He'd be dealing with the worst problem a detective faced: SCC-Stone Cold Crime. This involved more than cold, uncrackingly frigid, lower drawer, forgotten crimes; he would face here the hard fact of unending, unappealing, and unreachable time. Who gave a shit about somebody killed five, ten, fifteen, twenty or thirty years before? What good was it to dig up old bodies when the morgue was filled with fresh stiffs every day? Who in the forensics sector wanted to hear about a dead case when their medic hands were overflowing with “live” cases, as it were? Who in the Missing Persons Division wanted to hear about a ten-or twenty-year-old missing person's report they'd given up on? Who in the detective's bullpen in any precinct in the city wanted to rehash a case that had so baffled him or her that the detective on the case had pleaded for years-even in sleep-to forget?
“Life's a bitch,” he muttered to the empty file room, “and then you go to the Cold Room.”
The telephone rang. It was Sergeant Stanley Kelton looking for a duty report, and he wanted it pronto. “Commander Bryce is doing a walk-through today, and I'll not have our paperwork looking sloppy, Officer Stonecoat, do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir.”
'Then get to it, man!” Kelton's Gaelic voice thundered through the phone.
“Yes, sir.”
“I'll send Langley downstairs for your report in an hour.”
“An hour? I just got here.”
“An hour, officer. You think Commander Bryce has time to putter about? No, mister, he's a busy man! Now, get what you can to me within the hour.”
“Aye, sir.”
There wasn't much to assemble for Kelton, but he managed to bring everything up to date, putting little X's into little square boxes. It appeared there was very little activity going on with records and files here, save for what some person named Dr. Meredyth Sanger was busy with.
He noted each entry and item she'd borrowed for the past two weeks. There were occasional others who'd come down to sift through some of the ancient paperwork, but nothing quite so noticeable as Dr. Sanger's sudden interest.
He took time to examine past weeks and months. Not a sign of Dr. Sanger before two, two and half weeks before his arrival. It appeared that up to that point, his predecessor, Arnold Feldman, had documented all activity to do with the Cold Room files, so he needn't duplicate the earlier man's efforts. The whole business left Lucas feeling mildly curious about Commander Andrew Bryce's interest in the interests of others roaming about the mite-ridden stacks of dead files here, but Lucas's mild interest was alloyed with a yearning to breathe free, to inhale fresh air, to seize an opportunity to escape this dungeon. Maybe Bryce, the chief ranking officer over the division, was thinking seriously of overhauling the way things were done, perhaps loading all this paper onto a computer system somewhere. Perhaps he meant to overhaul the entire precinct, starting literally from the bottom up.
At the turn of the hour a young, towheaded officer calling himself Will Langley showed up at the door requesting the reports Kelton had impolitely asked for. Langley seemed apologetic, saying, “Didn't give you any more time to get your feet wet than they gave me.” He went on, explaining that reports were usually due at the end of the month, but that there was a push on for some unaccountable reason.
Stonecoat greeted the young officer with a handshake and said, “No problem. But there's not a hell of a lot to report. Nothing much goes on down here, from what I can see.”
The kid's eyes had traveled around the room, and he glumly replied, “Damn, I thought / had pulled lousy duty…”
“You think Kelton's going to want anything else of me today?”
He shook his head, shrugged. “Can't say, but I doubt it, sir.”
“I'm no sir, son, just an officer like yourself.”
“Oh, no, sir, I've heard about you.”
“Heard what?”
'That you were a detective in Dallas, that you got near killed alongside your partner.”
“Old water under an old bridge, Langley.”
“Whatever you say, sir.” The kid left and the rock-hard silence of the place was even more deafening than before.
TWO
Already Lucas felt claustrophobic, trapped, as if consigned to a bloody prison while fellow academy graduates were being assigned squad cars and duty on the street, out in the Texas sun. Meanwhile, time seeping like water through rock, Lucas was beginning to feel a creeping panic, a fear that he could easily lose control here, that there were, after all, only tenuous threads holding him together in the first place, and now to be boxed in like an aging wolf in a zoo? He was closing in on thirty-three, and he would have been a lieutenant detective in Dallas had he not been made a cripple. Now what was he?
Perhaps he should have listened to his aunt and uncle, and to Grandpa. Perhaps he should have remained on the reservation up in Huntsville, where a mixed bag of Indians, mostly Coushatta, Alabama and Texas Cherokees, eked out a living by supplying tourist needs, there to peacefully live out what remaining years he had coming to him. He was, even by his grandpa's standards, an old man before the accident, and now he was ancient.
He continued to pace the aisles here in the Cold Room, a stark contrast to the wide-open spaces of the reservation home below the stars of an immense sky. His father's boyhood home had been his own, and despite the reservation poverty, it was filled with the compassion of his people, the Cherokee. Looking around at the dirty little hole to which he had been consigned, the hole into which his new situation landed him, he knew he just wanted to burn the fucking place to the ground and run out screaming an ancient Indian chant that'd been running through his head: My enemy holds invisible arrows; he is everywhere; make me invisible, too, so that I might kill him before he kills me…
Lucas dropped his weight into the chair they'd given him. The ancient chair didn't match his desk, and it made the sound of squealing, frightened pigs when he leaned back in it. “Make my arrows invisible, too… Make my feet silent… Make my hands follow my brave thoughts, otherwise there is no contest.” He spoke aloud the remainder of the remembered chant, thinking of his mother, a half-breed, strong-willed woman who had been the only stable force in his life before she died of cancer. He also fondly recalled his grandfather, Two Wolves, his mother's father, who still lived at eighty-six, and a third powerful image of an ancient warrior painting his chest with clay colors and charcoal, smoking a weed that would in fact convince him of both his invisibility and his invincibility. It was no accident that Indians raced at bullets. They believed themselves invisible to the bullets fired by the marksmen of the U.S. Cavalry.
The Cold Room, this place that had been here since 1910, had already become Stonecoat's all too visible enemy, choking him, destroying him from within.
“Make me invisible,” he repeated, “so I don't have to see this place or be seen in this place.”
“Ahh… are you… ahh… speaking to me?” Stonecoat wheeled around at the sound of the female voice, the squeaking chair they'd given him from storage screaming in his ear, embarrassing him. He fought to regain what little composure remained and stared slightly up at a woman whose startlingly lovely smile and wide aquamarine eyes met his for a moment in the dim light.
“No, I'm sorry… just getting buggy down here alone,” he softly apologized.
“My guess is, you didn't hear me come in…”
“No, I didn't. Got to get this chair oiled.”
“Well, it's no wonder,” she replied prettily, a dusty file folder in her hand. “Why's the desk so far from the door?
There's room for it up at the-”
“Hey, I just got here. What the other guy before me did… I don't know. Maybe he smoked weed back here, and I can't say as I blame him, ahh, miss.”