The Lightning Rule (3 page)

Emmett smelled the fire before he saw it. Smoke was billowing out of a burning abandoned car on Livingston Avenue, opposite the Fourth Precinct, a common sight in the Central Ward. The city wouldn’t pay to tow abandoned cars, rendering them fair game to be stripped for parts. Their skeletal hulls were left on the curb and often set alight, as this one was. Silhouetted in the glow of the flames, figures darted across the road. From somewhere far off, a fire truck was wailing. Close by, glass was breaking. None of it was uncommon for the neighborhood. What Emmett witnessed next was. As he drove closer, he saw packs of people hurling bottles, stones, and debris at the police station. Officers outside were dodging the onslaught, scrambling for the safety of the precinct.

Adrenaline and disbelief churned in Emmett’s head. He had to get into the station house. The precinct’s lot would be prime pickings for vandals, so he circled and parked at a distance. His Dodge Coronet was almost ten years old and it blended in with the other automobiles on the streets. The sole benefit of his low civil service salary was that he couldn’t afford the kind of car that would catch a criminal’s eye.

Since running might attract attention, Emmett moved in quick, measured steps toward the station. While he was safer dressed as a civilian,
many in the ward would recognize him as a cop nonetheless. In the dark, in the confusion, Emmett would be a target either way.

His key let him duck in the station’s rear door, and he hurried to the entrance hall, where it was pandemonium. With its high ceiling and massive staircase, the hall was a grand space in an otherwise unremarkable building, and it was filled to the corners with jostling bodies, a blur of blue uniforms and black faces. Patrolmen were hustling men two at a time toward the holding cells, towing them by their handcuffed wrists. The din of voices and shuffling feet reverberated through the hall. Some of the station’s front windows were cracked, some broken, paper hastily taped over the missing panes. Emmett spotted Nolan rushing past and caught him by the shoulder.

“What happened?”

“It’s crazy. This is crazy.” The kid was panting, rambling, eyes frantic. “They all just showed up and starting shouting that they wanted to see him, that we had to let him go.”

“Officer,” Emmett said sharply, snapping Nolan from a tailspin. “Who’s ‘him’?”

“Ben White. The cabdriver. I thought it was a phony name. I thought this was some kinda joke, some kinda initiation. But I saw Tillet and Donolfo bring him in. Said they were double-parked on Fifteenth Street and this guy in a Safety Company cab cut around ’em. Said he was resisting arrest. Took four guys to carry him in here. One on each arm and leg. They brought him to a cell and they um….” Nolan couldn’t put what he had seen into words or didn’t want to. “The cabbie, he didn’t look too hot when they were finished. Get me?”

Emmett didn’t recognize the arresting officers’ names, however he was acquainted with what they had done. It was referred to as “handling” an arrest, an activity that took place with the troubling regularity of a hacking cough that comes back again and again, portending some more serious illness. In the last year, two suspects had been shot by officers from the Fourth Precinct, the first during a routine traffic stop, the other after a search for contraband. Both incidents were labeled as “accidental weapons discharges.” A third suspect had died in custody under what the
newspapers called “mysterious circumstances.” The real mystery was how the higher-ups kept the press from learning about the man’s crushed skull, care of a nightstick. Those were the reports that never made it to the Records Room: no file, no way to press charges.

The abuse was needless, reprehensible, but Emmett’s hands were tied. His father used to say, “Keep your hands away from the moving parts or you won’t keep your hands.” That was the rule at the Westinghouse plant. Men lost fingers to the saws, wrenched their spines operating machinery, had arms crushed in presses. If they put themselves in harm’s way, they would get hurt. The same was true of the department. Emmett was being ostracized as it was, and making a stink would only worsen his situation. He had to keep his hands to himself.

“They must’ve hurt Smith bad. The floor of the cell was covered with blood.” The memory made Nolan visibly queasy.

Most local residents were too afraid to lodge complaints against the police for fear of harassment or retaliation, fretful of meeting a similar fate as the cabdriver. If someone did venture to make a formal statement, the investigation would be forwarded along the chain of command to the police director, Wallace Sloakes, who would determine if the case merited a departmental trial. Such trials were unique unto themselves because Sloakes alone sat as judge. A born salesman who happened to wear a badge, he was as dirty as he was undiplomatic, and of the seventy complaints of brutality received that year, Sloakes permitted three to be taken to trial. Only one officer was deemed guilty. The punishment was a reprimand and a three-day suspension. Even the chief magistrate of the municipal court had ceased hearing civil cases dealing with charges against policemen, claiming they needlessly clogged the courts. Anybody brave enough to file a complaint faced an impenetrable bulwark of policemen and city officials. The system favored the force, and that was as strong a deterrent as a billy club. Normally, there would be no recourse for a cabdriver carried in by his arms and legs and beaten in a holding cell. That night, there was.

“I don’t know how they found out,” Nolan said. “I guess somebody saw Tillet and Donolfo wailin’ on the guy.”

“They?”

“Them. The people outside. They came pouring outta Hayes. You’d a thought it was a goddamn parade.”

The Hayes Home Housing Projects was a sprawling, ten-building complex situated catty-corner from the Fourth Precinct. Cops were called there on a daily basis, and those reports constituted a sizable share of the station’s cases. Thirteen stories tall, the brick behemoths loomed over the neighborhood, a ramshackle stronghold punched through by windows set apart like arrow slots in a castle. Hayes had seen its share of battles—battles about the landlord’s lack of repairs, rampant burglaries, and drug pushers prowling the halls. Apparently, the tenants had brought the fight out into the streets.

“Then that guy, that preacher guy, he came and demanded to see the cabbie.”

“Who? Mose Odett?”

“Yeah, that’s him. The one who’s always getting himself in the news.”

Mose Odett was a self-fashioned activist from Hayes who wore secondhand three-piece suits and spoke to everyone as though he was on a podium. More a radical than a militant, he organized rent strikes and sit-ins to push for enforcement of housing codes in the tenement. Slumlords and councilmen alike cringed at the mere mention of Odett’s name, which was in the paper as much as the mayor’s, where he made a point of punctuating every interview with the phrase “police brutality,” whether it applied to the topic or not. Emmett respected Odett’s convictions, if not his showboating, and admired his antiviolence stance. He wondered if that stance had changed.

“Did Odett get in?”

“We got the word to let him through. Then the inspector gave Odett a bull horn and fifteen minutes to make everybody beat it.”

Inspector Herbert Plout ran the Fourth Precinct. Twenty years on the force and a yielding personality had garnered him the position. A reed-thin man who moved his hands too much when he talked, Plout was as good as gum on the heel of a shoe when it came to a crisis. Emmett didn’t see him in the crowd. The inspector was presumably
holed up in his office, having reports ferried to him from the front lines.

“What happened when Odett—”

A barrage of stones pummeled the station, interrupting Emmett midsentence. The hail of rocks and garbage thundered against the exterior walls. The precinct was under siege. Squeals of shattering glass made Nolan jump. The young patrolman’s eyes glazed, unable to regain his train of thought. Emmett grabbed Nolan’s sleeve to force him to focus. “Keep talking, Officer.”

“Odett was preaching to everyone to go home. But they wouldn’t go. They shouted him down. They won’t go away. Why won’t they go away?” The kid was pleading for an answer Emmett didn’t have.

A hush came over the room, and the bodies packed into the entrance hall parted. Police Director Sloakes was hacking a path through the melee, ordering officers aside. Someone had smuggled him in the back door, an indignity the image-conscious director would have resented if it weren’t for his own personal security.

Nolan was staring along with everyone else. “Who’s that?”

“A man whose acquaintance you’re better off not making.”

Emmett had met Sloakes twice, two occasions too many. His fourth year on the force, Emmett had taken the civil service exam to become a detective and passed with only one error. In spite of his score, he needed Sloakes’s approval to advance. As director, Sloakes had the discretion to assign patrolmen to the Detective Division, and his inaugural act upon entering office was to shuffle the squads, inserting his croanies into the plainclothes and gambling details that raked in the most profit from their precincts. During Emmett’s first meeting with him, Sloakes paged through his personnel file with a sly grin, vaguely amused, then slotted him into the Robbery Division with nothing more than a handshake and a cryptic suggestion to do his best. Recently, Emmett had had his second meeting with the director. Sloakes called him in unexpectedly. He was advancing Emmett yet again. This time, inexplicably, up to Homicide. Emmett hadn’t requested the assignment. Robbery was simple, safe, and, in the Central Ward, there was a constant supply of cases. He would never have requested to be in the Homicide
Division, however he couldn’t refuse the promotion. That seemed somehow fitting to Emmett. His Catholic morality made him feel as if he deserved the position for that exact reason—because he didn’t want it. Emmett had spent three weeks on the squad before bottoming out in the basement. He couldn’t blame Sloakes for that. Nevertheless, he preferred to stay off the director’s radar. Emmett eased toward the staircase and out of view.

“What in the name of all that’s holy is going on here?” Sloakes bellowed. He had a bland face and worked hard to fake charisma that didn’t come naturally to him.

Inspector Plout finally appeared, fawning over the director and trying to usher him to his office. “I went out and explained that the cabdriver was gone, that he’d been taken to the hospital. It didn’t help.”

Plout whispered a postscript in Sloakes’s ear, to which the director shook his head adamantly and said, “No, damn it. These men should be outside. Around the building.”

Suddenly, a Molotov cocktail exploded against the station’s facade. Emmett yanked Nolan behind him, and everyone hit the floor. A spray of orange flames licked the broken windows.

“Get these men in helmets. I want a nightstick in every hand,” Sloakes barked while Plout did his best to disappear into the wall. “Give me a perimeter. Where’s the fire department? Where are the damn fire trucks?”

A band of officers brushed by Emmett and Nolan, going toward the supply room for the helmets and nightsticks, which they passed out bucket-brigade style. Contrary to an actual bucket brigade, neither would help quell the fires outside.

“You coming?” Nolan asked, being swept into the receiving line.

Emmett was about to reply when he was jerked by the arm and pulled up the stairs.

“What do you think you’re doing here, Detective?”

Lieutenant Declan Ahern couldn’t meet Emmett eye to eye even with an extra step between them, but he made up for the height difference in sheer presence. At fifty, he had a full head of bristled silver hair and a boxer’s flat-bridged nose. Born and bred in the city’s West Ward,
where the Irish gangs and the police were one and the same, Ahern had to choose at a young age between being a criminal proper and being a cop. Emmett pictured him flipping a coin.

“The desk sergeant called me.”

“He shouldn’t have. You’re on restricted duty for striking an officer, remember?”

The lieutenant took a dark delight in reminding him. During an argument, Emmett had punched another detective in his division, though that infraction was not the real grounds for his reassignment. The truth behind his demotion struck harder than any right hook and hit below the belt. Emmett knew it, and so did Ahern.

“You ready to get out of the basement and back on a regular shift? Say the word. You’ve kept me waiting a long time, Martin, and I’m not one for waiting.”

Men shouldered past them on the stairwell, forcing the lieutenant chest to chest with him.

“How long can you wait? Huh, Emmett?”

Being in the basement was like holding his breath. To come up for air, all he had to do was tell Ahern what he wanted to hear. On principle, Emmett couldn’t do it. He hemmed his mouth, holding on to the words to prevent them from prying out.

“Fine,” the lieutenant said. “You started this. Until you have an answer for me, I’m gonna forget you’re alive.”

Entombment in the Records Room with his career on hold indefinitely was no idle threat. Ahern didn’t make idle threats, only real ones. He let go his grip on Emmett’s arm, yet Emmett continued to feel it.

“Go home, Detective. You’re no good to me here.”

Emmett bit down on his anger and said nothing. Disobeying a direct order wouldn’t do him any good either. At that moment, he wasn’t much use anywhere or to anyone, especially himself.

Sloakes was furiously motioning Ahern over and shouting to nobody in particular, “Put the windows in tomorrow morning and get this place cleaned up. Return to normal and don’t treat this as a situation. Because once you start treating problems as problems they become problems.”

The main door to the station swung open, wafting in the scent of
seared metal and the dying whine of sirens. Reinforcements had arrived. Patrolmen in yellow helmets wielding their newly acquired nightsticks went pouring outside, clubbing anyone within reach. Emmett was sucked into the swirling throng of men clamoring to get at the action, and for the first time in months, he left through the Fourth Precinct’s front entrance. The lieutenant had made it clear that this was not his problem. Emmett had problems of his own.