The Lightning Rule

by Brett Ellen Block

  Emmett slogged to shore and screamed his brother’s name over and over again. Because of the gushing water, it was impossible to get anywhere near the pipe’s spout. Finally, Edward’s body came pouring out with the deluge and splashed into the river. Emmett swam to him and dragged his body to the rocky beach. Edward’s face was a milky blue. Wet leaves clung to his arms. Emmett flipped him on his stomach and wailed on his back. It was all he could think to do. But Edward wouldn’t breathe. Emmett pleaded with him, and he pleaded with God to make his brother breathe.

  “Don’t leave me, Edziu. Please don’t leave me.” Crying, Emmett rocked him and prayed. His eyes, nose, and throat burned from the water. He thought it was from praying so hard. He promised he would be good for the rest of his life if God gave Edward back to him. That was when a man in a rowboat appeared on the river, the answer to his prayers. Emmett flagged him and he rowed over, took Edward from Emmett’s arms, and carried him to the closest street where they stopped someone in a car who drove them to the hospital. The doctor’s were able to revive Edward. Emmett had bruised his brother’s rib cage beating on him, which forced the water from his lungs. Edward had been breathing shallowly since the beach. Emmett was too distraught to notice.

  The trauma wiped the entire incident from Edward’s memory. He couldn’t recollect anything about the drainage pipe or almost drowning that day. All he recalled was swimming earlier that morning. Emmett had told his parents the truth about what happened. They chose not to tell Edward and made Emmett promise not to say anything either. Although part of him yearned to come clean, Emmett was afraid of what Edward would think, that he wouldn’t want him as a brother anymore, so Emmett honored his parents’ wishes. In spite of the pact, Emmett believed that Edward sensed there was something he wasn’t privy to, some family bond he had been excluded from, and he spent his days resenting Emmett, not for nearly killing him, but for having a secret he wouldn’t share.

  Emmett had allowed his brother to hold on to his anger, to nurture it and indulge it until it twisted into what they had now. From the day of the accident forward, Emmett listened to Edward breathe in his sleep, grateful for each inhale and exhale. It was a nightly reminder of what he had almost done to him.

  The hinges on the screen door creaked and the door bumped the frame, sending a shiver through the silent house. Edward rolled in from the porch. Emmett pretended to be asleep. He heard Edward wrestle himself into bed, struggling to position his legs and get comfortable. Emmett wanted to help. He knew not to. Edward had to learn to take care of himself. Emmett had to let him learn. Edward’s breathing soon fell into a rhythm as steady as a metronome. Then, and only then, could Emmett sleep.

  FORTY

  Morning came on like a fever, a hot flush that awakened Emmett from a deep slumber. The bright light made his eyes pound. His shirt was drenched in sweat. When he sat up, his head spun.

  “Just ’cause it’s Saturday is no excuse for you to lay in bed all day,” Edward said wryly, sipping coffee and eyeing him from across the living room.

  “What time is it?”

  “Seven. Here.” Edward wheeled over and gave him his coffee cup. It tasted watery to Emmett, weaker than tea.

  “That was all that was left of the coffee grounds,” Mrs. Poole apologized, coming slowly down the stairs. “And I used the last two eggs to make that biscuit mix you brought home. They’re ready, if you’re hungry.” She was holding on to the doorjamb for support. As she walked into the kitchen, her limp was more pronounced than usual.

  “I told her we have aspirin in the medicine cabinet,” Edward whispered. “She’s being stubborn. Won’t take it. Been driving me crazy.”

  “Who does that sound like?”

  Edward took his coffee back as punishment for the remark. “Woke up on the wrong side of the couch, huh? Just get her the pills, will ya?”

  Emmett got the aspirin from the bathroom, popped one himself, and went into the master bedroom to change into clean clothes. Mrs. Poole had made the bed, sheets tucked in to perfection. Her purse lay on the nightstand, propping up a timeworn photograph of a young black serviceman in uniform, her husband before his accident. Though he was gone, Mrs. Poole still slept beside him each night.

  “I told him to wait for you to eat, Mr. Emmett. He wouldn’t listen.” She and Edward were seated at the kitchen dinette. She had set a place for him as well as Freddie.

  “I’m not one to stand on ceremony. Even if I could.” Edward was judiciously rationing the butter he spread on the warm biscuit.

  “Go ahead. Start eating. Freddie probably won’t be up for a while anyway.” Emmett put the bottle of aspirin next to Mrs. Poole’s plate. “Take these. You’re going to need them. He might be a handful today.”

  “You mean Freddie, right?” Edward said. “Right?”

  Mrs. Poole hid a smile behind her napkin. Because Emmett was suggesting that the pills were for something besides her back, she consented to taking them. “If you insist.”

  “I do.”

  The biscuits were a consolation for the tasteless coffee. They were delicious. Emmett could have finished his in a single bite.

  Edward was stuffing himself and talking with his mouth full. “These are terrific. I mean really terrific.”

  Emmett was happy to see his brother’s appetite returning. When Mrs. Poole put the rest of the biscuits aside for Freddie, Edward was actually disappointed.

  “The kid’s a midget. He couldn’t eat that many.”

  “I have a feeling you wouldn’t leave him any if it was up to you.” She wrapped the remaining biscuits in foil.

  “Fine. Save ’em for the pip-squeak.” Edward gave up the fight and lit the last cigarette in his pack. “So, Marty, you off into the wild blue yonder again?”

  That was where Emmett felt like he was headed, more of the infinite unknown. He had hit a wall with the murder cases. Emmett wasn’t sure what to do, and he had nobody to go to for advice, nobody except Edward.

  “Come outside with me for a minute,” he said.

  “What for?”

  “I have to talk to you about that crabgrass.”

  Edward coasted out onto the porch. “Crabgrass. Very subtle. You want the gun back, is that it?”

  “No, I have to ask you something. Say I told you there were four dead boys, all stabbed a month apart, one in the heart, one in the abdomen, one in the leg, and one in the neck.”

  “I’d say the crime rate’s going up.”

  “What if I said they were all missing a single finger—the pinkie, ring, middle, and pointer.”

  “Is it a gang thing? Some kind of initiation?”

  “I can’t imagine anybody would want to join if it was.”

  Laundry hung on the line in the yard. Pillowcases and towels cast square shadows across the sallow lawn. Even the crabgrass was shriveling. The drought would be the death of the entire yard.

  Edward tapped his cigarette into an ashtray on the porch railing meditatively. Then his expression changed. An idea had floated to the surface.

  “What?” Emmett asked.

  His brother took an earnest drag off the cigarette, working himself up as though preparing to pull off a Band-Aid. “One time, these guys came back from the cathouses in Da Nang telling secondhand stories they’d heard from the marines stationed there. Said one of them was showing off, talkin’ big about how many gooks he’d killed. Some guy tried to call the marine’s bluff. So this marine, he took out a string and put it over his head like a necklace. The guys said they thought it was dried flowers, maybe one of them Hawaii things, the whadaya call ’ems, leis. Turned out they were ears, ears cut off the Vietcong, and strung like beads. What you said about the fingers got me thinking of that.”

  A cascade of possibilities clicked into place. From the beginning, the severed fingers had seemed deliberate to Emmett, yet he hadn’t been able to puzzle out the purpose for their removal. The notion that they were trophies, the killer’s keepsakes, made a macabre sort of sense
.

  “Why did that marine kept those ears?”

  “Sick as it is, I think he was proud. Wanted to remember what he’d done.”

  Somebody wanted to remember Evander Hammond, Julius Dekes, Tyrone Cambell, and Ambrose Webster. What Emmett couldn’t get a fix on was why.

  Edward finished his cigarette, having smoked it down to the filter. “No coffee, no food, and I’m outta smokes.”

  “I’ll bring you some and more food if I can find it.”

  “Sure you don’t want the twenty-two?”

  “I won’t need it.”

  “Will I?”

  “You shouldn’t.” Emmett tried to sound certain, but he hadn’t been certain about anything the last three days.

  “Hey Marty.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Where’s the thumb?”

  “What?”

  “You said a pinkie, a ring, a middle, and a pointer. Where’s the thumb?”

  Emmett mulled that over on the ride to City Hospital. It was nearly eight and the streets were as desolate as if it were dawn. He wound up behind a patrol car at a stoplight. Protruding from each window was the barrel of an M-16, pointed straight up in the air, standing at attention. The department didn’t have that kind of firepower. The riders had to be National Guardsmen. Emmett was stuck in the middle of Bergen Street with nowhere to turn off when the patrol car unexpectedly hit the breaks, compelling him to come to a halt too. Both of the M-16s on the right side lowered, aiming for a bar with handwritten signs in the windows that read soul brother.

  Without warning, the riders fired their M-16s. Bullets popped and glass cackled until the bar’s windows were pulverized and the casings were splintered. When the Guardsmen were done, the signs were gone.

  “Kennedy ain’t with you now, you nigger bastards,” one of them shouted, and the patrol car cruised onward.

  The daily papers and television news were fraught with images of the Vietnam War. That was thousands of miles away. This was a block in front of him. A surge of mournful awe struck Emmett right down to the marrow. He let the patrol car get a solid lead, then cut onto another road the next opportunity he got.

  Outside the hospital, a mass of people were jockeying for position behind an army green truck. A canvas cover arched over the flatbed. Guardsmen were distributing emergency food from the back, doling canned goods into the crop of upraised hands. Since the grocery stores were sold out and few in the projects had freezers, food was becoming scarce, as scarce as it was at Emmett’s own home. Though his household was desperate for food too, Emmett wouldn’t dare get in line.

  A woman snatched a box of rice from somebody and a scuffle ensued. Two Guardsmen jumped off the truck to break up the fight. The others continued dispensing provisions. In their fatigues, the Guardsmen seemed identical to Emmett. Distinguishing them from the men who had just shot into a bar without cause would be like picking a single raised arm out of the crowd. There was no discernable difference. Their actions were what set them apart.

  Emmett quickly made his way to the morgue. This time, the corridor was lined with gurneys. Sheets were draped across the bodies, stacked two deep. On some, the feet drooped over the sides, paper tags hanging from the big toe. Emmett wondered if the coolers had conked out on Dr. Ufland after all.

  “I’m doing the best I can,” the doctor was saying into the telephone. “Yes, sir. I understand, sir.” He hung up with an irritated groan. “Stop calling me every five seconds and maybe I could do my job.”

  “Do you have a minute?”

  Ufland pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and squinted. “Detective Emmett is it?”

  “That’s right. I was here on Thursday.”

  “I remember now. That was that slow day,” he said with a rueful roll of his eyes. “You’ll have to forgive me, Detective. I haven’t slept in awhile. Twenty bodies in forty-eight hours tends to make a coroner cranky.”

  It wasn’t the coolers that had broken. It was the riot. Three corpses on gurneys awaited autopsy, all males, all black. Buckshot was peppered into the flesh of the one closest to Emmett. The skin puckered around the pellets as though they were burrowing ticks. The second man had multiple holes blown through his upper torso. Dried blood was matted on the wounds. Large-caliber gunshots had ripped through the belly of the third victim, mutilating his body beyond recognition.

  “High Velocity Double 0 ammunition. Not standard issue to the department. You see why, Detective? Every shell has nine or twelve slugs, each a third of an inch in diameter. Made mincemeat out of him. Anyhow, these three’ll have to take a backseat to this guy.” Doctor Ufland was referring to the body on the slab. He was young, white, with a single bullet hole puncturing his chest. “The police director’s been hounding me to get him finished.”

  The face was familiar. It was Patrolman Nolan. Emmett crossed himself and softly said a prayer.

  “You know him, Detective?”

  “A little.”

  “The crew that brought him in said a sniper got him. It was a through and through. He died instantly,” Ufland said, sympathetic.

  Emmett regretted being harsh with Nolan the day before at the station. He recalled thinking that the kid wouldn’t make it through the weekend. He hadn’t.

  “Is he who you’re here about? Did Director Sloakes send you?” The doctor began to get antsy.

  “No, Sloakes didn’t send me. I had some questions for you.”

  “As long as you don’t mind if I work while you talk.”

  Ufland didn’t wait for an answer. He took a scalpel to Nolan’s sternum and the flesh parted in a solid red stroke. Emmett had to turn away.

  “I brought some reports for you to look at.” He fanned out the autopsies from the first three murders. The papers partially blocked his view of Nolan’s body. “I realize you didn’t do these procedures, but I was curious if you saw anything in common with them?”

  The doctor gave each a cursory gander, then flipped aside the skin on Nolan’s chest. “All knife wounds. Different points of entry.”

  “Is there anything about the points of entry that’s similar?”

  “Similar? No. What they have in common is that they’re precise. Here.” He pointed with a bloodied knuckle. “The knife went right between the ribs into the heart. On the second, it hit the liver. The third’s to the femoral artery in the leg. The victims bled out quickly, either internally or externally.”

  “Doc, do you remember Ambrose Webster, the kid with the severed leg and the missing finger?”

  “You find the finger?”

  “Um, not yet, but take a look at the diagrams, at the hands.”

  Ufland’s patience was wearing thin. “I see more missing fingers. So?”

  “Doesn’t that strike you as peculiar?”

  “What strikes me as peculiar is this many dead men in my morgue. I don’t know what’s going on up there. I do know what’s ending up on this table.” Overworked, Dr. Ufland was taking out his frustrations on Emmett. “I see what you’re getting at, and it’s a stretch, to say the least. This connection of a few missing fingers is tenuous. It’s a fluke. People don’t just go around killing Negroes.”

  “You’ve got twenty bodies right here in this morgue that say otherwise.”

  “Lightning doesn’t strike twice, Detective. It strikes over and over and over in different spots every time. Take my word for it. Better yet, take theirs.” Indignant, he motioned to the collection of corpses. “I’m too busy for fantasies. This is no place for them.”

  Nolan lay on the slab in front of Emmett. The young patrolman who had been so excited about being a cop was now a cadaver, a casualty of the riot. Dr. Ufland was right. Newark was no place for fantasies, not anymore.

  FORTY-ONE

  Emmett sat in his battered car in the hospital’s parking lot, gripping the stack of autopsies as though the answer to what he should do next would somehow be transmitted from the pages to his hands. His hallowed logic had landed him right back w
here he began—with no leads. He debated whether he should pay Lieutenant Ahern a visit, but his dignity forbade it.

  He stuffed the reports into the glove compartment. It was so full the lid wouldn’t close. He had to take everything out to get the files to fit again. The source of the problem was the oversize manila envelope containing the photographs from Ambrose Webster’s crime scene. Emmett had completely forgotten about them.

  There were twelve eight-by-tens in total. Because they were taken in the dark subway tunnel with its sooty walls and metallic track, the color snapshots could have been mistaken for black-and-white. The only hues that stood out were those of Webster’s clothes, his yellow T-shirt and faded blue dungarees, speckled with mud. Even the blood from his neck looked gray.

  Rafshoon had varied his angles. Some were panoramic, others close-ups. The pictures had a magazine quality. They were crisper and more exacting than the average photo album fare, and the shots appeared hauntingly posed. Ambrose Webster could have been a prop. The location in the tunnel had struck Emmett as strangely staged and inaccessible. The photographs confirmed that. It was an odd place to dump a body, odd to the point that it didn’t smack of being accidental.

  Flipping through the stack of pictures, he was reminded of what Doctor Ufland had said about finding the lost digit for the family’s sake. Emmett studied each print to see if, perhaps, the missing finger was caught on film. The camera’s flash reflected as white on the rails and glimmered on the gravel along the railroad bed. He had to comb every inch of the photos to differentiate the flash from what might be the flesh of a finger. In the top left corner of one of the wide shots, Emmett noticed some sort of opening, a frame for a small door. He couldn’t make it out clearly. If it was some sort of passage, that might have been how the killer disposed of Ambrose Webster’s body. Emmett had to get a closer look, but he wasn’t going back to the train tunnel, not if he didn’t have to. Albert Rafshoon’s studio address was written on a label affixed to the manila envelope.