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

softly to him. Betty looked stunned. Sam had joined Drea at the mike and now held her tight. Her face was a mask of anguish, his one of fury. A scan of the rest of the room told me there was relief but also agitation and restlessness. People were stirring, ready to escape. “Listen up!” I called. “I know you’re upset. But please keep your seats for a moment.”

“Are the police on their way?” someone said over the babble.

“There’s no need,” I said. “The incident is over without injury or property damage. Please give us time to make sure it’s safe for you to go.”

“Go?” This speaker was a young man at the end of the bar. “We gotta talk about what just happened, man! We need to talk about it. Nazi clowns? That was some freaky shit!”

There were murmurs of agreement. Heads nodded. At least a dozen phones were still out, recording. I would be on the web by morning. There was nothing I could do about that.

“I understand. All I ask is that everybody stay put for a minute. Thank you for your cooperation.” I turned to Zulema, still near Drea and Sam. “Zulema, I need five food-storage plastic bags, now.”

She signaled one of her servers, who nodded and disappeared into the kitchen.

“Ramos, bring me your Sharpie.” He had been using the fine point marker on the labels for the contraband collected at the door.

The server returned with the bags as Ramos handed me the Sharpie. Remembering where Lansing had stood, I used a cloth napkin to slip Lansing’s wine glass and utensils into the first bag. Then I zip-sealed it and wrote his name on it. The room was eerily silent as I collected items from each of the other places at the table, numbering the bags one through four. “Zulema, do I have your permission to remove from the premises these bags with your property inside?”

She leaned into the microphone. “If you’re gonna take it to a lab somewhere to identify those culos, hells yes!”

Cathartic laughter eased the crowd into an hour of discussion no one had anticipated having. The corridor between rooms thickened as those in front pressed in to see. Will Johannes worked his way through the crowd and stopped near Corso’s table. At Drea’s request, Rory Gramm joined her and Zulema to moderate but Randall declined, though he did stand when Drea identified him and Johannes as two of the conference organizers who had brought her to town. While Randall took a half bow to brief applause and Johannes waved, Bobby came to me and whispered he thought the man in what I noted as clown position four might have been part of the crew that assaulted him. I nodded and promised myself bag four would get extra attention.

It was a literate, educated crowd that offered more than outrage at the clowns and sympathy for Drea. Several explained the trappings of white supremacy. “The nine percent thing,” one man said. “Some of these groups think only nine percent of the people in the world are pure white.” A UB grad student in a pink halter explained that since H was the eighth letter of the alphabet, two eights side by side was code for Heil Hitler. Someone else offered a thumbnail history of the blood drop cross. A woman who taught high school said Weiss Macht was German for white power. No one could explain Clown World.

A frail woman with papery skin and wispy white hair got to her feet with the help of the short, dark-haired young man seated beside her. A beige dress draped on her shoulders as if she were a hanger, she gripped the back of her chair to support herself. “I was five when they came for us,” she said, her accent underscored by a flutter. “They put us in a train car, my whole family, stuffed in like livestock. I remember everything like it happened yesterday. The smells of sweat and waste, tears, dead bodies held up by the press of others, bodies still warm because they had no room to cool. I was too young then to understand where we were going or what any of it meant.” She paused to drag a liver-spotted hand across her eyes. “But I learned fast and have understood this kind of evil for more than eighty years. Unless it is cut out at the root and the ground that fed it burned to ash, America will be drawn to its own destruction.”

I recognized the voice. “Ma’am, you’re the one who told me not to let him provoke me.” She nodded, teetering unsteadily. I moved to where she stood and reached her in time to help her back into her seat. The young man beside her, who sprang to his feet, thanked me. Great-grandson? I wondered. Then I looked down into the woman’s watery brown eyes. “Thank you for what you said then. It helped steady me. Thank you for telling us your story.”

“I do have one question, young man,” she said. “What’s an HNIC?”

Several Black people in the audience laughed as I paused to consider how to answer her question. Truth, I decided, was the best approach. But I had no wish to embarrass her, especially if our exchange made it online. I leaned down to whisper into her ear. “What he called me, HNIC? I’m sorry but it means Head Nigger in Charge.” As her eyes widened and she covered her mouth, I straightened and put a hand on her bird-bone shoulder. “I promise you, it didn’t bother me. I’ve been called worse.”

What did bother me—though I kept it to myself—was my inability to determine how Lansing knew my last name was Rimes.

25

It was past two in the morning when Drea came into the suite’s living room. Wrapped in a white terrycloth robe with the hotel’s bold TT logo on the upper left pocket, she sat on the edge of my pull-out bed. Phoenix had left two