Ed McBain
Lightning
This is for Ruth and Basil Levin
The city in these pages is imaginary.
The people, the places are all fictitious.
Only the police routine is based on established investigatory technique.
1
Detective Richard Genero did not like to go out on night calls. The truth of the matter was that the nighttime city scared him. There were all sorts of things that could happen to a person in this city once the sun went down. Even if the person happened to be a cop, things could happen to him. He knew plenty of cops who’d had things happen to them at night. Somehow, the things that happened to cops happened to them more often at night than during the day. That was one of the sacred precepts he had learned about police work, and he had formulated a rule about it and the rule was Never go out at night, an impossible rule to observe if you didn’t want your fellow police officers to think you were chickenshit.
Once, when Genero was still a patrolman, he was walking his beat one cold December night when he saw a light burning in a basement and, like a good cop, went down to investigate. He found a dead kid with a blue face and a rope around his neck. That was one of the things that had happened to him at night. Another time — well, that wasn’t even nighttime, that was during the day; things could happen to cops even during the daytime. He’d been walking his beat, it was raining, he remembered, and he’d seen somebody running away from a bus stop, and when he’d picked up the bag the person had left behind on the sidewalk, it had a human hand in it! A person’s hand! Cut off at the wrist and left on the sidewalk in an airlines bag! Boy, the things that could happen to cops, day or night. The way Genero figured it, you weren’t safe in this city no matter what time you went out in it.
He felt only a little safer with Carella by his side.
The two men had gone out at night because they were doing a follow-up on a crib burglary, and the victim worked as a night watchman at a construction site. It had taken Genero a long time to learn that a crib burglar wasn’t somebody who went around stealing beds that babies slept in. A crib, in a burglar’s vocabulary, was an apartment. A crib burglar was somebody who burglarized apartments, and that was usually done during the daytime, when most apartments were empty; the last thing a burglar wanted or needed was to walk in on some old lady who’d start screaming her head off. That was why burglars who went into office buildings went in at night, when everybody had gone home from work already, and usually they went in after the cleaning lady was finished, too. That was a safe rule for smart burglars to follow: Always go in when nobody’s there.
The burglar in this particular case had gone into the apartment at 2:00 in the afternoon and was confidently unplugging the television set in the living room when all of a sudden a guy in his pajamas walked in from the bedroom and said, “What the hell are you doing here?” The guy turned out to be a night watchman who worked at night and slept during the day, and the burglar ran like hell. Carella and Genero were here at the construction site tonight to show the watchman some mug shots, even though a safe rule for smart cops to follow was Never go out at night, even if you went with Carella. Carella wasn’t Superman. He wasn’t even Batman.
Carella was either a little over or a little under six feet tall, Genero wasn’t so good at estimating heights. He guessed Carella weighed about 180 pounds, but he wasn’t so good at weights, either. Carella had brown eyes, slanty like a Chink’s, and he walked like a baseball player. His hair was only slightly lighter than his eyes, and he never wore a hat. Genero had been out with him in the worst rainstorms, and there was Carella marching around bareheaded, as if he didn’t know you could catch a cold that way. Genero liked being partnered with Carella because he figured Carella was a man you could count on if something was about to happen. The very thought of something about to happen made Genero nervous, but he didn’t think anything was going to happen tonight because it was already 3:00 a.m. when they finished showing the mug shots to the burglary victim, and he figured they’d head back to the squadroom, have a cup of coffee and some donuts, do some paperwork, and wait for the day shift to come in at a quarter to 8:00.
The night was almost balmy for October.
Genero came out of the construction site ahead of Carella because he thought he’d heard some rats scampering around when they were skirting the edge of the excavation, and if there was one thing he hated worse than spiders, it was rats. Especially at night. Even on a mild October night like this one. He breathed deeply of the autumn air, glad to be out of the fenced-in area with its great mounds of earth and its open gaping holes and steel girders lying around everywhere so a man could trip over them and break his head and get eaten by rats in the dark.
The construction site occupied one side of the entire street, and the other side was all abandoned buildings. In this neighborhood, a landlord got tired of paying taxes, he simply abandoned the building. The abandoned row of empty tenements faced the construction site, looking like soot-stained ghosts in the light of the moon. They gave Genero the creeps. He was willing to bet there were thousands of rats in those abandoned buildings, staring out at him from windows as black as eyeless sockets. He took a package of cigarettes from his jacket pocket — it was mild enough to be going around without an overcoat — and was starting to light one when he happened to look up the street.
Carella was just coming through the gate in the fence behind him.
What Genero thought he saw was a person hanging from a lamppost.
The person was attached to the end of a long thick rope.
The person hung twisting gently on the still October air.
The match burned Genero’s fingers. He dropped it just as Carella saw the body at the end of the rope. Genero wanted to run. He did not like to be the one to discover dead bodies, or even parts of dead bodies; Genero had a large aversion to corpses. He blinked his eyes because he’d never seen a body hanging like this one except in Western movies, and he figured if he blinked it might go away. Even the boy in the basement hadn’t been hanging like this one, hadn’t been hanging at all when you got right down to it, had just been sort of leaning forward on the cot, the rope around his neck, the end of it tied to the barred basement window. When Genero opened his eyes again, Carella was running toward the lamppost, and the body was still hanging there, dangling there on the air, twisting, as if a posse had found a rustler and strung him up on the spot.
Only this wasn’t Utah.
This was the big bad city.
“What the hell is this?” Monroe said. “The Wild West?”
He was looking up at the hanging body. His partner was looking up too, shading his eyes against the glow of the sodium vapor bulb at the end of the lamppost’s arm. They had put sodium vapor bulbs in this part of the city only last month, on the theory that bright lights prevented crime. So here was a body hanging from a lamppost.
“This is the French Revolution,” Monoghan said, “is what it is.”
“The French Revolution was they cut off your head,” Monroe said.
“They also hung you,” Monoghan said.
The two men, despite the unusual fall weather, were both wearing overcoats. The overcoats were black. It was de rigeur for Homicide cops in this city to wear black. It was a custom. It was not a custom for Homicide cops to wear pearl gray fedoras, but both Monoghan and Monroe were wearing them, the snap brims neatly turned down. Genero was pleased to see that they were wearing hats. His mother had told him to always wear a hat, even on the hottest days, especially on the hottest days because then you wouldn’t get sunstroke. Today hadn’t been particularly hot, just unusually mild for October, but Genero was wearing a hat, anyway. You could never be too careful.