“Ah – have I been pushing it? I mean, did I bring it up?”
“Well, we got through your year of law school and my broken engagement to Jack Fellows and why I quit the Kappa house at Ole Miss the same week I broke up with Jack, and how long it’s been since you’ve been out with a girl – we got through all that just fine. But about six minutes ago – I think it was my crush on Sam Hawks, the high school fullback?”
“Yeah – ”
“That’s when the meter was up and you had paid me all the attention you were going to pay me. Now it’s AB Nick, All Business Nick, that’s what the women call you. All those years with a crippled wife and you never even looked at any of us. Men like you don’t grow on trees, I’ll tell you that. Now let’s go and get your numbers, all right, AB Nick?”
“Sure.”
He paid the check and they drove down to the Federal Building.
“Now, what is it I’m looking for?”
“Okay. I want you to run municipal taxi drivers’ licenses two ways. First, by numbers. I’m looking for numbers with a sequence of R, O, one, one, one, space, D, O, something like that…”
“Wow, that’s not much.”
“Okay, and then I want names. From the licenses. I want all the names that start with either ROM or DO and all the names that start DO and end ROM. And variations on ROMDO or DOROM?”
“Nick?”
“What?”
“Nick, what on earth -?”
“I think a guy trying to reach me with something left me a clue. I first thought it was the name of an organization. But now I see that’s all wrong. He was trying to tell me how he hid what he hid for me. And the only place he could have stashed it was in the cab that brought him to his death. So he either memorized the driver’s name from the hack license over the right half of the windshield on the visor, or the license plate number as the cab drove away. See, he had to have a way to ID the cab. So I – ”
“Okay. Okay. I’ll try. I can’t promise anything.”
She leaned over abruptly and gave him a kiss on the cheek.
“What was that for?” he said.
“For being a pain in the ass,” she said. Then she got out and went into the building.
Nick waited and waited. Twice, a cop car prowled along the street and flashed a beam onto him, but his bland white face and coat and tie spoke the Esperanto of class to the cops, and they let him be. The streets were otherwise deserted. He knew up there in the office the skeleton crew was on – the FBI never sleeps, all that stuff – and he could visualize her hunched at her terminal, the low buzz of the office at quarter-staff, the sense of restfulness and ease that comes on the graveyard shift. He’d worked it himself his first year in the office and was aware how lulling it could be.
At last, she emerged but he could tell by the tentativeness in her body language that her luck hadn’t been good.
“No home runs?” he said when she got in.
“Nick, I tried and tried. There’s not much to go on.”
“Yeah. Well, you’re right. Did you get anything?”
“Well, first off, the license number idea doesn’t pan out at all. It seems that cab plates are all numerical – there aren’t any letters in them. Don’t ask me why. So there aren’t any license numbers beginning with an R.”
“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.”