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

I joined Mira and Phoenix and watched the next three witnesses bury Joey Snell’s hopes of avoiding a trial. Larry and Corey told the same story: Joey offered them money to help him beat up someone. “This ni—I mean, this black guy,” Larry said. Joey never told them he had a gun in his pocket. Tripp ended each examination with the same question: “If Mr. Rimes had not struck you when he did, would you have, in fact, beaten him up?” Each answered yes. On cross, Eli Aronson asked each man if he had given his testimony as part of a plea deal. Both said yes.

Justin Battles established that Joey had sole possession of the gun before the event, not only by coat fibers, pocket lint clinging to the hammer, and partial prints on the grip and frame, but also by the presence of thumb and forefinger prints on the shell casings inside the cylinder, which meant Joey alone had loaded the Ruger.

Judge Vassi retreated to her chambers to consider her decision and remained there long enough to smoke two cigarettes. At the bailiff’s command, we all rose as she returned to the bench. She handed the bailiff a slip of paper before dropping into her chair. We all sat. Then Aronson and Joey both stood when she announced she had reached a decision.

“First, Mr. Aronson, I must take you to task.” She cleared her throat but failed to reduce the rasp. “Preliminary hearings are rare enough today, but preliminary hearings with witnesses are rarer still. I agreed to this one in the spirit of extending to the accused every opportunity to get the gun disqualified, which you insisted would be difficult to do without questioning witnesses. But if you think trying to turn a hearing into a trial is artful lawyering and not a waste of the court’s time, you need to sue your law school.”

“Yes, your honor. I apologize for my…zeal.”

“Then take my advice. If you can’t sleep at night, try a talk show instead of a Perry Mason rerun. Getting the guilty to confess on the stand doesn’t happen in real life.”

“Yes, your honor.”

When Judge Vassi said the case would go to the Grand Jury, Aronson’s shoulders sank. Meanwhile, Joey looked back at me and shouted, “Don’t get comfortable, Rimes! He’ll just send somebody else!”

Phoenix squeezed my hand as the gavel hit. “Calling out Hellman as a wild stab at a plea deal,” she said to Mira and me. “Good luck with that, pal, you and your asshat lawyer.”

“I’m still a thrift shop hit,” I said.

As we moved toward the courtroom door, the bailiff caught up to us and tapped me on the shoulder. Then he handed me a slip of paper with my last name on it in blue ink. I opened it as he drifted away. The note was unsigned, its writing tight, controlled:

Law enforcement officers sometimes say it’s better to be judged by 12 than carried by 6. You were lucky to be right this time but without the benefit of a doubt that comes with the badge, you must be careful in the future.

“Plausible deniability,” Phoenix said when I passed the note to her. “Vassi didn’t want her admonition to be part of the record. But she’s right. You have to be careful.” She handed it to Mira, who scanned it and returned it to me without comment. Her disdainful look as I shoved the note into my back pocket told me never to hesitate if my life hung in the balance.

Coats buttoned against the lake wind tunnels created by tall downtown buildings, we walked into the parking ramp together. Mira’s white Mazda Sport and my metallic blue Honda CRV were on the third level. Mira would have returned to the medical examiner’s office on the Erie County Medical Center campus. I would have dropped Phoenix, who had walked to court from her loft, at the offices of Landsburgh, Falk, and Trinidad on Franklin. Then I would have taken Elmwood to my gym in North Buffalo. But as we left the elevator, the iPhone in my front right pocket vibrated.

I pulled it out and saw a number I didn’t recognize. “Hello?” The voice on the other end was unfamiliar but full of urgency. My breath caught as I listened. When I broke the connection, Phoenix and Mira were staring at me as if I were in the middle of a stroke.

Phoenix put her fingertips to my cheek, her pinky at the corner of my mustache, and looked into my eyes. “Gideon, what is it?”

“That was Rory Gramm, chairman of APP.”

“Hey, isn’t that the—”

But I cut Mira off with an uplifted hand. “Bobby was attacked. He’s at Buffalo General for emergency surgery.”

5

Glasses dangling from a neck chain and long coat open, Rory Gramm met us in the lobby of Buffalo General. About fifty, with the rosy cheeks and tousled dark hair of a child painted by Norman Rockwell for a 1950s magazine cover, he had three inches on me and weighed at least forty pounds less. He apologized for taking so long to call. Bobby had been in surgery for an hour when Gramm remembered being introduced to a godson or nephew—a meeting of which I had no memory. Fortunately, my godfather almost never locked his phone. Unable to recall my name, Gramm had scrolled through Bobby’s directory until something sounded familiar.

A professor in the University at Buffalo School of Social Work, Gramm was the founding chairman of the Alliance for Public Progress. The police had already interviewed him, but he gave me a case number for follow-up. After the woman on duty at the hospital security desk checked our IDs and issued visitors’ passes, he took us to a third-floor waiting room. A handful of others, men and women, sat in plastic shell chairs, flipping through magazines or watching the early afternoon cooking show that filled the flat screen high on the wall. While I checked in as next of kin