The Lightning Rule

by Brett Ellen Block

  “I’ve come to see Luther Reed. Some mutual friends sent me.” Emmett flashed his shield.

  One man lumbered into the back room. The other positioned himself squarely in front of the door, filling its frame. A minute later, the door reopened, sending an icy gust into the hall, then Emmett and Freddie were let through.

  The back room was dim and frigid. An industrial air conditioner was chugging in the corner, beer bottles chilling on top. Six men were seated around a folding table playing cards. A pile of cash sat in the center. All of them had guns in their waistbands. Presumably an extra was strapped under the table as well. They continued playing without a word, flicking down cards.

  Emmett said nothing. Freddie was twitching at his side, unable to stand still. Finally, the player at the head of the table showed his hand. The others folded, and he swept the money toward his lap.

  “You a patient man. Most cops ain’t,” the winner remarked. He had a slight build and empathetic eyes that gave him the appearance of being gentle. It was Luther Reed and he was anything but.

  “I’m in no hurry,” Emmett told him. “It’s nice and cool in here. I could stay all day.”

  Reed contemplated that. “Quite a pet you got. He housebroken?”

  “Yeah, except he bites.”

  Luther laughed softly. “I met a lot ’a cops in my day. I don’t think you and me’s had the pleasure.”

  “No, I don’t think we have.” Emmett couldn’t play coy for long. He wouldn’t give his name unless he absolutely had to.

  “I already made my contribution to the Policemen’s Benevolent Association, if that’s what you’re here about.” Reed eyed Freddie, intimating that he was the contribution.

  “I didn’t come for a donation, however you are in the position to make a generous one I see.”

  The game’s winnings were mounded at Reed’s elbows. He grouped the bills into a neat stack. It was his turn to be coy. He appeared to be debating whether he should tolerate a second round of police shakedowns.

  “Keep it. I bet your electric bill’s a doozy.”

  Surprised, Reed passed the cash to the man beside him. It went into his pocket, under his gun.

  “I won’t take up too much of your time,” Emmett said. “I just need you to tell me where the other one is?”

  “The other what?”

  Reed was at a loss, and he didn’t like it. Emmett let him squirm for a minute, then he pinched Freddie’s neck until the kid squirmed. “Your friend here doesn’t work alone. It’s a two-man gig. I believe you’ve met the second half of the act.”

  “A couple days ago. Ain’t seen him since.”

  “That’s funny, because this is the last place anybody saw him. You can imagine how that might come off to those impatient sorts of cops.”

  It took a second for Reed to weigh his alternatives. “Tell him,” he ordered.

  “All’s we did was rough him up some,” one of the men at the table began.

  Another finished. “We let ’im go. I saw him walk out onto the Strip. Swear to God.”

  “Cross your heart and hope to die?” Emmett asked.

  The back room fell silent aside from the hum of the air conditioner. The man closest to Reed who had taken the money moved his hand to his gun. Emmett could feel Freddie go tense.

  “Put ’cho goddamn hands on the table,” Reed hissed. The man did as he was told.

  “Well, you all seem very sincere. I’ll be sure and pass that along so nobody else comes by to barge in on your card game.”

  The chill had gone out of the room. It wasn’t cold anymore.

  “Whatcha gonna do with that new pet ’a yours?” Ever the businessman, Reed was probing for his own interests. Freddie owed him money.

  Emmett squeezed the kid’s neck again. “I think I’ll put him on a short leash.”

  “You do that,” Reed said. “’Cause anybody can take a stray off the street and say its theirs.”

  He wouldn’t dare mention the debt, yet his disappointment was obvious. Emmett’s wasn’t, though it affected him as keenly. After Luther Reed’s men had finished beating Ambrose Webster, the teen had disappeared without a trace, a stray somebody else had claimed.

  SEVENTEEN

  The day was escaping, leaving Emmett empty-handed with nothing to show for his efforts besides Freddie, who was rubbing his neck theatrically and saying, “I thought we was gonna be acting.”

  “I had to make it look real.”

  “Felt pretty damn real to me.”

  They got into the car and Emmett uncuffed him. Freddie massaged his wrists. “What now?”

  Emmett was wondering that himself.

  “Hey. Don’t you know it’s rude not to answer when somebody’s talkin’ to you?”

  “Yup. I’ve heard that before.” He went for the glove compartment. Freddie withdrew from him skittishly. “Relax. We’re done acting.”

  He had put the Julius Dekes file he took from the Records Room in the glove compartment.

  “I’d take another candy bar if you got one.”

  “Sorry. That was it.” Hunger had hit Emmett as well. It would have to hold. “Do you recognize this kid?” He showed Freddie the school photo of Dekes.

  “No. Why? He dead too?”

  “Actually, he is.”

  “Jeez, I was just kidding.”

  “You’ve never seen him?”

  “I said no.”

  The address for the next of kin, Dekes’s mother, Dorothea, wasn’t far from Freddie’s house. “He was your age and he was from your neighborhood. Are you sure you don’t know him?”

  “Because we both brothas we got to know each other? Is that what you sayin’?”

  “No. But it would help.”

  “Help how?”

  Emmett hadn’t intended on telling Freddie about Julius Dekes, but Webster’s trail had run cold. He would have to forge a new path.

  “They had something in common, Ambrose and this kid.”

  “They was Negroes. We covered that.”

  “Someone cut off one of Ambrose’s fingers. The kid in the picture was killed two months ago. He was also missing a finger.” Emmett flipped to the autopsy diagram displaying where the ring finger had been scratched out.

  “Don’t be showing me that stuff, man.” Freddie wrinkled his nose.

  “You see the connection?”

  “Yeah? And?” He was only half-heartedly convinced. It was the same response Emmett could expect from Lieutenant Ahern.

  “Never mind.”

  They drove in silence until they reached Freddie’s neighborhood.

  “Are you taking me home?”

  “No.”

  “We ain’t done?”

  “Done? Didn’t you hear what Reed said? He’s not going to be satisfied until he gets his two grand from you. Assuming you don’t have that saved in your piggy bank, don’t you think you might be safer with me?”

  “With you? You cuff me, bring me to Luther, almost get me shot, and I’m gonna be safer with you?”

  Emmett parked the car as Freddie continued to mutter bitterly. “This’ll be safer for both of us.” He slipped the handcuffs on Freddie again, shackling him to the steering wheel. “You’re in debt to me and to Luther. I won’t hurt you to get my money. He will.”

  Freddie was contorted across the front seat, seething. He was about to start swearing a blue streak.

  “Now don’t scream and try to attract attention. You wouldn’t want anybody calling the cops, would you?”

  The address in Julius Dekes’s file was a tenement on Treacy Avenue. Three elderly black women were sitting on the stoop. They were fanning themselves with folded newspapers while a toddler maneuvered a slot car around their feet.

  “I’m here to see Dorothea Dekes. Can you ladies tell me if she’s home?”

  One nodded warily, and they watched Emmett go inside.

  Dorothea Dekes answered her door while wiping water from her hands with a rag. She had been washing dish
es. Two young girls clung to her legs. “Yes?”

  “Mrs. Dekes?” He let her see his badge.

  “Yes?” she repeated.

  Emmett introduced himself. “May I talk to you about your son, Julius, ma’am?”

  Her expression saddened. “Go on in your room,” she told the girls, then she invited him in.

  A pot was boiling on the stove. Though Emmett was starving, the smell told him what she was cooking wasn’t anything he would care to eat. Simmering lye in water was a home remedy for warding off rats and roaches.

  “I have to admit I don’t recall you,” Mrs. Dekes said, offering him a seat at the kitchen dinette. Her hair was combed into a bouffant, and her dress had been ironed into sharp angles. “Were you one of the detectives who came here after they found him?”

  “No, ma’am. That wasn’t me.”

  “I only saw them that one time. I went to the police station and the man at the desk said they were out. I went twice more. He said the same thing.”

  “I’m sorry about that.” Serletto and Hochwald had discarded the case. They were the last people Emmett would make excuses for. There was no excuse.

  “Did you find who killed him? Is that why you’re here?” Her voice held cautious hope.

  “Not yet.”

  “But you’re still looking?”

  Emmett couldn’t close Vernon Young’s case, and he’d had misgivings about taking Ambrose Webster’s. Here he was signing on for another. He held as cautious a hope as Dorothea Dekes that this wasn’t an error in judgment.

  “Yes, ma’am. I’m still looking.”

  She reached out and rubbed his hand, grateful. “I knew it. I knew those officers couldn’t see me because they were busy searching for who did this to Julius. Everybody told me I was wrong, that the police had gave up on him. But I knew they hadn’t. In my heart, I believed.”

  Emmett didn’t have it in his heart to tell her otherwise.

  “Could you go over some things with me, Mrs. Dekes? I was, um, recently assigned to help the detectives with Julius’s case,” he lied, “and I wanted to get the background from you in person.”

  “Of course. Of course.” She was eager to help. “I was at the nursing home where I work. I have the dinner shift. I don’t get home until midnight. I would always leave food for supper, and Julius would heat it up for his sisters and him. When I got back that night, the girls were awake. They were crying, saying Julius never came. That wasn’t like him. He was a good student, a good boy. He was going to be a schoolteacher,” she said, his aspirations evidence of his virtue. “I waited up all night. When I telephoned the police, they said he must have run away. They called me a week later to come to the morgue.”

  “Would Julius have been heading here straight from school?”

  “No, he played basketball with some friends. I talked to them boys myself. I asked them if they saw where Julius went. Everybody said they saw him walk home same as usual.” The pot of lye was bubbling on the burner, filling in the silence and adding to the heat. Her son had vanished, just as Ambrose Webster had.

  “I couldn’t afford the funeral on my own. The casket had to be made special because of how big Julius was. Our church had a collection. It was a beautiful service, so many flowers.” Her mind seemed to wander, then she was back. “Are you a churchgoing man, Detective Emmett?”

  “Not as much as I used to be.”

  “I’ll put you in my prayers tonight. I’ll pray you’ll get who did this to my baby.”

  Mrs. Dekes rubbed Emmett’s hand again, as if it was he who needed consoling. When he stood to go, the two young girls were at the door to their bedroom, staring up at him. The smallest was sucking her thumb. Emmett wasn’t even in his own prayers. Being in someone else’s couldn’t hurt.

  The women on the stoop stopped their talking when Emmett stepped outside, all except for the one who had the toddler on her knee. She was teaching him how to count, folding down his fingers one at a time. The boy was mesmerized. He stared at her mouth as she said the words aloud: “One. Two. Three. Four. Five.”

  Emmett was overcome by the skidding feeling of a sudden realization. Julius Dekes was missing his ring finger, Ambrose Webster his pointer. They were out of sequence.

  He hurried to the car. Freddie had commandeered the driver’s seat. “Move,” Emmett ordered.

  Freddie scooted across to the passenger side as far as he could with the cuffs on. He had Julius Dekes’s autopsy report in his lap. He had been reading it.

  “I thought you didn’t want to see that stuff.” Emmett unlocked the cuffs.

  “Wasn’t anything else to do. What’s the rush?”

  “I have a problem.”

  “I coulda told you that.”

  Emmett leaned over to get his radio out from under the passenger seat.

  “What’s that thing?”

  “A radio.”

  “Don’t look like no radio I ever seen.”

  “My brother built it. It was a gift.”

  “Maybe you oughta ask for somethin’ else next year.”

  The radio was a clunky amalgam of parts Edward had patchworked together, topped off with a big dial from an old Packard Bell. He had a knack for taking things apart and reassembling them and could breeze through issues of Popular Mechanics as effortlessly as reading the comics, a talent their father shared, which Emmett hadn’t inherited. Edward had given him the radio his third year on the force, tuned specially to pick up the police band. It was too cumbersome to carry on foot patrol, but Edward had made it for him to have in case of an emergency. Emmett’s current situation qualified.

  A joggle of the tuner and the frequency came in clear. Dispatch was announcing that, citywide, officers were being put on mandatory emergency duty, twelve-hour shifts on and twelve off. All vacation days were suspended until further notice.

  “Sucks for you,” Freddie said.

  Emmett shushed him, listening. It was almost seven, and the rally was about to get under way. The dispatcher ordered those in patrol cars to stay by their radios because a dozen picketers had planted themselves outside the Fourth Precinct. No other commands were issued.

  “Now you gonna take me home?” Freddie groaned. “I’m hot. I’m tired. I’m hungry. And I’m sicka being in this damn car.”

  Sunset hadn’t put a dent in the weather. The humidity curdled the air. Emmett was hot and tired and hungry too, and he had a sickening sense that with nightfall would come more violence.

  EIGHTEEN

  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 tha
t.”

  “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.”