Nickel City Storm Warning (Gideon Rimes Book 3) Gary Ross (most popular novels txt) 📖

“Was Jerry black?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Cropper gazes right into your eyes. “I’m gonna be honest here. I was raised to think coloreds are worth less…than whites. My father’d say stuff like, don’t end up like a ni—like them. Shiftless, criminal, and begging for a handout. A white man’s pride in his work is all he got left.”

You want to say most of America’s thirty million black adults have never been unemployed or arrested but you bite your tongue—literally—to keep from interrupting.

“I guess I was ready for Liberty Storm long before it came along. I went to meetings with Brick and ate their food and drank their beer. All it ever cost me was listening and reading pamphlets and talking bad about people like Jerry.” Cropper chuckles. “But I got to having second thoughts. Nasty as he was, Jerry had a job, responsibilities, a picture of his wife and kids on his desk in the stockroom. He pushed people like me to work hard for the company. But all Brick ever saw was a colored guy telling him what to do. He went deep into Liberty Storm and even said once we should take Jerry away from Bethesda, cut his throat, and bury him in the woods. I talked him out of it.”

“Oh?”

“Brick was dumb but not too dumb to know his limits. I told him there were cameras all over the mall and parking lots and highways. Regardless of what we thought, I said, the law considered Jerry a human being so we’d go to jail. Brick said he’d have to give the idea some more thought.”

“So how come you had second thoughts?”

“Your husband, ma’am, and strange enough, my father.”

“You said you contacted my husband.”

“I did,” Cropper says. “But let me tell you about my father first. See, Pop was quite a bit older than Mom but she died a long time ago. He got broke-down sick. There was nobody to take care of him. I’m an only child and didn’t make enough to pay for a home nurse. His younger brother was already dead—the brother whose daughter I’m gonna see in Richmond. His sister out in California hadn’t talked to any of us for years. So he went on Medicaid and into a nursing home not long after I joined Liberty Storm.”

Pausing as the server comes near, he gazes about the diner as she sets on your table two cheeseburgers, two orders of onion rings, a vanilla milkshake, and a mint iced tea. When she leaves, he turns back to you and eats an onion ring before resuming.

“About six or eight months after I started going to meetings, Pop took a real bad turn. It was obvious he wasn’t gonna be around long, so I went to see him much as I could. He was a mean cuss and beat me fierce when I was young but he was my father, if you know what I mean.”

You nod, not to sympathize but to encourage him to continue. Memories of your own loving father flood your mind to wash out violent images of Cropper beaten as a child.

“Well, I was there one day—turned out to be the day before he died—and he was talking awful to this colored nurse or aide or whatever she was. She was trying to feed him and he was calling her nigger this and bitch that and threatening to beat the shit out of her worthless black ass. She said, ‘I’m just trying to do my job, Mr. Cropper.’ I looked at her face—calm, patient, steady—and I saw the gold cross hanging round her neck. Then I looked at his face, twisted in a rage I knew too well, that my very Christian mother also knew too well. When the nurse was done, I went to her and apologized for him. I told her he was old and didn’t mean it. Her look told me she knew he did mean it, but instead of being mad she said, “You should pray with your daddy, son. Can’t be good to stand before God with hate dripping off your lips.’ After he died, I kept thinking about that. Here she was, just trying to do her job for a man who thought everybody like her was too lazy to work and she took a minute to worry about his immortal soul.”

For a time you are both quiet as you tuck into your burgers, you with small bites, Cropper with larger chomps that guarantee he will finish first. You have half yours left when he crunches through his onion rings and takes long pulls on his shake. You decide to ask for a takeout box because everything about this late lunch—the sounds of chewing and slurping and talking, the smells of food and sugar-laden air near the soda machine and milkshake mixers, the pink and white décor—has begun to twist your gut. Grant’s favorite diner. Grant’s favorite junk food. Grant’s favorite confidential source, who inadvertently led to Grant’s murder. As you begin to think this whole meeting was a mistake, Cropper surprises you.

“I’m sure being here’s gotta be hard for you…if he liked this place and all, so I’ll tell you how I came to contact him and I’ll give you what I came to give you so you can get back to your life and, I hope, your healing.”

“All right,” you say quietly.

“I used to read your husband’s columns in the Post,” he says. “I know, I don’t seem like the kinda fella reads liberal papers, but I used to deliver it when I was a kid. Guess that was my first job. I’m still pretty conservative, but I always liked the way he wrote. The way he talked about race without singing, ‘Poor me!’ The way he pushed personal responsibility, like conservatives on the radio. When Liberty Storm started talking about taking the war to the streets, I had second thoughts. Sure, take the fight to drug dealers and welfare queens and guys who make