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 what 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.