The Lightning Rule

by Brett Ellen Block

  The direction they were headed was toward the room with the light on. Soon Emmett was coasting down a ramp, going below ground level. The sulfurous smell was consumed by the rankness of sewage, the same stink Emmett had encountered in the subway tunnel. When they stopped moving, Meers hissed in pain from his injury. Emmett opened his eyes for an instant. The room was ten by ten with exposed stone and dirt walls, and at one end was a life-size cage that Meers was dragging him into. Heart pounding, Emmett shut his eyes and waited.

  The dolly wouldn’t fit into the cage door, so Meers had to finish the last few feet using his own brawn. Because of his lame arm and wounded shoulder, his whole left side useless. He was pulling the rope that bound them together with his right arm, grunting and braying from effort. When at last Emmett’s heels cleared the cage door, Meers exhaled in relief.

  “I’ve had bigger, Detective, though none quite as cumbersome as you.”

  Meers bent over him to remove the vest. His hot breath gusted on Emmett’s cheeks. He unhitched the clamp and the rope went slack.

  “I promise you’ll be right as rain by tomorrow.” He petted Emmett’s head, consoling him.

  Emmett leapt up and rammed Meers against the bars. “You won’t.”

  The cage door swung closed, trapping them inside. Emmett got his hands on Meers throat and choked him. Meers’s face went red. He was worming as Emmett raised him off his feet. In desperation, Meers kicked Emmett in the thigh where he had shocked him with the cattle prod. The intensity of the pain caused Emmett to let go.

  Meers unsheathed his bowie knife and squared off with him. He swiped at Emmett, herding him toward a door that opened into darkness, a portal identical to the one Emmett had seen in the subway tunnel, only much larger. Emmett lunged at Meers, who maneuvered like a cornered animal, and he slashed at Emmett’s chest. The blade was so sharp that Emmett didn’t feel the cut until he saw a red arc well through his shirt.

  Just beyond the cage lay a plastic flashlight. Emmett thought it must have been by the door and Meers had knocked it over while transporting him. The flashlight had rolled within reach of the bars. Emmett dove for it, anticipating Meers would pounce. When he did, Emmett hammered a fist into his bloody shoulder. Meers momentarily withered, giving Emmett a window to escape through the access door into the dark.

  “Thank you, Detective,” Meers shouted.

  His gratitude made Emmett go cold. Faltering through the pitch-black, he switched on the flashlight. Terror seized him. He was in a tapered brick tunnel so constricting that he had to crouch or the top of his head would hit the ceiling. The stench was revolting.

  “Here I come,” Meers proclaimed.

  Emmett broke into a full sprint and cut into a different tunnel, fear pulsating through him like a live current. Mud sucked at his ankles, hampering his progress. Having to hunch did too. The water flow was getting heavier. Rain washing into street gutters had been funneling into the sewers. Narrow as they were, there was a distinct possibility the tunnels could fill.

  Elbows grating across the brick, Emmett glanced back to see if Meers was close, then tripped. He pointed the flashlight to see what he had stumbled over. On the tunnel floor lay a rotting corpse. The body had been decapitated. The skin was bloated and shedding, the hands devoured down to the bones by rats. Emmett fought not to wretch. That was when he heard squeaking, getting louder and louder. He shined the beam behind him. A gray tide of rats was cascading toward him, trying to outrun a tumult of water. Emmett sprang to his feet.

  At a fork in the tunnel, he made the snap decision to go right. The tunnel split again, then again. The maze was endless, more intricate in reality than on the sewer maps he had read. He veered into a tunnel that was larger and he could run upright. Sewer water splashed with his every step. As he ran, the flashlight’s beam caught on something metal, steal footholds driven into the wall. It was a maintenance ladder. Overhead, light flickered through the slots in a manhole cover. Emmett scaled the rungs into a vertical shaft and attempted to raise the cover. It wouldn’t budge. He forced his shoulder into it. Still nothing. Manhole covers weighed about fifty pounds, which Emmett could have handled. Something had to be on top of the manhole, a parked car or a truck. He would have to locate another ladder.

  When he climbed down, Meers rushed at him, his knife glinting like a flare. Emmett pivoted on the rung and kicked Meers aside. But the metal rung was slick and he fell, dropping the flashlight. It got carried along with the current. Emmett chased after it, following the submerged glow. He had to get to it before the batteries gave out.

  Emmett plunged into the water, scooped up the flashlight, and rode the current to flee from Meers. The churning flood had swept him from his feet as well and he was flailing for solid ground. Emmett dodged into another tunnel where the water level was lower, panning the flashlight wildly for another manhole. He was bounding through the tunnel, eyes focused upward, when something caught his pant leg.

  “Help me.”

  Calvin Timmons was sprawled on the tunnel floor. His clothes were soaked black with blood. He had pushed himself up the wall so he wouldn’t drown. Emmett took his hand. It was cold. The kid was fading. Blood continued to seep from the cut to his lower abdomen.

  “I’m here,” Emmett told him. “I’ll help you. What’s your name?”

  “Calvin. Calvin Timmons.”

  “Calvin, my name’s Martin. I’ve got to find us a way out. To do that, I have to leave you alone for a minute.”

  Calvin gripped Emmett’s hand and wouldn’t let go.

  “Promise you’ll come back?”

  Emmett had broken promises to his brother, to himself, to God. He was the last person to be promising anything to anyone. But he did.

  “I promise, Calvin. I’ll come back.”

  He was scouring the walls for ladder rungs when Calvin began wheezing, a warning to him. It was too late. Meers tackled Emmett, sending the flashlight skittering away. The beam wound up facing the opposite direction, making it difficult for Emmett to see. Meers got on top of him and raised the knife. Emmett caught his arm, fighting him. The shadowy light carved Meers’s features into gargoylish relief. Wet hair was plastered to his forehead. Thrill burned in his eyes.

  “Let me do it,” he whined, like a child who had never gotten his way.

  Emmett bashed Meers’s arm against the bricks, loosening the knife from his grasp. It landed in the muddy stream as Emmett threw Meers off of him. Crawling and splashing, Meers rooted around for the blade. Emmett yanked him up and pressed him to the tunnel wall. Meers gouged his fingers into the cut on Emmett’s chest. Emmett howled in pain. Countering, he kneed Meers in the stomach and felt something metal in his pocket. Emmett thought of Freddie and his pickpocketing trick. He struck Meers again, this time in the shoulder, dipping into his pants pocket as Meers reeled in pain. Inside was a pocketknife.

  He let Meers get free and scrabble for his bowie. That gave Emmett a chance to open the three-inch folding blade. Meers unearthed the knife from the slippery sewage and charged at him, rearing it back. Before Meers could bring down the bowie, Emmett thrust the pocketknife between his ribs. Meers gazed at his beloved Case XX with the red bone handle protruding from his chest. He lurched and fell to the floor into the muck, spitting up blood, then he went still.

  “Martin?” Calvin called out weakly. “You still here?”

  “I’m still here, Calvin. I’m coming.”

  The water level in the tunnel was rising. It was up to Emmett’s shins. As he turned, Meers grabbed him by the ankle and clung on with his last ounce of strength. Emmett forced his head underwater. Meers writhed, unable to hold his breath, and Emmett put all his weight on Meers’s body. Soon Meers ceased to fight. He stared at Emmett from under the water until the awareness drained from his eyes and they went dull.

  “Martin.” Calvin was sputtering on the rising swell.

  Emmett retrieved the flashlight, went to Calvin, and lifted him to his feet. The kid groaned. His breathing
was shallow.

  “Don’t you leave me, Calvin.” It was what Emmett had said to his brother the day Edward almost died. “Don’t you leave me.”

  Bleeding profusely from the chest, he carried Calvin on his back, searching for a ladder, praying for a ladder. The flashlight began to flutter. Water had reached the batteries. The light would soon give out and they would be trapped in the dark. Emmett prayed harder.

  Farther down the tunnel, a row of metal rungs caught the beam’s light. “I see something, Calvin,” Emmett said, but Calvin had lost consciousness.

  Emmett leaned him against the wall and quickly climbed the shaft. Rain was dripping through the manhole cover. When he pushed, the cover quivered. Straining, Emmett exerted everything he had left in him and lifted the cover clear of the hole.

  Heavy rain pelted his face. He blinked hard to see. The red and white lights of a patrol car were flashing up the road, a beacon of rescue. The manhole had let out a half a block from a police barricade. Cops in rain slickers were interviewing the drivers of window-fogged cars as water sluiced off every surface toward the gutters. Emmett imagined the body of Lazlo Meers washing through the bowels of the city, carried by rainwater on a course for the Newark shaft, the three-hundred-foot pipeline into the abyss of the bay, never to be seen again.

  The patrol car’s lights shimmered on the water-glazed street and refracted off every raindrop. The rain would quench the drought. The drought would end. The riot would end, and as with all endings, it would happen not when it was wanted, not when it was needed, but when it was through.

  FORTY-SIX

  Pale light was coming through Emmett’s bedroom window. Drizzle pattered on the glass. It could have been early morning or near dark. He couldn’t tell. Mrs. Poole was sitting at the foot of his bed in a chair brought upstairs from the kitchen. She was reading the newspaper. Emmett wasn’t sure how long he had been asleep. He was still weak and tired. When he tried to sit up, the stitches in his chest ached.

  “Lay back, Mr. Emmett. You’re supposed to be resting.” Mrs. Poole got up to prop his pillows and gave him a sip from a mug of coffee. “Should taste better than yesterday’s, I expect. The markets are open again. Freddie went and bought us fresh groceries.”

  “You gave him money, let him loose, and he came home?”

  “He was worried after you, Mr. Emmett. We all were.” She put her hand on his. “Now I’ll let you be.”

  “No, stay. I’m awake. What’s the paper saying about the riot?”

  Emmett knew there would be no mention of Calvin Timmons or himself in the news. They didn’t rank amid the chaos.

  “How ’bout I read to you for a bit?”

  “Are you trying to get me to fall back to sleep?”

  “You’re too smart for your own good, Mr. Emmett.”

  “There aren’t many who’d agree with you on that. Myself included.”

  Mrs. Poole settled into her seat and read the newspaper to him from cover to cover. On the front page, Police Director Wallace Sloakes was quoted as saying he was immensely proud of the conduct displayed by Newark’s police force, the state troopers, and the National Guard during the city’s strife. Buried on page five was a piece in which Mose Odett condemned the department for its flagrant abuse of power. His article was a fraction of the length of Director Sloakes’s. Somewhere in between was a blurb about Inspector Plout and his brave struggle to hold the Fourth Precinct together. Plout was portrayed as the valiant captain of a marauded ship, when in actuality, Emmett hadn’t seen the man emerge from his office since the conflict began. The reality of the riot was already being distorted. Like a bad rumor, that week’s events would be modified and remolded every time the stories were told and retold until innuendo grew into truth and fiction solidified to fact.

  “Oh gracious, listen to this,” Mrs. Poole said glumly. “‘Flames ripped through the entire block of Boyden Street razing countless tenements and leveling an abandoned warehouse. Area residents claimed they smelled a strange odor during the blaze. The fire department has yet to comment.’ Lord knows I always feel bad for folks who lose their homes in fires. It’s so sad, so final.”

  The warehouse where Luther Reed cut and processed his drugs was on Boyden Street. Reed’s boobytraps would have been futile against the inferno.

  “What’re you grinnin’ about, Mr. Emmett?”

  “Nothing. I was just wondering what the smell must have been.”

  Mrs. Poole read on. “‘Another suspicious fire broke out at a residence on Gold Street. Assumed to be the result of arson, police are investigating.’”

  Emmett would have wagered that the house that was torched was the discreet gentlemen’s club frequented by off-duty brass. The arson was somebody’s rendition of revenge. It would hit ranking officers harder than the riot did.

  According to the newspaper, twenty-six people had been killed during the course of four days. Over fifteen hundred were arrested. An estimated ten million dollars in public and private property was damaged or lost. The devastation was incalculable despite the calculations. The paper’s op-ed section closed by saying: “Newark will rise from the ashes, better and stronger than before.” Even the ever-optimistic Mrs. Poole didn’t sound convinced reciting those words.

  Emmett wasn’t certain either. To be better and stronger, things would have to change. The newspaper was proof that, so far, nothing had.

  “Mind if I ask you something, Mr. Emmett?”

  It was the very same question he had posed to her the first day she starting working for him. He answered with the same reply. “Depends on the something.”

  “Is it true what Edward said? That you were going to be a priest?”

  Emmett owned up to it. “Yes, that’s true.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  The guilt he harbored about his brother’s accident had led him to the priesthood, then led him away from it and toward the police force. Years of punishing himself had gotten Emmett nowhere but alone. Now he had a chance. He had Edward back.

  “I guess I wasn’t the right man for the job.”

  “I think you would’ve made a darn fine priest, Mr. Emmett. Maybe the Lord just meant for you to be a detective instead.” Mrs. Poole smiled.

  “Maybe.”

  A knock came at the bedroom door. Freddie peeped through the crack. “Can I come in?”

  “You boys talk. I have to get supper started,” Mrs. Poole said, an excuse to give them some privacy.

  Seeing Emmett laid up and bandaged turned Freddie shy. “How ya feelin’?”

  “I’m okay. I hear you were running errands.”

  “Figured maybe I could do odd jobs for you to pay back that hundred I owe.”

  “I have a screen door that needs oiling. A garage door too.”

  “No problem.”

  “Ever pull up crabgrass?”

  “I can learn.”

  “You’ve got a deal. As long as you promise to go to your court date.”

  “Promise,” Freddie vowed.

  “Seems you may be off the hook with Luther Reed, at least for a while.”

  “No kidding? What about those detectives? They still gonna want the tape?”

  “With the riot and Reed out of commission, they shouldn’t give you any trouble.”

  “At least for a while,” Freddie added knowingly. “I found a place to hide it like you told me to. A place nobody’d ever look.”

  “Is it under the mattress of my old bed?”

  Freddie’s jaw dropped. “Damn.”

  “Your secret’s safe with me.”

  Emmett got up, too sore to move any speed other than slow. Freddie came to his side to lend a hand.

  “Aren’t you s’posta to stay in bed?”

  “Yup.”

  “We goin’ downstairs?”

  “Yup.”

  “Thought so.”

  Freddie helped him put on a shirt and take the staircase a step at a time. Mrs. Poole put her hands on her hips when Emmett shuf
fled into the kitchen with Freddie in tow.

  “Don’t yell at me,” Freddie said, preempting her. “It was his idea.”

  “Is Edward in his usual spot?”

  “He’s been keeping it warm all day,” she replied. “Freddie, help me set this table. And don’t forget the napkins.”

  “You heard the lady,” Emmett told him, smirking.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Freddie sighed.

  “I have to borrow this for a little.” Emmett took one of the kitchen chairs out to the porch. Edward was indulging in his new hobby, watching people’s windows across the yard, his substitute for television. Rain was dripping on the tin awning melodically.

  “Should you be lifting heavy objects in your present condition?”

  “I shouldn’t be doing anything in my present condition.”

  Emmett winced as he sat down beside his brother. The welts on his legs smarted. The doctor at the hospital had identified them as electrical burns and informed Emmett he was lucky not to have any permanent damage. His physical injuries weren’t permanent. Any lasting damage from his encounter with Lazlo Meers remained to be seen.

  “Jesus, Marty, you’re gettin’ as crotchety as me.”

  “We make quite a pair.”

  Sitting there together, they would have been eye to eye if either would look at the other.

  “You wanna tell me about it? You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

  Emmett told his brother everything. He wanted to. He gave Edward his theory on the murders as well as the details about being held at the factory, the hunt through the sewer tunnels, all of it. The porch became his confessional. At the end, he told Edward what he had done to Lazlo Meers.

  “I drowned him. I didn’t try to arrest him or take him in. I just drowned him.”

  “He treated those boys like they weren’t human. Like they were animals. Like they didn’t matter.”