Lady Joker, Volume 1 by Kaoru Takamura (lightest ebook reader .txt) 📕

pleasures for so many years—where would he go from there? Most likely, he would just set out again in search of even more terrible coffee. Realizing this, Handa’s spirit nearly drained out of him.

The point was, something was still missing. For this octopus to consume its own leg, there had better be a cause worth dying for. Kidnapping or tainting beer with a foreign substance was all well and good, but it wasn’t enough. Handa lost himself in this burning question, in the urgent but directionless search for that something.

The best place to meet up with Jun’ichi Nunokawa was at the wild bird sanctuary in Yashio, where Nippo Transport’s truck terminal was located, after he had finished the Kyoto-Osaka-Kobe route. Every evening, Nunokawa left the terminal before eight and drove the six-hour Keihanshin route, as it was called, to Osaka, where he took an hour break during reshipment before heading back. Then, returning to Tokyo shortly after ten in the morning, he would soon take his minivan back to the company housing in Kachidoki. But if he saw Handa waiting for him in front of the main gate of the wild bird park, Nunokawa would circle halfway around the park to the parking lot on the south side, where he would pick Handa up.

Handa always tried to tailor the conversation to fit within the time it took to drive northward along the waterfront to where Nunokawa lived. It was obvious that the truck driver was exhausted after the Keihanshin round-trip, which was 550 kilometers each way. Nunokawa barely seemed to have the energy to open his mouth, and as if this were his last task before he could get to sleep, he forced his heavy-lidded eyes open and merely listened to Handa. Even when Handa had exclaimed, “We’re talking two billion!” Nunokawa had only looked at him drowsily without uttering a word.

When they had seen each other in mid-October, however, Nunokawa had handed Handa the thing he had asked for and said, “Will these do?”

Handa opened the manila envelope and took out three standard-size snapshots and checked their subject matter. “Perfect,” he replied

The daughter of Takeo Sugihara, one of the executives at Hinode, was living in a luxury apartment in the hills of Takanawa. Yoshiko was married now and had taken her husband’s name, Itoi. Her address was listed in her alumni association’s directory; once Handa knew her address he had been able to figure out her husband’s name, and after making up a reasonable excuse and inquiring at the precinct’s local police box, he had learned that her husband was a physician. Handa had stopped by the address several times, whenever he happened to be nearby, and from what he had observed Yoshiko was now the mother of an infant still in diapers. In the mornings she would leave her apartment with her stroller to go shopping at the Peacock Supermarket at the bottom of Gyoranzaka Hill. Sometimes, she would take the baby to Takanawa Park. On three separate days, Nunokawa had taken snapshots of this same mother and child with a compact camera as he drove a rented van along Gyoranzaka Hill. On one thirty-six-exposure roll of film, Nunokawa had mixed in random other shots whose locations were impossible to identify and taken it to a photo shop far from Minato Ward, where he had had them developed and printed as fast as possible.

The faces of Yoshiko and her child were clearly visible in all three photos, which Nunokawa had taken from the driver’s seat of the van. The young mother, doing her morning shopping and pushing her baby in the stroller, had the peaceful visage of one who was never far from affluence, and the baby was plump and healthy—the snapshots conveyed nothing significant aside from these plain facts. Nunokawa did not divulge anything about his own impressions of the fortunate mother and child he had observed with his own eyes, and Handa also refrained from asking anything further.

“By the way, Nunokawa-san. Can you steal a car?”

“Stealing it is easy, but if you want to drive it around, you need a key.”

“Yo-chan can cut a key. Once the new year starts, in or out of the city, it doesn’t matter where, I want you to mark ten or so vans that are sitting in parking lots collecting dust. The darker the color the better. Once you’ve found them, give me the makes and models for all of them. I’ll give you prototypes for the keys to those models, and I want you to insert them into the keyholes, turn them around a few times, and bring them back to me. Then Yo-chan will cut the teeth of the keys.”

“So they get nicks where the teeth should be, right? Got it.”

A quick learner who did exactly as he was told and said nothing redundant—Nunokawa was indeed useful. The special skills and athletic ability he had developed in the military seemed wasted in the driver’s seat of a truck; it would be a shame not to put them to use now in various ways.

“After you pick the cars, we’ll choose which roads. You ever heard of the N system?”

“You mean those things that look like rapid surveillance cameras above major intersections?”

“Yes, exactly. Do you know the intersections and expressway toll booths where those things are found?”

“Yeah.”

“I want you to investigate various getaway routes from the Tokyo metropolitan area that avoid them completely. It doesn’t matter where—the destination could be Tanzawa, Okuchichibu, Fuji, Okunikko—the deeper into the mountains the better. We don’t need a hideout, either, but if there’s a place where we can spend two or three nights on the mountain, that would be great.”

“Driving during the day or at night?”

“Late at night.”

“What season?”

“Next year, late March.”

“Better find roads that won’t be icy.”

Nunokawa replied in a clipped monotone that made it seem as if this were no different from his daily work. Nunokawa had decided to join them of his own volition, but he seemed to still be