My bulldog’s voice was raspy when it came to what happened to Jonas. He’d lost his best friend after all.

“So John Adrian . . .” Remy said, her voice trailing off.

“Yeah,” I said. “The manager must’ve been aware of what was going on down here.”

“And Pelo, the clerk, wasn’t,” Remy said, finishing my thought.

I stared around.

The subflooring was made of worn plywood and all around it were fresh scratch marks from some animal.

I pointed toward a wooden shelf at the far side of the room. It had a solid back to it, and none of the rest of the shelves did.

“That’s odd, right?” I said.

I walked over to it and ran my hands along the dusty wood. To my right I saw a set of two industrial-strength L-brackets mounted on a blank wall. The kind you might hang something heavy on.

I reached my hands around the sides of the shelves and lifted.

Off it came, a lightweight wood.

I carried it to the hooks and hung it there.

“Wow,” Remy said.

Behind where the shelf had just stood was a door.

“So if anyone came down here, looking around . . .” I said.

“They wouldn’t see a way out,” my partner answered.

We opened the door and found an angled stairwell. Followed it up into a tiny entry area maybe ten square feet wide with two more doors. One was locked, but by the direction, presumably led into another storefront. The other was a metal door that swung out onto a loading dock in the same alley we’d been in ten minutes ago.

“Huh,” Remy said.

We walked outside into another area cordoned off by a fence. But it was clear that we were behind the hardware store now, two doors down from the Golden Oaks.

“The partnership owned this place too,” Remy said. “I saw that in the paperwork. They shut down the hardware store the same week as the Golden Oaks.”

I left the door ajar, but glared out at the loading dock.

The exit was one of those kinds where the driveway angled away from the store. So you could step right into trucks from our level. Load boxes right from this back door.

“So someone running an illegal operation under the liquor store,” I said, “could use this as a way to ship—”

“To ship what?” my partner said. “It could be anything illegal down here, P.T. Anything.”

“Yeah,” I said, my flashlight cutting through thick dust that came off the stairs.

“What did you find out about the guy who robbed the liquor store anyway?” Remy asked.

“That’s why I kept coming back,” I said. “I figured the key was talking to this clerk Pelo, but he went MIA. I never saw him again.”

We walked back down the stairwell from the loading dock and into the big dusty room below the Golden Oaks. Above us, I could hear a rat moving with something clinking behind him. Some part of his body was probably caught in a trap, and he was carrying it with him.