His Indian blood served him well in one regard: The bronze-red tincture actually masked the scar tissue, at least until someone came too near.
“Fire plays freaking hell on any color skin, just the same,” he'd tell the ones whose stares lingered a might too long.
His clear, dark brown eyes would then blink bright and wistful, and then he'd bring up an unfelt laugh to let the other man or woman off the hook. He had long since let go of any hope that people might show some sensitivity, and besides, in his case there was no such thing as a comforting word.
Still, he bolstered himself daily with the fact he was alive, and that he had come back from that shrouded land reserved for the dead. During his visit there, he had regained a great deal that he had once lost-most importantly, who he was in a past life, for the voice of his ancestor, the one originally named Stonecoat, spoke directly to him, telling him he must go back, that there was much for him yet to do in this reality.
Maybe that was what bothered people the most. Even those who didn't know his story seemed to sense, or judge from his scars, that he had once walked among the dead, and that he was here now as some sort of misguided spirit with wide, peeking-out eyes and what the Cherokee called “going back” characteristics associated with those who ought to've been killed in some glorious manner, such as on the battlefield, but had not fulfilled such a destiny, so in dying they go backwards and return to earth until they might find a more suitable way to die. The questionable accolade had so attached itself to one family that it had in the distant past become the family name, Going back, his mother's side.
Lucas came from a long line of warriors, but nowadays he felt more like a mischievous ghost of himself, anxiously searching for his identity but only causing trouble for the world around him as he did so, a world in which he no longer felt at ease or to which he fully belonged. Returning to police work, he had hoped, might return him to some degree of normalcy, but such a plan had an inherent flaw. Suppose he accomplished a return to “life before the accident” only to learn that it continued to be unfulfilling and worthless?
He had recently begun to despise his own inner voice, his own musings on the subject of himself and his aims. Such self-reflection came at too high a cost. It cost in dark alleyways of hatred and anger, which led to self-indulgence, drink, and drugs. Besides, his inner voice had begun to sound too damnably much like the shrinks he'd had to contend with back in Dallas, and this thought made him explode again. “What a lot of horseshit,” he said, sending a fist into one of the stuffed boxes on the shelf before him-one of the countless such boxes in the Cold Room.
The box retaliated with a nasty puff of foul gray dust mites, making him cough in turn.
What few friends he had on the force were all back in Dallas, and even their kindness hadn't always prevailed. This went tenfold for his ex-wife, who saw his disabilities more in economic terms than humane ones.
Lucas's large hands had healed well, and he had full use of them, most of the time. The occasional lockup came on him-sudden muscle spasms, like those in his back. The accident had, the doctors said, aged Lucas by fifteen, maybe twenty years. “Can I skip male menopause, then?” he'd asked one doctor, who enjoyed his dry humor.
His legs-even the left one-had, for the most part, escaped the torture of metal and fire of the inferno the squad car had become that day. The legs were now good. Sleep wasn't so good.
Since the yearlong hospital convalescence, he didn't eat well, and nowadays when he did eat, he ate sparingly, like a thin gray squirrel, putting away more than he consumed; like a camel, he went without water for days, so long as he could find some ready, pain-numbing alcohol instead-another matter not for public consumption, and certainly not for the department's bloody IAD inspectors and medical staff.
He felt both restless and weary at once, a stout weeping willow, on the one hand growing toward the sky, on the other reaching toward the earth.
Working alone, with minimal to no secretarial support, should suit the likes of Lucas Stonecoat just fine, he now thought as he once again ran his eyes over the room, a spiritless gray caven to which he had been assigned only hours before. The heartless, unfeeling place rippled with faint light coming in at the street-level windows.
The old station house was a little younger than the Alamo, but not by much, he imagined, the exterior a pitted, boulder-strewn facade of the sort only found in old Texas towns. It had only survived so long among the sleek steel high-rise chapels of downtown Houston because it housed cops, and it belonged to the city, and so long as it remained cheap space for the city and didn't collapse, so it went… There was talk of renovating a vacated city school now being broken into each night and used as a crack house in a seedy section of the city. It might do some good to turn such a damnable place into a precinct house full of the latest in crime-fighting technology, but somehow Stonecoat didn't see it happening so long as the city fathers and city council men and ladies gave more lip service to crime prevention than actual dollars and cents.
So, Stonecoat imagined he was stuck here in the ancient cavern of the Cold Room, perhaps forever, or until he broke under the pressure of God Reality. Here the walls were as dead and unfeeling as the cardboard boxes of the dead files stocked here. True enough on the surface, but microscopically, the place was a buzzing jungle of activity, mites eating away at the paper and munching off chunks of cardboard; dust-eating microbes carried on the wind each time the door was opened or the fan turned on. In fact, much of the dust was created by the walls, like an epidermal layer of skin sloughing off, invisible to the naked eye. Dust reigned here, creating a halo when the 9:09 sun hit the reflecting glass on the building across the street, somehow making its curious way into this crypt and making the walls of the Cold Room shimmer as if alive-and it was no illusion.
Houston brass thought they'd be doing him a favor, no doubt, putting him to clerking here amid the “lockup” of debris. No one expected him-or anyone else, for that matter-to actually work on cracking cases and finding solutions where others had only found insoluble questions. Even if there was a way to warm up a frozen-with-age case as those surrounding Lucas, he'd have to do it in an atmosphere filled with paper people, paper lives, and paper events of a bygone day; he'd likely have no witnesses to the crimes, no one alive, anyway, and no one to interview, no one to hassle or prod or pry. Maybe the brass thought it was a former detective's dream: Open a case, chase answers from a safe hole in the ground, do it without the least expense of emotion or turmoil or involvement or human contact-which he'd had four years of as a detective in Dallas, and the three before that as a patrol cop.
Even if he could relocate a witness or even a suspect involved in so dusty a case file as one in these, the individual would likely be of a forgetful nature or in a forgetful frame of mind, and why not? So long after the incident had gone the way of water and smoke? He didn't imagine there were people who would willingly want to dredge up an ancient, encrusted anchor to trawl about a murky paper lake of forgotten, fishtailing information that had given up nothing from its dismal depths the first time around. He wasn't sure he even wanted to dredge this lake, to raise the dead, or reenervate the tragic crimes he was supposed to somehow solve.
Of course, no one expected much. He was told that from the outset. “Do what you can, Lucas,” Captain Phil Lawrence had instructed. “And keep your duty sergeant informed.”