, reading the movement—ears forward, body angled toward the back door, the quiet readiness of a dog who understood that jackets meant something was happening.

“Not this time,” Angus said.

Scout held the position for a moment, assessing whether this was negotiable. It wasn’t, and he seemed to accept that, turning back to his corner with the unhurried dignity of a dog who had made his position clear.

Angus picked up his keys and the planner and left.

* * *

Pembrook Road was quieter than he remembered. He hadn’t been here in years—there was no reason to come this far north unless you were going to the cannery buildings, and nobody went to the cannery buildings. They stood in a row along the disused waterfront, four of them, corrugated metal and weathered timber that had been sitting since the seventies, padlocked, council-owned, and left in the predictable administrative limbo of structures too expensive to demolish and too derelict to use.

He drove the length of the road slowly.