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

had stepped into the waiting room. Surgical mask hanging below her chin, she gazed about, calling for us in an accent that screamed Brooklyn.

Mira and I stood at the same time. The woman motioned us toward her. Phoenix and Gramm behind us, we reached her in seconds. She was thin, Asian-American, fortyish, with filaments of blonde hair protruding from beneath her cap. “I’m Dr. Zhao,” she said, snapping off a plastic glove and offering her hand.

Her smile made me swallow some of my anxiety. But Mira was still taut beside me, hands clasped beneath her chin, lips pressed into a bloodless line. I took the doctor’s hand. “We’re the next of kin. Gideon and Mira.”

Dr. Zhao led us into the corridor. “The surgery went well. He’s strong for a man—”

“What kind of surgery?” Mira cut in. She winced at the answer: ruptured spleen from blunt force trauma. “What grade? How much intra-abdominal bleeding was there?”

“Grade Two and very little,” Dr. Zhao said. “He didn’t need a splenectomy but the rupture was large enough to require sutures. Laparoscopically. There’s additional bruising, and a ruptured eardrum, but he’s strong for a man his age. In a few weeks, he’ll be fine.”

Mira’s eyes filled with held-back tears and her shoulders sagged with palpable relief. “Then his prognosis is good, barring complications?”

Dr. Zhao narrowed her eyes at my sister. “Are you a physician?”

“Medical examiner,” she said, shaking the woman’s hand. “Mira Popuri.”

“You’re Dr. Popuri. I’ve heard good things about you.” Dr. Zhao nodded as she released Mira’s hand. “The prognosis is good. Very good. He’s in recovery and you can see him, but not in your office anytime soon.” She smiled again. “Someone will come for you in a bit.”

As Phoenix slipped her arms around Mira, Dr. Zhao moved off.

“I’m glad her surgical skills are better than her stand-up,” Phoenix said. “Are you okay? Both of you?”

As Mira nodded, I said, “I am now.”

“The board will be happy to hear this.” Rory Gramm pulled a cell phone from his coat pocket. “And Mrs. Cathcart. Dr. Chance is well-liked at APP.”

“Mr. Gramm—” I began.

“Rory, please. Gideon.”

“Rory, before you call anyone, I’d like as detailed a description as you can give me of this Dr. Lansing and copies of anything he might have signed, like an attendance log.”

“Happy to. I’ll go you one better. I’ll try to find out if anyone with APP took a picture of the unpleasant bastard. If they text it to me, I can pass it to you.”

“Great. Also, you were saying something about the parking lot attendant catching those men defacing a wall?”

“Yes.” He stretched his answer into a hiss of disgust. “Maury said they were spraying swastikas on the walls. Can you imagine? What screams hate more than swastikas in red Krylon?”

Now I was certain Jasper Hellman had not sent the gang to beat up Bobby. But knowing I might have to ignore Queensberry Rules did nothing to make me feel better.

Excerpt One

From In the Mouth of the Wolf by Drea Wingard, with Grant Gibbons (1)

The night you are widowed by the wolf is seared into your brain precisely because it comes at the end of such an ordinary day. Yes, it is Halloween, but apart from buying three jumbo bags of bite-sized chocolates on your way home from work—for the trick-or-treaters who will come to your Annandale home—you cannot recall the day. What you had for breakfast or lunch, what you wore, the tasks you left on your desk at the Library of Congress for the next day—all are lost to you. Forever.

You remember with great clarity your celebration of thirty-three years of marriage, four days earlier. It was an unseasonably chilly evening, with a temperature in the forties. Instead of taking you to one of your favorite restaurants, Grant prepared dinner himself, serving bourbon chicken, collard greens, baked squash, and buttermilk biscuits on a blanket in front of your living room fireplace. Then you ate off paper plates, seated on the carpet as if you were still the impetuous grad students who went two months after their elopement with only a mattress, a few crates of books, and a small color portable in their Manhattan studio apartment. After dinner, as you moved aside the paper plates and shed your clothes to make love before the crackling fire, you recalled it was Roscoe, Grant’s classmate at Columbia, who gave you a used card table for Christmas that year. Had kidney failure not taken him a decade ago, he would have been pleased to see you made it to your Pearl Anniversary. You remember him fondly.

The night you are widowed by the wolf, however, kills all future memory. What is past stays past, but now, and ever after, you are fixed in a horrifying present that includes the events of that night and pushes you so far outside yourself you remain a distant observer of your own life. Every day is HERE. Every day is NOW. Every day is IT, happening all over again. So all you ever want to do is scream.

You and Grant are seated before another fire in the darkened living room, watching a recent Dracula film on the large flat screen above the fireplace. In an old sweatshirt and stretchy jeans, you are clipping and sorting grocery coupons from the Sunday Post. Occasionally you take a few kernels of microwave popcorn from Grant’s bag. You take turns answering the chimes and dishing out Snickers and Milky Way miniatures to giggling children who gather on the flagstones outside your front door. Sometimes one of you calls the other to see a particularly imaginative costume. Standing together to look at children dressed for Halloween reminds you of Miranda, now in grad school herself, in distant London with her British fiancé. You miss her childhood and her smile. Though neither of you has mentioned it, you know you both temper the absence of your only child with hope for a grandchild.

The number of witches, monsters, and