The Lightning Rule (12 page)

When Emmett pulled into his driveway, all of the lights were on inside the house, glowing through the curtains in the open windows. He hadn’t seen the place that lit up since his mother was alive. The heat had been a convenient excuse to leave the lights off. Somehow that made it easier for him and Edward to avoid interacting with each other. It took a stranger, a woman, to turn the lights on again.

“When I said I wanted to go home, I meant my house. Not yours.”

Emmett prodded Freddie up the front steps. “It’s this or the handcuffs.”

“Is that a slide?” Freddie was gawking at the wheelchair ramp.

“Yeah, this is Coney Island. The first ride’s free.”

Mrs. Poole came into the living room at the sound of the front door opening. A dish towel was tucked into the elastic waist of her skirt as a makeshift apron. The aroma of cooking food met Emmett and Freddie like a welcome breeze.

“I know that ain’t your mama,” Freddie mumbled.

Emmett fastened a hand on the kid’s collarbone, forcing him forward into an introduction. “Mrs. Poole, this is Freddie Guthrie. He’s going to be spending a few hours here.”

“I am not—”

A hard squeeze and Freddie clammed up. “If you can spare an extra hour, I’ll tack a whole day’s pay onto your next check.”

“Of course I can stay, Mr. Emmett.”

The money didn’t seem to matter to her. He had a feeling she would have stayed simply at his request. “I appreciate that.”

“You mind him, young man, hear?” Mrs. Poole sidled toward Freddie, who cowered, more frightened of her than of Luther Reed. “Don’t make me say it twice.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Freddie answered, his manners materializing out of nowhere.

“I fixed some supper. Best I could do with what was here. Thought you might be tired ’a those frozen dinners. You can help me set the table,” she told Freddie, guiding him into the kitchen. “Silverware’s in the top drawer. Forks go on the left.”

Freddie didn’t attempt his usual back talk and went willingly to work.

“My hat’s off to you. He’s been giving me lip from the get-go.”

“Having ten brothers and sisters will teach you a thing or two.”

“And I thought having one brother was an education. Speaking of which, where is Edward?”

“Out on the back porch. He’s been there awhile.”

“How was he?”

“Not too chatty. He’s the kind ’a horse you can’t even lead to water. Forget about making him drink. Just got to let him be.”

The evening sky hung low, as if it skimmed the awning over the porch. A cigarette was smoldering between Edward’s fingers. He was watching the neighbors pass lit windows in the houses across the yard. The screen door squawked when Emmett opened it and when it banged closed.

“You could put some oil on that door hinge, you know.”

“Then you wouldn’t hear me coming.”

“I’ll always hear you comin’, Marty.” He took a drag of his cigarette. “You’re late.”

“Something came up.”

Edward didn’t inquire as to what because then it would have seemed like he cared.

Mosquitoes were out in droves, buzzing by Emmett’s ear and bobbing around the porch lamp. “Aren’t you getting eaten alive out here?”

“Nope. Bugs aren’t interested in me. Was a godsend when I was in over in Nam. The other guys in my battalion would be covered in bites. But I didn’t get a single one. My blood must taste bad.”

He rarely talked about the war and stopped himself abruptly, as though he had let something slip.

“So? How did it go today?”

“It was fine, Marty,” Edward answered, his tone remote. “She was fine.”

“You want me to get someone else?”

“I said she was fine.”

Acknowledging that he needed help had been tough for Emmett. It would be tougher for Edward.

“She’s a good cook,” he conceded. “She made sandwiches and she cut the bread the way Ma used to. They were good. For sandwiches.”

A light popped on in a nearby apartment window and the silhouette of a woman appeared. She was in a rush, combing her hair and primping in a mirror they couldn’t see. Then she shut off the lights to go. Edward crushed his cigarette into an ashtray on the porch railing. “Show’s over.”

Emmett opened the door for him to wheel inside. Freddie looked up from setting the table. He and Edward regarded each other for a moment.

“Is he the something that came up?”

“This is Freddie Guthrie. He’ll be, uh, joining us for the evening. Freddie, this is my brother, Edward.”

“You’re grown. You can shake the man’s hand,” Mrs. Poole instructed.

Hesitant, Freddie walked over and stuck out his hand. Edward shook it hard, taking measure of him. “Department must really be hurtin’ for new recruits. Ain’t he young for a rookie, Marty?”

“You could say he has…an interest in the law.”

“I bet.”

Mrs. Poole broke the tension. “I hope you boys are hungry. Weather
like this, the food can’t get cold. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t eat it when it’s ready. Y’all come on to the table.”

She had laid out place mats and their mother’s linen tablecloth, which Emmett never did. Between the smell of the food and the perfectly set table, Emmett forgot about the heat and everything else that had been weighing on his mind. He and Edward hadn’t had a home-cooked meal since the women from Saint Casimir’s stopped bringing over casseroles following his mother’s death. Emmett didn’t realize how much he missed real food and eating at the table instead of in front of the television.

Mrs. Poole served a plate to each of them, then proceeded to say grace. Freddie bowed his head, afraid of crossing the woman, and murmured along with her. Edward lowered his head as well. Emmett spoke the prayer in time, sneaking a glance at his brother, who he hadn’t said grace in years. Emmett had missed that too.

“Amen,” Mrs. Poole intoned. They all repeated after her. Emmett and Freddie dug into the food, too famished to talk. They finished their meals in minutes.

“Either it was awful tasty or you two were awful hungry,” she marveled

Emmett dabbed his mouth with a napkin. “Dinner was excellent. Wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. Yeah, it was,” Edward said, moving his food around with his fork. He was eyeing Freddie while Freddie was eyeing the leftovers.

“Mrs. Poole, will you fix him another plate?” Emmett said. “I have to go out for a bit. When I get back, I’ll drive you two home.”

“For real this time?” Freddie was skeptical.

“Eat your food,” Mrs. Poole told him, refilling his plate.

When Emmett got up from the table, Edward trailed him into the living room. “I know trouble when I see it, Marty. That boy’s trouble. And you’re gonna leave me and an old lady to babysit him?”

Edward had a unique ability for reading people. He could hear a lie before it sprang from a person’s lips and pick out a phony from across a room. Emmett had always thought his brother would have made the better cop.

“He’s harmless. But the guy he owes money to isn’t. It’s just for a couple hours. He’ll be safe here.”

“Will we?”

Emmett lifted his right pant leg, exposing the .22 caliber gun strapped to his calf. “You want it? For babysitting?”

Offended, Edward rolled toward the kitchen. “Don’t take too long. You’ll keep the kid up past his bedtime.”

The line of picketers outside the Fourth Precinct had grown from the ten reported earlier on the police band to a crowd of three hundred that clogged the street. There wasn’t a single patrolman on the scene. From where Emmett was parked at the far end of Livingston Avenue, he could see Mose Odett wielding a bullhorn and wearing one of his trademark suits in a pale blue hue the color of pool water.

Odett’s evangelizing bubbled through the horn. “We are not here to talk about the cab driver, Ben White. We are here to talk about what we see happening in this neighborhood every day. We are here to talk about Newark. Newark is a black city. The white folks leave at five o’clock. And what do they leave us with? Falling-down buildings and rats and garbage. In exchange, they give us liquor and heroin and hair straighteners, then they want to know why we’re mad. We’re mad because all we want is a fair trade. Nothing’s fair in Newark anymore.”

What Odett was saying wasn’t wrong. But Emmett felt the timing wasn’t right. Yesterday, Inspector Plout had given him a bullhorn to try and pacify the crowd. Now he had his own and he was inciting it. The congregation was cheering him on.

“We’ve prayed and we’ve preached and we’ve protested and it ain’t done no difference. What are we supposed to do? Tell me, what are we supposed to do?”

Emmett had a feeling he knew what the crowd’s answer would be.

He had left the lights in the Records Room off on purpose. They were still off when he got there. They would have to stay that way. Like the window that he and Edward had seen the woman in, turning on the basement lights might draw attention.

With only the flashlight borrowed from the patrolman to see by, Emmett sieved through the cases that predated Julius Dekes’s murder.
The reports transformed people into paper, their wounds splotched in pen across a two-dimensional body, then crammed inside a manila folder, where they would exist in suspended animation until somebody opened that folder and reintroduced them to life. Emmett went straight to the autopsies, looking for fingers that the coroner had scratched out. His clock was ticking softly from the desk drawer. As a novice, Emmett had been denied a wristwatch or a calendar. Time was a material object outside his possession, dispensed by chapel bells that parsed the day into doses of work, play, prayer, and sleep. The term of Emmett’s novitiate was twenty-four months, exactly 730 days, the preordained number set by the Society of Jesus. On the date of July 31, the Feast of Saint Ingatius of Loyola, he was to have taken his vows. It was July, ten years later, and he had to face yet another monumental decision: whether to tell the lieutenant about his suspicions, then potentially lose the cases and, perhaps, his career, or try and solve the murders himself. What Emmett found next made his choice all the more crucial.

An autopsy report dated in April showed an eighteen-year-old with an X across his heart and ink-slashed pinkie finger. His name was Evander Hammond. Reading the file, Emmett got a sensation in his stomach that teetered between nausea and exhilaration. Hammond, an athlete who lived on Bruce Street in the Central Ward, had been missing for four days. His body was discovered by a construction crew in an alley. The murder weapon was a knife, identical to the other boys. Knives were the most commonly used weapon in the ward, but the sites of the victim’s wounds were all different, a cunning pattern that wouldn’t pique the coroner’s curiosity. In a morgue as busy as Newark’s, the missing fingers would be written off as oddities or accidents. But to Emmett, these were no random irregularities. They were the strongest link he had.

The line drawing of Hammond’s hand was encircled in the flashlight’s beam. He was missing a pinkie, Dekes a ring finger, Webster his pointer. No case matched the middle finger. The irony wasn’t lost on Emmett. He had gone through every murder on file for that year and was about to start over when a volley of breaking glass rattled the precinct. Shouting echoed through the air ducts. Feet were pounding above
his head, a kind of morse code that prompted him where the file would be: it was on somebody’s desk in Homicide.

A monstrous logic was clicking into place. This murderer was targeting strong black teens, stabbing them and snipping off their fingers, then leaving their bodies in various corners of the Central Ward like so much trash. Horrifying as the riot was, this killer put an unfamiliar fear in Emmett. He knew what this person was capable of, and he still had no way to identify him.

The bombardment wasn’t letting up. All of the debris left on the street from the night before provided a bounty of munitions. From the basement, it sounded like a hard rain. Emmett wished that was what it was. With the station under attack again, patrolmen would be the precinct’s infantry, sent out as the first line of defense until officers from other wards could arrive. Any detectives on shift would remain in their squad rooms awaiting orders. Emmett couldn’t chance going up to the third floor, not in the middle of the blitz. He would have to come back.

If there was a Fourth Precinct to come back to.

The summer heat had a way of making the nights seem especially dark. But no night was ever dark enough for Lazlo Meers. Somewhere a streetlamp or a parked car or a neon sign was always leaking ruinous light. Meers preferred complete darkness.

The light didn’t hurt his eyes, however he didn’t need it. He had extremely acute vision, which he considered a gift in exchange for his infirmity. At the age of twelve, Meers had contracted polio. He had awoken one morning suffering symptoms of the flu, a fever and sore throat. His father forced him to go to school regardless. A stern man, Meers’s father did not abide illness. Only the weak got sick. He had never missed a day of work at the zinc mines, and his temperament was as strong as the raw ore he oversaw being excavated from the earth. Lazlo had the misfortune of inheriting his mother’s tender constitution. She had died giving birth to him, and her delicate nature was a legacy his father loathed in him. Meers stuck it out at school while his legs steadily went limp, too afraid to go home early and face his father. When he attempted to get out of bed the next day, he fell to the floor, his limbs incapable of holding him. He spent the ten months that followed in an iron lung, his chest muscles too debilitated to pump and keep him alive. The bellows motor of the massive respirator would push
air in and out of the tank, squeezing Lazlo’s small chest to expand and contract his rib cage. A distinctive
whooshing
noise replaced every breath. Decades later, Meers could still hear that
whoosh.
He heard it at work when a door would swing shut or when a truck would pass on the road or when he would roll down the windows in his car and the breeze would gush through, ever-present reminders of what he was.

It was in his car though that Meers could forget too, cruising the streets until something sparked his fancy. The humid weather brought the teenage boys out into the night to cool off. So many boys in the Central Ward, right there for the picking, but Meers had discriminating tastes. Only a certain type would do.

Once he made his choice, he had to catch the boy’s eye. He had purchased a brand-new Cadillac Eldorado for just that purpose. It was a two-door hardtop coupe in vampish red with oxblood leather interior to match. Meers had gone to great expense to outfit it with reclining bucket seats, an AM/FM stereo, white sidewall tires, and most importantly, power door locks including a remote control to the trunk. With its angular body and hidden headlights, the Eldorado was arrogant, an attention grabber. It cost him a year’s salary and then some, but it was worth every penny.

Meers stayed off the main thoroughfares where the Cadillac would get too much scrutiny as well as certain side streets where too many people were on the stoops. That particular evening, he was cruising the long blocks of Peshine and Jelliff and Badger avenues. He trolled until he saw a lone teenager crossing on Bigelow. He wasn’t as tall or strapping as Ambrose Webster, the boy from a few days ago whose name Meers had taken off a student movie pass, yet he had appeal.

Webster had been a disappointment, not the prize Meers presumed. When he first spied the teen loping along Springfield Avenue looking lost and bruised, Meers thought he was too damaged to be of use. Webster was such an impressive specimen that Meers simply couldn’t resist, even after he realized that Ambrose was impaired. What would that matter, Meers contended at the time. Instinct was instinct. That was a miscalculation. Webster couldn’t follow the rules. He didn’t understand them. Such a waste.

This new prospect had promise. Snug dungarees and a T-shirt thinned from too many launderings showed off the kid’s physique. He was lanky with whipcord muscles and a runner’s legs, built for speed. Meers liked that. He coasted alongside him and lowered the window.

“Pardon me, young man,” Meers called. “Would you mind giving me a hand?”

The kid would have kept walking if it weren’t for the Cadillac. He actually did a double take and stared longingly at the car’s curves as if it were a woman. Meers relished the glint in his eye.

“My tire’s going flat. You see it?” Earlier, Meers had let some air out of the rear tire, enough to be convincing, though not too much. He still had to be able to drive on it. “This is my boss’s car and I was only supposed to take it to get washed. If he finds out I went joyriding, he’ll fire me.”

“Can’t, man. I’m in a hurry.”

“If you could just help me get the spare tire out of the trunk,” Meers pleaded, amping his voice into a high, whiny range so he would come off as helpless.

“There’s a filling station up the road.”

“I doubt I can make it. I could pay you. Twenty bucks.”

That much money was difficult to pass on. The kid hesitated, vacillating.

“I’ll pull into the alley, okay?”

“Yeah, all right. But we gotta do this quick, man, ’cause I gotta go see a girl.”

“Don’t worry. It’ll be quick.”

Meers pulled into a deserted alley. When he climbed out of the driver’s seat, he let the kid get a full view of him. In the iron lung, Meers’s muscles had atrophied from inactivity, stunting his growth. He was small-boned and had the gaunt countenance of a sickly man. Except Meers wasn’t sick anymore.

He pressed a button to pop the trunk and hobbled to the rear of the car, accentuating a mild limp caused by the disease. His breath was labored, asthmatic, an affect to add to the impression. Meers had plenty of practice with labored breathing. The Christmas after the polio struck, he and the other children in the iron lung ward tried singing Christmas
carols. They couldn’t finish the choruses until the bellows would exhale for them, so they sang each bar of the song, then had to wait for the
whoosh
to continue singing. Standing there in the alley watching the kid silently appraise him reminded Meers of those pregnant pauses between the holiday carols.

“Gosh, I really appreciate this,” he panted. “My boss would kill me if he ever found out I borrowed his car. He treats it like it’s his baby.”

The manufactured backstory didn’t interest the kid. “Gimme the money first.”

“Oh, of course. Silly me. Where are my manners?”

Meers peeled a twenty from his wallet, opening it wide to display the wad of bills inside. Ambrose Webster was the only one who hadn’t fallen for the temptation to rob him or at the very least attempt to steal the car. The notion hadn’t even occurred to him. This kid was already two steps ahead. Meers could practically see the cogs in his head spinning. The Cadillac and all of that cash were irresistible.

A satire was being set in motion whether the kid was aware of it or not. The car he was lusting after had gotten its title from the mythical kingdom of El Dorado, renown for its unsurpassing wealth. For hundreds of years, men had searched without luck for the legendary city, and the name itself had become synonymous with the vain pursuit of riches. The pursuit to take the car and the money from Meers would also be in vain.

He held out the twenty-dollar bill, and the kid stuffed it in his pocket. “Let’s get that tire, shall we?” Meers said.

The Eldorado came with a full-size spare, and it had the largest trunk available in the Cadillac line. Meers had selected it expressly for that amenity.

“You got a jack?”

Something to hit me with, Meers was thinking. This one was smart. That pleased him.

“Hmm. Let me look.”

Meers pretended to poke through the trunk’s contents, demonstrating that he didn’t have full use of his left arm. Crippled by polio, it hung at his side, underdeveloped and idle. He forearm had limited strength,
but his fingers worked well, and he could easily extract the tiny bottle of ether in his pocket to anesthetize the boy if necessary. To do that, Meers would have to get up close, which was why he kept an electrified cattle prod on his person. He had modified the cattle prod so it was small enough to smuggle under his pant leg, secured by a sock garter. Such contingencies were essential in case things got out of hand.

“Here we go.” Meers caught the kid eyeing the heavy tire jack.

“Gimme it.”

“Shouldn’t we get the tire out first?”

It was a wrinkle in the kid’s plan. He tried to act unfazed. “Oh, yeah. The tire.”

“Careful. The tire’s heavy,” Meers cautioned.

“Relax. I got it.”

As the kid leaned in to retrieve the tire, his wrist brushed a concealed wire that ran from a truck battery in the backseat through the trunk to the wheel well. The instant the wire made contact with his skin, he closed the circuit. The shock jerked his body and his eyelids fluttered, the voltage knocking him unconscious. His knees buckled, sending his body slumping into the trunk. That did most of the work for Meers. He simply had to lift the kid’s legs over the lip of the trunk and he was done.

“I’m much more relaxed now, thank you.”

Meers dug through the kid’s pockets and pulled out a wallet. Inside were a couple of quarters and a rubber. The wallet had come with a personal identification card for the owner to fill in their name and address. On it, the kid had written, “If you stole my wallet and you find this, I’ll find you. You dead.” He had signed his name at the bottom: “Calvin Timmons.”

“Why hello, Calvin,” Meers said genteelly. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. I think we’re going to have a lot of fun together.”

Then he shut the trunk.