The Lightning Rule

by Brett Ellen Block

  Ruggiero Caligrassi didn’t introduce himself. That wasn’t necessary. Emmett knew who he was and he knew who Emmett was.

  Caligrassi glanced at Amata and laced his hands behind his back as a general might when inspecting the troops. It was the same stance the manductor, head of the monastery at Saint Andrew’s, adopted during his daily appraisal of the novitiate, his expression tinged with the indifference of authority, just like Caligrassi’s. On the day Emmett was to have taken his vows, he had requested a private audience with the manductor, during which Emmett told him that he could not continue on his path to the priesthood. The two years as a novice were merely the first of thirteen required to ascend to the title of Jesuit. The lengthy commitment wasn’t what deterred Emmett. He could not, in good conscience, take those vows. In his mind, it would have been more grievous than the sin he had already committed.

  Upon learning of Emmett’s desire to discontinue his studies, the manductor simply nodded. He was a slim man in his forties with the imperturbable countenance required of clergy, yet it was obvious he would have preferred for Emmett not to go. Admitting as much would have been out of character, an impropriety. The basis of the faith was that a Jesuit’s life and labors would only be blessed while doing God’s will rather than their own. Personal opinions were incidental. The manductor could not employ his to sway Emmett’s choice or strong-arm him into staying. A Jesuit deferred such power to God.

  “Have you prayed on your decision?” the Manductor asked. Emmett told him he had. “Then you must do what God puts in your heart.”

  What beat in Emmett’s heart was guilt, but it wasn’t God who instilled it there.

  “This man is an…associate of yours, I believe.” Emmett made sure his voice did not betray the strain of carrying Amata upright.

  “Yes, he is,” Caligrassi replied, his tone patient.

  “He needs to go to a hospital.”

  “Looks that way.”

  “I could have left him where he was. By the time anybody found him, it would have been too late. I’m here because I’m hoping that counts for something with you.”

  “I see.” Caligrassi gestured for Lucaro to help with Amata.

  A tense instant arose during the transfer. Emmett was ready for him or the others to try something. Instead Lucaro, a man who thought nothing of shooting Vernon Young in the back, carefully laid Amata on a booth with a gentleness Emmett hadn’t imagined him capable of.

  “So?” Emmett said.

  Caligrassi pursed his lips, contemplating. He went to the bar and took an empty demitasse cup off the counter. In his hands, it looked like a piece from a little girl’s tea set.

  “There’s a crack in this cup, a hairline crack. That doesn’t mean it’ll break. Doesn’t mean it won’t.”

  At that, Caligrassi smashed the porcelain cup against the counter, shattering it to bits. The handle remained whole, clasped between the tips of his forefinger and thumb.

  “I won’t use a cup with a crack in it. You understand, Detective?”

  Emmett finally did. He understood that Otis Fossum’s name had never actually mattered. The ability to get the name, to bend and break the wills of others, was what was crucial to Caligrassi. That made him who he was. His performance with the cup had been for the sake of the men in the café, to put Emmett in his place for entering mob turf bearing a wounded foot soldier as a bartering chip. Caligrassi had to show him up to save face. Emmett played along. He hoped Caligrassi would too.

  “The man you’re looking for, the one from that night behind the dry cleaner’s, he moved to South Carolina once he realized who it was he saw. He’s gone. He’s no threat to you or Mr. Lucaro anymore.” The lie was stated with such conviction that Emmett almost persuaded himself it was true.

  Acting unconvinced, Caligrassi shrugged vaguely. “If he’s gone, then it can’t hurt for you to give me his name.”

  “If I do, then we’re done? With everything?”

  “Then we’re done.”

  Emmett let out a resigned breath. “His name is Horace Barnes.”

  Caligrassi blinked soulfully. He didn’t believe him. Even if Emmett had given Caligrassi the real witness’s name—Otis Fossum—he still wouldn’t have believed him. The name had become irrelevant.

  Horace Barnes was the manductor from Saint Andrew’s. He had died of coronary arrest a year after Emmett left the monastery. For Barnes, power had rested in his piety. For Ruggiero Caligrassi, power was shattering a cup and pressuring a police officer in front of a room full of men in order to assert his authority. All Caligrassi cared about was getting Emmett to call “uncle.” So that was what he did.

  “Don’t you have other things to do, Detective?” Caligrassi remarked. “We are having a riot, you know.”

  Emmett walked out of Valentine’s into the unforgiving night heat, leaving Tomaso Amata with his breath hissing through his injured lungs, while Otis Fossum was at home, awake in the dark because that was his daytime, unaware that he was, at last, free.

  Freddie unlocked the door for him and gave him back the keys. “Didn’t hear any shots.”

  “Not in this part of town, at least.” Emmett was too drained to think about what might be happening elsewhere.

  “No more guys gonna be following us?”

  “Nope.”

  “One down. Two to go.”

  Between the cops and Luther Reed, there was no lesser of those two evils.

  “I’m hungry,” Freddie said.

  “Me too. You like hot dogs?”

  “They all right.”

  “I’m not sure these will be.”

  “I’d eat ’em anyway.”

  “Me too. Let’s get out of here.”

  As Emmett drove, a clacking noise emanated from the side of his car where it had impacted with Amata’s. “That sounds bad.”

  Freddie rolled down the window for an evaluation. “Fender’s dented. Paint’s scratched. And the headlight’s done for.”

  “You’re the expert. How much do you think it’ll cost to fix?”

  “Couple hundred, easy.”

  “I guess I’ll really be needing that money you owe me.”

  “Gotta keep me alive if you wanna collect.” Freddie was half joking, half not. “Am I stayin’ at your house again?”

  “Of course. I have to protect my investment, don’t I?”

  “That your old bed I slept in? From when you was a kid?”

  “Yup.”

  “It’s nice. For a bed.” That was Freddie’s form of thank-you.

  “Yeah,” Emmett agreed. “It’s a good bed.”

  They were stopped at an intersection, waiting for the light to change. Both of them stared out the windshield as if it were a movie screen and the film they had been watching together had ended. There was nothing left to do but go home.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Telling the difference between day and night was nearly impossible from inside the pen. Subtle changes in temperature were the only hint that the sun had risen or set. The room stayed cool, sodden with the stench of sulfur and the rancid breath of the sewers. Meers tried to make the cage as commodious as possible with the carpeting, mattress, and ample food, though he could do nothing about the smell. That was a separate torture, one he was inured to.

  “It stinks in here. You know that? Huh? You hear me? I bet you do.”

  Calvin had been trying to taunt him into a response for the past hour. Meers intentionally alerted him to his presence by stomping heavily over the pen so dirt would rain down from the ceiling. What Calvin didn’t realize was that Meers had been in the refinery for two hours, observing him through the peephole in the floor above the cage.

  From that vantage, he had seen Calvin pacing. The kid hadn’t cried, at least not yet. That or Meers had missed it while he was at work. However, he doubted it. Calvin wasn’t the crying type. All the others readily wept, especially Ambrose Webster. He bawled from the start. Meers didn’t take any joy in their tears. In fact, they per
turbed him. Crying was a sign that his pet’s composure was unspooling, a factor that would adversely affect the game. But Calvin was different. Although he was a fraction of the size of Ambrose Webster, he possessed the quality Meers desired most—ingenuity.

  Like his other pets, Calvin had scrutinized the cage for a way out. He probed for weaknesses and attempted to squeeze through the bars. Meers had built the cage so the bars were deceptively wide-set. He checked anatomy books to ascertain the average size of an adult male human head, then spaced the bars a centimeter under those measurements, a tease on his part. Once Calvin was convinced he couldn’t fit in between the bars, he foraged for things to form into weapons. The carpet was glued down, not nailed, and Meers had extracted the springs from the mattress because they were metal. What made Calvin special was that when his search didn’t pan out, he practiced putting his arms through the cage bars to test the maximum distance of his reach, in case his captor should come close to the cage. That made Meers smile.

  “You don’t know who you dealin’ with, man. People be lookin’ fo’ me. And when they find you, you gonna be sorry.”

  Meers loved listening to him. Calvin was cocky, self-assured, his voice devoid of fear despite the circumstances. Meers wished he had a tape recorder. He toyed with the idea of buying one. Perhaps after supper, he thought.

  He was preparing Calvin’s dinner in the room above the pen, purposefully making plenty of noise to remind Calvin he was there. Meers had installed a hot plate and carted in an ice chest for provisions. The evening’s meal consisted of half the prime rib he bought from the butcher and another carton of whole milk as well as two potatoes wrapped in foil that Meers baked at home, dinner fit for an athlete in training. He warmed the potatoes beside the hot plate as he fried the steaks. The aroma of cooking meat wafted from the pan and was immediately overpowered by the sulfur.

  Based on his trials, serving the prime rib rare made it easier for his pets to digest. Well-cooked meat had caused John to become sluggish, just slightly, though it was perceptible to Meers. Sweets had a similar effect. For those reasons, he prepared only nourishing food. Water was also a necessity. Meers provided a full bucket in addition to a bedpan to collect waste, both soft plastic, making them ineffectual weapons.

  “I got me a black belt in karate,” Calvin shouted. “I can kill a man with my bare hands.”

  “Too bad we didn’t get that on tape, huh, John?” Meers lamented, flipping the steaks.

  John’s decapitated head sat on an old metal filing cabinet, ogling Meers as he cooked. He had recently replaced John’s eyeballs with glass eyes to make them seem more realistic. The plastic irises had a dull sheen, and the whites were as vivid as a doll’s, set off against the papery skin of the face. The glass eyes had come from a medical supplier. Meers had given the excuse that his father lost his eye in an industrial accident and claimed the extra was for him to wear when cleaning the other, so he would never be without. The clerk had commended him for being such a dutiful son. Because the glass eyes wouldn’t sit flush in the sockets, they bulged with shock, as though John continued to be appalled by the acts Meers committed.

  “I think I should get a tape recorder. What do you think, John? Then we’ll be able to save him for posterity. Won’t that be fun.”

  “I hear you up there,” Calvin hollered. “You must be stupid if you think I don’t. You a punk. Can’t face me like a real man, can you?”

  The steaks were sizzling in the pan, muffling the curses that accompanied Calvin’s provocations.

  “He certainly is working up an appetite with all of that yelling, isn’t he?”

  Initially, Meers had difficulty getting John to eat. He would repeatedly sniff the servings and sample a tiny bite, afraid the food was poisoned. Once assured each meal was harmless, John wolfed them down. Meers imagined that the man ate better as his prisoner than he did living on the streets. From him, Meers learned to estimate the portions. He had to give enough to stoke stamina, but too much would induce lethargy. It was a surprisingly precise science.

  “These steaks look tasty, don’t they, John?” When Meers stuck a fork into each slab, juice and blood flowed into the pan with a steamy hiss. The meat was almost done.

  Julius Dekes had been cautious of the food too and had refused water as well. The entire first day, he wouldn’t eat. He grew listless and thirsty. By late in the second day, Dekes’s hunger won over. Through the peephole, Meers witnessed him devour an entire meal and lick the paper plate clean. He kept the boy an additional day longer than the rest to let him recover. As it turned out, Julius Dekes was worth the wait.

  He was wily, fast on his feet, and took every side tunnel in the sewer line, attempting to throw Meers off his track. In the end, it didn’t work. When Meers found him, Dekes fought violently, flailing and biting, before Meers managed to plunge the knife into his liver. Stunned, the boy sagged, aware that the blade had entered his body. Julius Dekes died with his eyes open, gazing at Meers with the same vacant stare of the glass eyes in John’s head.

  “Never leave an animal to suffer,” Meers’s father always lectured. “Killin’ em is your right. Being cruel ain’t.”

  That was the phrase that played in Lazlo’s mind when, at the age of nineteen, his father suffered a stroke. He had been standing at the stove boiling soup, then suddenly fell to the floor, sending the hot liquid splashing around the apartment’s cramped kitchen. He was paralyzed, his jaw clenched, unable to speak or protest when his son put a pillow over his face.

  A knife would have created too much blood, and the neighbors would have heard a gunshot, so Lazlo smothered his father. The stroke would have caused him to be terminally bedridden, as Lazlo had been during his episode of polio. He could not let that fate befall his father because that would have been cruel. Lazlo called the police and told them that his father must have expired while he was away getting help. The police believed him, and there was no inquest. Eli Meers’s death was ruled as “natural causes.”

  According to his father, killing was his right. Being cruel wasn’t. That was why Meers took special care not to be. On birds and animals, the organs were in similar places, depending on the size of the prey. Eccentricities did exist among the species, the location of the heart or the amount of entrails, yet that was only significant when it came to cleaning them. With humans, the organs were virtually in identical positions. Meers always aimed for the areas that would ensure a speedy death. Stabbing Julius Dekes in the liver killed him in under a minute. That was merciful by Meers’s standards.

  Following the hunt came the arduous process of removing the body. Meers trekked back to the refinery to retrieve the sled and harnesses in order to clear Dekes’s carcass from the tunnel. Though the remains would never have been found had he left them, the consequences of decay outweighed the effort required for eliminating them. The sewers were filthy and foul by nature, but they represented Meers’s private world, and he would go to extremes to preserve their sanctity.

  “It’s feeding time,” he proclaimed. Meers placed the piping hot food on a paper plate and retrieved the milk from the cooler. As with the cage’s trapdoor, the lone light in the pen was controlled from the observation room. The instant he switched off the bulb, Calvin’s voice erupted from below.

  “Hey. Hey. What chu’ doin’?”

  Soundlessly, Meers slipped into the pen, and his eyes quickly acclimated to the darkness. His others pets had huddled at the rear of the cage whenever the lights went out. Calvin, on the contrary, was at the bars, fondling the air, ready to grab whatever came in contact with his hands. He groped at nothing as Meers slid the meal into the open slot at the bottom of the cage, the carpet dampening the noise. The smell of the steak piqued Calvin’s reflexes. He was reaching out from between the bars toward Meers and raking the darkness with his fingers.

  “You in here? Huh, sucker? You such a tough guy, come on over here by this cage. Come and get me.”

  Meers would give Calvin his shot. He
would give him a head start. He would give him time to escape. After that, he would hunt him.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Sirens were caterwauling from somewhere in the distance, momentarily drowning out the chatter on the police band radio. The fervor over the previous night’s spate of fires had been supplanted by a new mayhem. Reports of snipers on rooftops were flooding into dispatch. Emmett was keeping a running list of the locations getting the heaviest fire so he could plot a safe course home.

  “Raise the volume,” he said to Freddie.

  “Newark police, hold your fire. State police, hold your fire,” commanded the dispatcher. “You’re shooting at each other. National Guardsmen, quit firing at the buildings. When the sparks fly, we think it’s snipers. Be sure of your targets.”

  “They shootin’ at each other?” Freddie was astounded.

  “Apparently.”

  An ambulance driver came on next, responding to a request for assistance. “Request denied. We won’t come anywhere on South Orange Avenue east of Norfolk. Been there twice. Been shot at twice. Repeat. Request denied.

  “How about the shotguns? Can we use shotguns?” someone from a patrol car was asking.

  “Knock that off,” dispatch ordered. “Do not use any shotguns.”

  “But they have ’em. They’re shooting at us and they have shotguns.”

  The various forces had finally gotten on the same radio frequency, but that hadn’t lessened the number of misunderstandings. Listening to the confusion was nerve-racking. It made Emmett’s head throb.

  “Can I turn it down now?” Freddie asked.

  “Please do.”

  Roadblocks were set up at short intervals along Broad Street. That forced the morass of traffic slowly onward like barges through locks in a canal. Few had heeded the curfew that prohibited driving. Newark rarely saw jams of that magnitude, except during the Christmas rush. The riot was the opposite of a holiday.

  “Can’t we go around?”