Cold Heart

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HOUSTON, JULY 23 Death waited three blocks away. Micky Ascherfeld watched the streets through the cool barrier of the cruiser's passenger-side window. Her partner, Wade Smith, hummed a country tune, nodding his head like one of those perpetual-motion birds in the Taqueria shop windows. They stopped at a red light and Micky glanced at two teenage boys, hectoring each other on the corner. But the kids were mouthing, not doing. Micky knew potential violence when she saw it. Heat waves transformed distant buildings and pedestrians into mirages. As the cruiser pulled away from the intersection, Micky imagined the tires lifting melted asphalt. It was only one o'clock. By three, the temperature was expected to go over 110. She held her hands in front of the air-conditioner vents. They coasted along, letting traffic pass them by. The order of the day on their beat was to be on the lookout for a pair of salt-and-pepper suspects who had been pulling hit-and-runs on local electronic shops. The pair, a teenage white male and a black female in her twenties, would burst into the store armed with pistols, grab all the money in the cash register and whatever appliance was handiest, then flee on foot. But Micky didn't think the pair would be doing any running on a day like today. She spotted a florist shop and her heart pounded. Suddenly it was cold in the cruiser and she tucked both hands under her thighs. As the shop passed, she tried to erase the memory from her mind, reciting the mantra in her head. No problem. No problem. Until the florist shop was left well behind. Until the hateful image it had conjured faded. Wade stopped at another stoplight. "You okay?" said Wade. "Fine." "Having the trouble again?" She shook her head. Her parents' murders were public record. But as far as the Houston Police Department was concerned, Micky had overcome any psychological damage the trauma had caused. By the time she got to the academy, the murders were four years old. She had buried the hurt and the fear so deeply that even the departmental shrink couldn't find enough of it to disqualify her for hire. But you didn't hide things like that from your partner. Not when you had been working the streets together for four years. You certainly couldn't hide them from your lover and they had been lovers for three, although the department didn't know about that either. "Just a glimpse," she said. "The florist?" "Yeah." "Why don't you talk to the doc?" "I'm all right," she replied. But she avoided florists, funerals, graveyards, and weddings. And as long as she didn't go into dark, tight places, she was okay. No problem. "You're not all right." Wade watched an overloaded plumbing truck weave through the intersection. "You're thirty-one years old and you're a nervous wreck. You can't fix this all by yourself." "I know that," she said, trying a smile. "But I've worked my way through it this long. I can handle it." An image of her father, lying in a pool of blood on a white-tile floor, flooded her mind. She could smell the flowers scattered around his body. She was crawling through their shop again. The sound of rubber soles padded somewhere behind her. "You ought to let other people help you once in a while." Wade sounded petulant and that struck her as funny, the childish tone in a man his size. She let out a hollow laugh and knew instantly that she had hurt him. She touched his arm but he drew back. "I'm sorry, Wade. I wasn't laughing at you." "What then?" What do I have to laugh about? I'm a nutcase masquerading as a cop. "How did you ever make it through the armed search course at the Aca