The Joint Hunt

The card was the thing.

Kimura had watched him buy it. That was what she kept coming back to, in the car, at twenty past nine, parked under a palm tree on Camelback Road with the engine running and the King’s phone face down on the passenger seat. Yesterday afternoon, at the airport, while the Household argued with a man about the cars, Theo Hartigan had gone to a ticket machine by the doors and bought a transit card with a cactus on it, with his own money, and then stood beside the machine typing on his phone for two minutes, and she had asked him what he was doing, and he had said:

“Registering it. My dad says you always register the card. If you lose it they can stop it.”

She had thought, at the time, that it was the most Hartigan thing she had ever heard.

She rang the transit authority’s night line at twenty-two minutes past nine and told a tired man in an office somewhere that her nephew had lost his card, and gave him the number off the registration, which she had, because she had everything, and asked him very nicely whether he could see where it had last been used, so that she would know which bus to ring about.

He could.

“Boarded at Camelback and Twenty-Fourth at seven thirty-one,” said the tired man. “Five fares. Then a transfer at seven fifty, southbound. Five fares. Nothing since.”

“Five,” said Kimura.

“Your nephew’s very generous.”

“He is,” said Kimura, and thanked him, and put the phone down, and sat for a moment with both hands on the wheel.

Southbound at ten to eight. Nothing since. An hour and a half of nothing, which meant that wherever they had got off, they had stayed. She looked at the map on her phone. She drew a line south from the transfer in her head. She thought about five boys, one of them eighteen today with a licence in his pocket, and what a boy who is eighteen today does with an hour and a half and a licence, south of Camelback, on a Tuesday.

She started the car.

---

She saw the octopus from a hundred yards away.

It was on a lit sign over the door of a long low bar on McDowell, an octopus in a captain’s hat with a moustache and a beer and a crab, and the last letter of the name was backwards, and the car park in front of it had a hitching post at every space. She had been in the Valley for two days and she had read the briefing, and the briefing had a page on hitching rails, because the briefing always had a page, and she knew exactly whose briefing it was.

She parked by the third post and went in at nineteen minutes to ten.

It was cold inside and nearly quiet. The quiz had finished. There were answer sheets on a table by the stage and a man with a microphone winding up a cable, and at the bar a barman with a grey beard was drying a glass, and he looked up when she came in, and she saw him see a woman of about thirty in a dark jacket in August, alone, looking at every face in the room in turn, and decide not to worry about it.

“Evening,” he said. “What can I get you?”

“Water, please.” She put her hands on the bar. “I’m looking for my nephews. Five of them. Well, one of them’s mine. The others came with him.” She made a face, an aunt’s face, a face that said boys. “It’s his birthday. Eighteen. He’s tall, red ears, Milwaukee accent. He’ll have shown you a licence.”

The barman put the glass down, and his face did something kind and amused.

“Facts Don’t Count,” he said.

“I’m sorry?”

“That was their team. They came second. Joined for two rounds and came second.” He poured her water. “Yeah, your nephew was here. First legal pint. I put it on the house.”

“That was kind,” said Kimura, and meant it.

“Nice kid. Nice bunch. The English one answered a cricket question from across the room.” He leaned on the bar. “The two little ones were seventeen. Very polite. German passports. Lemonade.”

Kimura held the glass of water very still.

“German passports,” she said.

“Both of them. The tall one didn’t have anything at all. No ID. Had a lemonade too.” He grinned. “Ordered the Pruitt. Wouldn’t say why.”

Then the grin went, slowly, from the top down. He looked at the till. He looked at Kimura, properly this time, at the dark jacket in August, the way he had decided not to when she came in.

“Paid in coins,” he said. “Was that…”

“No,” said Kimura.

The barman thought about it for about as long as it takes to dry a glass. Then he nodded, once, the way a man nods who has been told the specials, and picked the glass up again.

“Did they say where they were going?”

“Bus,” said the barman. “North, the tall one with the ears said. To Scottsdale. Left about ten minutes ago.” He nodded at the door. “Stop’s on the corner.”

---

There were two stops on the corner, one on each side of McDowell, facing each other across the road, under two little shelters, and both were empty.

Kimura stood on the pavement between them in the heat with the octopus glowing behind her.

North, he had said. Hartigan had said north. Hartigan, whose father drove buses, who had registered the card, who had downloaded the timetable, who had never in his life, she was perfectly sure, got on a bus going the wrong way. She looked at the northbound shelter. She thought about it for about four seconds, and then she got in the car and went north.

She was on Scottsdale Road by the time the tired man rang her back, because she had asked him to, because she had said her nephew might find it and use it, and could he let her know.

“It’s been used,” said the tired man. “Nine thirty-four. McDowell and Fifty-Second.”

“Northbound,” said Kimura.

“Southbound,” said the tired man. “Five fares again. That’s the route over the freeway. Ends in Ahwatukee.”

Kimura pulled over.

She sat at the side of Scottsdale Road with the engine running and the air conditioning blowing and her hands on the wheel, facing north, which was the direction she had been absolutely certain of, and the King was twenty miles behind her going south through a mountain on a bus whose number she now knew and whose route she could see on the map ending in a car park at the bottom of the Valley.

“Thank you,” she said to the tired man.

“I hope he has a good birthday,” said the tired man.

“He’s having a wonderful birthday,” said Kimura, and hung up, and turned the car round.

---

She rang Kessler from the freeway at two minutes past ten.

She had been thinking about Kessler since the German passports, and she had stopped thinking at about the point where she would have to decide whether he was lying, because she knew he was, and it only remained to find out how well. He answered on the first ring. He always did.

“Kessler.”

“It’s Kimura.”

“Sergeant.”

“Is His Imperial Majesty asleep?”

“Yes, Sergeant. He has a headache. He retired at ten past seven. You were there.”

“Which bar is he asleep in?”

There was a silence on the line. It was a very good silence, a professional’s silence, the silence of a man who has been asked a question by a colleague he respects and has no intention of answering it.

“His Majesty is asleep,” said Kessler.

“Where are you, Kessler?”

“Outside His Majesty’s door.”

Behind his voice, quite clearly, Kimura heard the hiss and sigh of a bus pulling away from a stop, and a small dog barking, and then a woman’s voice, a long way off, saying wrong way?

“That’s a very loud corridor,” said Kimura.

“It is a large hotel,” said Kessler, and then, after a moment, in a slightly different voice, the voice of a man who wants another professional to know one thing and not two: “He is safe, Sergeant. They are all safe. I have not seen them.”

“Of course you haven’t.”

“Goodnight, Sergeant.”

He rang off.

Kimura drove on south in the fast lane with the mountain coming up black ahead of her across the whole of the windscreen. She thought: he has not seen them. He is not allowed to have seen them. So he is right behind them, all the time, and if anything happens he is the nearest man in the March, and he will never say so. And she found that she trusted him completely, which made her angrier than anything else had all night.

---

The car park at the end of the line was empty.

She got there at twenty-five to eleven. A row of shut shops, a mattress in a window, a drinks machine humming between a dentist and a dry cleaner’s, and on the bench in front of the mattress shop five empty water bottles in a row, very neatly, with their caps on, the way a boy lines up empty bottles when he has been brought up to put things in the bin and cannot find a bin.

She stood and looked at them.

Nobody. No bus till morning. No taxi rank. No sign of which way. She looked north, at the mountain, over the shops, enormous and black, and understood that they were on the other side of it again already, somehow, and that she had come twenty miles to stand in front of a mattress shop in 98 degrees and look at their rubbish.

At a quarter to eleven, standing in the empty car park, she rang Castellanos.

He was at his mother’s in Tucson. She knew that because he had told her, on the Friday before he left the detail, that he would be at his mother’s for the last two weeks of August as he was every year, and that if she needed him she was not to ring him, and she had said she would not, and he had said good.

He answered on the third ring. She could hear a television, and a woman’s voice asking who it was at this hour.

“He’s gone,” said Kimura.

There was no silence at all. She heard him get up and go into another room and shut a door.

“How long?”

“Three hours.”

“Is Hartigan with him?”

“Hartigan. The English one. The German Emperor. The other one.”

“Lukas.”

“Kessler’s covering for them. He says he hasn’t seen them. He’s right behind them. They went to a bar on McDowell and did a quiz and came second. Then they got the wrong bus to Ahwatukee. I’m in Ahwatukee. They’re not.” She looked at the bottles. “Nobody outside the detail knows. Nobody’s going to.”

“Good,” said Castellanos.

There was a pause.

“And how long have you known him?” he said.

She knew what he meant. He meant: you know him. You have stood at the edge of his rooms for two years. You know where he goes and what he does and what he is going to do next. So why are you ringing me?

“Two years,” said Kimura. “Three in April.”

“I’ve known him six,” said Castellanos. “And I don’t know where he is either.” She heard keys. She heard a door open, and the night outside it, and a screen door bang. “Come anyway, you mean.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You rang me at a quarter to eleven at my mother’s,” said Castellanos. “That’s saying it. I’ll be two hours. Less if I’m not a police officer for the drive.”

“You’re always a police officer.”

“Not tonight,” said Castellanos. “Tonight I’m visiting my mother,” and rang off.

---

She sat in the car outside the mattress shop for one minute exactly, by the clock on the dashboard, with the engine running, because she had learned in two years under Castellanos that one minute of sitting still was worth ten of driving in the wrong direction, and she had already driven in the wrong direction once tonight.

The King’s phone buzzed on the passenger seat.

She turned it over. She did not unlock it. She could not have unlocked it if she had wanted to, and she did not want to. A message had come in, and the first line of it showed on the dark screen under the time, from a name she knew:

Anneliese Hartigan: Happy birthday to Theo from all of us!! Hope you boys are having a nice QUIET night, Peter says not to let him

That was all she could see. The rest was cut off.

Kimura looked at it for a long time.

Then she put the phone face down on the seat again, and put the car in gear, and drove north, back round the end of the mountain toward the lights of Scottsdale, a bar behind, where she would be, she already suspected, for the rest of the night.