Impact

57

Harry Burr looked around the lobby of the cheap hotel, smelled something, checked his shoes for dog shit. Nothing--somebody else must've tracked it in. He had had plenty of time to cool off on the trip down to Washington. He'd been so close: Christ, he'd even seen the girl rip the drive from the back of the fridge on their way out, but they'd jumped in a damn cab before he could catch up to them and finish the job.

They hadn't completely escaped him. He'd been able, with the hack number on the cab's roof and a little help from a friend on the D.C. force, to trace them here. He went up to reception and rang the little bell, and a few moments later a doughy man-boy with a belt three sizes too tight, squeezing a tight ring in his fat, shuffled out from the back. "Help you?"

Burr put on an appropriately agitated air and spoke in a rush. "I certainly hope you can. I'm looking for my daughter. She ran away with a man, a real scumbag, met her in church if you can believe it, the pervert." He paused to take a breath. "I think they spent the night here, got some pictures of them"--he fumbled in his suitcase and pulled out glossies of Ford and the girl--"here they are." He paused, gulping in breath.

Smacking his lips, the man slowly bent over the two photographs and looked. A long silence ensued. Burr resisted the impulse to poke him a twenty, which was clearly what the man was waiting for. Burr didn't like paying for information--you sometimes got bad information that way. People who gave you information from the kindness of their dumb little hearts always gave you good.

Another smacking of the lips. Mr. Phlegmatic raised his eyes and met his. "Daughter?" he asked, with a skeptical note in his voice.

"Adopted," he said. "From Nigeria. My wife couldn't conceive and we wanted to give a little girl in Africa the opportunity. Look, have you seen her? Please help me, she's my little girl. That scumbag met her at our church, he's twice her age and married, too."

The eyes dropped back to the picture and a long sigh came out, like a bag being squeezed. "I seen 'em."

"Really? Where? Are they staying here?"

"I don't want any trouble."

"There won't be, I assure you. I just want to save my daughter."

The clerk nodded, masticating a piece of gum. His face reminded Burr of a cow with its cud. "If there's trouble, I'll have to call the cops."

"Do I look like a man who'd cause trouble? I'm a professor of English literature at Yale for heaven's sake. I just want to talk to her. What room?"

No answer. Now was the time to apply a little cash. He flipped up a fifty, which the clerk pawed out of his hand. With a grunt he went into the back office and came out with the register. He opened it on the desk and turned it around, pointing with a fat finger. Mr. and Mrs. Morton.

"Mr. and Mrs. Morton? They took only one room? Number one-fifty-five?"

The man nodded.

Harry Burr made the face of a father thinking about something he'd rather not think about. "What about ID, didn't they have to show ID?"

"Sometimes we forget to ask," he said lamely.

Burr checked the map of the motel and noted that room 155 was in the motel's back wing, first floor. It was a cheap motel, all the rooms with separate front entrances and no back doors. So much the better.

He straightened up. "Thank you, thank you very much."

"No noise or I call the cops."

"Don't worry." Burr went out to his idling car, pulled out of the drive-through, reached in the glove compartment, and felt the reassuring grip of the Israeli Desert Eagle .44 magnum semiautomatic, his working firearm. He grasped the suppressor and affixed it to the muzzle and laid it on the seat next to him as he eased the car around to the back of the motel.

There wouldn't be any noise if Burr could help it.