crisscrossing passages through which the most important business of their equally narrow lives competed for time and space.
Lucas now cruised this world, creating the necessary maps in his mind as he went. He must learn the lay of this new land. Dallas had been home for much of his life, but the new Houston-many of its skyscrapers helped to the sky by skilled Indian hands-was new to him.
According to the news, Houston's lakefront property was at an all-time premium in a quite virtual sense: Beaches had become carpets of people laid out like so many sand towels and nowhere to walk. Galveston Bay was filled with those seeking relief, swimming in the tide, bobbing like flotsam under a grueling sun that bubbled the gulf waters, melted the hearts of Houston's whores, and scorched the tile roofs of suburban homes. The air around Houston itself had become a humid, demanding and breath-stealing warrior in the most physical sense. Just like Dallas, and nothing like Dallas, except for the no-ocean option, he'd decided.
The downtown silver towers of the high-rise district stood over it all, professing to live and stand forever, if not as towering pyramids, then towering ruins below time and sand. Home base for NASA, home of major league sports teams and opera houses that surpassed anything in the East for sheer size and show, Houston now was home to Lucas Stonecoat. He wasn't ever going to be completely comfortable here, and he knew it.
“I'm still a cop,” Lucas kept telling himself as he drove further and further from the precinct. “I still carry a badge and a gun, and I still have the power of arrest.” He had come from a long line of warriors, beginning with the first of his line to be called Stonecoat. Other ancestors became Light-horse Guards, the 1850s counterpart of the Secret Service, but they were in the service of the Cherokee Chiefs.
Lucas had pulled loose his tie and placed a sports coat over the passenger seat removing his “medicinal” supply in the pocket. His most immediate intention was to locate the nearest safe bar. The image of the Cold Room, its four walls moving in threateningly, continued to chip away at his resolve.
“Low fucking man on the totem pole takes on a whole new meaning,” he said, sipping Red Label whiskey, which he'd camouflaged in a brown medicine bottle. He took a second long pull on the “painkiller,” replacing the half-pint bottle below the folds of his sports coat.
He wondered why they had bothered to issue him a uniform. Who needed a fucking uniform down in the Cold Room? No doubt it was issued for parade days and visits from dignitaries, for crowd control or if a riot were to break out in a slum neighborhood. He'd simply hung the uniform in his locker, seriously doubting if Lawrence or anyone else would call him on it if he never wore the damned thing, simply wearing plainclothes instead. What sense did it make to dirty a uniform down there on an eight-hour shift out of sight of God and everyone on the planet?
Maybe he'd test his theory tomorrow, and maybe not. If he did things by the book, if he wore the damned uniform, it would feel awkward enough, but if he did follow the letter of the precinct law, and if he impressed Captain Lawrence, it stood to reason that he'd be returned to street duty, and after that who knew? He could begin to work again toward a detective's shield, with all the privileges that followed.
“Dream on, fathead,” he told himself now. As to the breaking of rules, it seemed hardly to matter; as to the whiskey, he'd have it empty and the car aired out before it was turned over to the next shift.
He was now just prowling, turning the police band up high, hopeful that he would be in the right place at the right time. In fact, he was praying for a bank robbery, a knock-over, maybe even a murder, something he could sink his teeth into. It was going to happen anyway, as inevitable as the rising temperature today, so why shouldn't it happen now while he was trawling by? Should a call come over, and he happened to be “lunching” nearby, he'd be the first to take it. Fuck the Cold Room.
Thus far, however, the radio band buzzed with cats up trees and gang graffiti calls, broken windows and stolen bikes, nothing of a serious nature or import; he hungered even for a household disturbance, something where he could rush in and bust somebody's chops. Wrong attitude, man, he counseled, so he simply pulled over and switched off his car, stepped out of the vehicle and into a seedy-looking bar. If he couldn't find trouble to attend to, he'd make a little of his own.
FOUR
Dr. Meredyth Sanger watched from across the street as the man she had been following climbed from his squad car and made his way toward the bar. “Oh, shit, Stonecoat's a lush…” She groaned and shook her head, disappointed at what she saw here. On the surface, she saw an on-duty police officer first sip from a questionable receptacle in his car and now step into a bar before noon. It wasn't pretty and it wasn't promising, not for Stonecoat and not for her… not for anyone. “Damn,” she cursed.
Dr. Sanger had had it with the kind of mentality exhibited by Captain Lawrence, his wait-and-see approach, his hands-off attitude, his management-by-crisis style. She was equally tired of seeing the kind of exhibition she'd witnessed out Lawrence's window, where subordinates were treated so shabbily by ranking cops that they were denied a chance to work up to their potential; that certainly seemed to be the case with Officer Lucas Stonecoat, who must take orders from a Stan Kelton.
She had to admit, though, that Lawrence was far easier to take than some men she'd worked with in police circles. She once had had to expose a watch lieutenant who had raped a female officer and had threatened the woman's life if she should ever talk. The woman had come to Meredyth for advice, help, comfort and support. Meredyth gave her all this and more over a period of a year, while the handsome but vicious lieutenant continued a constant barrage against the young woman until finally she agreed to wear a wire. With the help of Internal Affairs, Meredyth was able to corner this man, to put him where he belonged. He was serving eight to ten for rape now, and his conviction had been upheld on appeal.
Despite the good work she was doing within the department, men like Lawrence still failed to take her seriously- partly due to the Blue Code, which labeled her a snitch, because the unspoken and inane belief held by many cops was that no matter what a fellow cop did, you never ratted on him. She sometimes wondered just who was crazy and who was sane.
How did a guy like Lawrence get ahead? He was a throwback to an earlier time, a freaking caveman without the body hair, yet he fit right into the old-boy system of the HPD. Hell, he fished and hunted with the best of the brass, told off-color and ethnic jokes so nasty they'd make Don Rickles cry and Howard Stern wince, and he talked openly in the squad room with his detectives of his many encounters and conquests of women as if some newsreel were playing relentlessly inside his self-deluded brain.
“Fatso” was Lawrence's squad room handle, but now that he was thirty pounds lighter than when he began and now that he was a captain, nobody dared call him that to his face, except perhaps the self-destructive type- maybe a guy like Lucas Stonecoat, from what she could see.
She leaned back into the cushioned car seat now; she had felt some guilt at first for having followed Lucas from the precinct, but not near so much as she had while watching him as he swilled booze a hundred yards away from her.
She had bottled up so much outrage at Phil Lawrence that her anger with Stonecoat was mild by comparison. “Damn that Lawrence,” she said to the empty car. “Why can't the captain see facts in evidence when put before him?”
She had stumbled onto some interesting anomalies with regard to the recent murder and mutilation case of a man named Charles D. Mootry. The man, an appellate court judge, died under gruesome circumstances. He was first dispatched with an arrow fired from some sort of high-powered gun or crossbow, piercing the victim directly through the heart. The unusual choice of weapon used by the killer was just the beginning in this bizarre case, for the victim's head had been removed and carried off by his assailant, along with other telling body parts, such as the hands, feet and the privates. Only a torso with arms and legs remained.
She'd first learned of the case itself, minus the most heinous details, through newspaper accounts, along with everyone else. She, like the poor slob in the basement pushing dust mites about, was not on Phil Lawrence's kiss list. In fact, Phil didn't believe in either of two facts of life in 1996- that women belonged in police work, or that men who were real men ever needed psychiatric support. In effect, he didn't believe she could work effectively within the superstructure of a paramilitary organization such as the Houston Police Department, which was not only a male- dominated environment but one rooted in the history of the decidedly male Texas Rangers, another law
