“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.”
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.”
