Then four years ago tonight, he had hung up the shingle.
Now he sat against the wall at a large round table in the power corner at Sam's, the classic restaurant and watering hole at Bush Street and Belden Alley. Fresh from a successful day locating a Piedmont dentist's nineteen-year-old daughter who'd dropped out of the USF dorms and moved in with her boyfriend in the Mission District, Hunt was the first one here for the anniversary party. Sitting alone at the table, he took a first sip of his Bombay Sapphire gibson and sighed with contentment.
He knew that in a few minutes he was going to be all but holding court with a high-energy, even slightly famous group of some of the city's most successful legal professionals. He wore a suit and tie. He could spout some of his high school Latin, his college French, and everyone would know what he'd just said-more, they wanted to know what he would say. They would be drinking fine wine and their waiter Stephano would call them all by their first names.
It almost seemed impossible. From where he'd been to here.
Hunt had been a foster kid in a succession of homes until he was eight when the then-childless Richard and Ann Hunt had miraculously decided to adopt him (and then proceeded to have four natural children of their own in short order).
When he opened his agency, there was never a question as to what he'd call it. In a practical sense, as a business name, The Hunt Club sounded substantial, as though a bunch of like-minded professionals hung out together and did good work. There might be fifty employees in an organization called The Hunt Club.
In fact, at first it was just him.
Next had come Tamara Dade. She and her brother Mickey were two of the very few kids Hunt had met in the course of his emergency work at CPS with whom he'd kept up. Tamara had looked Hunt up when she was about fourteen to thank him for saving her life back when she'd been Tammy and down to her last spoonful of peanut butter.
Beginning with that unexpected phone call, they'd stayed in touch with one another in a haphazard way. A few years ago, Hunt had attended her graduation from San Francisco State. After that, Tamara did some clerical work while she looked for a "real" job, but nothing exciting presented itself. Then Hunt opened his agency and found that business was good and he needed at least both an assistant and a part-time field guy. Now Tamara came in to the office every day, serving as receptionist, office manager, bookkeeper, secretary, and since she was going back to school in criminology and starting to log her investigatory hours, occasional partner. Though she was an efficiency machine in the office, she was even better getting her hands dirty in the field-totally fearless and a crackerjack interrogator in whom people naturally confided.
They weren't long in the business before Hunt had occasion to call on Devin Juhle for some classified DMV information he couldn't get through normal channels. Hunt got acquainted with some of the homicide guys' snitches, who tended to know where witnesses went to hide out. After that, Juhle and his partner Shane Manning had started to refer to themselves as Hunt Clubbers. Then one night when Hunt was over at Juhle's house for dinner-a regular occurrence-his wife, Connie, refused to put food in front of him until he made her a member as well.
After that, the whole thing took on a kind of insider's cachet. One evening Amy Wu had stopped into Lou the Greek's with Wes Farrell, one of the partners in her firm, for a drink while Hunt, Juhle, and Manning, already a bit in their cups, were working on the club's bylaws, in this case, formally adopting Will Ferrell's Saturday Night Live bit, itself based on the original Fishbone lyric, as their official club cheer-"U-G-L-Y, you ain't got no alibi, you Ul-ly, hey, hey, you Ul-ly."
Naturally, Amy and Wes lobbied for admission. Hunt and the guys played hard to get. After all, what was the point of having a club unless there were standards? What could Amy and Wes bring to the party? Wes didn't hesitate. He unbuttoned his dress shirt and showed off the T-shirt he wore under it, on which were written the words,
EVERYTHING'S BETTER ON ANABOLIC STEROIDS.
"I wear a new one of these every day," Wes said. "I may have the world's most complete obnoxious T-shirt collection."
Nodding in admiration-Farrell passed the attitude test and was going to make the cut-Hunt and the cops turned to Amy.
She wiped away the tear that now somehow glistened on her cheek. "I have never, ever been in a club in my life," she whispered. "No one's ever let me join in. Oh, never mind, anyway." Obviously hurt, she turned, took a few halting steps away. Hunt, feeling awful, rolled his eyes and got up to undo some of the psychic damage if he could-after all, she was his friend, to say nothing of a significant source of his income. He gently put his hand on her shoulder. "Amy, we didn't mean…"
And she whirled around, beaming at him. "Are you kidding me?" she said. "You don't think people would kill to get me in their clubs?" She pulled him down and kissed his cheek. "Great liars are always in demand, Wyatt. You never know when you're going to need one."
Eventually, Amy hooked up with and was now engaged to Jason Brandt, another lawyer who worked mainly in the juvenile division but who made the club after he won a bet with Hunt that he could get the three of them into any Giants game any time they wanted without tickets or reservations. Or any other public concert, event, happening. Brandt didn't seem to understand why anybody ever paid or bought tickets to do anything. He told Hunt, who had come to believe it, that over the course of his senior-year summer-and granted, it had been before 9/11-he had toured the U.S. by commercial airliner, with stops in Chicago, Boston, New York, Miami, and Los Angeles, without buying one ticket.
Finally, Hunt hired another young stringer, Craig Chiurco, to help out with surveillance, and soon enough Chiurco and Tamara became an item. So now, since Shane Manning had been killed, there were eight of them-four, including Hunt, on the payroll-and another four irregulars who took the occasional break from their day jobs as lawyers and cops and even mothers to have a little fun on the edge of things, break up the routine.
This morning at the office, Hunt had given his employees each a five-hundred-dollar bonus. For the irregulars, the anniversary was a reasonably good excuse to have a dinner and a few laughs at Sam's.
Wes Farrell had grown out his hair again, though not as extreme as a few years before when it had gotten below his shoulders. Still, in a ponytail, the hair was a statement, like tonight's T-shirt he'd just shown everyone under his dress shirt that read, I WAS TOLD THERE WOULD BE NO MATH. He was explaining that he generally preferred nonverbal statements, such as his hair.
"So what's with the hair, anyway?" Wyatt Hunt asked him.
"You don't like it?" Farrell, hurt, put a hand to his heart. "I've been working on it for weeks."
"I know. I love the hair. I do. It's just not exactly the standard lawyer look."
"Tony Serra has it," Amy Wu said, referring to the defense legend they'd once made a movie about. "Long hair, I mean."
"Tony Serra's not your run-of-the-mill standard lawyer," Hunt said.
Farrell took umbrage. "Nor, might I point out, am I."
"No," his girlfriend said, "that you're not." Samantha Duncan-no relation to the restaurant Sam's-put a hand over his and leaned over to answer Hunt. "And as for the statement, he's not cutting his hair until something makes sense. I tell him that's not going to happen until we've got a new administration in Washington." Sam was rather flamboyantly a Green Party person, which in San Francisco put her close to the mainstream, though not necessarily among this crowd of law enforcement types.