Point of Impact by Stephen Hunter Page B

Eduardo?”
    “Huh?”
    “Guy calling himself Eduardo calls in, ’bout half an hour ago. Said he had to talk to you. Very shook. Latino accent. Probably nothing, but you can’t tell.”
    Nick ransacked his head. Eduardo? He had about fifteen investigations going, mostly small-time drug runners, most of them thought to be working for Gilly Stefanelli, the capo of the New Orleans organized crime branch. But he could place no Eduardo in this catalog of losers, grifters, sharpies and angle-players, though indeed the name sounded familiar.
    Then, yeah, he had it. It was a pass-over. Wally Deaver, who’d just left DEA for private business, had told him he’d given his name to a few of his snitches and contacts, because he didn’t want the guys in
his
fuckin’ office making supervisor off of
his
snitches.
    “What’s the number?”
    “Ah, lemme see, nine-eight-eight, twenty-twenty, room fifty-eight.”
    “From the exchange, I’d say it’s out by the airport, isn’t it?”
    “Yeah, I could hear jets overhead. You know, Nick, why don’t you pass on it? It’s no big deal, these guys call in with shit all the time, that’s all. If it’s important, he’ll call back. Take some time, sort it all out. Put allyour pieces back together, it’s no problem. I’m sorry I even mentioned it.”
    “No, I ought to give the guy a call. You never know. Talk to you.”
    Nick hung up, fished for another quarter, and dialed the number quick before it vanished from his head. He got a desk clerk, identifying the place as the Palm Court, and asked to be put through to room 58. The phone rang and rang and rang.
    “I guess he ain’t there,” said the clerk.
    “Hey, where are you?”
    “It’s just off I-ten at the airport exit. We’re on the left, two down from the Holiday Inn.”
    “Great, thanks,” said Nick, looked at his watch, and with a sigh decided to go back to work.
    The Palm Court Motel turned out to be a shabby nonchain budget joint familiar by type out of half a hundred third-rate dope deals that Nick had either watched or busted or simply listened to. It was one of those cinder block places painted in gaudy, once-fanciful colors and built in the early fifties when Americans were just discovering their automobiles and the seductions of a bright band of highway to ride to the horizon.
    He pulled into a stall, found room 58, near the stairway on the first floor, bathed in the fluorescent glow of two Coke and two Pepsi machines. He knocked hard on the door. Nick was a big man, almost two hundred, and though extremely strong, never quite looked it. He had a soft, mulchy body and wore his hair in a longish crewcut. He was wide, really, rather than big; and the hair was a bit blond and the eyes bluish. He looked more like a junior minister or a soap salesman than a federal agent.
    His gift was for friendly perseverance—a virtue learned from Myra. He thought of before as his HotDays. There’d been a time when he’d burned to lock criminals away, to test himself in the streets and sewers, to save America from itself. In service to that dream he’d driven himself monastically for close to his first five years in the Bureau. He was always pushing himself, and yearned to go on the raids, the big busts, to get assigned to the Counter-Terrorism Squad or the Bank Robbery Rolling Stakeout Team. He wanted to kill a bad man in a fair gunfight, that was his goal.
    Then it all came apart in Tulsa. Since then he’d surrendered both his body and his career in making up for that one botched moment, in trying to drive it from his mind.
    But sometimes, lying there, hearing Myra’s tortured wheezing next to him or seeing, in the moonlight, the skeletal silhouette of The Chair, it would come back over him with the force of an unexpected blow.
    God, you hit the girl
.
    That’s what Base had said.
    Nick would get up and be physically ill. He’d stagger into the john and blow his food for an hour, and come out reeking and shaking and so