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

world. From Nineteenth-Century pseudoscience to Twentieth-Century eugenics to Shockley and Jensen’s ideas of genetically limited black intelligence. From the publication of Mein Kampf to a New Jersey man who named his son Adolph in 2008 and later changed his own surname to Hitler. From the Ku Klux Klan and Germany’s Nazi Party to more than seventy supremacist groups, racist churches, and political parties in America today.

Online you find videos targeting young white men: exercises to build healthy white bodies that will make white women swoon, combat training with white men showing off their martial arts prowess for subduing mud people and drug users and taking back America from inferiors, instructions that range from taping the hands to protect them during street fighting to designing and hiding weaponry that may save precious lives, from guides to concealing identity during public demonstrations or civil disobedience to living room lectures on the importance of having white babies.

Underscoring everything are printouts from racist internet joke sites, the search having produced two million page hits:

What do you call five niggers hanging from a tree? An Alabama wind chime.

Why do niggers use clear plastic garbage bags? So Mexicans can window shop.

What’s the difference between a Jew and a pizza? A pizza doesn’t scream in the oven.

What’s the best blindfold for chinks? Dental floss.

What is black and white and rolls off a pier? A nigger and a seagull fighting over a dropped hot dog.

Feeling soiled and sad but full of rage, you now want to write this book for more than Grant’s memory. You want to write for all those shunned because of Rush’s beliefs, for a slave girl of fourteen pulled into bed by a future president thirty years her senior, for those who died at the hands of Tillman’s Red Shirts, for Moore’s humiliated pallbearers, for the thousand-plus whose empty skulls were filled with pepper seeds or lead shot to estimate the value of their descendants, for the slaves caught and returned to a bondage that included whipping as a therapy for the madness that made them flee, for those who went under the knife or into gas chambers, for those whose churches demanded adherence to a faith that demeaned them, for students condemned to high rates of failure by the low expectations of those who teach them, for children raped by a charismatic monster masquerading as yet another voice of God, for everyone diminished by a hatred with roots so deep the venom of its fruit is heated by hell. You understand, at last, that this is bigger than Grant and you.

This is evil.

Evil that must be stopped.

19

To my surprise, Judge Marlo Vassi opened the door to James Torrance’s penthouse. With ash-blonde hair styled to sweep across one side of her forehead and deep red lipstick freshly applied beneath the thin vertical creases that betrayed her smoking habit, she wore a black dress, a three-layered pearl choker, and open-toed shoes. The polish on her fingers and toes matched her lipstick.

“Good evening,” she said, smiling. “Nice to see you again, Mr. Rimes.”

“Judge,” I said, nodding. “This is Drea Wingard.”

Judge Vassi took hold of Drea’s hand. “I’m so pleased to meet you at last, Ms. Wingard.” She glanced at me. “Let’s forego titles tonight, Gideon. My name is Marlo.”

“Then the pleasure is mine, Marlo,” Drea said. “Please call me Drea.” In a burgundy cocktail dress and sensible flats, she smiled as she shook the judge’s hand and let herself be drawn into the entryway.

Marlo looked back at me again. “Jim’s on an overseas call out on the terrace. He should be joining us any moment.” She returned her attention to my companion. “I loved your book, Drea. We both did, especially the way you put your reader right in the middle of things with you.” She narrowed her eyes, as if in pain. “Yours is a sad but remarkable story.”

“You’re too kind,” Drea said.

Free of my vest and wearing a fresh sports jacket, I followed the women from the entryway into a cool, pristine white dining room large enough for a basketball game. The ceiling was sloped and held four square skylights. Running lengthwise through the room was a table that could have accommodated twenty but held only twelve place settings, six on each side. In the far corner was a raised platform with four black chairs and four hardshell instrument cases, one larger than the other three, which suggested our dinner entertainment would be a string quartet. To the left of the small stage was a sliding glass door through which I could see a terrace and beyond it the Lake Erie horizon. James Torrance was out there, clad in a white summer jacket and hand to his head as if holding a mobile phone to his ear. He seemed unaware of our presence on the other side of the tinted glass—likely because the glass was reflecting early evening sunlight.

I remembered he had sat beside Judge Vassi at the Alliance for Public Progress meeting. I hadn’t thought anything of it at the time, perhaps because Matt Donatello and I were sizing each other up. But now my mind began to assess what it might mean if the two were more than acquaintances—a conclusion I still had insufficient evidence to reach. Even if they were simply friends, it seemed likely one had brought the other into the Alliance. Their relationship, whatever its nature, could be a pivotal factor in where the conference was being held if not why.

“Our other guests will be arriving in about twenty minutes or so,” Marlo said, leading us through a doorway in the middle of the dining room’s south wall. “I told Jim to have you come earlier so we could get to know each other a bit.”

We emerged in a small circular area that opened onto a larger room on each side and another corridor straight ahead. To the right was a sprawling, commercial-looking stainless steel kitchen with six or seven staff working over ranges and at counters.