Cutting Edge

by Robert W. Walker

  Lucas yanked open his car door, for some reason looking back at the precinct and up at the window where Meredyth Sanger regarded him with piercing, curious eyes. She was speaking to someone in the room with her—Captain Lawrence, no doubt—but stopped suddenly upon seeing Stonecoat staring up at her. Her sudden loss for words seemed almost as if she feared he could read her lips or hear her from this distance. A silent look passed between them. She was special. He didn't know how or why he felt so, but she was somehow special.

  She pulled her eyes away and disappeared from the window. He climbed into his car and fought with the faulty ignition.He had to escape this place, at least for now; he must search out better air, wider spaces, freedom, some substitute for, or semblance of, sanity, and some reason to go on.

  Painted buses, rusted and gilded cars, limos, taxis, air traffic and Rollerbladed bodies. Houston raced around Lucas, gaudy, huge and powerfully energetic, even in the shimmering heat rising off its asphalt prairie, her network of intersecting streets the arteries by which she lived. But recently her strength had been reduced, drained like a fevered lover or an oil well gone dry. Over the past two weeks of intense, insufferable temperatures, the fiery heat had scorched the social fabric into a deep ochre, a burnt umber that seemed like a visitation from the surrounding deserts of king cactus. Competing for a record year of heat and humidity, Houston basked in 110-and 120-degree days, 101 in the shade before noon—too hot for dogs to catch flies or wag their tails, too hot for bare skin on grass, much less asphalt and tarmac and metal railings, too hot for tires, which were daily exploding; too hot for tennis or handball courts, too damned hot for sex or even love, Lucas thought.

  He had burned his hand just turning the key in the ignition of his car.

  Still, somehow Houston bustled with the frenetic energy of a waking giant anxious to outpace this day's harsh whiteness. If the city could move, he thought, it would take off racing into Galveston Bay, and if that did not cool her concrete and steel temples, then she might race out across fields, to spread her enormous legs and sprawl among the prairies that lay just over the horizon, out on the cooling, refreshing desert of night that had been home to Lucas's dispossessed, wandering ancestors who'd first left their ancestral homes, an area that covered most of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia's Great Smoky Mountains, just ahead of the white march to Manifest Destiny. His immediate Cherokee family had avoided the Trail of Tears because they had voluntarily exiled themselves to Oklahoma long before the forced march of the remaining People. Lucas's ancestors next left the land “given” them by the U.S. government in Oklahoma when squabbling factions of the Cherokee had joined the pioneers to Oklahoma in the 1830s. Finally, the people whom Lucas claimed as his settled among the brier patches and cactus of East and Central Texas. There they knew peace only after the Texas Cherokees were massacred down to a remaining handful of women and children.

  Reservation life had become the only way of life for the generations that followed, and it was the rare individual who could escape it through education and hard work. Lucas had done just that, and now he was a city-dwelling Indian who often longed for something else.

  Many of the city creatures born here in Houston never went beyond the limits of their often filthy and infested neighborhoods, never got beyond the city lights to the prairie stars, dying here as they lived here, out of sight of any god worth speaking to, living their limited, tunneling, boring lives out in a grid world of narrow, confining, crisscrossing passages through which the most important business of their equally narrow lives competed for time and space.

  Lucas now cruised this world, creating the necessary maps in his mind as he went. He must learn the lay of this new land. Dallas had been home for much of his life, but the new Houston—many of its skyscrapers helped to the sky by skilled Indian hands—was new to him.

  According to the news, Houston's lakefront property was at an all-time premium in a quite virtual sense: Beaches had become carpets of people laid out like so many sand towels and nowhere to walk. Galveston Bay was filled with those seeking relief, swimming in the tide, bobbing like flotsam under a grueling sun that bubbled the gulf waters, melted the hearts of Houston's whores, and scorched the tile roofs of suburban homes. The air around Houston itself had become a humid, demanding and breath-stealing warrior in the most physical sense. Just like Dallas, and nothing like Dallas, except for the no-ocean option, he'd decided.

  The downtown silver towers of the high-rise district stood over it all, professing to live and stand forever, if not as towering pyramids, then towering ruins below time and sand. Home base for NASA, home of major league sports teams and opera houses that surpassed anything in the East for sheer size and show, Houston now was home to Lucas Stonecoat. He wasn't ever going to be completely comfortable here, and he knew it.

  “I'm still a cop,” Lucas kept telling himself as he drove further and further from the precinct. “I still carry a badge and a gun, and I still have the power of arrest.” He had come from a long line of warriors, beginning with the first of his line to be called Stonecoat. Other ancestors became Light-horse Guards, the 1850s counterpart of the Secret Service, but they were in the service of the Cherokee Chiefs.

  Lucas had pulled loose his tie and placed a sports coat over the passenger seat removing his “medicinal” supply in the pocket. His most immediate intention was to locate the nearest safe bar. The image of the Cold Room, its four walls moving in threateningly, continued to chip away at his resolve.

  “Low fucking man on the totem pole takes on a whole new meaning,” he said, sipping Red Label whiskey, which he'd camouflaged in a brown medicine bottle. He took a second long pull on the “painkiller,” replacing the half-pint bottle below the folds of his sports coat.

  He wondered why they had bothered to issue him a uniform. Who needed a fucking uniform down in the Cold Room? No doubt it was issued for parade days and visits from dignitaries, for crowd control or if a riot were to break out in a slum neighborhood. He'd simply hung the uniform in his locker, seriously doubting if Lawrence or anyone else would call him on it if he never wore the damned thing, simply wearing plainclothes instead. What sense did it make to dirty a uniform down there on an eight-hour shift out of sight of God and everyone on the planet?

  Maybe he'd test his theory tomorrow, and maybe not. If he did things by the book, if he wore the damned uniform, it would feel awkward enough, but if he did follow the letter of the precinct law, and if he impressed Captain Lawrence, it stood to reason that he'd be returned to street duty, and after that who knew? He could begin to work again toward a detective's shield, with all the privileges that followed.

  “Dream on, fathead,” he told himself now. As to the breaking of rules, it seemed hardly to matter; as to the whiskey, he'd have it empty and the car aired out before it was turned over to the next shift.

  He was now just prowling, turning the police band up high, hopeful that he would be in the right place at the right time. In fact, he was praying for a bank robbery, a knock-over, maybe even a murder, something he could sink his teeth into. It was going to happen anyway, as inevitable as the rising temperature today, so why shouldn't it happen now while he was trawling by? Should a call come over, and he happened to be “lunching” nearby, he'd be the first to take it. Fuck the Cold Room.

  Thus far, however, the radio band buzzed with cats up trees and gang graffiti calls, broken windows and stolen bikes, nothing of a serious nature or import; he hungered even for a household disturbance, something where he could rush in and bust somebody's chops. Wrong attitude, man, he counseled, so he simply pulled over and switched off his car, stepped out of the vehicle and into a seedy-looking bar. If he couldn't find trouble to attend to, he'd make a little of his own.

  FOUR

  Dr. Meredyth Sanger watched from across the street as the man she had been following climbed from his squad car and made his way toward the bar. “Oh, shit, Stonecoat's a lush...” She groaned and shook her head, disappointed at wh
at she saw here. On the surface, she saw an on-duty police officer first sip from a questionable receptacle in his car and now step into a bar before noon. It wasn't pretty and it wasn't promising, not for Stonecoat and not for her... not for anyone. “Damn,” she cursed.

  Dr. Sanger had had it with the kind of mentality exhibited by Captain Lawrence, his wait-and-see approach, his hands-off attitude, his management-by-crisis style. She was equally tired of seeing the kind of exhibition she'd witnessed out Lawrence's window, where subordinates were treated so shabbily by ranking cops that they were denied a chance to work up to their potential; that certainly seemed to be the case with Officer Lucas Stonecoat, who must take orders from a Stan Kelton.

  She had to admit, though, that Lawrence was far easier to take than some men she'd worked with in police circles. She once had had to expose a watch lieutenant who had raped a female officer and had threatened the woman's life if she should ever talk. The woman had come to Meredyth for advice, help, comfort and support. Meredyth gave her all this and more over a period of a year, while the handsome but vicious lieutenant continued a constant barrage against the young woman until finally she agreed to wear a wire. With the help of Internal Affairs, Meredyth was able to corner this man, to put him where he belonged. He was serving eight to ten for rape now, and his conviction had been upheld on appeal.

  Despite the good work she was doing within the department, men like Lawrence still failed to take her seriously— partly due to the Blue Code, which labeled her a snitch, because the unspoken and inane belief held by many cops was that no matter what a fellow cop did, you never ratted on him. She sometimes wondered just who was crazy and who was sane.

  How did a guy like Lawrence get ahead? He was a throwback to an earlier time, a freaking caveman without the body hair, yet he fit right into the old-boy system of the HPD. Hell, he fished and hunted with the best of the brass, told off-color and ethnic jokes so nasty they'd make Don Rickles cry and Howard Stern wince, and he talked openly in the squad room with his detectives of his many encounters and conquests of women as if some newsreel were playing relentlessly inside his self-deluded brain.

  “Fatso” was Lawrence's squad room handle, but now that he was thirty pounds lighter than when he began and now that he was a captain, nobody dared call him that to his face, except perhaps the self-destructive type—maybe a guy like Lucas Stonecoat, from what she could see.

  She leaned back into the cushioned car seat now; she had felt some guilt at first for having followed Lucas from the precinct, but not near so much as she had while watching him as he swilled booze a hundred yards away from her.

  She had bottled up so much outrage at Phil Lawrence that her anger with Stonecoat was mild by comparison. “Damn that Lawrence,” she said to the empty car. “Why can't the captain see facts in evidence when put before him?”

  She had stumbled onto some interesting anomalies with regard to the recent murder and mutilation case of a man named Charles D. Mootry. The man, an appellate court judge, died under gruesome circumstances. He was first dispatched with an arrow fired from some sort of high-powered gun or crossbow, piercing the victim directly through the heart. The unusual choice of weapon used by the killer was just the beginning in this bizarre case, for the victim's head had been removed and carried off by his assailant, along with other telling body parts, such as the hands, feet and the privates. Only a torso with arms and legs remained.

  She'd first learned of the case itself, minus the most heinous details, through newspaper accounts, along with everyone else. She, like the poor slob in the basement pushing dust mites about, was not on Phil Lawrence's kiss list. In fact, Phil didn't believe in either of two facts of life in 1996— that women belonged in police work, or that men who were real men ever needed psychiatric support. In effect, he didn't believe she could work effectively within the superstructure of a paramilitary organization such as the Houston Police Department, which was not only a male-dominated environment but one rooted in the history of the decidedly male Texas Rangers, another law enforcement agency under repeated siege due to sexual harassment charges that could no longer be ignored.

  So what good was her mental medicine here? What possible good could she do here? Men like Lawrence hid their prejudices well for appearance' sake, allowing underlings like his detectives to do their talking for them. Perhaps no psychiatrist—male, female or neuter—could be of any damned use whatsoever to a man living out a fantasy of being Wyatt Earp or Matt Dillon. God, she hoped Stonecoat wasn't a Geronimo wanna-be.

  Both her sex and her profession irked the captain, but she didn't work for him, not strictly speaking, and while she hadn't wanted to go over his head—another cop taboo— Phil didn't exactly leave her with any choice. She was damned if she did and damned if she didn't, but also damned if she'd sit another day in her office while Lawrence casually, unassumingly, even cunningly assured his men that appointments with her were made to be broken—despite his lip service, despite what he called policy, as when he'd told Lucas to submit to her scrutiny on a routine basis. It was all hogwash.

  She realized that Texas was part of the Bible Belt, that it was ten, maybe twenty years behind in both the civil rights movement and in women's rights issues, and that men like Lawrence were on every old-boy circuit in the bloody state, but it was high time someone explained the facts of life to “Cap'n Phil,” as his boys called him. She'd gone to top brass officials and had quoted their offical manuals to them. She had not only blown the whistle on Captain Lawrence's out-of-date practices, but had also pointed a finger at his ineptness and incompetence. She had gone out on a lengthy, shaky, narrow limb.

  She still fumed from what he'd said to her behind the closed door of his office this morning. After getting assurances that he wasn't being put on tape by a hidden recording device, he had half-kiddingly and sanctimoniously dared ask her if she'd take exception to his frisking her. She did take exception and promised their discussion was strictly private. “Good,” he'd replied to this, coming around his desk and pressing his body close to hers, searching her eyes for a rise. She instead glared and stepped back, giving off no uncertain signs.

  “Look,” he said, his voice quivering, “no pussy with a Ph.D. is going to screw me over in my own department and get away with it.”

  “Is that a threat, Captain?”

  “Consider it fair warning.”

  “Consider this, then. I'll file charges against you if you so much as come near me again.”

  She'd stormed from Lawrence's office, driven by anger and frustration to chase out after the only man in the department who didn't appear to be under Lawrence's thumb, yet—Lucas Stonecoat.

  “Right, you are,” a small voice told her. “He's not under Phil's thumb now, but give him time.” She realized the bastard had gotten to her, that she was talking to herself now.

  She didn't know precisely how Lucas Stonecoat and Lawrence were getting on, but she knew Lawrence was just bigoted enough to rub Lucas the wrong way. A feud between them was as likely as water rolling down a rocky slope. Perhaps she could usher in the feud between them a little sooner with a few well-placed words, all to her advantage. It wasn't a pleasant alternative and certainly called her ethics into question, but it was feminine, after all, and she damned sure had to do something. She was grasping at straws, and the largest one to come along in some time was the tall, imposing Lucas Stonecoat.

  She considered his size as he climbed from the car across and down from her. She thought Lucas strong looking, handsome, save for the scar, but even this added an element of mystery that lured her on. His voice, so like a whiskey-drinking blues singer, reminded her of her father's cracked tones.

  Maybe she'd best get to know Lucas Stonecoat, she thought, see if he could provide some assistance. After all, he'd once been a detective. His insights on the Mootry case might prove invaluable.

  To this end, she'd stalked him from the precinct like a cub following a lumbering grizzly bear. This grizzly drove l
ike a crazy man, a good deal more fleet of wheel than he was of foot, given the pronounced limp. He was already ducking out of sight ahead of her. Damn, he really was going into a bar this time of day, while on duty. What kind of a fool was he?

  She hesitated now, debating with herself. Should she boldly go inside, confront him, or see him another time? Time was a luxury she could ill afford, especially now that Lawrence had taken off the gloves. At bedrock of all the rumors she'd heard about Lucas Stonecoat, there seemed a grudging admiration on the part of others that Lucas was a badger once he clamped down on a case, the kind of tenacious, tough detective who'd make for a useful ally, if only she could get him to listen to her.

  She pulled up, passing his vehicle, U-turning and placing her own car right in behind his. Taking a deep breath, thinking of all that had brought her to this time and place—her father, her mother, her uncle Bill, all pushing her to be the best at whatever she chose to do in life—she got out of the car and marched in to find this supposedly crazy Indian cop to learn firsthand his story, tired of the secondhand crap she'd been handed. All this effort put forth, all this dangerous activity in which she risked so much, she thought. Perhaps she liked it, the intrigue; perhaps it was just what Lawrence had said it was, “A self-serving attempt to further your career.”

  “No, no!” she'd fended off the allegation. “It's to build a bridge of connections between the Mootry case and case files I've found in the Cold Room dating back some ten years, possibly more.”

  The old pain had come back like a rodent sniffing out prey: quietly at first, before pouncing. It was the pain that made his already pronounced limp, due to the stiffness in his hip, even more pronounced. He wondered how he'd ever hidden the true extent of his continuing physical ailments from the training officers all through his trainee period. It hadn't been easy, relying on painkillers and trying to remain alert at the same time. In the end, he'd made it, and despite the hellhole to which he'd been assigned, he was, at the very least, carrying a shield again. It wasn't a detective's shield, not even second-class; it was the silver of the uniformed street cop, but it was something.