Stephen Hunter - Point Of Impact

“Dammit, that’s right! I think I even knew that once.”

“Maybe it was an 8 , or a 5 , and the number sort of fell apart, but – ”

She trailed off.

“Okay. One down. What about names? Did you get any names?”

She sighed, and handed him the printout. He opened the door just a bit to bring on the dome light.

“It’s not great. It’s not even promising. There are two first names and one last name that begin with ROM, in which the other name has a DO in it.”

“Shit,” said Nick, stricken, feeling like an idiot.

“Nick, don’t take it so hard.”

“Ah, Christ, I just – ”

But he couldn’t finish. He looked up the deserted street. He looked down the deserted street. Another failure.

He looked at the names.

The list read:

ROMNEY DONAHUE

ROMAN DOHENY

D’ORLY ROBARDS

And that was it.

“Oh, Jesus,” said Nick, in despair.

“It’s no good?”

He groped.

“You got me exactly what I asked for. But…why would he only write down part of the first name and part of the last name? I just don’t – ”

He trailed off. The connection to Lanzman’s dying message, ROM DO, suddenly seemed vaporous.

Well, he thought. It was an extremely long shot, but he still ought to look them up, check out their cabs and -

“What are these other names?”

“Well, just to be on the safe side, I got all the cabbies whose first names begin with either R or D and whose last names begin with R or D . That was my first field of discrimination. Just in case your copy was wrong or – ”

“It wasn’t. I saw it. I saw it. Sally, the guy wrote it in his own blood as he was dying on a linoleum floor. I saw it in the linoleum, on the tiles, and then watched as it disappeared when – ”

Nick stopped talking.

He stared at the list.

“Nick? Nick, are you all right? Nick, what’s going – ”

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

He pointed to a name on the list.

“Suppose the blood ran together in some spots. It connected letters that shouldn’t be connected. And suppose he died before he finished.”

“I don’t – ”

“Look, Sally. Look. He was writing a name but the last two letters joined together at the top. The blood ran across a crack in the tile and bridged two letters. And he didn’t finish.”

Nick had one of those weird sensations you get once or twice in a career, when it all comes together.

“An N and an I at the end of the first name; they ran together and it formed an M . And he wrote the middle initial. And then he couldn’t quite finish the last name. But here it is.”

He pointed to it, on the list.

Roni D. Ovitz, it said. Sun Cab Co., 5508 St. Charles Avenue.

It was a magnificent workup, Shreck acknowledged. The Defense Cartographic Agency had created a masterpiece. Represented in multicolored Plasticine topography were the many heights and levels of the Ouachita range, the gaps, the valleys, the enfilades. It stretched for twenty feet, almost six feet wide. On the relief map, dappled in green for forestation exactly as the satellite had recorded it, the mountain range had been resolved into a maze of elevations. They were all there: Black Thorn, Winding Stair, Poteau, Mount Bayonet, Hard Bargain Valley…

“What do you see, Mr. Scott?” Shreck asked.

The man in the wheelchair hunched forward, his keen shooter’s eyes devouring the landform represented before him.

“Space,” he said. “I want space. Lots of space.”

“It’ll turn on some sort of transfer. We have the woman; they’ll have Dobbler’s treasure. They’ll want to trade; we’ll want to trade. We’ll use the girl. We’ll draw them to us with the girl.”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Lon. “Give me the shot, and I guarantee you I will make it.”

“Mr. Scott,” said the Colonel, “pardon me for not being polite but being polite isn’t my business. You’re about to go against a combat sniper. You don’t have any mobility. Shit, you don’t have any legs . You may have to take fire, to return fire under fire. And…your disability. He can move, if it comes to that, and you can’t. And what happens if we’re hit or have to retreat? There you are, out there, paralyzed, on the ground, with no help. Nobody will come for you. There’s nothing for you except death.”

Scott met his stare for what seemed the longest time. The handsome head and shoulders on the collapsed body and the dead legs: even now Shreck hadn’t quite grown accustomed to it.

“Do you know, Colonel Shreck, you’ve given a cripple a chance that no cripple ever had.” He smiled, almost ruefully. “You’ve given me a chance to go to war. And to test myself against the very best. You’ve given me the chance to be complete, if only for a few seconds.”

Shreck said, “I don’t know who you are, Mr. Scott, or what the hell you’ve done. But I’ll say this for you, you’ve got a set of balls on you.”

At Sun Cab, it turned swiftly to anticlimax. First came the news that Roni D. Ovitz, an Israeli émigré, had been shot in a robbery two months ago and though only suffering a flesh wound had quit the taxi business and was working as a counterman at his brother-in-law’s TCBY franchise in a suburban mall. But his cab was still the property of Sun Cab and a quick check of the records located it, now on the road with another driver.

The dispatcher, faced with two people with earnest faces and FBI identifications, didn’t hesitate an instant. He ordered the cab in, and it dropped its fare in the French Quarter, and got to the garage in about ten minutes.

“So what’s the beef, Charlie?”

“Fed beef. These two FBI agents. They – ”

“Hey, I didn’t do a damned thing, I – ”

“That’s okay, pal,” said Nick, in his calming voice. “This isn’t about you. It’s about the cab.”

“That buggy is bad luck. Somebody shot Roni Ovitz through the neck and before that a guy named Tim Ryan was fuckin’ killed and – ”

But Nick wasn’t listening.

Okay , he thought. You’re in the backseat of the cab. You know you’ve been made. You’ve just got a few seconds. What do you do? The trunk? How can you get to the trunk? You can’t get to the trunk .

Under the front seat? No. The driver would see you, and whatever you stashed, he’d dig it out a few seconds later .

Nick said “Excuse me” to Sally, then went and climbed into the automobile, a 1987 Ford Fairlane. He sat there, his eyes closed, smelling the odor of the old and sodden upholstery, the stench of a hundred thousand other, unremarkable passengers, the tang of gasoline and oil, and, he supposed, one other coppery whiff in the air, the whiff of fear. Roni Ovitz’s fear. Tim Ryan’s fear. And, for surely by the time they reached the motel, Lanzman knew he was quite probably doomed, Lanzman’s fear.

Oh, you were a cool one, Nick thought. You held together to the very end. Whatever it was that motivated you – patriotism, faith, machismo – whatever it was, it was strong and beautiful stuff. Oh, you were a man, my friend. An hombre . Oh, yes you were.

His fingers had of their own accord fallen to the seat where, blindly, they probed and pushed at the juncture between cushion and back. There was a gap there, when the yielding cushioning was peeled back; you could slide a document through.

Nick got out of the car, turned, leaned in and pushed his hand through. He gave a mighty tug and yanked, and the seat lurched forward on hinges. Underneath it lay a tapestry of Western civilization and its contents: candy wrappers, cigarette packs, combs, pens, quarters and tokens, two playing cards, a business card and a rolled wad of some kind of heavy paper.