“How'd he miss you at such close range?” Gerald wondered aloud.
“His hand was shaking like a leaf when he pulled the trigger. He might just as well have put a bullet through my head or heart. Did you talk him into this stupid business?”
Now the paramedics rushed in alongside uniformed police, who ordered Stonecoat up and away from the shooting victim.
“I'm a cop with the Thirty-first,” he announced, flashing his badge. “Best call my captain, Phil Lawrence, and he'll take it from there. You men want to take this punk into custody for attempted armed robbery?” He shoved Gerald toward the uniformed men.
“Be glad to.”
“Hey, you're new with the Thirty-first, aren't you?” asked the other.
“Yeah, first year.”
“Way to go, rookie. Looks like a righteous collar and shoot. You keep up the good work and you'll see promotion soon.”
“Just happened to be in the right place at the right time.”
The clerk had returned through the other side door and he piped up, saying, “He saved my life, and he read these goons like a book; he knew they were going to rob the place before they ever got into the store, before they ever got out of their car out there.”
“Impound the vehicle, will you?” Stonecoat asked the two uniformed cops, who appeared to be unsure about what to do next.
The paramedics shouted for everyone to get out of their way as they hoisted Mickey from the ground on a stretcher and carried him from the store, one of them congratulating Stonecoat on saving the kid's life. “Good improvised dressing! Did the trick. His vitals aren't great, but they're better than they might have been.”
The two uniformed cops took Gerald toward their waiting squad car. Other police vehicles had arrived, strobe lights flashing. One patrol sergeant, who apparently knew the terrain well, huddled with the cops in the know, then he came into the store to find Lucas.
“I'm Brady, Jim Brady,” he told Stonecoat. “Watch commander for this area. Seems you're a little ways off from the Thirty-first, officer.
What's your name, officer?”
“Lucas, Lucas Stonecoat.”
“Rookie with the Thirty-first, my men tell me. Oh, yeah… think I've heard some talk about you.
Used to be in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, didn't you?”
“Yeah, yeah… that's right, Sergeant, but I don't see where that has anything to do with this occurrence here today.
“I sure hope not.” He sized up Lucas, circling him and talking the whole time. “IAD's on the way. Your captain's on his way, too.”
“It was a righteous shoot, sir,” replied Lucas, knowing the man wanted to hear him say the word sir.
EIGHT
Lucas had to admit that what had begun as a dismal, uneventful day had quickly transmogrified into an exciting, exhilarating and challenging day after all. He'd met a vivacious woman who was passionate about her work- perhaps too passionate about her work-had visited the animals in the zoo, had foiled a robbery attempt by two other animals, and what's more, he had been cheered to see his captain come straight to the Texaco station and back him one hundred percent. Lawrence had done all he could to shield his new recruit from the onslaught of Internal Affairs detectives, a breed of cop always anxious for a scandal. It appeared that Captain Lawrence wasn't half so bad as Dr. Sanger had made him out to be. Whatever personal and professional differences existed between Sanger and Lawrence, Lucas was sure of one thing: He didn't want to get in between a rock and a hard place.
Lucas now pulled into a parking spot at the rear of the Thirty-first, near a back door that would take him into the precinct without his having to pass either the sergeant's cage or the squad room. He wasn't anxious to face his big Irish sergeant just now, nor the detectives and officers who would want all the dope on what went down at the gas station. Word got around a precinct faster than a hairdresser's.
Lucas now scooped up his assorted newspapers and headed toward the building and back to the Cold Room, where he had a couple more hours to kill before going off duty. The newspaper stories on the Mootry case would keep him occupied till then, he was sure. Maybe he'd get through this day after all.
He quickly located the staircase that took him down into the bowels of the old structure and to the Cold Room, the stack of Houston Chronicles and Star-Standards under his arm.
Reopening the dank room, he found it a stone coffin. Looking around at his small kingdom, a dungeon in the belly of the Thirty-first Precinct, wondering if every goddamned precinct in the lousy city had a Cold Room, he mentally reconsidered Dr. Sanger's offer with a glacial, determined eye. On the one hand, he told himself, he had a great deal more to lose than did Dr. Sanger in sticking his neck out on a case he had no business on; on the other hand, what had he to lose? His dark little castle of moldy case files, the faceless, lost orphans of murder dating back to the turn of the century?
Still, it would require some quiet deliberation. He'd have to weigh all the facts, review the information on the Mootry case, see what if anything it had to do with the case files Dr. Sanger had mentioned. Still, he was no one's fool. He realized how crazy it'd be to team up with Meredyth Sanger. “What does she know about criminal investigation anyway?” he asked himself. Still, she could be his ticket out of here, if not for good, then at least during their investigation into this matter together. And what might that lead to? he wondered. There was no telling.
He suddenly slumped into the shocked and protesting chair, its piercing wail an ear-shattering banshee scream that could curdle the blood of the toughest cop in the precinct. He imagined it must be echoing through the heart of the old building and hurting everyone else's ears and teeth as much as his own. Christ, am / getting that heavy? He silently wondered.
As comfortable as he was going to get, he flicked on the swivel lamp and scanned the papers for all the news on Charles D. Mootry, Esquire, now deceased. After three-quarters of an hour spent scanning the various articles he'd collected, he decided aloud, “Not much more than what Meredyth had to say has gotten into the press.” This was true so far as he could determine from the articles read, but the case itself was rather an incredible one, something for Gary Larson's Far Side or Ripley's Believe It or Not.
It had all the earmarks of a Movie of the Week, too.
He next dug out the file that Dr. Sanger had carelessly tossed below his desk lamp early that morning. At first he just picked at the file the way he might a blemish on his skin, and he helplessly wondered how much of the file material she'd duplicated on the station Xerox. He finally, without enthusiasm, thumbed the file open and peered at the police reports and ghastly photos she had been playing with. Inside the innocent-looking, cream-colored manila folder, now yellow with age, an abhorrent world of black-and-white crime scene photos stared back, like grinning devils, displaying broken and irreparable lives; lives lost to the ultimate discontinuity: murder.
The older case file held a nightmare similar to the Mootry affair; in fact, it was shockingly similar to what had occurred in Bay town, where Mootry's body had been discovered, but this was a case in Sugar Land, and this one was-by police file standards-ancient, dated 1986. One of the ads clinging to the news clippings he found said that gasoline was eighty-seven cents a gallon. President Ronald Reagan was in office; the paper was filled with news of an armed U.S. strike against Libya, this after several terrorist bombings Libya was believed connected to. Ferris Bueller's Day Off was playing at the movies and Me and My Girl topped the musicals list. The largest U.S. corporation according to Fortune was General Motors, and a dispute was waged over AIDS virus research in which the Patent and Trademark office designated the Pasteur Institute of Paris as the senior party rather than the U.S. National Institutes of Health, in the matter of the first AIDS blood test. At stake were millions of royalty dollars to be earned by the use of the test.
Stonecoat could only recall that it was the year that the North American Soccer League went belly-up with great financial losses to all involved. This memory triggered his recollection of several more events in '86 that he had taken particular note of. It was the year the Chicago Bears defeated the New England Patriots to become world
