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

different from self-defense. Plus, you would go to prison and Liberty Storm would have a martyr. I don’t believe that’s the best outcome possible. Do you?”

“No,” you say after a few seconds. “No.”

“Where we are now is the point we let each other know if we’re willing to try.”

“I’m willing to try, Dr. Clay.”

“Good.” A beat. “Do you have a responsible friend who would hold your gun under lock and key for a while?”

“No.”

“With your permission, then, I could put it in my safe. I have papers we’d both sign, an agreement that I’m holding it for you, temporarily. Would you be amenable to that?”

“Yes,” you say, confident that in Virginia you can always buy another gun.

15

The Sunday night before Drea Wingard came to Buffalo, Phoenix and I dined at Charmaine’s Table. Afterward, we crossed the quiet lobby to the South Tower and took the elevator to the seventeenth floor. Using my gold keycard, I opened the door to the suite where I would live for the next week and ushered her inside. The suite was dark, save a soft bluish halo around the backs of the three computer monitors arranged in an arc on a long table facing the door. The table was a few feet past the two steps down into the carpeted sunken living room. Two straight-back chairs facing the monitors were visible in the glow, but it was dark beyond them. The curtains over the floor-to-ceiling window at the far end of the room were drawn.

I turned on the overhead lights and floor lamps with a slider control just inside the door.

The mint green outside walls curved enough to remind us the suite was in a tower. Four abstract paintings hung on interior walls, as did a flat-screen TV. To the right of the entryway was a kitchenette with a bistro table for four and to the left two bedrooms and a bathroom. But I would sleep in this main room, on the pull-out sofa bed already pushed back to the closed curtains. Beside it stood a tubular steel coat rack that already held my clothes. At my request, hotel staff had removed all the decorative pottery and small sculptures, freeing tables and shelves to serve as work surfaces. Five or six people could move freely in the space between the sofa and the computer table.

“So this is it,” Phoenix said. “Command central.” She stepped down and walked around to the work side of the computer table. Her dark hair fell forward as she leaned down to look at the monitors. The glimmer cast a wave of shadow on her cinnamon cheek.

“We spent all day setting it up,” I said. “Pete, Yvonne, and I.”

“I see that.” She tapped the keyboard in front of the middle monitor. “You turned off the sleep mode so pictures are always on, in real-time. With six images to a screen, you can monitor eighteen locations at once—or Yvonne can. Twenty, now that I look at the last monitor.” She raised her eyes to me, narrowed them. “I didn’t see the camera in the hallway.”

“You weren’t supposed to.”

“How much is all this costing you?”

I shrugged as I went down the steps to join her. Brushing back her hair, I looked into her eyes. “A lot of stuff came from Jimmy’s. Yvonne contributed two monitors and her own computer.” I pointed to the tower on a plastic mat under the table with cords and cables bundled behind it. “A high-end machine. She linked and synched all of it and can send images to our cells. The last monitor is for the catwalk above the convention floor. We have eight rotating mini-cams activated by motion sensors. They cover each entrance and walkway and rotate ten degrees every few seconds so no one can get to the catwalk without being seen.”

Phoenix slipped her arms around me, the smooth fabric of her teal jacket making a rustling sound against the rough weave of my gray sports jacket. She looked into my eyes. “Your honor, please direct the witness to answer my question without trying to distract me.” She smiled. “Tell him not to say Sam is paying. I know Sam has only two K to put into this. One for Pete, one for Yvonne. Right? The cameras, the color printer, the rented van in the parking ramp—you didn’t get everything from Jimmy or Yvonne. I bet that fridge over there is full of food too. So, Mr. Rimes, how much is all this costing you?”

“I won’t know for sure till I get my MasterCard statement.”

“That’s what I thought.” Eyes still holding mine, Phoenix furrowed her brow. “How can you make enough to feed yourself when you give your services away? Baby…”

“My pension is good.”

“You know what I mean.”

“You’re a fine one to talk when you do so much pro bono work.”

“Irrelevant and immaterial.” Phoenix released me, stepped back, and sighed with an exasperation I rarely heard. “We don’t keep things from each other anymore. Remember? Why didn’t you come to me? I can help.”

I hesitated before answering. “A voice in the back of my mind says I’m overreacting. It tells me the kind of people after Sam’s cousin aren’t organized enough to take a shot at her here, so far away from their safe zone. But another voice reminds me things are usually more complicated than I expect. You know I believe in being sure. If that’s unreasonable this time, I figured the full responsibility should be mine, not yours or Bobby’s.”

“Being sure is one thing.” Phoenix gestured toward the monitors. “But this is maybe two steps below presidential security.”

“Oswald, Hinckley—even losers get lucky. I can’t afford to overlook anything.”

“This isn’t all on you, babe. The conference and the hotel share responsibility too.”

“Bobby aside, nobody involved knows Sam or how much his cousin means to him.”

She was quiet for several seconds, watching me. “You’re a good man, Gideon.”

I shrugged. “With some of the things I’ve done, had to do, I don’t know if I’m