“Lucas, it's going on three A.M.; I've got to get some sleep, and you'd better do the same. Have you tried some of that whiskey in a tall glass of warm milk?”
“Milk?” He almost spat the word. “I don't have any milk in the apartment.”
“Then I take that as a no?”
“That's right.”
She could only frown. They said a final good night.
But ten minutes later there came a knock at his door, and when he opened it, there she was, extending a pint of milk to him. 'Try the milk-and-whiskey toddy. There's something released in warm milk that'll help you sleep. Trust me.”
He stood astonished, not remembering how the pint of milk got into his hands. “Thank you. I will try your remedy.”
“That's all I ask. Just a try.” Her smile warmed him. “Now, good night, I hope!”
She was rushing away again.
“Are you sure you're safe out this late alone?” he asked her as she disappeared into the shadows of the hallway for the elevator.
He next saw her silhouetted against the light of the elevator when the door opened. Someone in a nearby room was shouting through the wall for quiet. “I know how to take care of myself, thank you. And Lucas,” she paused, and just as the elevator door closed, added, “I do hope we can be partners.”
Lucas stared down at the cold pint of milk in the green-and-white carton she'd handed him. The slogan on the milk proclaimed it to be
WINS DAIRY MILK-THE VERY BEST OF LIFE IN A CREAMY CASCADE OF WHITE ENERGY.
“Give me white lightning any day,” he muttered to himself.
TWELVE
His warm milk and whiskey in hand, a full glass of it, Lucas now lowered himself into Sears' poor excuse for a La-Z-Boy, as he had no sofa yet, and found the TV remote and a cold piece of pizza. He tossed aside the pizza, finding it a poor complement to the hot toddy.
Fatigued, feeling spent, he flipped on the TV and channel-surfed, stopping to stare with wonder at a QVC-style television evangelist who was going to save him from himself, from wild, wild women, from anything smokable or pokable, from anything he might guzzle, such as whiskey, from Satan, and from an eternity in Satan's last resort. The TV evangelist whooped as well as the best Baptist minister in all of Texas and made as much sound and fury and promise as a used-car salesman with a sledgehammer in hand.
Unable to stomach another word, Lucas switched on an old western with Jimmy Stewart in the lead role opposite bad guy Arthur Kennedy. Lucas closed his eyes and allowed the dialogue, voices and music to wash over him. It was nearing three-thirty in the morning, the dementia hour, and he dozed, semiconsciously wondering if the white medicine woman's remedy acted as placebo more than anything else, wondering if his sleep was helped by the drink, or if it had come on simply due to exhaustion, or a combination of both. Either way, he knew he'd sleep more soundly if he stopped worrying about how-he had gotten here…
He awoke with a knife to his heart, but the startled moment came to an abrupt end the instant his eyes leapt open. Those damned Cold Room files had brought on a nightmare. He surveyed the apartment, a barren, stark personality, this place, without warmth or color. Meredyth could not have approved of the place or liked it. He had to do something about that, had some ideas, wondered when he'd find the time. He wanted very much to get some rich, vibrant desert earth colors to surround himself with-reds, browns, ochres, umbers, perhaps a few Arizona or Texas landscapes with towering mountains. He loved the Painted Desert and Grand Canyon scenes. Yes, that would work.
He'd work on it. For now, he shuffled off to the shower, painfully stripping away his clothes, the old injuries firing up anew, a punishment for falling asleep in the old chair. In his medicine cabinet, he found some horse-sized pain pills left over from his days at the hospital in Dallas. The pill bottle ought to've been emptied months before, but he'd weaned himself off traditional medications, taking the big brown things only sparingly, relying more and more on tribal medicines forwarded by his grandfather, as well as smoking the root. The root gave him a greater high than any bourbon or marijuana might. The herbal medicine, also known as locoweed, was as old as his tribal people. This and meditation were now his constants, his caregivers, his doctors.
Still, since he'd not smoked anything tonight, he popped one of the white man's remedies and got under the soothing hot spray of the shower. Afterward, he quickly toweled down and found his soft mattress. The bed comforted him back to a deep slumber, his greatest regret at the moment being that Meredyth Sanger wasn't lying beside him, and secondly that she'd have absolutely no reason to ever speak to him again-not after what he had to say to her in the morning.
But liking her wasn't enough reason to get involved with her harebrained scheme of building a case for a serial killer going about with steel-tipped arrows over a period of almost twenty years. Besides, there were just too damned many loose odds and ends.
Still, linking the two most recent cases, Mootry and Palmer, might have merit, and there damned well could be a serial killer on the warpath in the greater Houston metropolitan area. But such cases were out of Lucas's hands, beyond any reach of either him or Dr. Sanger, so far as he could tell.
He fumbled for the card she'd left him, which he had placed next to his phone, and for a long moment, he focused on her melodic name. “Oh, hell,” he announced to the empty room. “Might jus' 's well get it over with.”
He began dialing her number, not worried about waking her. “Damnation and hell, she's kept me up all night with this crazy shit, not that I could sleep anyway, given all my givens.”
His was an impossible situation. He understood the need for a Dr. Jack Kevorkian in the lives-or rather deaths-of many people. Insomnia alone was hell, but coupled with agonizing and torturous pain, that was quite a bit more. He silently meditated as the phone rang at the other end.
The phone rang six times before he heard her knock it to the floor, retrieve it and find the mouthpiece. Obviously, she was having no trouble sleeping. Maybe she had taken her own remedy. She now found the presence of mind to speak clearly. “Ellowww? What time is it?”
“Near four-thirty.”
“Stonecoat…”
He lied. “I've gone over the files again and-”
“Again? So, you see the similarities!” she said, excited, instantly awake.
“Listen to me, Dr. Sanger,” he began.
“You'd have to be blind not to see the connection, the pattern.”
“Will you listen to me?” he commanded.
Her silence was her reply.
“Now look, we both know that these back cases… well, that nobody gives a damn about the Cold Room files, but you go poking your nose into an ongoing case like the Mootry matter, and people go ape shit, especially detectives working the case.”
“So what's your point?”
“Point is, I'm in no position to piss off my superiors.”
“Lucas, we have to… We can make a difference together if you'd only give it a-”
“I need my job, Doctor, not just for the money… I need the work. Some people would say I have no business carrying a badge; most departments in this country would not have hired me, given my record.”
“Have you tried other departments?”
“I wanted to stay in Texas.”
“Then you're whining, Lucas. Come on, I need your expertise, and I need an ally.”
“There're plenty of guys down there who'd like nothing more than to help out a… help you out. I'm just not the guy. Sorry, Doctor. I'll keep your confidences. You needn't worry about that, and-”