The Lightning Rule by Brett Ellen Block Read Free Book Online Page B

use their badges to get free coffee. With his hand in Emmett’s top drawer, Serletto had the nerve to claim he was borrowing a pen.
    “Maybe you should’ve enlisted with your brother,” Serletto had whispered to him. “Maybe you woulda come back in a bag instead.”
    Emmett decked him. He had never hit another man in anger in his entire life. The second his fist connected with Serletto’s jaw, Emmett realized that it was a trap, Serletto the bait. Emmett blamed himself for falling for it.
    Rather than suspending him for striking Serletto, the lieutenant ousted Emmett to the Records Room. So began the slow squeeze. Whoever Ahern truly took orders from—because it certainly wasn’t Inspector Plout—had demanded Fossum’s name, and the lieutenant was going to get it by whatever means necessary.
    “When I heard about this case with the colored kid in the train tunnel, I knew you were the right man for it, Martin.”
    Lieutenant Ahern took a soulful drag off his cigarette for emphasis. Two months earlier, he had put Emmett in his hip pocket until the day came when he could use him. That day had arrived.
    To investigate the crime, Emmett would likely have to go into the projects to interview the family. After last night’s skirmish, that would be a challenge. He was white and he was a cop. Without a partner, he had no backup. If instead Emmett let the case drop and did nothing, he would take the hit in the press and at the precinct, proving the rumors true, that he was unfit for duty. The lieutenant was offering a lose-lose proposition. Or so Ahern must have assumed.
    Emmett still had his badge and he still carried a weapon, howeverhis demotion to the basement told everyone that Lieutenant Ahern didn’t trust him. Getting an investigation of his own would change that. It would also give Emmett the chance he had been hoping for on the Vernon Young case.
    “You want the body or not?”
    Emmett didn’t answer. Ahern stabbed out his cigarette on the stone ledge. He wasn’t about to push Emmett down the proverbial stairs. He was going to let him fall.
    “Yeah. I’ll take it.”
    The lieutenant wouldn’t allow his satisfaction to show. “Then you should get a move on. Transit’s stopped service on the subway line on my orders. They’re telling the public it’s for maintenance. Won’t be able to hold the trains for more than an hour.”
    The Warren Street stop was on the city’s main subway artery. The fact that Ahern could get it shut down for any length of time attested to his power, a strong warning to Emmett. If the lieutenant could stop a train, there was no telling what else he was capable of.
    “Listen, Martin, I don’t want to see this niggerboy’s body on the front page of tomorrow’s newspaper. Whole city’d go up in smoke. Watts would look like a backyard barbecue. You hearing me?”
    Emmett had heard exactly what he needed to hear, but before he went to see the body, he had a call to make.

SIX
    Two patrolmen were there to meet Emmett at the subway station. They huddled in a sliver of shade under an overhang, acting like they had better things to do. When a woman in a minidress strolled by, the younger of the two swiveled his head after her. He would have whistled if Emmett hadn’t walked up.
    “Hot enough for you, Detective?” the officer with the wandering eye asked, grinning as if they were old friends.
    “Where’s the body?”
    “Over here, sir,” the older patrolman replied, flashing his partner a stifling glare.
    Repair signs and traffic cones cordoned off the doors, preventing people from entering. Inside, the station was steamy. The tiled walls retained the heat. Decorative mosaics depicting the old Morris Canal seemed molten in the humidity and ready to drip.
    Newark’s Seven City subway system had been constructed in the 1930s in the dry bed of the canal, which had been drained and filled forty years prior because the stagnant waters were a health hazard. Subway lines had run