He momentarily wondered if he'd made a mistake with her, searching for a badge, guessing she could be a lieutenant or something, in which case he ought to've referred to her as sir or madam, he supposed.
“It's Doctor, Dr. Meredyth Sanger.”
“Oh, Doctor?”
“Psychiatry.”
Police shrink, he thought, just what I need. Already-checking up on me, already familiar with my record, already anxious to get me on her couch, and not for the romp of it. Pretty, though… much better prospects of getting me on her couch than that weaselly ferret of a man back in Dallas ever had. All these thoughts rushed in at him unbidden, in the same instant in which he suspiciously eyed the dead file she'd lifted from one of the shelves.
“What's that you're carrying out?” he asked. “You know you have to sign out anything you take from here. Here's the roster. Just sign here. Be sure to indicate the file number, date it and sign.”
“I'm not taking it out, officer.” He detected the sharp anger, and not even his blue serge suit could hide the fact he held only a rookie's status here. Only a rookie would get such duty, and she knew this. He wondered how long she'd been around; how much she knew about the inner workings of the department; if she could help him or hurt him, or both.
“I'm returning this.” She extended the file on long, fragile fingers with lovely nails. “I think I've got all I need from it-for now, anyway.”
“Sorry, I thought you'd been back there in the stacks. Call me Lucas or Luke,” he corrected her, preferring it to “officer.”
She smiled in response, a smile that brightened both the room and, momentarily, his spirits.
Lucas again stared at the file, which she now defensively clutched to her chest. He noticed the absence of a wedding band on her finger, although she obviously liked rings. He saw a sapphire on her right hand, a purple birthstone gem on her left hand.
“You're the Cherokee guy, aren't you? The one everybody calls”-she corrected herself before saying Redskin- “Stonecoat?”
He instinctively turned the scarred side of his face from the light and her view, realizing she'd edited her own words, that she'd almost called him Redskin. “That'd be me, yes, Redskin,” he bluntly replied. “It's a nickname given me by my dead partner in Dallas, long before the flaming scar, but it's a tag that has followed me here, used liberally in the training sessions among the other rookies, who were ten years my junior. But then, you already know all about that, don't you?”
“Only what I've heard, Mr. Lucas Stonecoat.”
She said it as if she'd heard many tall tales about him, but he'd already become defensive, first straightening in his chair and then standing up so he could loom over her. She was a head shorter, even if he did have a forced slouch. “Okay, Dr. Sanger, so you've found me. But don't get your hopes up.”
“What?”
He stepped past her, into the shadows, which made a mosaic of his face. “I don't intend to become your guinea pig, Doctor, so-”
“What the hell're you talking about?”
“I don't intend to play twenty questions with you about my childhood or my accident or anything else that piques your curiosity, any more than I-”
“Hey, hold on there, Stonecoat!” she shouted, realizing where the conversation was going. “All I know is the Cold Room has a new guy, that Arnold Feldman's gone, thank God.”
“You didn't like Feldman?”
“And where'd you learn such big words as 'piqued,' anyhow?” She still managed a smile for him, but this only made him more nervous with her.
“Then you're… Oh? Well…” Lucas began to babble, “Listen… listen, maybe I did jump the-”
“You're really not to worry about me head-hunting for you, officer. I have plenty of head cases upstairs to keep me busy for the rest of the year, trust me, so-”
He smiled now, almost laughed. “Is that right? Well, hey, maybe I was a little-” he attempted a lame apology, thinking how pretty her silver-blond hair and blue-fire eyes were.
“-so I didn't come slumming down here for additional patients,” she forged ahead. “Don't need 'em, don't want 'em. Got a precinct full of 'em. You got that, Lucas?” She slapped down the file, sending dust bunnies flying in every direction below his desk lamp, and before storming out, added, “Maybe you ought to begin on your new duty with a can of Pledge and a dust rag.”
“Hey, hey,” he shouted after her, taking a few steps in her direction, bumping metal shelves with shoulders too wide for the aisle, causing her to slow at the door. Their eyes met for a moment. Masking his thoughts, which were vaulting toward a pinnacle he'd not felt in years, he simply said, “You forgot something.”
“What?”
“You… you forgot to sign that stuff back in. Do you mind?”
She glared at him now, the pretty eyes no longer inviting or smiling, her teeth set like an angry fox terrier's. The effect was cute, pretty even, he thought, but he dared not tell her such thoughts.
She yanked the clipboard from his outstretched hand, snatched a pen from her ear, located the right line, and scrawled her name with a shaking fist. He paid no attention to either the date or the ID number attached to the file-precisely what his superior had told him he must do. He instead concentrated on her name-Meredyth Sanger- trying to determine the origin of the melodic name. French, maybe, or Cajun? he wondered as she disappeared through the door.
He could hear the pulse of the city outside the ground-level window. Houston was the largest city in the state, fourth largest in the nation, with a population of 1,657,504.
The city had experienced phenomenal growth since the days of its riverboat-landing beginnings when it was called Buffalo Bayou and a pair of brothers named Allen in August of 1836 decided to sink roots. Eventually the area was named after General Sam Houston. Today the metropolis was the financial and industrial hub of the state, with the largest seaports in all of the Southwest and the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center. Along with nearby Galveston, all things Texas-and many an item distinctly other than Texan in origin-could be found here. But this morning's traffic report from Eyewitness News Team 2 in Houston exposed it as the cattle town it had always been when it showed film of traffic backed up for mile upon mile on the Interstate due to an overturned semi that had sent its cargo of live beef, mostly nervous longhorn steers, roaming freely about downtown Houston.
From a law enforcement perspective, Houston was to be congratulated. The largest reductions in homicide rates in the country for 1995 had been in New York and Houston, both having seen a near one-third decrease in killings in 1995, while Dallas, Texas, unfortunately, was seeing an increase in homicides.
All the same, Lucas found Houston somewhat dizzying. He had grown up in nearby Huntsville, Texas, and the changes and growth of Houston since he'd left as a young man to take academy training in Dallas was astounding. He hardly knew his way around the city anymore. But there remained a few neighborhood bars he was familiar with, places where a man could step back into the past, if only for the time it took to drink a beer. At the moment, the thought of a drink was almost too much to bear.
THREE
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.