The Lightning Rule (17 page)

A fleet of open-top, military jeeps was parading down Irvine Turner Boulevard, four National Guardsmen in combat helmets per vehicle. People on the sidewalks stopped to witness the procession. Emmett did too. The hot breeze kicked up by the passing jeeps gusted against his skin and ruffled his jacket. It seemed like an invasion rather than a rescue.

Doubt was hammering in his mind as he walked back to his car from Franklin’s. The missing fingers were the strongest pieces of evidence he had. They shimmed his theory about the murders into plumb. Everything else—the wounds, the timing, the locations of the bodies—was off kilter. He couldn’t reconcile logic with fact. That made the murders all the more confounding.

Parked conspicuously on the corner across the street from Emmett’s car was the blue Oldsmobile. Either his pursuer was intentionally being obvious in order to intimidate him or the thug was new to the racket. Chances were he was inexperienced. Emmett would play on that if he could. Somehow, he had to con the Delta’s driver into believing that Freddie wasn’t at his house anymore, even though that was exactly where he was.

Emmett needed time to think. He took a circuitous route through the Central Ward, willingly letting the trail continue. In the rearview
mirror, he caught a glimpse of the guy behind the wheel. He wore a Borsalino hat with the brim tipped, which cast his features in shadow except for a round jaw and double chin. He was a ringer for Edward’s description of Lucaro’s right-hand man from the previous night. Emmett was tempted to stop the car and have a fair fight out in the open, but that wouldn’t be in his best interest or Freddie’s. He led the Olds to his house and pretended not to notice when the car sailed past his driveway.

“The king returns,” Edward crowed as Emmett came through the front door. Mrs. Poole was sitting vigil with him in the living room.

“I’m not the only one.” Emmett spied between the shades and saw the coupe circling for a parking spot. “Say, which of those guys socked you?”

“The short one. Little bastard.”

“And he’s the one who pushed me,” Mrs. Poole added.

“Well, that’s who’s keeping us company.”

“Couldn’t lose ’im?”

“Didn’t want to.”

Thrown, Edward furrowed his brow. Before he could ask why, Freddie came in from the kitchen gulping a glass of milk.

“Didn’t wanna what?”

“Didn’t want to wake you,” Emmett told him, covering. “I thought you were asleep.”

“I woulda been ’cept somebody’s so deaf they got to have the TV volume on full blast.”

“His majesty has delicate ears,” Edward griped.

“How was it out there, Mr. Emmett? Those troopers you were talking about, they taking care ’a things?”

“So far they’ve set up roadblocks and they’re garrisoning the Guard at the armory.”

“They’re not bringing in tanks are they, Marty?”

“Tanks? Man, that’d be cool,” Freddie said. All of them stared. “What? Tanks are cool.”

“I’m ’bout to show you cool,” Mrs. Poole cautioned.

“Anything worth reading in there?” Emmett asked. Edward had the newspaper on his lap.

“Every article’s the same. Says some cabdriver started everything.”

Emmett recalled Patrolman Nolan’s understated description of the pummeled taxi driver, Ben White, that he “didn’t look so good.” Now the papers were blaming him for the entire riot. The real blame belonged to almost everyone except White.

“Was there any mention of what happened to him after his arrest?”

“Released on bail. Got his license revoked. Claimed the cops were lying about him driving on a one-way street or something.”

Mrs. Poole sighed. “Hard to know what’s what.”

“No it ain’t,” Freddie countered.

Both of them were right, Emmett thought.

“Then I’d settle for knowin’ what’s coming next,” she said.

Edward tamped his pack of Carltons. “What is coming next, Marty?”

“We’re going to be doing some moving.”

“Where you movin’?”

“It’s not where I’m moving, it’s what. Are those old cardboard boxes Pop got from Westinghouse still in the garage?”

“Should be. For as many as he had, you’d ’a thunk he was planning on packin’ up the whole house one piece at a time.”

The lone perk of their father’s job on the production line was dibs on the leftover boxes the appliances were shipped in, appliances too expensive for most employees to purchase brand-new. Their father took the boxes because he couldn’t pass up something free, regardless of how unimportant or purposeless it was. For every box he brought home, Emmett imagined his father must have felt he had gotten over on the company that had been getting over on him for eight hours a day, five days a week for the lion’s share of his life.

Sunlight was radiating around the rims of the window shades that blocked the view of the street. Emmett peeked under one of the blinds. The Oldsmobile had scored a spot on the opposite side of the road, a few doors down.

“From where he’s parked, the guy won’t be able to see me go into the garage.”

Freddie folded his arms. “What guy?”

“I’ll get to that in a minute. First, I’ve got to get the boxes.”

“What the hell’s going on?”

“Watch that mouth,” Mrs. Poole said sternly.

“Fine, what the
heck
is going on?”

Edward had figured it out. He grinned at Freddie “Looks like you’re going for a ride.”

When Emmett raised the garage door, the hinges yowled so loudly that the noise seemed to take up physical space. The whole neighborhood could hear it. Emmett didn’t care what the Delta’s driver heard. It was what he saw that counted. From a pile of dozens, Emmett grabbed four flattened medium boxes. His father’s frugality finally had value.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Marty. Those hinges could’ve woken the dead. You oughta oil them too when you do the screen door.”

“That’s not exactly at the top of my to-do list at the moment.”

Mrs. Poole helped Emmett put together the boxes. “What are we going to fill them with?”

“Nothing.” He folded the flaps, and the boxes closed into perfect squares. “They just have to appear to be full.”

Freddie was pacing. “You gonna tell me who the guy is or not?”

“I’ll tell you in the car.”

“Then let’s go.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“He could sneak out the back door,” Edward suggested, “and crawl on his hands and knees to—”

“Hold it. You can stop right there ’cause I ain’t crawlin’ no place.”

“Freddie, if you don’t do this, you’re going to wind up with one of those.” Emmett pointed to his brother’s black eye. “Or worse.”

“Man, you think you can hit me?”

“It wouldn’t be me doing the hitting.”

“I could,” Edward volunteered.

Emmett rubbed his temple. “You’re not helping.”

“It’s that cop, Vass, ain’t it?”

“I wish it was,” Emmett told him.

“Is it Luther?”

“It’s not Luther.”

“It’s somebody badder than Luther?”

“Badder than Luther,” Emmett said.

Freddie’s expression turned dour. “Can I get somethin’ to eat before we go?” he asked, a last request.

“Sure.”

After Mrs. Poole fixed Freddie a sandwich, she pulled Emmett aside. “We’re running low on food. Thought I should tell you. I could go to the market, but….”

“No, don’t. Write me a list. I’ll bring home groceries.”

“Should we get enough for three people or for four?” She was worried about Freddie. Emmett was too.

“If I can’t lose that guy outside, we might have to get enough for five.”

While Freddie ate the sandwich that heralded the end of their food, Emmett described his game plan.

“Oh, jeez. All right,” Freddie reluctantly agreed. “Let’s get this over with.”

Emmett kept watch from the back porch as Freddie slithered along the side of the house to the middle of the driveway, where he crouched to wait for the signal, then Emmett began carting the boxes out the front door, struggling down the steps as though they were heavy. He put three of them in the trunk, filling it to capacity.

Emmett had the last box in his arms when Edward said, “Gonna shake him this time?”

“Even better. He’s going to think he’s found Freddie. That way he won’t come back here.”

“Some feat. That’d make you a magician.”

“No,” Emmett said, recollecting the comment Freddie had made about Houdini outside the bail bonds office. “Just the talented assistant.”

He lugged the final box outside and pretended it wouldn’t fit in the trunk. The passenger seat was the only space left. He opened the door, the sign for Freddie to slink over, screened by the car, and acted as if he was orienting the box on the seat as Freddie climbed into the foot well.

“See. Being short can be an asset sometimes.”

“Yeah, yeah. Stop talkin’ and start drivin’.”

Emmett reversed out of the driveway and the Olds pursued, the outline of the driver’s Borsalino visible above the wheel.

“He took the bait.”

“Congratulations. I feel like a pretzel.” Freddie was worming around to reposition himself.

“You’d feel worse if you were with the guy who’s following us.”

“What’s that stuff?” He pointed at the passenger-side headrest. A prominent smudge of dried blood striped the leather.

“It’s not motor oil.”

“Is it blood? Whose blood is it?”

“It’s Cyril’s.”

“You beat him up?”

“I didn’t. He did.” Emmett thumbed backward.

As the Delta coupe fell in behind them, Emmett recounted the sad tale of Vernon Young’s death, including the dilemmas that resulted in its wake and the mix-up that now involved Freddie. When he was through, Emmett told him what had happened to Cyril and to his mother and tried to reassure him.

“I took them to the hospital. You don’t have to worry.”

“I’m not. Not about Cyril.”

“Your mom’s going to be okay, Freddie.”

He nodded blankly, taking it all in. “So this guy in the car, he thinks I’m that Otis cat, and what? He wants to rough me up?” Huddled beneath the dashboard, he looked young and vulnerable, like a stowaway on a sinking ship.

The truth wasn’t kind, but Freddie was entitled to it. “No,” Emmett said soberly. “He wants to kill you.”

The beauty of a cage was its simplicity. Light and air could come in and out freely. Whatever or whoever was inside could not.

Through a hole in the ceiling above the pen, Meers was peering down at Calvin Timmons, who remained unconscious, sleeping fitfully in the cage. Meers entered the pen only when delivering the food. Otherwise, he spent his free hours clandestinely watching his captives, face pressed to the hole in the floor of the old storeroom, his private version of a peep show.

The cage was one of Meers’s finest accomplishments. Perfect in concept and execution, it gave him almost as much satisfaction as the hunts. Designed to specific dimensions with certain features that would have appeared questionable had he hired somebody to fabricate it for him, Meers had set about building the cage himself. The abandoned zinc refinery gave him space to work. He had purchased an acetylene torch and tanks, a welder’s mask, and all the raw materials necessary for assembly, then studied up on the welding process by reading instructional manuals. Meers burned his fingers badly and often practicing the skill. Eventually, the burns healed and his masterpiece came to life, iron bar by iron bar.

He also cobbled together a pulley system, enabling him to open the cage’s trapdoor from the floor above with a winch. That prevented his prey from seeing him while granting them a head start. If Meers didn’t give them a five-minute lead, the game finished too quickly. Such was the complication with Ambrose Webster. He had been as bad as the women.

Twice Meers had tried using females, two separate times with the same disastrous results. Both were prostitutes, easy to entice into his car, however they disintegrated into hysterics as soon as they regained consciousness and realized where they were. They had begged and pleaded and promised him their bodies. But Meers didn’t want their bodies. He wanted them to run. Moronic as mules, they stood at the entrance hatch, petrified and trembling, frustrating him. Each ran screaming through the tunnels without getting far before falling. The deafening echo irritated Meers so much that he dispatched each of them shortly after the games had begun. He dumped their bodies in the desolate reaches of Newark Bay under cover of night, food for the fish.

Ambrose Webster was almost as pathetic. Meers had been forced to fire at him with his pistol the way one would startle a horse into racing. The shot sent Webster lumbering off, though he repeatedly dropped the flashlight Meers had generously furnished him. Meers always left a flashlight in the cage along with copious amounts of food to maintain his pets’ energy and endurance. Like his standard five-minute head start, the flashlight was a practical measure. Without any sort of defense against the absolute darkness of the sewer tunnels, his prey would be incapacitated, and there would be no sport in the hunt. To keep things relatively fair, Meers purchased cheap plastic flashlights, too flimsy to be implemented as weapons. Strength and speed were his prey’s God-given weapons, gifts nature had not bestowed upon him. Meers was simply leveling the playing field.

Greed had gotten the better of him during that particular game. Ambrose Webster was a colossus, an unfit match for Meers, the ultimate challenge. However, his size turned out to be the ultimate disadvantage.

The sewer system was nearly a hundred years old, and while the newer lines could be considered cavernous at twenty-five feet high and half as wide, the original egg-shaped, brick-lined sewers by the zinc refinery measured under six feet tall and two across. Huge as he was, Webster was unable to maneuver through the older tunnels. Because they tapered at the bottom, he couldn’t maintain his footing. He would hit his head and stumble and cry. What a pity, Meers had thought when he caught up to him. The giant was blundering through the dark on his knees, pawing for the fallen flashlight. He was too frightened to run, even when he saw Meers coming.

As a boy, Meers had watched his father put down a horse with a fractured ankle from a neighbor’s farm. His father nuzzled a revolver to the bony nub beneath the mare’s ear and pulled the trigger. The horse didn’t drop instantaneously. It wavered, then its knees folded and the mass of its body pitched to the ground. When Meers slit Ambrose Webster’s throat, he was reminded of the horse.

Meers would only hunt with a knife. His gun was purely an instrument of motivation and a safety precaution. The Linder Crown Stag bowie he carried had been the star of his father’s collection. With its seven-inch blade, authentic antler handle, and solid brass guard and pommel, it was a handsome knife, efficient. For the scale of what Meers was hunting, the long blade was necessary to ensure a fatal blow versus a shallow cut. He always brought his father’s old Case XX folding pocketknife along too. The deep red bone handle and nickel silver inlaid shield made it a collector’s item. Meers cherished it more than the bowie. The pocketknife was tiny and artful and perfect, and it held fond memories. His father had let him use it to skin his first woodchuck.

Neighbors had often hired his father to clear the varmints from their farms. With their sons off fighting the Great War, there was nobody to cull the woodchucks into check, and they would annihilate the crops, eating and burrowing to the point that the tractors collapsed through the thinned earth. The horse that Lazlo’s father shot had broken its ankle by stepping into the entrance to a den. Never one to turn
down the opportunity to be paid to do what he loved, his father would go out to the farms weekly, balance a rifle on a fence post, and snipe the woodchucks from seventy yards when they stood on their hind legs to sniff the wind. The farmers let him keep the carcasses as part of his pay. When he got them home, he would pare the fur with the barbed, gut hook tip of a cocobolo knife and soak the meat in salt water for days. Afterward, it was still as tough as shoe leather and about as appetizing. Once his father began allowing Lazlo to skin his own woodchucks, the taste grew on him.

Because his mother was dead, Lazlo’s father was his sole guardian. That precluded him from enlisting or being drafted into the service to fight in World War II, a depravation Eli Meers resented bitterly. Occasionally, Lazlo would look up from his schoolbooks in their old, two-room country home and his father would be staring at him as if he were a stain on the floor, a nuisance he had been stepping over all day and didn’t want to deal with.

Barred from enlisting, Eli Meers took up a different cause. Wartime propaganda had labeled crows as “black bandits.” The birds were robbing the nation’s farms of vital grain needed for food production for the troops. A hunter’s patriotic duty was to destroy as many as possible, thus they were allotted priority in purchasing the limited supply of available .22 cartridges and shotgun shells. Eli Meers’s contribution to the war effort was killing three hundred crows single-handedly. Lazlo himself had shot at least a hundred. The numbers were a source of glory for his father, who normally wouldn’t have wasted the ammunition on something he couldn’t cook. Crows were not for eating. They fed on carrion, fouling their own flesh, so Lazlo and his father would leave the coal black carcasses in heaps under trees, a lure for other crows to consume.

They hunted in the early morning hours, dressed in dark clothes, hats, and gloves with bandanas covering their faces, disguised as thoroughly as thieves. The sight of human skin in the murky dawn was the equivalent of light striking a mirror and could spook the birds from as much as a half mile away. Knowing that crows were wary creatures,
they would find a ridge or mound of earth to act as a blind, then his father would mimic the crows’ two distinct caws. One was the fighting call of an angry crow coming upon an enemy, to which every bird in the area would hurry to its rescue. The second was a summons to birds that had strayed from the flock. Both would dust the crows from the trees or fields up into the sky where Lazlo and his father could blast them with their shotguns. The twelve-gauges put out a larger shot pattern, especially with a set of choke tubes, ensuring multiple kills. Lazlo loved to watch the crows drop from midair, pirouetting like falling bombs, then count how many they had killed. Paper decoys attached to trees or barbed wire fences with clothespins also brought them some success, but it was the birdcalls that were more reliable. To hear his father do them terrified and transfixed Lazlo. The sounds that emanated from his mouth were inhuman, haunting. Lazlo would often dream that an actual crow was poking its head from his father’s mouth, flapping to escape his lips. It was the only dream he ever had of him.

Meers wondered what Calvin Timmons was dreaming about. He hoped the shock from the battery hadn’t hurt him too severely. He had tested the voltage repeatedly on his first pet, a black vagrant Meers had lured with a ten-dollar bill and kept in the cage for weeks, running tests. Despite being a drunk and living on the streets, the vagrant had a hefty build, making him a suitable subject. Dry runs with a regular car battery proved to be too mild, the sedation too brief. The truck battery had just enough kick to knock out Meers’s pet without impairing him, a crucial feature. He couldn’t allow his prey to be damaged or depleted or else he would have to nurse them extensively, and that would create a delay. The conflict was that the longer they stayed in the cage, the sooner they cracked. He had to pace things perfectly or they would get overripe. Frazzled nerves would render them careless.

That was the fate that befell his first pet, the vagrant, who Meers had named John, for no other reason than it was common. Even sober, John was an unimpressive opponent, though he had his utilities. Meers performed various trials on him. He determined how much food was needed to sustain the man, how much to fortify him. He clocked how
many minutes John could run in the tunnels before tiring and what, if any, injuries he sustained, such as cuts and twisted ankles. John would constantly try and talk to Meers, ask him his name, where he was from, why he was doing this, why him. When that didn’t work, John resorted to insults. He would call him a faggot or a sissy, desperate for any sort of response. Meers never answered. Not until the day he hunted John for real.

“Thank you,” he said as he raised the trapdoor to the cage that opened into the sewer tunnel and let the man free one final time. “You’ve been very helpful.”

John must have sensed that the rehearsals were over. That day, he ran fast. He ran for his life.

Meers had spent months memorizing the tunnel system. He knew the layout by heart, where the tunnels widened and which got the heaviest runoff flows. He didn’t expect to keep up with his prey. His passion was tracking them and predicting their moves. If he lost the trail, he could return to a main tunnel to regain ground. Despite his maladies, Meers could travel swiftly through the constricted quarters. He wore a miner’s hat with a carbine lamp to free up his hands. The added benefit was that the light burned so brightly it blinded whoever looked directly at him. He didn’t see that as unsportsmanlike because he didn’t need the light. He could have hunted without it. If anything, he was helping his prey. They would know when he had caught up to them.

When Meers finally caught up to him that night in the tunnels, John submitted to him willingly, panting, glad for it to end.

“Do it,” he shouted. “Do it already.”

So Meers did. He walked right up to John and stuck the bowie knife through his stomach, aiming for a kidney, a wound that would cause him to expire rapidly. Meers felt the blade’s tip hit a vertebra, and John slid down the brick tunnel wall. He died within minutes, his blood draining into the sewer water. Meers stared at the body and waited to feel what he had the day he turned seven and his father took him squirrel hunting. He didn’t. He felt much more. He felt healthy, whole, in
creasingly alive with every breath that coursed through his wizened lungs.

Meers cut off John’s head below the Adam’s apple and took it back to the zinc works. He dried the head in a cool, dark corner of the refinery the way his father dried opossum to prepare the meat. He wanted to preserve John as a game-head mount, like a buck or an elk. On the average mount, the only actual parts of the animal were the antlers and the skin. All of the organs and tissues were re-created with man-made materials. The eyelids were sculpted from clay, the soft tissues of the nose and mouth formed from wax, and the armature of the skull and neck were crafted from hard foam. Meers couldn’t remove John’s skull without damaging the skin, so he improvised.

He doused the dried head in formaldehyde—submerging it in a container would ruin the effect—and mounted it on an iron stand that he welded himself. For the first few weeks, the face held its shape. The hair was lifelike, however the pallor grew gray. Soon the features began to slip. The ears shrank and crinkled as would dried leaves. The lips receded, teeth bared in a pained grin. Because the lower eyelids sagged and pulled away from the eyeballs, which had gone milky in the formaldehyde, John appeared to be staring with pupil-less eyes. The head was ghoulish, monstrous. Nevertheless, Meers could not bear to part with his memento.

His oversight was that he had left John’s body in the tunnel. Due to the heat and the dampness, it promptly rotted, ratcheting up the stink in the sewers. By the time Meers thought to dispose of it elsewhere, it was too putrid to move. That was when he devised the harnesses. The notion of his hunting grounds being littered with human remains was repugnant to him, so he began dumping the bodies in areas close to where he had captured his pets to make the murders appear local. He also started keeping fingers as souvenirs instead of heads. Using his father’s cherished pocketknife, he sawed them from the hands of his prey. That was the true glory of the hunt: collecting his trophies.

Taking the fingers was a safeguard too. Had the bodies been discovered decapitated, surely the police would have gone on the alert. Thus
far, Meers hadn’t seen any of his pets’ names in the newspaper, not a single one.

Calvin Timmons would likely fall into obscurity as well. Meers gave the sleeping teenager a final glance before leaving. He would allot Calvin the day to recuperate and regain his faculties. Tomorrow they would play.