Lightning

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The city in these pages is imaginary.

The people, the places are all fictitious.

Only the police routine is based on established investigatory technique.

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.

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