Nickel City Storm Warning (Gideon Rimes Book 3) by Gary Ross (100 best novels of all time txt) 📗

“You free for a talk this morning?” he asked.

“Got some work to do,” I said. “How about lunch?”

He hesitated a moment, lips pursed in thought. “All right, twelve-thirty. My treat.”

“Then I guess whatever’s got you so serious isn’t my fault.”

“Just like when you were a kid.” He relaxed a bit and smiled. “Something was always your fault till I told you it wasn’t. Well, it isn’t, so don’t take responsibility for it. I’ll pick you up at your office.”

I nearly said I would drive, but the look on his face told me he needed to get behind the wheel himself.

At twelve-thirty-nine I checked my office window for the third time and saw Bobby’s old silver Camry slide to the curb in front of the laundromat below. Pulling on a black denim jacket to cover the baby Glock in my shoulder rig, I hurried downstairs and pulled open the passenger door.

“Sorry I’m late.” His silvery hair had been thinning more in the past year so he had taken to wearing hats and caps. Today’s was a beige summer-weight tam. “I got tied up.”

“If you mean literally and you’re coming from Kayla’s, I don’t want to hear about it.”

He laughed. For the first time in weeks, the laugh was his—full-bodied and unchecked, stretching his cheeks, and fanning up into the crinkly corners of his eyes. It felt good to hear it.

We drove north to Pano’s-On-Elmwood and didn’t bother trying to find room amid the cars in the small lot adjacent to the restaurant. A space opened up five or six doors ahead. After he claimed it, Bobby activated the Buffalo Roams parking app on his phone and paid for two hours. Then he retrieved a small briefcase from the rear seat. We walked back.

Despite the change in ownership, a new blue-themed décor, and the addition of On-Elmwood to the name, the menu was still mostly Greek. The lunchtime crowd was as large as ever. But our wait was short. We were shown to an upstairs table by a window overlooking Elmwood. The street was full of pedestrians, likely from places nearby—Buff State, the Albright-Knox and Burchfield-Penney art galleries, the Hotel Henry, or the new condos at Elmwood and Forest—as they searched for food, sunshine, or merchandise from specialty shops. It was a preview of the coming summer when crowd size would double.

Bobby folded his hat and put it in the breast pocket of his sports jacket, which he draped over the bamboo chair back. I unbuttoned my jacket but left it on. Our server was a slender young man in a black shirt and khaki pants, with a nametag that said BRAD. We were ready to order before he set glasses of water on the marble-topped table and handed us menus. Spanakopita for Bobby, chicken souvlaki for me, and iced tea for both of us. Before and during our meal, we talked of routine things. Casual things. Normal things. What to get Mira and Shakti for their birthdays, hers in July and his in October. The Danube River cruise Bobby and Kayla would take in September. Whether the Camry could survive another winter. After Brad cleared our table and refilled our glasses, Bobby pulled the briefcase at his feet onto his lap. From it, he withdrew a legal-sized file folder.

“What tied me up today was Jonah,” he said. “I wanted to discuss some of this with you before I saw him at ten to finalize. But you couldn’t, and I realized the decisions were mine anyway so I went ahead without you.”

I nodded, already certain I knew where he was headed.

He pulled papers from the folder and passed a thick stapled document to me. “My updated will. I also have copies for Mira and Kayla.”

I read the first few lines—more or less identical to the will I already had at home in my fireproof document lockbox. Then I looked at Bobby and swallowed. With my parents and his wife Evelyn long dead, along with friends and comrades in arms, I was no stranger to death’s theft of loved ones. But in the absence of the others, Bobby was a constant in my life, in my grasp of reality, an anchor who long ago had begun to seem eternal. That he felt his mortality now sparked an anger I had not expected—not at him but at the skinheads who had reminded him he was going to die. As was the case with most non-lethal assaults that lacked definitive evidence, the police had moved on to more pressing matters. I was still no closer to identifying the assailants myself, which meant much of my anger was directed inward.

“I’ll find them, Bobby.” I looked right at him, to let him know I understood what was tearing him apart from the inside. “I’ll make them pay for what they did to you.”

He was quiet a moment, studying me, making me squirm as he had whenever he’d caught the teen-aged me in a lie. “Then what? You take them on yourself when none of us can be certain we got a good enough look at them? What happens when the case is kicked? Even if you track them down and bury them all, do you think it ends there? However deep the ground, the cancer in their hearts will make its way to the surface and find another soul to feed on. Another person to beat up. Another synagogue or mosque or church to deface, or worse, to shoot up on Facebook Live.” Face taut, he swallowed hard. “How many times in recent years have I gone to an interfaith service held after a slaughter? How many times have I heard the minister introduce the rabbi, the priest introduce the imam, the Buddhist introduce the Sikh or Hindu or Taoist so they can all say the same things about love and hate?”

I placed my right hand over his left. “By trying to help, you may have been the thing that prevented