Robert Walker - Final Edge

"Do you have to be a cop twenty-four-seven?"

"What about you, Doctor? Heal thyself. Do you have to be a shrink twenty-four-seven?" he countered.

"Touche, mon amour. I guess we both know each other better than most couples, hey, Lucas?"

"That's usually a good thing, isn't it?"

"Dr. Phil would say so, but sometimes there's such a thing as too much honesty."

"Really? And when is that?"

"When the truth is clearly that two people are incompatible."

"You think that's the case with us?" he asked.

"Do you?"

"What kind of word games are we playing here, Mere?

What's more important than the truth that… that I love you?"

This silenced her for a moment. She raised her lips to his, kissing him. "I love you too, Lucas, truly."

The noise of birds skimming over the lake at the bottom of the lawn rose up to them. "Then we have no problem we can't overcome."

"You buy into that? That love can overcome any problem, any obstacle?" she asked.

"In my culture, aside from God, it is the most powerful force in the cosmos."

"Once you loved Tsali, and once she loved you, but what happened to your powerful force then?"

He dropped his gaze and sipped at his lukewarm coffee. She saw that she had hurt him, her words stinging. "That was young love. Our love, Meredyth, makes us feel young, but it's more solid, grounded. We have much more in common than you had with Byron and I had with Tsali, and we learn from each other each day."

She wrapped her arms around him. "So much evil is done in the name of love, like this love-starved, love- seeking Blodgett girl, searching for the attention of the world because she couldn't get it from her own mother."

"Every beat cop and detective on the force knows that love kills," he replied, holding her tight. "If it's not a prostitute murder, it's a stalking-ex murder, and if not that, the father who kills his family, why? Because 'I loved them too much.'"

"So many deaths all balled up with love and its many permutations. And yet so many beautiful and wondrous outcomes have resulted from pure, genuine love."

"Let's don't ever take our love for granted, Mere."

"Agreed. Let's celebrate it often."

"Right you are. All the same, sweetheart, I am curious to know if anything's come of our APB."

"Christ, Lucas, it's not our APB anymore. Ahhh," she mock-screamed. "I give up. Make the call. No! Wait a minute. Hold on!" She had pushed him away from her and stepped back. "If you love me, you'll get it off your mind for a while."

"Celebration time, you mean?" he asked, holding his arms out for her to return to him.

She fell into his arms. "I'm not referring to sex. I'm talking about having some fun-F-U-N!"

He held her at arm's length, staring into her sea-green eyes. "Hell, you're right. I've forgotten how to spell it. As for the Ripper business, it's not even my case anymore. Let them deal with it."

She pulled away and went to the porch swing, pulling herself into a ball there. "I really don't want to hear another word about the fucking case, Lucas." She pulled her feet up and under her. The swing swayed only slightly, unhappily.

"Isn't that what I just said? Am I missing something here?" Lucas watched her sulk, and then he stared down at the movement around the stables. Men who worked the horses and saw to their needs had already begun to exercise some of the animals. "Let's go for a ride, shall we?" he suggested.

She remained balled up, but her eyes found his. After regarding him for a moment, she smiled. "Now your're talking."

"Walk you to the stables?"

"You're on." Meredyth's smile broadened, lighting up her features.

"Is this how you intend to always get your way with me?" he asked.

"Whatever are you talking about?" She pushed open the porch screen door and skipped down the stairs. "I have no modus operandi that you don't know about."

He followed her down the steps and along the gravel drive to the path leading to the stables. "I meant the way you had me come to the deduction you wanted."

"Are you suggesting that I would stoop to some sort of Aristotelian third degree to bring you around to the conclusion you'd already logically deduced, Detective, in the subterranean depths of that big head of yours?"

"Aristotelian…is that a shot?" He grabbed her and began tickling. She ran ahead of him with Lucas giving chase. Their laughter joined with the robins and the sparrows nipping at one another, flitting in and out of the trees. Their laughter echoed in the quiet and rumbled down to the workmen at the stables, who looked in their direction, and the laughter traveled across the lake.

Now, arms entwined, they sauntered the rest of the way down the path toward the stables, hibiscus bushes and a thicket of trees lining their way. "Kind of like Oz for grown-ups here," Lucas confided. "I really like this place, Mere."

"Good…I'm glad you do. Strange thing is, Lucas, it's always been special for me and my parents, but now, having you here to share it…well… it's positively dreamlike."

"I know what you mean…the sharing of it, like we shared the desert that night-that's what makes it doubly special."

A tractor down at the stables roared into animation. Behind them, just out of earshot, Lucas's police-band radio crackled into life as well, and Stan Kelton's voice came over, asking, "Lucas? Lieutenant Stonecoat? If you can hear me, please respond."

After a pause, Kelton cursed and broke off.

In the house, on Lucas's cell phone, Jana North was leaving a message at the same time. "Lucas…I tried Dr. Sanger's cell and now I'm trying you. There's been an unusual shooting at a cafe in the Spring Brook area, not far from the Waller County line and the farm we raided. Four dead, two civilians, two state troopers. Looks like a hell of a firefight, but the troopers only got off one round. And, Lucas, a silver-gray BMW was seen leaving the scene."

A groundskeeper who came in and did the landscaping once a month arrived, pulling in alongside Lucas's unmarked squad car. He regarded the car as something unusual, and seeing the house had been opened, he guessed one or more of the family had come up from Houston for the weekend. Surveying the stables, he saw Dr. Sanger and a guest waiting for a pair of fine-looking, eager horses to be saddled up. Howard Kemper wondered at the injustice in the world, that some people had all this freaking free time and lavishness in their lives, while he had played the Texas and Louisiana lotteries religiously for the past ten years, to win the occasional fifty or a hundred bucks.

He shook his head, climbed up on the back of his truck, sat on the lawn mower, and turned the ignition key. He drove it down the ramp and out onto the thick grass, where he began the chore he would normally have completed by now if circumstances in his life hadn't gotten so hectic this morning. Riding high on the mower, Kemper thought he saw something shiny and reflective off in the trees down by the lake. When he looked again, it was gone, whatever it was. Likely just the way the sun had spanked the surface of the lake right now, he guessed. Damn beautiful lake, and unless you were native to the area, you'd never guess it a man-made lake.

After a moment of feeling odd, as if someone were watching him, Howard began cutting grass in earnest, and whenever he did so, his complete attention went to the job. He and his machine became one; for Howard, it was a kind of Zen thing, cutting grass.

In what other profession could a potbellied, middle- aged man with no education or desire for one, with a pickup and the right tools, make a living riding around on his rump, enjoying the sun, the fresh air, the view, the squirrels, and the birds in the trees? The Zen of Lawn Maintenance. He thought it'd make a great book title and a bundle of money, a book like that, but he wondered how he could get it written. Mr. Brody, across the lake, was rumored to have made his money writing paperback Westerns and suspense novels centering around a turn-of-the- century Sherlock Holmes type. He reportedly wrote two books a year-living off advances and royalties. Perhaps Brody'd be interested in co writing the lawn maintenance book if Howard proposed dictating it to him, but then Brody seemed pretty disinterested in his own damn lawn, leaving all decisions regarding that green nuisance, as he called it, to Howard's judgment. Brody claimed to hate grass and anything smacking of lawn work. How does any man ever cultivate such an attitude toward his own lawn? Kemper wondered.