Page 37 of Jonah’s Lure

Chapter Twenty-Two

He drove home from Prospect Street and sat in his parked truck outside the house.

The Millers’ curtains were drawn. The afternoon had gone without him noticing it go. A light glowed next door and the sound of a dog barking came from somewhere further down the block. His hands were still on the wheel, and he left them there because taking them off meant the day was over. But the day wasn’t over; it just sat there in front of him, refusing to move forward.

Angus sat in the truck with the engine off and the cold creeping in around the door seals and thought about the sequence of the day. Walt had been alive at nine thirty that morning. He’d set down his coffee mug with deliberate care, understanding the liability of what was being discussed. He’d said, “I recognized the type,” and meant it. The empty building on Pembrook Road, the discarded blanket against the wall, the smell of a space recently occupied. Then Prospect Street. Standing beside Miguel while Vera Stinson described seeing his truck outside at nine and looked at him with the expression of a woman doing what she believed was right. Then Murphy outside the house and the three seconds of what her face said.

He gripped the top of the steering wheel.

He’d been a man of faith long enough to recognize the feeling when the space between himself and God seemed to widen. When prayer felt like speaking into an empty room. When the silence on the other end wasn’t peace but the silence of a man who knew he was drifting toward something wrong and didn’t want to bring that to God’s attention.

He knew exactly where he’d been drifting.

Call Logan. Two words in his journal, crossed out hard enough to score the page beneath. The harbor board meeting minutes he’d told himself were public record, even though he knew perfectly well what he was doing. The planner he’d sat with at his kitchen table before he called Miguel, reading through what was in it, making decisions about it, before he handed it over. His hand on the truck door on Pembrook Road, the padlock right there, with nobody watching, and how long it had taken him to put both hands back on the wheel. Each of those moments was small. Each one was justifiable in isolation. Each one was another step toward becoming the man the evidence said he already was.

He hadn’t prayed. Not really. Not since before this started. He’d written things in his journal that were addressed vaguely upward and called it enough.

It wasn’t enough.

He sat in the truck in the cold, looking at the steering wheel, and said out loud to the empty cab—to God, hoping He was listening—“I don’t know what you’re doing, Lord. I’m trying to make sense of it all, but I can’t.”

It wasn’t elegant. It wasn’t the composed prayer of a man who had his theology in order. It was the stripped-back version, the kind that arrives when there is nothing left to dress it up.

“Walt is dead. Jonah has been gone for ten days. My badge is in a folder in Augusta, and someone has used facts from my own life to make me look guilty of things I didn’t do—” He stopped.

He started again.

“I came close, Lord. To doing it the wrong way. More than once. I know You saw that.”

No answer came. He hadn’t expected one. He’d been a Christian long enough to know that the answer wasn’t the point. The asking was the point. The act of bringing it into the room rather than carrying it alone in the dark.

“I am not going to become what they’re trying to make me look like, Father,” he said. “I need you to know that. I need to know it too. I’m not like my brother. I’m not Logan. Help me not to go there, Lord. Give me the strength to resist it.”

He sat with that for a while.

The distinction mattered and he needed it to matter. Logan had operated outside the law because he'd decided the law's outcomes were insufficient. Because he'd weighed the results and found them lacking and decided his own judgment was the better instrument. And the results had been real. Lives saved, harm prevented, people removed from danger. Angus had seen it. He couldn't pretend otherwise.

But the instrument had become the thing. Logan's certainty about his own rightness had become indistinguishable from that of the men he opposed. Both believed the ends justified the means. Both had replaced God's authority with their own. The difference between them was only the direction in which they pointed.

He had a contact in his phone he was building a reason to call.

He had every justification he needed for every step he'd almost taken.

That was the thing about this kind of temptation. It never looked like what it was. It looked like urgency, like necessity, like the reasonable conclusion a reasonable man arrives at when the system moves too slowly and a young man’s life is on the clock. It looked like every true thing it stood next to—until you named it clearly.

He named it.

* * *

Scout was scratching at the back door before Angus had his jacket off, pressing his nose into the gap at the base the way he did when he’d been waiting longer than he felt was reasonable. Angus unlocked the door and Scout came pushing through, went straight to his bowl, and then straight back to Angus.

Scout pushed his head under Angus’s hand and stayed there, as though he sensed his owner’s need. Angus’s fingers found the warm, solid weight of him, the familiar coarse fur behind his ears. He sat down on the kitchen floor with his back against the cabinet and let the dog push into him and didn’t try to make anything of it beyond what it was.

“Yeah,” he said quietly. Scout’s tail moved in a slow, steady arc. “You believe me, don’t you.”

Scout looked at him with the forthright attention of a creature who had no interest in evidence, oversight boards, or the contents of online forums. Who knew one thing and knew it completely.

Angus scratched behind Scout’s ears for a long time. His throat tightened once, and he let it and didn’t make a thing of that either. Just a man on a kitchen floor with his dog on the worst Tuesday of his professional life, holding on to a relationship that had no conditions attached.