Cutting Edge Read online

  Final Diagnosis:

  1. Severe chest injury—

  gunshot wound left upper q.

  2.Severe closed-head injury.

  3.Compound tibia-fibula fracture— left.

  4.Wound infection, tibia-fibula.

  5.Crushed hip; replacement—left.

  6.Partial paralysis, right arm, hand.

  7.Acute respiratory distress syndrome.

  8.Conjunctivitis.

  Operations:

  1.Chest wound & closure.

  2.Tracheostomy.

  3.Swan-Ganz placement.

  4.Laparotomy.

  5.Hip replacement—left.

  6.Bladder repair.

  7.Suprapubic cystostomy.

  8.Arm, shoulder, and forehead lacerations.

  Daniel Garvey, M.D.

  TLT-219#4314

  D: 6/6/92

  T: 02:07:52

  Stonecoat,,Lucas Daniel Garvey, M.D.

  368-58-7899 Discharge Summary

  It hardly touched on the whole story. There were subsequent operations as well. Removal of this, removal of that. He had had so many needles stuck into him that soon he felt like the proverbial porcupine who was asked where it hurt the most. He didn't feel a thing.

  The part of the doctors' many reports on him that'd hurt him the most in a legal sense was the part about the blood-alcohol level. He and his partner had been drinking, having just gotten off duty when the police band, at the police bar where they routinely drank, radioed the news that an armed heist was in progress at a store on Lincoln at Talmadge, a location they had been watching for days in the hope this exact guy would strike. There had been a string of armed robberies in the neighborhood and witnesses tied it all to one guy, a black man with red hair who actually called himself Malcolm and wore at one time an X cap, at another a T-shirt bearing Malcolm X's likeness. The man had grown increasingly daring, increasingly violent, and he was expected soon to graduate to murder if not stopped.

  They raced out after having had two shooters apiece, and they went to work. It was the last bad idea his partner, Jackson, ever had, and for Lucas, the results became a living nightmare and continued to be so.

  But no one, not even the doctors, knew of his bouts with epileptic like seizures that came and went at unaccountable moments, coming on him as they did only after leaving the hospital for good.

  He had never mentioned it to his doctors; he hadn't wanted to undergo another battery of tests, praying the new assault on his system would eventually end of its own accord, but so far, the blackouts showed no sign of abating. In fact, over the four years since the accident, the seizures had steadily claimed more and more of him, until now they might last several minutes. It was enough to disqualify him as a candidate for police duty, so he had dared not confide it to anyone.

  If the force knew of such a weakness, he'd be gone in a blink.

  He had spent several years recuperating out at the reservation home of his forefathers, but since his arrival in Houston and acceptance of both a rookie's status and a rookie's pay with the Houston Police Department, thirty-two-year-old former detective Lucas Stonecoat had told his lawyer to plead or bribe Dr. David L. Cass to release all his psychiatric and medical records into the care of the attorney and to destroy all remaining copies from files and computers alike. Being placed under psychiatric care after the accident was standard procedure in the Dallas Police Department, but his psychological profile was at least one area of his life which Lucas intended to keep in that rare realm called privacy.

  The media coverage of the accident, his subsequent battle back from death, and the media circus surrounding both his divorce and the suit he filed against the Dallas Police Department had been enough limelight for both his lives.

  Meanwhile, his body each day made war on him. Who was tougher? Who had more will, God Mind or God Pain? Often, the body seemed to be winning the struggle for control, taking delight in torturing the mind. It seemed a forced old age, the constant struggle to overcome his own physical deficiencies and turmoil, from the onset of arthritis in his hands to a near-constant bout with what could only be termed a continuous, living headache that had taken up residence inside his cranium, a pain which nothing could completely extinguish, certainly not anything found in a drugstore.

  Lucas and Jackson were proven to have been under the influence while giving high-speed chase through the city streets, and Jackson was judged to have been killed in the pursuit due to his own negligence and disregard for protocol and proper procedure, so the city had little reason to do more than the minimum for Jackson's family or for Stonecoat's mounting bills. Instead, the department, via the press, stripped Lucas of his rank.

  Lucas took the DPD to court, but in Texas, a lone Cherokee cop stood little chance against the circus, as the system was called. Awaiting a trial, he had little reason to stay in the city he had adopted, and he no longer felt at ease there; he had few friends to speak of on the force, fewer since his attempt to stand up for both Jackson and himself. So now he was pulling a paycheck here in Houston, working over the dust-laden files of the Cold Room. Case after piled-to-the-ceiling case of murdered men, women and children gone unsolved, cases the department had wanted badly to close out but had been unable to do so; cases that, if closed, would gain the HPD more recognition and a better statistical average on murders solved, a more sterling record, which inevitably led to more federal dollars.

  Lucas Stonecoat had a simple enough job, and where better to place a deformed cop, one with half a face of scar tissue, so as not to frighten children and white women? He couldn't even pull crossing guard duty.

  He suddenly pounded frustrated fists onto the desktop, and the noise reverberated about the Cold Room, sounding like a kettle drum. He stood and paced the crowded little space of his new existence like a caged bear, consciously trying not to breathe too deeply the musty, dust-laden air. He wasn't exactly Toulouse-Lautrec; he still had some height, a strong, firm body that some might call gaunt. Only the slight hunch of his back, the scar tissue along his right side, at his cheek, neck, and down to the biceps, and other telltale signs marked him as a maimed man, damaged goods.

  His Indian blood served him well in one regard: The bronze-red tincture actually masked the scar tissue, at least until someone came too near.

  “Fire plays freaking hell on any color skin, just the same,” he'd tell the ones whose stares lingered a might too long.

  His clear, dark brown eyes would then blink bright and wistful, and then he'd bring up an unfelt laugh to let the other man or woman off the hook. He had long since let go of any hope that people might show some sensitivity, and besides, in his case there was no such thing as a comforting word.

  Still, he bolstered himself daily with the fact he was alive, and that he had come back from that shrouded land reserved for the dead. During his visit there, he had regained a great deal that he had once lost—most importantly, who he was in a past life, for the voice of his ancestor, the one originally named Stonecoat, spoke directly to him, telling him he must go back, that there was much for him yet to do in this reality.

  Maybe that was what bothered people the most. Even those who didn't know his story seemed to sense, or judge from his scars, that he had once walked among the dead, and that he was here now as some sort of misguided spirit with wide, peeking-out eyes and what the Cherokee called “going back” characteristics associated with those who ought to've been killed in some glorious manner, such as on the battlefield, but had not fulfilled such a destiny, so in dying they go backwards and return to earth until they might find a more suitable way to die. The questionable accolade had so attached itself to one family that it had in the distant past become the family name, Going back, his mother's side.

  Lucas came from a long line of warriors, but nowadays he felt more like a mischievous ghost of himself, anxiously searching for his identity but only causing trouble for the world around him as he did so, a world in which he no longer felt at ease or to which h
e fully belonged. Returning to police work, he had hoped, might return him to some degree of normalcy, but such a plan had an inherent flaw. Suppose he accomplished a return to “life before the accident” only to learn that it continued to be unfulfilling and worthless?

  He had recently begun to despise his own inner voice, his own musings on the subject of himself and his aims. Such self-reflection came at too high a cost. It cost in dark alleyways of hatred and anger, which led to self-indulgence, drink, and drugs. Besides, his inner voice had begun to sound too damnably much like the shrinks he'd had to contend with back in Dallas, and this thought made him explode again. “What a lot of horseshit,” he said, sending a fist into one of the stuffed boxes on the shelf before him—one of the countless such boxes in the Cold Room.

  The box retaliated with a nasty puff of foul gray dust mites, making him cough in turn.

  What few friends he had on the force were all back in Dallas, and even their kindness hadn't always prevailed. This went tenfold for his ex-wife, who saw his disabilities more in economic terms than humane ones.

  Lucas's large hands had healed well, and he had full use of them, most of the time. The occasional lockup came on him—sudden muscle spasms, like those in his back. The accident had, the doctors said, aged Lucas by fifteen, maybe twenty years. “Can I skip male menopause, then?” he'd asked one doctor, who enjoyed his dry humor.

  His legs—even the left one—had, for the most part, escaped the torture of metal and fire of the inferno the squad car had become that day. The legs were now good. Sleep wasn't so good.

  Since the yearlong hospital convalescence, he didn't eat well, and nowadays when he did eat, he ate sparingly, like a thin gray squirrel, putting away more than he consumed; like a camel, he went without water for days, so long as he could find some ready, pain-numbing alcohol instead—another matter not for public consumption, and certainly not for the department's bloody IAD inspectors and medical staff.

  He felt both restless and weary at once, a stout weeping willow, on the one hand growing toward the sky, on the other reaching toward the earth.

  Working alone, with minimal to no secretarial support, should suit the likes of Lucas Stonecoat just fine, he now thought as he once again ran his eyes over the room, a spiritless gray caven to which he had been assigned only hours before. The heartless, unfeeling place rippled with faint light coming in at the street-level windows.

  The old station house was a little younger than the Alamo, but not by much, he imagined, the exterior a pitted, boulder-strewn facade of the sort only found in old Texas towns. It had only survived so long among the sleek steel high-rise chapels of downtown Houston because it housed cops, and it belonged to the city, and so long as it remained cheap space for the city and didn't collapse, so it went... There was talk of renovating a vacated city school now being broken into each night and used as a crack house in a seedy section of the city. It might do some good to turn such a damnable place into a precinct house full of the latest in crime-fighting technology, but somehow Stonecoat didn't see it happening so long as the city fathers and city council men and ladies gave more lip service to crime prevention than actual dollars and cents.

  So, Stonecoat imagined he was stuck here in the ancient cavern of the Cold Room, perhaps forever, or until he broke under the pressure of God Reality. Here the walls were as dead and unfeeling as the cardboard boxes of the dead files stocked here. True enough on the surface, but microscopically, the place was a buzzing jungle of activity, mites eating away at the paper and munching off chunks of cardboard; dust-eating microbes carried on the wind each time the door was opened or the fan turned on. In fact, much of the dust was created by the walls, like an epidermal layer of skin sloughing off, invisible to the naked eye. Dust reigned here, creating a halo when the 9:09 sun hit the reflecting glass on the building across the street, somehow making its curious way into this crypt and making the walls of the Cold Room shimmer as if alive—and it was no illusion.

  Houston brass thought they'd be doing him a favor, no doubt, putting him to clerking here amid the “lockup” of debris. No one expected him—or anyone else, for that matter—to actually work on cracking cases and finding solutions where others had only found insoluble questions. Even if there was a way to warm up a frozen-with-age case as those surrounding Lucas, he'd have to do it in an atmosphere filled with paper people, paper lives, and paper events of a bygone day; he'd likely have no witnesses to the crimes, no one alive, anyway, and no one to interview, no one to hassle or prod or pry. Maybe the brass thought it was a former detective's dream: Open a case, chase answers from a safe hole in the ground, do it without the least expense of emotion or turmoil or involvement or human contact—which he'd had four years of as a detective in Dallas, and the three before that as a patrol cop.

  Even if he could relocate a witness or even a suspect involved in so dusty a case file as one in these, the individual would likely be of a forgetful nature or in a forgetful frame of mind, and why not? So long after the incident had gone the way of water and smoke? He didn't imagine there were people who would willingly want to dredge up an ancient, encrusted anchor to trawl about a murky paper lake of forgotten, fishtailing information that had given up nothing from its dismal depths the first time around. He wasn't sure he even wanted to dredge this lake, to raise the dead, or reenervate the tragic crimes he was supposed to somehow solve.

  Of course, no one expected much. He was told that from the outset. “Do what you can, Lucas,” Captain Phil Lawrence had instructed. “And keep your duty sergeant informed.”

  “Sure... sure, Captain,” he had replied, while thinking, What kind of a duty sergeant do you have on a task like this? It was police work, but just barely... more like clerk duty in a necromancy file room.

  He'd be dealing with the worst problem a detective faced: SCC—Stone Cold Crime. This involved more than cold, uncrackingly frigid, lower drawer, forgotten crimes; he would face here the hard fact of unending, unappealing, and unreachable time. Who gave a shit about somebody killed five, ten, fifteen, twenty or thirty years before? What good was it to dig up old bodies when the morgue was filled with fresh stiffs every day? Who in the forensics sector wanted to hear about a dead case when their medic hands were overflowing with “live” cases, as it were? Who in the Missing Persons Division wanted to hear about a ten-or twenty-year-old missing person's report they'd given up on? Who in the detective's bullpen in any precinct in the city wanted to rehash a case that had so baffled him or her that the detective on the case had pleaded for years—even in sleep—to forget?

  “Life's a bitch,” he muttered to the empty file room, “and then you go to the Cold Room.”

  The telephone rang. It was Sergeant Stanley Kelton looking for a duty report, and he wanted it pronto. “Commander Bryce is doing a walk-through today, and I'll not have our paperwork looking sloppy, Officer Stonecoat, do you understand me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  'Then get to it, man!” Kelton's Gaelic voice thundered through the phone.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I'll send Langley downstairs for your report in an hour.”

  “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 th
at 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.