Page 8 of Jonah’s Lure

“Reid,” he said again.

A click. The call ended.

He stood by the window with the phone in his hand and looked at the screen. The call had lasted eleven seconds.

“Who was it?” Miguel asked.

Angus looked at the dark blue pickup truck parked at the far end of Birch Street. He hadn’t noticed it when they arrived. It hadn’t moved in the forty minutes they’d been in the apartment.

“Get the plate on that truck,” he said.

Chapter Five

The plate came back registered to Cobb.

Miguel was already at the end of Birch Street when the result hit his radio—dark blue Ford pickup, registered to Raymond J. Cobb, south waterfront address. By the time he reached the spot where it had been parked, the truck was gone. He’d heard the engine turn over from twenty yards away. A dry rectangle on the wet asphalt was the only thing it had left behind.

Angus came down the apartment staircase and stood at the curb. Both directions were empty. The engine sound had already been absorbed into the ordinary noise of the street.

“He was watching the apartment,” Miguel said.

“Yes.”

“You want to go to the workshop now?”

Angus looked at the dry rectangle. A man who saw them enter the apartment and moved before Miguel cleared the street—that was not someone reacting. That was someone who had already planned for this moment. Arriving at Cobb’s workshop now meant entering a space he’d either abandoned or prepared for this exact scenario. Neither option was useful.

“No. We wait for the phone records. We move on him with something in hand.” He looked at Miguel. “In the meantime, I want to know everything about that south dock unit. Who owns it, who leased it to Cobb, what the terms were, and how the payments came in.”

Miguel wrote it down, and they parted at the curb.

* * *

The first two harbor board contacts were brief and produced nothing beyond what Clara had already given them. Both men confirmed Jonah was prepared, serious, and had raised the northern expansion idea at the last meeting, where he met resistance from the older fleet operators who didn’t want competition on the Penobscot Bay grounds. One of them described Jonah as the kind of young man who did his homework before opening his mouth, which, in a room full of men who’d been doing things a certain way for thirty years, was not always a compliment. Neither had seen Jonah outside the meetings. Neither knew the name Ray Cobb.

By four thirty, Angus was at the diner on Harbor Street with a coffee in front of him. Walt Greer occupied the corner booth, his crossword folded in half and his coffee long since cold.

Walt was sixty-six, a retired sea captain from Gloucester, Massachusetts, who’d moved to Weyport four years earlier and made the corner booth at the diner his permanent post. He possessed the compressed watchfulness of a man who’d spent decades reading weather and water and had applied the same habit to people once he retired. He’d made it his business to know everything that moved through Weyport since his arrival, and he usually knew it before anyone else did. Angus had learned early on that a conversation with Walt cost nothing and was rarely wasted.

* * *

He carried his coffee to the booth. Walt moved his newspaper without being asked.

“Jonah Holt,” Angus said. “Tell me what you know.”

Walt set his pen down. “Frank’s boy. Heard he was missing.” He looked at Angus steadily. “Good kid. Serious about the business. Shows up to harbor board meetings having actually read the agenda—you’d be surprised how rare that is.” He paused. “Frank doesn’t make it easy on him. Never has.”

“How do you mean?”

“Frank built that operation from one leased boat and a handshake deal. He’s proud of it, and he should be. But a man who builds from nothing sometimes can’t see when the building is done and the running of it belongs to someone else. Jonah knows the water. Knows the business inside and out. Frank just can’t separate the son from the student. Can’t see that the boy he taught grew into a man worthy of being entrusted with something.” He shook his head slowly. “Not uncommon. Doesn’t make it less of a waste.”

Angus drank his coffee and let Walt run through the harbor board dynamics—the northern expansion proposal, the older fleet operators who’d pushed back on Jonah’s licensing questions at the last meeting, and the two or three names who’d been loudest about it. He noted them without writing anything down. He’d add them to the file later. Anyone with reason to want the expansion plan stalled had a motive worth examining, however thin.

Walt talked for a few more minutes and then looked at his crossword as if he’d just remembered it was there. Angus reached for his jacket.

Then Walt said, in the same even tone he’d used throughout the conversation, “You know Pete Hutchinson is back.”

Angus put his jacket down.