“I'll have to sleep on it.”
“And if you never get to sleep?”
“You know about my insomnia, too? You've been all over my medical file, and you've been all over the computer Internet trying to locate all kinds of conspiracies. I'm not so sure I trust you, Doctor.”
“Don't be ridiculous. I'm only interested in the truth.”
“Yeah, well, perhaps you should heed some of your own Anglo advice.”
“Which is?”
“Careful of what you wish for… you may get it.” She bit her lip and nodded. “Tomorrow, then, without fail, you will let me know, one way or the other.”
“I will.”
She stood up, took his hand and shook it firmly. “Thank you.”
He held on to her hand, enjoying the warmth of touch. It had been a long time since he had held a woman's hand. “For what?”
“For being the first man to listen to me on this, to take me seriously on this, and to see that there is something quite odd going on here.”
“Did you take all you have to Captain Lawrence?”
“I did.”
“Withholding nothing? Not even the Gunther file or the added info from Atlanta on Reynolds?”
“Well, he never gave me a chance to get that far. He's so negative and so insufferable.”
“Funny, I haven't found him to be either.”
“That's because you're a man. He doesn't treat you like a… a goddamned Barbie doll or a bug.”
She made her way toward the door.
“You sure you don't want to stay a little longer?” he asked, afraid to let her go and afraid she might hear the panic in his voice as well. The moment she stepped out the door, the place wrapped itself again in that deafening silence it wore before she'd brought her fire inside. It was a fire he both admired and remembered; it was the fire he had once carried.
“Lucas, it's going on three A.M.; I've got to get some sleep, and you'd better do the same. Have you tried some of that whiskey in a tall glass of warm milk?”
“Milk?” He almost spat the word. “I don't have any milk in the apartment.”
“Then I take that as a no?”
“That's right.”
She could only frown. They said a final good night.
But ten minutes later there came a knock at his door, and when he opened it, there she was, extending a pint of milk to him. 'Try the milk-and-whiskey toddy. There's something released in warm milk that'll help you sleep. Trust me.”
He stood astonished, not remembering how the pint of milk got into his hands. “Thank you. I will try your remedy.”
“That's all I ask. Just a try.” Her smile warmed him. “Now, good night, I hope!”
She was rushing away again.
“Are you sure you're safe out this late alone?” he asked her as she disappeared into the shadows of the hallway for the elevator.
He next saw her silhouetted against the light of the elevator when the door opened. Someone in a nearby room was shouting through the wall for quiet. “I know how to take care of myself, thank you. And Lucas,” she paused, and just as the elevator door closed, added, “I do hope we can be partners.”
Lucas stared down at the cold pint of milk in the green-and-white carton she'd handed him. The slogan on the milk proclaimed it to be
WINS DAIRY MILK-THE VERY BEST OF LIFE IN A CREAMY CASCADE OF WHITE ENERGY.
“Give me white lightning any day,” he muttered to himself.
TWELVE
His warm milk and whiskey in hand, a full glass of it, Lucas now lowered himself into Sears' poor excuse for a La-Z-Boy, as he had no sofa yet, and found the TV remote and a cold piece of pizza. He tossed aside the pizza, finding it a poor complement to the hot toddy.
Fatigued, feeling spent, he flipped on the TV and channel-surfed, stopping to stare with wonder at a QVC- style television evangelist who was going to save him from himself, from wild, wild women, from anything smokable or pokable, from anything he might guzzle, such as whiskey, from Satan, and from an eternity in Satan's last resort. The TV evangelist whooped as well as the best Baptist minister in all of Texas and made as much sound and fury and promise as a used-car salesman with a sledgehammer in hand.
Unable to stomach another word, Lucas switched on an old western with Jimmy Stewart in the lead role opposite bad guy Arthur Kennedy. Lucas closed his eyes and allowed the dialogue, voices and music to wash over him. It was nearing three-thirty in the morning, the dementia hour, and he dozed, semiconsciously wondering if the white medicine woman's remedy acted as placebo more than anything else, wondering if his sleep was helped by the drink, or if it had come on simply due to exhaustion, or a combination of both. Either way, he knew he'd sleep more soundly if he stopped worrying about how-he had gotten here…
He awoke with a knife to his heart, but the startled moment came to an abrupt end the instant his eyes leapt open. Those damned Cold Room files had brought on a nightmare. He surveyed the apartment, a barren, stark personality, this place, without warmth or color. Meredyth could not have approved of the place or liked it. He had to do something about that, had some ideas, wondered when he'd find the time. He wanted very much to get some rich, vibrant desert earth colors to surround himself with-reds, browns, ochres, umbers, perhaps a few Arizona or Texas landscapes with towering mountains. He loved the Painted Desert and Grand Canyon scenes. Yes, that would work.
He'd work on it. For now, he shuffled off to the shower, painfully stripping away his clothes, the old injuries firing up anew, a punishment for falling asleep in the old chair. In his medicine cabinet, he found some horse-sized pain pills left over from his days at the hospital in Dallas. The pill bottle ought to've been emptied months before, but he'd weaned himself off traditional medications, taking the big brown things only sparingly, relying more and more on tribal medicines forwarded by his grandfather, as well as smoking the root. The root gave him a greater high than any bourbon or marijuana might. The herbal medicine, also known as locoweed, was as old as his tribal people. This and meditation were now his constants, his caregivers, his doctors.
Still, since he'd not smoked anything tonight, he popped one of the white man's remedies and got under the soothing hot spray of the shower. Afterward, he quickly toweled down and found his soft mattress. The bed comforted him back to a deep slumber, his greatest regret at the moment being that Meredyth Sanger wasn't lying beside him, and secondly that she'd have absolutely no reason to ever speak to him again-not after what he had to say to her in the morning.
But liking her wasn't enough reason to get involved with her harebrained scheme of building a case for a serial killer going about with steel-tipped arrows over a period of almost twenty years. Besides, there were just too damned many loose odds and ends.
Still, linking the two most recent cases, Mootry and Palmer, might have merit, and there damned well could be a serial killer on the warpath in the greater Houston metropolitan area. But such cases were out of Lucas's hands, beyond any reach of either him or Dr. Sanger, so far as he could tell.
He fumbled for the card she'd left him, which he had placed next to his phone, and for a long moment, he focused on her melodic name. “Oh, hell,” he announced to the empty room. “Might jus' 's well get it over with.”
He began dialing her number, not worried about waking her. “Damnation and hell, she's kept me up all night with this crazy shit, not that I could sleep anyway, given all my givens.”
His was an impossible situation. He understood the need for a Dr. Jack Kevorkian in the lives-or rather deaths-of many people. Insomnia alone was hell, but coupled with agonizing and torturous pain, that was quite a bit
