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.”
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.