The Lightning Rule

by Brett Ellen Block

  “I’d appreciate that.”

  As Emmett hung up, gunshots blasted nearby on Hill Street. They were .38s. Emmett could tell. The first time he heard one fired was at the academy, though it wasn’t on the range. His class had been issued their weapons and a cadet was admiring his under his desk when it accidentally discharged, blowing a hole through the desktop and into the ceiling. Emmett never forgot that sound.

  Using the edge of a building as a blind, he stole a glance around the corner. Two jeeps were stopped in the road. A posse of patrolmen and troopers were scrambling into a barbershop, weapons raised.

  “Help,” someone yelled. “Help me.”

  Emmett shucked off his jacket to expose his gun holster and shield, ensuring nobody would mistake him for a civilian. That didn’t guarantee they wouldn’t shoot him. But it might make them think twice.

  “I’m a police officer,” he announced, approaching the barbershop with his service revolver drawn.

  The front window was in pieces. A row of red vinyl barber’s chairs faced cracked mirrors. Broken shards of glass glittered on the linoleum. Emmett couldn’t tell if the place had been looted or if the troopers and patrolmen had wrecked it. They didn’t notice him. They were circled around a black kid about Freddie’s age. He was spread out on the floor with a bullet hole through his cheek. Blood wreathed his head.

  “I’m a police officer,” Emmett repeated.

  Some of them turned, looked him up and down. “It’s all right. We got him,” an officer said, as if Emmett was horning in on a bust.

  A trooper rifled through the kid’s pockets and pulled out a crinkled wad of cash. He counted it. “Seven bucks.”

  The trooper went to put the bills in his own wallet. A patrolman stopped him. “Hey. What’s wrong with you? There are five of us. Not including this guy.” He jabbed a thumb at Emmett. “Sorry, buddy. We got here first,” he said as they divvied up the money over the corpse.

  Emmett looked at the kid’s face. The bullet hole was the size of a dime. Were it not for the blood, it could have been a birthmark. He realized that it was the kid who had been calling for help.

  “What did he do?” Emmett asked in a daze, shock making his mind gluey.

  “He ran. We told him to stop or we’d shoot, and the nigger ran,” a trooper explained, justifying their actions. He was chewing gum and holding his gun so casually it may as well have been his car keys.

  “Hey, how ’bout this?” A patrolman pulled a pair of scissors from a jar of blue Barbicide, shook them dry, and arranged them in the kid’s palm. “Pretty convincing, huh?” The rest agreed.

  “Who’s gonna call it in?”

  The men responded with round of “not me’s.”

  “I did it last time,” was the other patrolman’s excuse. He had a seat in one of the barber’s chairs. “Ay. Take a little off the sides, will ya?” he kidded to a trooper.

  Another trooper was punching the buttons on the shop’s register and shaking it, attempting to jimmy the cash drawer. When it wouldn’t budge, he banged on the sides. “Stupid thing won’t open.”

  “You could shoot it,” somebody suggested.

  “Waste ’a ammo.”

  “Not if it’s full ’a money.”

  The trooper took aim and Emmett backed out the door.

  “You leavin’?” a patrolman asked, as though he was bowing out of a party early.

  “He’s a detective,” the other officer said. “He can do whatever he damn well pleases.”

  “Hey, you in a radio car? Maybe you could call this in for us.”

  Their behavior had rendered Emmett speechless. They stared at him, waiting, until he could formulate a response. “No, I’m not in a radio car. Sorry.”

  Except Emmett wasn’t sorry, not for them. He was sorry for the kid with the bullet in his face lying on the floor of the barbershop. He was sorry for Newark.

  FORTY-THREE

  The noon sun was leering down on the city. Its heat felt like contempt to Emmett. He walked to his car, totally unaware that he was still holding his gun until a black woman sitting at a second-story window hid inside at the sight of him.

  Rubbed raw by anger and regret, he was ready to go home. He had been running a debt on his body from lack of sleep, and the tab was coming due. He craved a shower, a decent meal, and his own bed. Most of all, he wanted the riot to end.

  Come Monday, Emmett would have to concede failure on Ambrose Webster’s murder. It was a dry well. His track record in Homicide was starting in the red. He had been assigned two cases, neither of which he was able to close. The disgrace was as pitiless as the weather. Lieutenant Ahern wasn’t aware of the other killings, and Emmett wasn’t beholden to inform him. Revealing his theories would only have made him seem naive and inept. The files regarding the deaths of Evander Hammond, Tyrone Cambell, and Julius Dekes would go back on the shelves of the Records Room, unsolved, destined to be forgotten. That was if the Fourth Precinct remained standing through the weekend.

  The dispatcher was prattling on the police band. Emmett shut off the radio and shut him up. He was swollen with the sense of defeat. He had tread every avenue of the investigation to no end, with the exception of one: he never made it to the public library, the last place Evander Hammond went prior to his disappearance. Emmett reserved no hope that anybody would recall Hammond, but a quick visit would close the book on the quartet of cases altogether, absolving Emmett of any further responsibility. Guilt was something he would have to absolve himself of.

  The library was in the opposite direction from his house, however it was a straight shot up Broad Street from where he was. Driving there would require Emmett to hurdle a slew of barricades. He didn’t have the energy to bounce around like a pinball avoiding them. His shortcuts hadn’t gotten him anywhere, literally or figuratively.

  “What happened to your car, Detective?” The patrolman overseeing the first checkpoint ogled at the hole in his rear windshield.

  The truth wasn’t worth rehashing. Emmett thought of his classmate from the academy who had put the hole in the ceiling. “Accidental weapons discharge.”

  “Boy oh boy. The guy who did it get in hot water?”

  “You could say that.”

  A yellow school bus was parked across the street. Cops, troopers, and Guardsmen were traipsing in and out. The bus was a hive of activity.

  “What’s the school bus for?” Emmett asked.

  “Orders were that when we made an arrest, we had to hold the coloreds until another unit could come and transport ’em to headquarters for booking. Couple ’a hours go by and we got too many arrests for the patrol cars to carry. So they sent the kiddie bus.”

  “Why? How many arrests have you made?”

  “’Bout sixty.”

  “Sixty?” The number was astronomical for that early in the day. “What were the charges?”

  “Different stuff. Mainly disorderlies or resisting.” The patrolman lit a cigarette and leaned into Emmett’s window to brag. He had missed his morning shave, and his stubble came in gray. “Get this. We had one ’a those old-type milk trucks pass through. The colored guy driving says he’s going to see his grandma. Going to see his grandma? You believe that? He didn’t even try to make up a decent lie. We check in the back ’a this milk truck and guess what was inside? A frickin’ stockpile of handguns, rifles, air pistols, knives, plus a bag of brass knuckles and a machete. A goddamn machete,” the patrolman exclaimed. “This old milk truck was an arsenal on wheels.”

  Emmett got the feeling the officer had been retelling that same story all morning to whoever would listen. Swapping gossip was a favored pastime of cops. The city was in a state of emergency and that hadn’t changed.

  “What happened to the driver?”

  “Whadaya think?”

  “Is he on the school bus?”

  “Naw, this was before the bus got here, before they told us to wait on transports. You know the rule: you beat ’em up, you lock ’em up. Guys in charge o
f that shift took the milkman to booking.”

  “What about the weapons in the truck?”

  “You’re looking at ’em.” The three National Guardsmen on duty at the barricade were outfitted to the teeth with additional weapons. They had two rifles apiece and extra pistols on their belts. “We gave the rest to the fellas at the other checkpoints. None of ’em was interested in the brass knuckles. Or the machete. Those went to headquarters. Too bad, really. Picture it: some colored guy’s giving you lip and you whip out that machete.” He pretended to wield an invisible blade, slicing at the air. “Hell, that’d be hilarious. Scare the bejeezus outta ’em.” The patrolman chuckled and flicked ash from his cigarette, concluding his tale. That reminded Emmett of Edward’s request.

  “Is anyplace open around here where I can buy a pack of those?”

  “I wish. Everything that ain’t burned to the ground is closed. Had to bring my own coffee in a canteen. Crazy, huh? We might as well be on the moon.”

  The moon would have felt less alien, Emmett thought.

  “Have a good one, Detective,” the patrolman said, as though it was an average Saturday, then he directed the next car forward.

  Emmett breezed through the subsequent blockades, his badge greasing the path. He was beginning to believe this trip to the library was pointless. By the time he decided to turn back, he was already there.

  Various branches of the public library were located throughout Newark. Evander Hammond had visited the one on Washington Street, which was the flagship, the original. It was a noble building with a foreign air. The rounded windows and chiseled limestone lunettes made the place appear as if it had been uprooted from the streets of Rome and plunked in the middle of the Central Ward, a stranded stranger that stuck out from the run-down storefronts on the block.

  “We’re closing, sir,” the woman at the front desk informed Emmett when he entered. Reading glasses dangled from her neck, and the bridge of her nose bore indentations from their constant wear. The name plaque on the desk said mrs. dorsey. The sign below it stated that library hours were from eight until five on Saturdays.

  Emmett checked his watch. “It’s eleven-thirty.”

  “Well, because of the…recent events we thought it best.” She refrained from using the term “riot.” The term had become a profanity.

  “Maybe you can help me, ma’am. I’m a police detective,” he told her to curry favor, “and I just have a couple of questions.”

  Mrs. Dorsey blushed. “I’m sorry, Detective. I didn’t mean to be rude.”

  “No offense taken.” After the last three days, Emmett was too numb to be offended by anything because everything he had seen was offensive. “Can you tell me if you recognize this boy.”

  He gave her the photograph included in Evander Hammond’s murder file, a snapshot from a birthday past. In it, Evander was proudly modeling a new pair of sneakers. Glee beamed from the picture. He had the confident smirk of someone who thought they were entitled to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, his new pair of sneakers a taste of what was to come. But Evander’s rainbow had ended in an alley with a knife wound to his heart.

  “This would have been a few months ago,” Emmett said. “He was a big kid, strongly built. Very friendly. A lot of personality. Definitely not a regular.”

  She studied the photo. “We get so many people through here. I can’t say that I recall him.”

  “Is there anybody else I could ask?”

  “The head librarian. He’s in every day. He’s upstairs, shelving. Just follow the squeaking.”

  “Follow the squeaking?”

  “The wheels on the book cart, they’re noisy. That’s how you’ll find him.”

  The high ceilings of the second floor’s main gallery made the eight-foot-tall bookshelves appear diminutive by comparison. Wood paneling refracted Emmett’s footfalls while the books muffled them. The effect was similar to having cotton stuffed in one ear. Emmett stopped to listen. He heard steady squeaking and trailed it, glancing down each row of shelves. The noise was difficult to track. It came from everywhere and nowhere.

  “Hello?” he said. No one replied. Emmett bobbed his head back and forth, weaving between the aisles as the bookshelves hurtled by. The deeper into the stacks he delved, the farther away the squeaking sounded. Finally, he spotted the wooden book cart standing unattended between two rows. Emmett called out again. “Hello?”

  A man rounded the end of the aisle wearing earphones and carrying a cassette player under his right arm. His left arm was lame and hung at his side, swinging of its own volition. He was slender and boyish with a man’s angular face, his pale hair thin at the crown. He gazed at Emmett inquisitively, like a deer in the woods, removed the earphones and clicked off the tape.

  “I’m Detective Martin Emmett. The woman at the front desk suggested I speak with you.”

  “I apologize, Detective,” the man said, his voice deep and liquid smooth, not at all what Emmett would have predicted. “Were you calling to me?”

  “Actually, I was.”

  “I’m trying to learn French. Hearing the language spoken is said to improve retention.”

  “Is it working?”

  “Un peu.” He made the sign for a little bit with his fingers and placed the cassette player on the book cart. The tape he was listening to was of Calvin Timmons shouting threats and degrading insults from the cage. The threats were as titillating on tape as they were in person.

  “I’m Lazlo Meers. How can I be of service?”

  Emmett showed him the picture. “This is Evander Hammond. Do you remember seeing him sometime in April?”

  Meers examined the photograph intently. He had noticed Hammond during a school field trip. The kid was a class clown. He goofed off during the library tour and was constantly whispering while Meers’s gave a speech about the Dewey decimal system. Hammond was as strapping as a full-grown man, and he had the strut of somebody who savored the spotlight. Meers salivated at the idea of taking him down a notch and making him squirm. He had already dispatched his pet John and was seeking a replacement. He thought Evander Hammond would make splendid prey. As the class was leaving the library to return to school, Meers pulled the boy aside on the pretense of earning a little money. He offered Hammond cash to help him move boxes of books up from the basement after hours. Hammond jumped at the chance.

  “I’m afraid I don’t recognize him, Detective. Is he in some kind of trouble?”

  “No, sir. He was killed.”

  “How awful.” The fact that someone had traced Evander Hammond to the library and to him was a feather of concern tickling Meers’s conscience. He attempted to get a read on the detective’s level of interest. “This was in April you say?”

  “Yes, it was back in April.”

  “And you haven’t apprehended his attacker?”

  “No, sir. Not yet.”

  Although Emmett was new to Homicide, the one question he knew to expect was: how did it happen. It was the first thing he would have asked. Curiosity came a close second to shock. The librarian wasn’t shocked or curious. Emmett might as well have been asking him for directions.

  “Are you sure you don’t recognize him, Mr. Meers? Here, take another look at the—”

  When Emmett tried to hand him the picture, Meers began breathing heavily. He leaned against the bookshelves for support.

  “Are you all right?”

  Meers was tugging at his tie like it was suffocating him and he couldn’t get any air.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Asthma.” Between gasps, Meers said, “My inhaler is on the cart.”

  Emmett had more he wanted to ask, but if he wanted answers he would have to help the man. He rifled through the book cart for the inhaler. That gave Meers time to reach under his pant leg and retrieve the cattle prod from the sock garter strapped to his leg.

  “I don’t see it. Let me call for an ambulance.”

  “That won’t be necessary, Detective
Emmett.”

  Meers jabbed him with the electric prod. Stunned, Emmett’s legs gave out. Meers shocked him again, immobilizing him.

  “Forgive me, Detective. I don’t normally behave this crudely. There really was no other way.” Meers took the tiny flask of ether from his pocket along with a handkerchief and sprinkled drops of the sedative onto the cloth. He clasped the kerchief to Emmett’s mouth, muzzling him as he drifted into unconsciousness.

  “That’s right. That’s a good boy. Breathe it in and off to sleep you go.”

  Meers inspected his new pet. He was tall, muscular, and clever enough to have found him. That made him a desirable adversary.

  “This is a lucky day indeed.”

  He went downstairs to the front desk. The library was dark, the windows and doors shut tight. Mrs. Dorsey had her purse over her shoulder and her glasses on, ready to lock up.

  “You go home,” he said sweetly. “I’ll take care of things.”

  “Very well, Mr. Meers. Where’s the policeman? I didn’t see him leave.”

  “That’s odd. He left five minutes ago.” Meers was taking a chance that Mrs. Dorsey had been away from her desk at some point in preparation for closing.

  She hesitated, perplexed. “Oh, I must have been turning off the lights in the other room and missed him. Okay, then, I’ll see you Monday. Be careful getting home, Mr. Meers. With all of the terrible things that have been going on, the later it gets, the more dangerous it’ll be.”

  “I’ll be careful, Mrs. Dorsey. I’ll be just dandy.”

  FORTY-FOUR

  Fortune was fickle. It could undermine the best-laid plans in the blink of an eye or deliver an unpredictable surprise to one’s doorstep. That day, just when it appeared his plans were about to unravel, fate smiled on Lazlo Meers. He had considered Calvin Timmons a windfall—strong, shrewd, an ideal candidate. Then came Detective Emmett, a gift fallen from the heavens. It was almost too perfect to be believed. As he fitted Emmett into the harness, Meers had a flush of delight. He hadn’t been that excited since his father first took him into the mine shafts as a boy.