The Lightning Rule

by Brett Ellen Block

  “Look who it is, Larry,” Serletto chimed.

  “I’m lookin’.”

  “Haven’t seen you since Jesus was a boy, Marty. You been hiding down in Records through this whole riot?”

  “Not quite.”

  “You back from the boonies for good? We’ll have to move the coffeepot.”

  “No, I was hoping to catch the lieutenant.”

  “Catch ’im at what?” Serletto smirked at his own lame joke. “Seems like you was on your way out.”

  “I’ve been here for fifteen minutes. He didn’t show.”

  “I coulda sworn I seen Ahern around here somewhere. Oh well. He’s a busy guy.”

  Serletto was gabbing away amiably as a distraction while Hochwald scanned the room for anything amiss. It was a well-rehearsed routine. Cops lied for a living. Coercion was their stock and trade. Except Serletto and Hochwald couldn’t come on as strong with Emmett as they would a suspect. Serletto watered down his approach, swapping the typical bluster and bravado for buddy-buddy cordiality that couldn’t have been further from kind.

  “We miss ya, Marty. No hard feelings, right? We should have a drink. Catch up.”

  “Yeah, we’ll have to do that some time.” Emmett accepted the invitation as he crossed between the men and out of the squad room toward the stairway.

  “Thought you were waiting on the lieutenant?” Hochwald said.

  “Just tell him I stopped by.”

  “Ay, what are we?” Serletto hollered. “Ahern’s secretaries?”

  Emmett clamped the Tyrone Cambell file under his arm so it wouldn’t slide out from beneath his jacket, and said with a smile, “You don’t have the legs for it.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The station’s front door was in Emmett’s sights. He was almost in the clear. Then the desk sergeant stopped him.

  “Hey, Detective. You got a delivery yesterday.” The sergeant had just come on shift. He was lighting a cigarette.

  “A delivery?”

  “I had a patrolman put it on your desk in Records.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You ever get a hold of that guy you were after?” he asked offhandedly, waving out the match. “What’s-his-name? Guthrie?”

  The desk sergeant was going against his own advice. He was snooping. With everybody outside gearing up for patrols, they were alone, and he was exploiting the privacy. Something was up. Either Ionello and Vass had learned that Emmett sprung Freddie or the sergeant was doing some digging on their behalf.

  “It was the wrong guy. My mistake.”

  Trusting that the sergeant wouldn’t mention his interest in Freddie to the arresting officers was Emmett’s real mistake. Given the havoc of the riot, he thought such a minor detail would have escaped inquiry. He was wrong.

  Emmett went down to the basement to see what the delivery was. Sitting on his desk was a wide manila envelope. Sitting at his desk was Lieutenant Ahern.

  “I ran into your new pal, Nolan. He said he bumped into you, so I came down to check on how your case was going, and low and behold, you weren’t here.”

  “Funny. I was upstairs looking for you, Lieutenant.”

  “I see you got your crime scene pictures from the subway tunnel.” He drummed the manila envelope with his fingers. “What’s the deal on your dead body?”

  Folded under Emmett’s jacket was verification of the connection between Ambrose Webster’s murder and three others. As he was contemplating the right words to explain, Emmett noticed that the desk drawer where he kept his clock was ajar. That was not how he left it.

  “I’ve got a name and an address. Things are going fine.” He tried to brush off the topic.

  “Any suspects?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Any witnesses?”

  “None.”

  “What about the kid’s friends? You talked to them?”

  “The victim was a bit of a loner,” he lied.

  “That’s not the definition of ‘going fine.’” Ahern leaned back in Emmett’s chair, making himself at home.

  “The body was dumped on the train tracks and the victim’s guardian hadn’t seen him since the previous evening. There’s not much to work with.”

  “It’s a damn shame how these kids are running wild nowadays.”

  This was no simple platitude. Emmett could sense where Ahern was headed. It made his pulse race.

  “Say you want to get a hold of a particular kid,” the lieutenant said, “but you can’t find ’em. The mother doesn’t know where he’s at. What do you do?”

  Ahern was talking about Freddie. Sal Lucaro must have contacted him, furthering the misunderstanding that Freddie was the witness in Vernon Young’s murder. Emmett heaved the lieutenant out of his seat by his lapels.

  “Do you have any idea what they did to my brother? Do you?”

  Lieutenant Ahern leveled a blasé gaze on Emmett. “This temper of yours keeps getting you in hot water, Detective.”

  “Did you send them to my house?”

  The addresses of policemen were confidential. The only way Lucaro could have gotten his was from someone in the department.

  “Did you?”

  Ahern lowered his eyes to his lapels, indicating that he would talk once Emmett released him, which he did.

  “No, I wouldn’t send them to your home, Martin. That wasn’t me. But they were getting impatient. You can put me off. Not them.” The lieutenant smoothed his jacket and strode toward the door. “You give me that name, I make a phone call and this all ends.”

  Emmett wouldn’t budge or blink or even breathe.

  “No? Well, it can’t be Julius Dekes.” Ahern glanced at the desk. “’Cause that nigger’s dead. Your filing’s getting sloppy. There was no report in the folder.”

  The lieutenant had been spying on him. He was probably the one who had turned off the lights the other night. Emmett couldn’t feel betrayed because he had never trusted the lieutenant, but he was surprised by how low Ahern had stooped.

  “Maybe you should help me look for it,” Emmett proposed. “You seem to have a knack for finding things.”

  That got a rise out of the lieutenant and he retaliated. “Do you wanna know why Director Sloakes moved you into Homicide? He pegged you for a patsy. College degree. Dropped out of the priesthood. He figured you for a head case if you couldn’t hack it in the church or at some regular job. Sloakes said you’d flip, get on the payroll, or you’d wash out, the perfect candidate to take the fall in the papers if he ever needed that someday.”

  Emmett was reeling. Ahern’s spite stung, though not as badly as the truth.

  “I believe that day’s coming real soon, Detective,” the lieutenant said, then he left.

  The basement was silent. Emmett’s clock was no longer ticking. He hadn’t been around to wind it and the clock had stopped. He opened the drawer and turned the key until it wouldn’t turn anymore. That was all he could do to put time between him and the inevitable.

  TWENTY-SIX

  The sun was up, but Meers would not have known it if it weren’t for his watch. There were no windows in the pen and only one door. Immense industrial pipes protruded from the ceiling of the subterranean room, and the floor was made of dirt, so the scent of earth was strong, laced with a whiff of sulfur and the reek of sewage. A ten-foot-square iron cage of Meers’s own construction abutted the pen’s far wall. In the glare of the room’s lone light, a bare high-wattage bulb, he was examining Calvin Timmons, asleep in the cage.

  Pacing its perimeter, Meers surveyed his new pet. Calvin bore no open wounds or abrasions that required tending, which was a relief. Meers had taken the utmost care in conveying the boy so as not to cause him harm. He had used a set of harnesses to get Calvin from the trunk of the Cadillac onto a padded rolling dolly and into the cage. Meers fashioned the twin harnesses himself, his being the smaller of the two. The thick leather straps would thread over his shoulders, across his chest, and behind his back where he connected his harness wit
h a carabiner clamp and sturdy rope to its mate, worn by the unconscious Calvin. As slight of build as Meers was, the harnesses allowed him to pull great loads. He could haul his pets with relative ease as long as he had the dolly to reduce friction.

  The dolly was ideal on flat surfaces, inferior on rugged terrains. That was where a sled’s rails prevailed. Meers had gotten his from a toy store. Crafted to be fast on slopes and take bumps, the sled was light. He could easily carry it with him for when it was time to clean up. He had made mistakes in the past, left messes that sullied his game. Over the last weeks, Meers had honed his skills, perfecting the routine with the harnesses and the sled. He had the technique down pat.

  Then Ambrose Webster spoiled everything. Meers had wrenched his shoulder freighting him into the subway tunnel. The injury continued to ache. That aggravated him. And that was why Meers treated himself to another pet. This time, the boy was quick. The extra effort would earn out.

  Meers usually rationed one per month, careful not to arouse suspicion. Patience was fundamental, as was planning, yet he felt shortchanged. Webster was a disaster. He was too scared to leave the cage when Meers raised the pulley, sliding the rear wall up like a tiger trap and providing him an exit. The rear wall of the cage was positioned to open onto an access hatch. Meers had removed the hatch door, exposing a gaping hole that connected to the city’s sewer system. The warren of tunnels that lay beyond the door was his hunting ground.

  He had discovered the secret door as a teenager, thanks in part to his father. After years of overseeing the zinc mines in Franklin, the company Eli Meers worked for, New Jersey Zinc and Iron, transferred him to be a foreman at the refinery in Newark. The refining plant operated out of a behemoth warehouse the size of a hollowed-out mountain, spanning acres of land bounded by Brill and Chapel streets and the Passaic River, making it an island unto itself. Raw ore was transported to the refinery from the mines on trains or barges by the tons. Three hundred men labored around the clock seven days a week smelting the virgin zinc into metals and oxides, and reducing iron ore to pig iron for making castings. It was dirty, strenuous work that kicked black soot into the air and created a stench that got embedded into clothes, hair, and skin. Workers would finish each day at the refinery with their coveralls as filthy as if they’d been in the mines themselves.

  Although the transfer entailed better pay, Meers’s father had taken it grudgingly. He abhorred big cities, Newark in particular, and hated having to leave rural Sussex County where they lived. Eli Meers preferred the wide open spaces of the country and taught his son to appreciate the bounty nature had to offer. The day Lazlo turned seven, his father put a .22 rimfire rifle in his hands and took him out to learn how to hunt squirrel.

  “If you can hunt a squirrel, you can hunt anything,” he had told Lazlo as they crossed a marsh into a hardwood stand in the predawn light. “Squirrels got the sharpest eyes, and they hear everything. Can’t even sneak up on a dead ’un unless you know how to move just so.”

  From that day forward, his father trained him. Lazlo was taught how to walk Indian-style, to pass through a forest without making a sound and to traverse tinder-dry leaves as deftly as balancing on a tightrope. He practiced focusing his eyes without fixing on any individual spot in order to take advantage of his peripheral vision. That gave him the ability to sense every twitch of motion in a full 180-degree field of view. His father disapproved of sights and scopes for rifles. They cost too much, and a skilled hunter wouldn’t have to rely on them. Skill was the very thing that separated the hunter from his prey.

  Before they moved, Lazlo and his father would hunt every morning. He improved at a rapid pace, to the point where he could distinguish the clatter of acorn hulls falling from the forest’s leaf canopy and the whooshing the squirrels made when jumping from tree to tree, a sound he would later come to hear as regularly as his own heartbeat. Lazlo got so good that he could pick off a gray squirrel on a beech branch from fifty yards, put a bullet through its head with a solid cartridge and not destroy any of the meat. Some of his fondest memories were of he and his father going home as the sun rose with rings of squirrels swinging from their belts like coattails.

  Mastering how to clean the kill was almost as important as hunting. With squirrels, it was as simple as slipping off a sock, and his father had shown Lazlo the best methods for paring off the pockets of fat that would taint the taste. A two-inch slice from a folding blade across the squirrel’s hips and the skin stripped right off. The head, feet, and tail were severed, the body cut into pieces, rinsed in cold water, and set in the icebox to chill. His father canned, pickled, dried, or smoked whatever they caught, and he had a special recipe for cooking squirrel with vinegar, salt, and cracker crumbs. It was Lazlo’s favorite meal.

  There were squirrels in Newark too, traipsing over telephone wires and scaling windowsills, yet Lazlo and his father certainly couldn’t hunt them in the city. Lazlo was eleven when they moved, and every day, he missed the vastness of the countryside. When he contracted polio, his father blamed the infection on the city, the congestion, all of the different races that crowded it. He blamed Newark for making his son lame and fragile. And he blamed Lazlo for being weak enough to fall ill. His company paid Lazlo’s medical bills, but after ten months in the iron lung, Eli Meers took his son out of the hospital despite the doctor’s protests.

  “If you’re meant to live, boy, then you will” was what he said.

  Lazlo did live. However, he couldn’t gain weight no matter what his father fed him, and his left arm was permanently maimed from the elbow down. The hand had limited feeling, a feeble grip. Because two hands were necessary to hold a rifle, Lazlo couldn’t hunt with a gun anymore. Of all the side effects from polio, that was the worst. His father would leave him in their rented apartment a few blocks from the refinery and return to Franklin on his days off to hunt alone, abandoning Lazlo to his own devices.

  With little money, Lazlo had only one place he could go: the public library. It was warm in the winters, cool in the summers, and he could linger there for hours in the silence, reading whichever books he pleased, far from his father’s indifference and the torment of his classmates, who teased him mercilessly about his ailments. Better still, he could take books home for free, as many as he could carry. He read rapaciously, devouring novels and history texts on a gamut of topics. His favorites were guides on hunting, especially those about big game. Lazlo imagined himself alongside the men in the books, stalking Kodiac bears in Alaska or rhinos in the Africa bush. He could practically feel the snow crunching underfoot or the sun shimmering on the plains. In his mind, Lazlo could still hunt.

  His father left him to his books. He ignored him and barely acknowledged his existence even when, as a teen, Lazlo would limp to the plant on foot to deliver food to the men working the late shift. Collecting pails from the neighborhood wives and bringing them to the zinc works earned Lazlo two cents per pail. He had devised a method of stringing the handles on twine and slinging them around his neck, enabling him to cart a dozen at a time. The garland of pails full of sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, and thermoses of coffee clanged like cans tied to a car bumper, which embarrassed his father so badly that he would retreat to the foreman’s office to avoid seeing his son doling out the food. For Lazlo, that was a slight improvement over being ignored, and the money he received slowly amassed into an ample trust, funds he would eventually put toward his new hobby.

  One day, after his deliveries, Lazlo’s father ordered him to go into the storeroom behind the foreman’s office to retrieve a ream of paper, mainly to get him out of sight. Lazlo had never been in the storeroom before. Boxes teetered in towers taller than him, and the shelves wobbled as though the dankness and lack of light had forcible weight. It was no place for someone his size. While struggling to heave the ream off a rickety shelf into his good arm, something in the dim light caught Lazlo’s eye: a set of stairs leading below ground level. He put aside the paper and followed the stairway down to a
n anteroom carved into the earth, an unfinished afterthought built to allow access to the massive pipes that fed in from the refinery floor to the sewer system. Between the blast furnaces, the slime catches, and the electrolytic baths for heap leaching, wastewater accumulated from the zinc works by the hundreds of gallons per hour and was siphoned into the sewers to run off into the Passaic River. The pipes plugged directly into a main sewer hatch the size of a door, and Lazlo could hear the water frothing and seething and racing through the tunnel behind the hatch. Because the pipes were active, he never entered the door, but he dreamed of what lay behind it, an underground world all his own.

  Underground was where Lazlo Meers felt most at home. In his youth, before the polio, his father had frequently taken him into the zinc mines. They would traverse the tunnels, inspecting the miners’ progress, the bright light of their carbide lamps blazing into an ocean of blackness. Lazlo didn’t fear the tight, dark quarters, quite the opposite. He found solace in the narrow mine shafts, where his small frame was perfectly in scale. There in the womb of the earth, he was safe.

  When, years later in the early 1960s, New Jersey Zinc and Iron finally went out of business, as had many industries in the city, Meers read about its closure in the newspaper and visited the lot. The gigantic refinery sat vacant. The vats and furnaces and dross kettles were gone, sold for scrap, their parts melted down in similar blast furnaces and kettles somewhere else. The plant was empty apart from the echo of birds nesting in the crossbeams and the abrasive odor of sulfur dioxide that remained, intractable as the building’s girders.

  Vandals had broken some of the vent windows at the roofline, letting in rays of light. Otherwise, devoid of electricity, the refinery was dark. Just the way Meers liked it. He went directly to the room under the old foreman’s office and found that the pipes leading to the sewer had been capped. The entrance to the tunnel was open wide. His secret maze was waiting for him. That was how it started.