The Search Read Online Free Page A

through glasses
that seemed to do his eyes no good at all, and came back with a sheaf of photocopied papers.
    ‘According to this,’ he said, ‘the car was checked in at a rental firm in Kingston – not one of our offices – a small firm we have an agreement with. Our cars can
be left with them and they get ’em back to us.’
    ‘How long ago was that?’ said Walker. ‘When was it checked in?’
    ‘Couple a months ago,’ said the guy, unwrapping a stick of gum, feeding it between his teeth.
    Kingston was another long haul, on the edge of the Southern Wetlands. Walker drove for two days, weather coming and going, birds. Power lines rising and dipping alongside him.
Sometimes overtaking the same car three times in a day.
    The last three hundred miles ran flat through the swamp. Trees were the same colour as the road, as the sky. Moss drifted from swamp maples. Here and there were splashes of dull red, either in
the trees or in the road, the smear of hit animals. Rain spotted his windshield, hardly even rain.
    The rental office was a run-down place near the railroad. A sign on the counter said: ‘If You Don’t Smoke I Won’t Fart’. The guy behind the counter was chewing on a
sandwich. The reception area smelled of chicken; maybe a cigarette had recently been smoked there. Walker leant his elbows on the counter, waiting for the guy’s mouth to empty.
    ‘I’m trying to find out about a car that was checked in a couple of months ago.’
    ‘What car?’
    ‘A blue Mustang. Licence 703 6GH. It was dropped off here by a man named Malory.’
    The guy wiped his fingers, screwed the serviette into a ball and chucked it away. ‘Let’s see. What was the date exactly?’
    Walker told him and he hauled a wad of oil-smudged papers out of a drawer, sniffed, began thumbing through them.
    ‘Yeah, it was checked in here.’
    ‘Do you happen to know anything about the person who checked it in? Where he went or anything like that?’
    ‘Let’s see. I was working that day.’ Walker waited for him to go on but instead the guy scrutinized him and said, ‘You a cop?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Tracker?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Finder?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Then what you want him for?’
    ‘He’s a friend.’
    ‘Yeah?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘And what’s he supposed to have done, this friend of yours?’
    ‘Nothing. I just want to find him.’
    With small variants Walker would have this same conversation many times in the months that followed. Strangely, the subsequent willingness to help of whoever he was talking to bore no relation
to whether they believed him or not. The dialogue was an elaborate form of greeting, a formality. People couldn’t care less what answers he gave but no one wanted to forgo this little
introductory exchange.
    The guy nodded, satisfied: ‘Let’s see, only a few cars were checked in that day. If I remember right, if it’s the person I’m thinking of, he asked about a
hotel.’
    He paused, waited. This was another feature of the conversations of the next months: they all fancied themselves as Scheherazade, needed prompting before they would part with the next crumb of
information.
    ‘And you recommended one to him?’
    ‘The Metropolitan.’
    It was five minutes away, one of those places that had always looked like it had seen better days. Walker took a room there and chatted to the clerk, a boy in his teens who let him look back
through the register, happy to oblige. Sure enough, Malory had stayed there, just one night.
    Walker was too tired to pursue things further. He trudged up to his room and called Rachel. The machine was on. He listened to the message and hung up. Then he redialled. He listened to her
voice again, asked her to call him at the hotel.
    He drank a beer and flicked through the channels on TV. He watched part of a programme about the lost city of Atlantis and the latest attempts to establish its historical authenticity. The noise
of aqualungs was making him fall asleep. He flicked off