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  Praise for Ed McBain & the 87th Precinct

  “Raw and realistic…The bad guys are very bad, and the good guys are better.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  “Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series…simply the best police procedurals being written in the United States.”

  —Washington Post

  “The best crime writer in the business.”

  —Houston Post

  “Ed McBain is a national treasure.”

  —Mystery News

  “It’s hard to think of anyone better at what he does. In fact, it’s impossible. “

  —Robert B. Parker

  “I never read Ed McBain without the awful thought that I still have a lot to learn. And when you think you’re catching up, he gets better.”

  —Tony Hillerman

  “McBain is the unquestioned king…light years ahead of anyone else in the field.”

  —San Diego Union-Tribune

  “McBain tells great stories.”

  —Elmore Leonard

  “Pure prose poetry…It is such writers as McBain who bring the great American urban mythology to life.”

  —The London Times

  “The McBain stamp: sharp dialogue and crisp plotting.”

  —Miami Herald

  “You’ll be engrossed by McBain’s fast, lean prose.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “McBain redefines the American police novel…he can stop you dead in your tracks with a line of dialogue.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “The wit, the pacing, his relish for the drama of human diversity [are] what you remember about McBain novels.”

  —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “McBain is a top pro, at the top of his game.”

  —Los Angeles Daily News

  LIGHTNING

  AN 87TH PRECINCT NOVEL

  Ed McBain

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright (c)1984 Hui Corporation

  Republished in 2011

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN: 978-1-61218-175-2

  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.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  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 ab
andoned 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.

  “You get lynchings up here, huh?” Monoghan said to Carella.

  “Yeah, we get all kinds of shit up here,” Carella said.

  He was looking up at the dead body slowly twisting on the end of the rope. As always, but only for the briefest tick of an instant, he felt a sharp dagger of pain behind his eyes. The waste, he thought.

  “You get the French Revolution up here,” Monoghan said.

  “You get the Wild West up here,” Monroe said.

  They both stood in the street, their hands in their coat pockets, looking up at the dead body.

  “Nice white panties,” Monoghan said, looking up under her skirt.

  One of the dead girl’s shoes had fallen to the pavement. A purple French-heeled shoe, the color of her blouse. Her skirt was the color of wheat, the color of her hair. Her panties, as Monroe had already observed, were white. She hung dangling above the detectives, slowly twisting at the end of the rope, a purple shoe on one foot.

  “Looks how old, would you say?” Monoghan asked.

  “Hard to tell from here,” Monroe said.

  “Let’s cut her down,” Monoghan said.

  “No,” Carella said. “Not till the ME gets here.”

  “And the PU,” Genero said.

  He was referring to the Photographic Unit. The men stood under the lamppost, looking up at the dead girl. A crowd had gathered. It was now 3:15 in the morning, but a crowd had gathered from nowhere, filtering in from the side streets onto this deserted street with its abandoned buildings and its construction site. Any hour of the day or night, there were people awake in this city. Genero thought it was a conspiracy, everybody being awake day or night. The four patrolmen, who’d responded in two separate RMP cars when Carella called in the 10-29, were busily erecting barricades and trying to keep the crowd back. Somebody in the crowd thought it wasn’t a real girl hanging there. He commented that it was a dummy or something. They were probably shooting a movie or something. A television show. They were always shooting movies or television shows in this city. It was a very photogenic city. The girl kept twisting at the end of the rope.

  “How do you hang somebody on a city street,” Monroe said, “without nobody seeing you?”

  Carella was wondering the same thing.

  “Maybe she hung herself,” Monoghan said.

  “So then where’s the ladder or whatever?” Monroe said.

  “Up here in the Eight-Seven,” Monoghan said, “she coulda hung herself and somebody coulda stole the ladder later.”

  “Anyway, it’s hanged,” Monroe said.

  “Whattya mean it’s hanged?” Monoghan said.

  “A person hangs himself, you say he got hanged. Not hung.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “It’s common knowledge.”

  “Hanged?”

  “Right.”

  “That don’t sound right. Hanged.”

  “It’s right, though.”

  “You see a guy with a big dork,” Monoghan said, “you don’t say he’s well-hanged, you say he’s well-hung.”

  “That’s a different thing entirely,” Monroe said. “We’re talking here about a different thing entirely.”

  “When you hang up your suit on a hanger, you don’t say I hanged up my suit,” Monoghan said. “You say I hung up my suit.”

  “That’s also different,” Monroe said.

  “How is it different?”

  “It’s different because when you hang somebody then the person has been hanged, he has not been hung.”

  Genero didn’t know which one of them was right, but he was enjoying the conversation. Carella was walking around the lamppost, hatless, looking at the sidewalk and the street. Genero was wondering what Carella expected to find. There was just the usual shit in the gutter—cigarette butts, gum wrappers, crumpled paper cups, like that. The debris of the city.

  “So what do we do here?” Monoghan asked. “Stand around all night waiting for the ME?” He looked at his watch. “What time did you call this in, Carella?”

  “Three-oh-six,” Carella said.

  “And how many seconds?” Monroe asked, and Monoghan burst out laughing.

  Genero looked at his watch. “Twelve minutes ago,” he said.

  “So where’s the ME?” Monoghan said.

  A man in the crowd stepped out boldly from behind the barricade when one of the patrolmen turned his back. He walked over to where the detectives were gathered in a knot under the lamppost. He had obviously been appointed spokesman for the spectators. He assumed the polite, deferential air most citizens of this city affected when they were asking information of policemen.

  “Excuse me, sir,” he said to Monoghan, “but can you tell me what happened here?”

  “Fuck off,” Monoghan said politely.

  “Get over there behind the barricade,” Monroe said.

  “Is the young lady dead?” the man said.

  “No, she’s learning how to fly,” Monoghan said.

  “She’s wearing a safety rope and learning how to fly,” Monroe said.

  “Shell be flapping her arms any minute,” Monoghan said.

  “Get back there behind the barricade and you can watch her,” Mo
nroe said.

  The man looked up at the dead girl twisting at the end of the rope. He did not think the girl was learning to fly. But he went back behind the barricade anyway, and reported to the others what he’d just been told.

  “You ever get anybody hung before?” Monoghan asked Carella.

  “Hanged,” Monroe said.

  “Few hanging suicides,” Carella said. “Nothing like this, though.”

  “A real hanging, you need a good drop,” Monroe said. “Most of your hanging suicides, they get up on a chair, put the rope around their neck, and then jump off the chair. You don’t hang that way, you suffocate. You need a good drop for a hanging.”

  “Why’s that?” Genero asked. He was interested. His mother had advised him to listen carefully all the time because that was the way you learned things.

  “‘Cause what happens in a real hanging, the rope…the knot up there…”

  “Regular hangman’s knot up there,” Monoghan said, looking up. “The drop snaps the knot up against the back of the guy’s neck, and it breaks his neck, that’s what happens. But you need a good drop, six feet or more, otherwise the rope just suffocates the guy. You get a lot of amateurs trying to hang themselves, they just choke to death. Guy wants to kill himself, he ought to learn how to do it right.”

  “I had a suicide once, he stabbed himself in the heart,” Monoghan said.

  “So?” Monroe said.

  “I’m just saying.”

  “Well, you get all kinds,” Genero said, trying to sound worldly and experienced.

  “For sure, kid,” Monoghan said, solemnly agreeing with him.

  “Here’s the ME,” Monroe said.

  “About time,” Monoghan said, and looked at his watch again.

  The assistant medical examiner was a man named Paul Blaney. He had been at an all-night poker game when he’d been summoned to the scene. He was angry because he’d been sitting with a full boat, kings over threes, when the phone rang. He’d insisted on playing out the hand before he’d left, and had lost the pot to four jacks. Blaney was a short man with a scraggly black mustache, eyes that looked violet in a certain light, and a bald head that looked very shiny under the sodium vapors. He greeted the men curtly, and then looked up at the hanging girl.