Page 42 of Jonah’s Lure

A single tear ran down his cheek, and he pressed the heels of his bound hands against his eyes.

His father’s voice came back to him. The crack in it. Son. He’d been carrying that word since the call, and it still hadn’t lost its weight. If anything, it had grown heavier in the dark.

He’d spent years trying to earn that word. Had built expansion plans toward it. Had sat across from Ray Cobb in a coffee shop and talked for hours about licensing timelines, county approvals, and what Angus Reid’s signature looked like on a document, all of it aimed at the same invisible target.

Look at me, Dad. See what I know. See what I’ve built. See that I’m ready.

He’d been so certain the expansion plan would finally turn his father around to face him.

He sat in the dark and laughed. Not from amusement. From absurdity. Like a man who sees himself clearly for the first time and finds the view unexpected.

He’d handed Ray Cobb everything. Had sat across a table for months and delivered it piece by piece with the enthusiasm of someone who genuinely couldn’t see what was happening because he’d been too busy trying to impress his father to notice he was being used.

His hunger for approval had been the door. He’d opened it, walked through, and led Ray straight to whatever was on the other side.

The laughter ran out.

He thought about the business card and felt annoyed at himself for forgetting it. And again, he asked for grace to be shown in his own carelessness.

He closed his eyes and sent words into the dark the way a man did when language had run out. Raw. Unstructured. Not addressed to anyone he was certain was there. Just the wanting itself, stripped bare and cast into the silence he’d stopped expecting a response from.

“Please.”

One word. Everything he had left.

To his surprise, barely had the plea left his lips when the slot opened.

Not water. Not food.

A paper cup slid through. Coffee, by the smell of it. Cold and bitter even from a distance. His throat was raw from eleven days of rationed water, and the smell of it reached him before he could think.

He dragged his weary body toward it and picked it up with both bound hands. His throat was raw, and it was all there was. He drank it without thinking.

He should have known. He understood that afterward, in the way you understand things that arrive too late to be useful. The timing of it. After the note and three days of waiting, a cup of coffee appeared through the slot at an odd hour. He should have known.

The aftertaste arrived before anything else. Bitter underneath the bitter. Then the heaviness in his hands. Then, nothing.

* * *

He didn’t know how long the nothing lasted.

What came after it was light.

Real light. Not the thin gray line under the door but full light pouring through an opening, finding him where he lay on the floor and landing on him like a spotlight.

Then the engine sound registered. Close. Cutting out. Footsteps. The sound of something metallic giving way. A lock. A door.

He raised his bound hands against the light and squinted into it, finding that no matter how hard he tried, he could not speak.

Nor could he walk.

Chapter Twenty-Five

By midmorning, Angus had drunk two cold coffees and walked the length of the kitchen so many times that Scout had stopped lifting his head when he passed.

Outside, a delivery truck had come and gone. Nothing exciting occurred on the street.

When the phone rang, he had it to his ear before the sound finished.