TWO
Already Lucas felt claustrophobic, trapped, as if consigned to a bloody prison while fellow academy graduates were being assigned squad cars and duty on the street, out in the Texas sun. Meanwhile, time seeping like water through rock, Lucas was beginning to feel a creeping panic, a fear that he could easily lose control here, that there were, after all, only tenuous threads holding him together in the first place, and now to be boxed in like an aging wolf in a zoo? He was closing in on thirty-three, and he would have been a lieutenant detective in Dallas had he not been made a cripple. Now what was he?
Perhaps he should have listened to his aunt and uncle, and to Grandpa. Perhaps he should have remained on the reservation up in Huntsville, where a mixed bag of Indians, mostly Coushatta, Alabama and Texas Cherokees, eked out a living by supplying tourist needs, there to peacefully live out what remaining years he had coming to him. He was, even by his grandpa's standards, an old man before the accident, and now he was ancient.
He continued to pace the aisles here in the Cold Room, a stark contrast to the wide-open spaces of the reservation home below the stars of an immense sky. His father's boyhood home had been his own, and despite the reservation poverty, it was filled with the compassion of his people, the Cherokee. Looking around at the dirty little hole to which he had been consigned, the hole into which his new situation landed him, he knew he just wanted to burn the fucking place to the ground and run out screaming an ancient Indian chant that'd been running through his head: My enemy holds invisible arrows; he is everywhere; make me invisible, too, so that I might kill him before he kills me...
Lucas dropped his weight into the chair they'd given him. The ancient chair didn't match his desk, and it made the sound of squealing, frightened pigs when he leaned back in it. “Make my arrows invisible, too... Make my feet silent... Make my hands follow my brave thoughts, otherwise there is no contest.” He spoke aloud the remainder of the remembered chant, thinking of his mother, a half-breed, strong-willed woman who had been the only stable force in his life before she died of cancer. He also fondly recalled his grandfather, Two Wolves, his mother's father, who still lived at eighty-six, and a third powerful image of an ancient warrior painting his chest with clay colors and charcoal, smoking a weed that would in fact convince him of both his invisibility and his invincibility. It was no accident that Indians raced at bullets. They believed themselves invisible to the bullets fired by the marksmen of the U.S. Cavalry.
The Cold Room, this place that had been here since 1910, had already become Stonecoat's all too visible enemy, choking him, destroying him from within.
“Make me invisible,” he repeated, “so I don't have to see this place or be seen in this place.”
“Ahh... are you... ahh... speaking to me?” Stonecoat wheeled around at the sound of the female voice, the squeaking chair they'd given him from storage screaming in his ear, embarrassing him. He fought to regain what little composure remained and stared slightly up at a woman whose startlingly lovely smile and wide aquamarine eyes met his for a moment in the dim light.
“No, I'm sorry... just getting buggy down here alone,” he softly apologized.
“My guess is, you didn't hear me come in...”
“No, I didn't. Got to get this chair oiled.”
“Well, it's no wonder,” she replied prettily, a dusty file folder in her hand. “Why's the desk so far from the door?
There's room for it up at the—”
“Hey, I just got here. What the other guy before me did... I don't know. Maybe he smoked weed back here, and I can't say as I blame him, ahh, miss.”
He momentarily wondered if he'd made a mistake with her, searching for a badge, guessing she could be a lieutenant or something, in which case he ought to've referred to her as sir or madam, he supposed.
“It's Doctor, Dr. Meredyth Sanger.”
“Oh, Doctor?”
“Psychiatry.”
Police shrink, he thought, just what I need. Already-checking up on me, already familiar with my record, already anxious to get me on her couch, and not for the romp of it. Pretty, though... much better prospects of getting me on her couch than that weaselly ferret of a man back in Dallas ever had. All these thoughts rushed in at him unbidden, in the same instant in which he suspiciously eyed the dead file she'd lifted from one of the shelves.
“What's that you're carrying out?” he asked. “You know you have to sign out anything you take from here. Here's the roster. Just sign here. Be sure to indicate the file number, date it and sign.”
“I'm not taking it out, officer.” He detected the sharp anger, and not even his blue serge suit could hide the fact he held only a rookie's status here. Only a rookie would get such duty, and she knew this. He wondered how long she'd been around; how much she knew about the inner workings of the department; if she could help him or hurt him, or both.
“I'm returning this.” She extended the file on long, fragile fingers with lovely nails. “I think I've got all I need from it—for now, anyway.”
“Sorry, I thought you'd been back there in the stacks. Call me Lucas or Luke,” he corrected her, preferring it to “officer.”
She smiled in response, a smile that brightened both the room and, momentarily, his spirits.
Lucas again stared at the file, which she now defensively clutched to her chest. He noticed the absence of a wedding band on her finger, although she obviously liked rings. He saw a sapphire on her right hand, a purple birthstone gem on her left hand.
“You're the Cherokee guy, aren't you? The one everybody calls”—she corrected herself before saying Redskin— “Stonecoat?”
He instinctively turned the scarred side of his face from the light and her view, realizing she'd edited her own words, that she'd almost called him Redskin. “That'd be me, yes, Redskin,” he bluntly replied. “It's a nickname given me by my dead partner in Dallas, long before the flaming scar, but it's a tag that has followed me here, used liberally in the training sessions among the other rookies, who were ten years my junior. But then, you already know all about that, don't you?”
“Only what I've heard, Mr. Lucas Stonecoat.”
She said it as if she'd heard many tall tales about him, but he'd already become defensive, first straightening in his chair and then standing up so he could loom over her. She was a head shorter, even if he did have a forced slouch. “Okay, Dr. Sanger, so you've found me. But don't get your hopes up.”
“What?”
He stepped past her, into the shadows, which made a mosaic of his face. “I don't intend to become your guinea pig, Doctor, so—”
“What the hell're you talking about?”
“I don't intend to play twenty questions with you about my childhood or my accident or anything else that piques your curiosity, any more than I—”
“Hey, hold on there, Stonecoat!” she shouted, realizing where the conversation was going. “All I know is the Cold Room has a new guy, that Arnold Feldman's gone, thank God.”
“You didn't like Feldman?”
“And where'd you learn such big words as 'piqued,' anyhow?” She still managed a smile for him, but this only made him more nervous with her.
“Then you're... Oh? Well...” Lucas began to babble, “Listen... listen, maybe I did jump the—”
“You're really not to worry about me head-hunting for you, officer. I have plenty of head cases upstairs to keep me busy for the rest of the year, trust me, so—-”
He smiled now, almost laughed. “Is that right? Well, hey, maybe I was a little—” he attempted a lame apology, thinking how pretty her silver-blond hair and blue-fire eyes were.
“—so I didn't come slumming down here for additional patients,” she forged ahead. “Don't need 'em, don't want 'em. Got a precinct full of 'em. You got that, Lucas?” She slapped down the file, sending dust bunnies flying in every direction below his desk lamp, and before storming out, added, “Maybe you ought to begin on your new duty with a can of Pledge and a dust rag
.”
“Hey, hey,” he shouted after her, taking a few steps in her direction, bumping metal shelves with shoulders too wide for the aisle, causing her to slow at the door. Their eyes met for a moment. Masking his thoughts, which were vaulting toward a pinnacle he'd not felt in years, he simply said, “You forgot something.”
“What?”
“You... you forgot to sign that stuff back in. Do you mind?”
She glared at him now, the pretty eyes no longer inviting or smiling, her teeth set like an angry fox terrier's. The effect was cute, pretty even, he thought, but he dared not tell her such thoughts.
She yanked the clipboard from his outstretched hand, snatched a pen from her ear, located the right line, and scrawled her name with a shaking fist. He paid no attention to either the date or the ID number attached to the file—precisely what his superior had told him he must do. He instead concentrated on her name—Meredyth Sanger— trying to determine the origin of the melodic name. French, maybe, or Cajun? he wondered as she disappeared through the door.
He could hear the pulse of the city outside the ground-level window. Houston was the largest city in the state, fourth largest in the nation, with a population of 1,657,504.
The city had experienced phenomenal growth since the days of its riverboat-landing beginnings when it was called Buffalo Bayou and a pair of brothers named Allen in August of 1836 decided to sink roots. Eventually the area was named after General Sam Houston. Today the metropolis was the financial and industrial hub of the state, with the largest seaports in all of the Southwest and the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center. Along with nearby Galveston, all things Texas—and many an item distinctly other than Texan in origin—could be found here. But this morning's traffic report from Eyewitness News Team 2 in Houston exposed it as the cattle town it had always been when it showed film of traffic backed up for mile upon mile on the Interstate due to an overturned semi that had sent its cargo of live beef, mostly nervous longhorn steers, roaming freely about downtown Houston.
From a law enforcement perspective, Houston was to be congratulated. The largest reductions in homicide rates in the country for 1995 had been in New York and Houston, both having seen a near one-third decrease in killings in 1995, while Dallas, Texas, unfortunately, was seeing an increase in homicides.
All the same, Lucas found Houston somewhat dizzying. He had grown up in nearby Huntsville, Texas, and the changes and growth of Houston since he'd left as a young man to take academy training in Dallas was astounding. He hardly knew his way around the city anymore. But there remained a few neighborhood bars he was familiar with, places where a man could step back into the past, if only for the time it took to drink a beer. At the moment, the thought of a drink was almost too much to bear.
THREE
Lucas had moved the desk closer to the door, and he had spent the past hour dusting off everything within reach before he announced to himself and the walls, “I gotta get outta here... Talking to myself.”
He had always talked to himself, just as his paternal grandfather always did, but he'd always done so with an audience of at least one other. As a detective, it was one of his most useful tools; but here, like this, it felt creepy and strange. It was one thing to talk to yourself with your partner listening in and making additions, deletions, and suggestions, or filling up your morning with a self-directed brainstorm while other detectives threw paper wads to plead for an end to what they called his Indian gibberish; but it was quite another matter altogether to talk to yourself in a closed, sealed, silent space.
He closed and locked the door and “set” the childishly florid, yellow-and-red first-grade cardboard clock on the window, indicating he'd be back at one, confident that no brass or hard-ass detective would come down here for anything within the next month.
A single flight of stone steps, more convenient to take than the elevator, led up to ground level. One doctor had told him to go easy, another to push the envelope and get all the exercise he possibly could. He wondered which was right. He also, more importantly, wondered if Meredyth Sanger had used the stairs. He imagined her storming up them, her legs pumping. Dr. Sanger—he liked the sound of it as it slipped off his mental tongue. He decided to follow in her footsteps, but on opening the stairwell door, he found the steps extremely tight and straight up. With his stiff hip, which over time was only going to get worse, he chose to wait for the dinosaur of an elevator.
He supposed it was a miracle that on the first day of his new assignment, consigned here in the bowels of the precinct, he'd actually seen a woman, and a good-looking woman at that.
When the elevator finally bellowed its way from upstairs, located him in the basement and deposited him on the first floor, Lucas Stonecoat looked out on a sergeant's desk crowded with people, all vying for attention and demanding help of the lone sergeant behind the wrought-iron cage. The bars made Sergeant Kelton look the part of the criminal. Still, Stanley Kelton, a veteran, remained unfazed by the madness around him. So far, Kelton was the only person in the building who didn't wince or pretend business around Lucas, save for Dr. Sanger, and maybe that was why he liked Kelton, and perhaps could get to like the lady shrink. But that, he told himself, was a truly stupid thought—a friendship with a head-banger named Sanger?
The melee left Kelton too occupied to notice the “rookie” slip past him. But at the door Stonecoat ran smack into Dr. Sanger again, this time in the company of Captain Phil Lawrence, the two of them embroiled in some verbal jousting. It appeared the good doctor did not reserve her linguistic lacerations for rookies and small fry alone. She certainly appeared to have her ire up over something she felt important, but Lawrence, a mild-spoken, firm-handed manager, motioned her toward his office for privacy before going any further. Out of the corner of his eye, Lawrence regarded Stonecoat, as did Dr. Sanger, as if he were part of their confrontation. Had she informed the captain of Lucas's behavior downstairs? Had he earlier been “rude” in the least toward her? Had he been too defensive, aloof? He had a problem gauging women, especially white women.
Lucas made a 180-degree about-face, preparing to disappear, when Lawrence—who obviously didn't relish his dealings with Meredyth Sanger—suddenly called out his name. Lucas stepped up to his captain with a “Yes, sir” on his lips.
“Stonecoat, I want you to meet our resident police psychiatrist, Dr. Sanger.”
Lucas put on his best stone face and said, “Very glad to meet you, Doctor.”
“You needn't pretend we don't know one another, Lucas,” she replied, making him bristle.
“Oh, you two know one another? That's very good, as it's my custom, Lucas, to have all new recruits meet with Dr. Sanger on a semi-weekly basis, just to stay in focus, that sort of thing.”
Lucas couldn't reclaim the audible groan that welled up and out of him.
“You don't have a problem with that, do you, Officer Stonecoat?”
“Yes, sir... I mean, no, sir... no problem.”
Lawrence ended the discussion with a perfunctory smile and nod, telling Dr. Sanger, “We can continue our conversation about the Mootry case in my office.” He indicated the closed door nearby.
Meredyth Sanger, looking exasperated, now frowned and found her way into the captain's office. Lawrence half whispered to Lucas, “Wish me luck with this woman. She's driving me nuts; I think it's some sort of conspiracy to get me committed.” He laughed at his own joke and rushed to catch up to Dr. Sanger.
“Man, Lucas,” said someone in his ear, “sorry they put you behind a desk, pal.” It was Thorn Finney, a friend throughout their academy training.
“Not just any desk, Thorn. A real hole in the wall.”
“Bitching luck.”
“I don't know that luck had a damned thing to do with it; might say my past precedes me.”
“That shits, man.”
Thorn's burly training officer partner tugged the other rookie away, saying, “No time for powwows, kid. We gotta get back out on the street.”
“Later, Lucas.”
Lucas followed the other two men through the door and outside the precinct walls. He breathed in deep breaths of air and squinted at the last rays of sun before they disappeared entirely in a sea of gunmetal-gray clouds, an early morning storm out over the big Gulf waters obviously brewing. Squad cars were busily pulling in and out of headquarters; Lucas watched handcuffed offenders swear and kick their way from backseats. Frustrated dregs of humanity, he thought.
He wasn't sure he was any different, handcuffed to the Cold Room. He wasn't sure he could go back inside and suck in dust mites all day long. He wasn't sure he could stand it without going out of his mind, at least not without a drink. Yeah, maybe a drink would help.
On the precinct steps now stood Sergeant Kelton, shouting, “Hey, Stonecoat! Where you going at this hour?”
“I need supplies. Going to requisition a few supplies.”
“Well, that's done on the third floor, Mrs. Babbage's department.”
“Thought I'd go the fast route, Sarge.”
“And what's that?”
“Wal-Mart.”
Kelton frowned. “You won't get reimbursed for any out-of-pocket expenditures, you know.”
“I'm well aware, Sergeant.”
“You okay, Stonecoat? I mean with the duty you pulled and all?”
“Never better,” he lied.
Lucas walked away, wondering if he'd be back or not, unsure of his next move. “You know what kinda duty you can expect to get here in Houston, in that cave?” he asked himself as he went for his car. “Nada, zip, nothing... absolutely—”
'Then at least we know what you'll get in return,” Stonecoat's other half argued back, some of the cops in the lot staring at him.
Lucas pushed past two uniformed rookies who gave him warm, unanswered salutations—boys he'd gone through his second academy training with. They took his ill temper in stride, one of them shouting, “How's that temper of yours, Redskin?”
Lucas silently, blindly pushed on for his car. Sergeant Kelton, his complexion a sickly white dotted with weak freckles, looking every bit his fifty-six years, muttered to himself, “I hope the department knows what it's doing, hiring on that one.”
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