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

Two crazy sisters with four boys and one girl between them, all crammed in a narrow trailer. Bed bugs, lice, disease, poor nutrition. Add to that failing in school until he was old enough to drop out, an inability to form attachments to women, and unresolved homosexual feelings for his smarter cousin. All the boys are dead now, except Hellman, and so are both mothers. The sister his cousins raped repeatedly as he watched and did nothing? She’s the real survivor of that horror show. She ran away the first chance she got and changed her name. She’s a respected professional now, happily married with children and living nowhere near Pennsylvania.”

“We questioned her,” Tripp said. “She knows nothing about a hidden thirty grand. If it exists, it didn’t come from her. She said also if she knew where it was and he’d touched it, she would burn every bill.”

“You know what else the psychiatrists revealed at trial?” I said.

Scowling, Joey waited a beat before responding. “You like making me look stupid, don’t you? Both of you.” He started to push himself to his feet, but Aronson put a hand on his arm.

“A trial will be worse for you, Mr. Snell. I advise you to let them finish.”

Joey dropped back into his chair.

“I’m not enjoying any of this,” I said. “Jasper Hellman was the follower but like his cousin, he has no conscience and is capable of anything. You need to understand how he used you so you’ll give Mr. Caster any help he needs. All right?”

“Yeah.” Joey looked down at his cuffed hands for a moment. “But I gotta say I wish I never laid eyes on you.”

“One last thing and you’ll never see me again.”

Joey rubbed the back of his neck. “Then get it over with.”

“The mothers never got the kids vaccinated,” I said. “Some religious thing. Measles and chickenpox went through the family when the kids were young. But mumps waited till Hellman and Tull were teenagers. Hellman’s case was the most severe. Bag Man’s bag got so inflamed it left him unable to father children. Which means there’s no daughter who could have paid you either.”

Joey was quiet a long time. Then he looked up, eyes glistening but not filling enough to send tears down his cheeks. “Same as always,” he said. “When you got nothing else to fuck, fuck Joey.”

11

In my career I had been to my share of lockups—army stockades, jails and holding centers, medium and maximum security prisons, even Abu Ghraib in Iraq. But nowhere had felt quite like Attica Correctional Facility, the supermax nearly forty miles from Buffalo. Everything about it was gray—the thirty-foot wall surrounding the sprawling grounds, the guard towers that seemed to belong to another age, the overcast sky, the grass which had yet to find its rich summer green. Even the air smelled gray. As I sat in my car packing into the biometric safe my watch, gun, baton, tactical pen, wallet, iPhone, and anything else I could not take through visitor processing, I thought about all I had read in preparation for my visit.

With the inmate uprising in 1971, Attica joined the top tier of American maximum-security prisons that marched into legend through news, song, film, and television: Alcatraz, San Quentin, Folsom, Leavenworth. Alcatraz had its Birdman and a host of movies with Burt Lancaster, Clint Eastwood, and Sean Connery. San Quentin had mass murderers Juan Corona and Charles Manson, Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin Sirhan Sirhan, a Bogart movie, and concerts by B.B. King and Johnny Cash. Folsom had a couple of Johnny Cash concerts too, as well as his best-selling album At Folsom Prison and a role in the Cash biopic, Walk the Line. Leavenworth had held Boston mobster Whitey Bulger early in his career, James Earl Ray a dozen years before he shot Martin Luther King, and self-taught ornithologist Robert Stroud for thirty years before a transfer made the Birdman of Leavenworth the Birdman of Alcatraz.

Because of the uprising, however, Attica was different. It had held fabled bank robber Willy Sutton before 1971 and Son of Sam killer David Berkowitz, John Lennon’s assassin Mark David Chapman, and Long Island Railroad shooter Colin Ferguson well afterward. But with reports of racism, inhumane conditions, and forty-three dead after the New York State Police regained control by force, the prison became the focus of corrections reform and racial and social justice advocacy. After five decades of books, films, documentaries, TV specials, songs, investigations, lawsuits, and still unreleased reports, Attica, as chanted by Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon, was still a one-word political firestorm.

Even though it was a weekday, the lines were long—Black and Latino visitors with a handful of whites, a sprinkling of men but mainly wives and girlfriends, some with children in tow, and mothers waiting to see their sons. I knew processing would take a long time. In addition to my driver’s license, I had my PI license and my old CID investigator card in the hope that somewhere along the way I would get a professional courtesy. It still took an hour, the only courtesy a reminder my CID card was expired and invalid for visits. Metal detector, light pat-downs, information forms completed with a stubby rubber pen, and having my photo taken for the visitor data system. But most of it was waiting my turn and passing one CCTV camera after another as prison personnel checked documents, searched diaper bags, and scanned people with a wand. I listened to the buzz of conversations around me, some in Spanish, most in English: “Girl, be glad it ain’t Saturday or Sunday or we might not never get there ‘fore cut-off.” “No, baby, Daddy can’t come home with us this time but he will be so happy to see you!” “Felt like the damn bus driver tried to hit every pothole he saw.” “What you mean this shirt too tight? I ain’t got nothing else to wear!”

It was noon when I reached the general population visitation