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

room and took a seat. As I waited for the man I had come to see, I took stock of where I was. Some women embraced and kissed men in prison greens or visiting day street clothes before they sat across from them. They would repeat the clipped show of affection when it was time to leave. There were soft toys and coloring books for the children. Disney characters and pictures of flowers and landscapes were painted on cinder block walls where men posed with their families or partners for Instax pictures visitors could buy. A Latino couple in their early twenties stood in front of Donald Duck, the man in his jumpsuit and the woman in a pink sweater and jeans. With an arm around each other, they smiled broadly. But her head rested against his shoulder at exactly the right angle for the overhead lights to find the moisture in her eyes.

I looked away and let out a long breath. Whatever the man had done to end up here, the woman was suffering as well. As were all the visitors, except me. However tough I was, or thought I was, I was Bobby’s kid. His capacity for empathy had shaped mine. I saw the pain behind the smiles and hugs in the room. I pictured these women and children aboard the busses in the parking lot, traveling back to New York City or Albany or some other corner of the Empire State, staring at the five Instax photos they had been allowed to buy. If I had been an attorney or here to take a deposition, I could have avoided the wave of emotion by using one of the small lawyer rooms off to the side. But feeling was the price of living.

At half-past noon Jasper Hellman appeared in the doorway.

My mind spun back to the day my partner Jimmy Doran pulled our cruiser into a Buffalo State parking lot and we saw Hellman kneeling beside a woman on her back. For all we knew when we opened our doors, the middle-aged man in a dirty tan Carhart jacket and red cap was helping someone who had fallen. We had no idea Marv Tull—in a checked jacket and heavy jeans and standing with his back to us—had just shot Solange Aucoin with a silenced automatic or that Hellman was fumbling for the car keys under her body. When Tull looked over his shoulder, he flashed us a friendly smile meant to be disarming. Even though our hands were on our service pistols, we were still processing the tableau when he whirled and fired twice. The explosion of the driver side window was louder than the snap of the suppressor. Jimmy went down as Tull turned to me. His gun snapped as I cleared my holster. The bullet went into a light pole behind me. I squeezed off two center mass shots and a third when he wouldn’t fall. As Tull dropped, Hellman was on one knee and rising. He put an unsilenced bullet in my door panel. I caught him in the gut, two of my four shots punching through him into Solange Aucoin’s Hyundai.

Seconds I couldn’t count. A hesitation too costly to forget. Never again.

Now, in loose-fitting greens, Hellman shuffled in and started toward my table. He looked thinner than when I shot him. As he drew near, his smile revealed bad teeth and a sublime satisfaction he had rattled me into a visit. He was close to fifty now, sallow-skinned and wearing horn rims. His hairline had receded, leaving graying brown strands stuck to his forehead as if with sweat. He chuckled when he reached me.

“I don’t get many visitors so I knew this had to be somebody real special. I’m so glad it’s you.” His voice had a peculiar raspy quality that swung back and forth between a high and low pitch as if he were comedian Gilbert Gottfried moonlighting as a Muppet in his spare time. “So, how you doin’, my nigga?”

The nearest corrections officer—young, thickset, dark-skinned—said nothing, but like most Black men he had a low threshold for the word nigger. He glanced at Hellman as he scanned the room.

“Just fine, Bag Man,” I said. “How’s it hanging?”

Hellman’s smile disappeared and his volume dropped. “Same place it always hangs, you black sumbitch.” He sat across from me, glasses looking as if he hadn’t cleaned them in three days, a stark contrast to his close shave. “Some suit came here to interview me about a kid who did time in my block. Seems like the kid got beat down trying to start a fight with some jerkoff on the street. Told the DA he did it for me.” He half-smiled and shrugged. “I don’t know nothing about it. Can’t even remember meeting the kid when he was here.”

“Kids do dumb things,” I said. “Especially when they’re promised big money.”

“Maybe but I wouldn’t know anything about it.”

“A wise thing to say. Still, a man’s got to be smart to get another man to risk his life doing what he can’t get to do himself.” I tapped my temple. “Pretty smart.”

Hellman nodded and grinned. “I guess so.”

I spoke softly. “A scared kid with daddy issues and maybe a history of sexual abuse meets an older guy who offers to look out for him in prison. They’re both lonely and form a friendship, a trust. Maybe something deeper because this man can offer the kid a different… perspective.” I paused and watched Hellman’s lips press into a thin, bloodless line. “Then the man promises the kid big money to do him a favor when he gets out—a move Marv would have appreciated, getting the kid to go after somebody on the outside. The kid fails, but the man’s dying to tell somebody what he did. Marv’s dead so that somebody is me. Tell me.”

“What you talkin’ ‘bout, nigga?” He laughed, enjoying both his own stab at a Black dialect and the freedom to hurl a slur when