Nickel City Storm Warning (Gideon Rimes Book 3) by Gary Ross (i can read books TXT) 📕

a good man or a lost man who sometimes does good things. In any case, I’m nowhere near as good a man as Bobby.” I took a deep breath. “Once when I was talking with him about the war, he told me sometimes a good man must do a bad thing to prevent a worse thing. He said something similar recently, not about me but about himself. If they can do that to Bobby…”

Phoenix smiled sadly and encircled me with her arms again. “This is about Bobby, isn’t it? Not just Sam. It’s about those skinheads.” She put her head against my chest, and I could feel the warmth of her breath through the thin cotton of my shirt. “You’ve conflated what happened to Bobby with what happened to Drea Wingard.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“No maybe about it.” She pulled back enough to look up at me. “The men who beat your godfather aren’t the same men who killed that poor woman’s husband. Different strains of the same sickness but not the same men.”

“I know that, intellectually. But maybe somewhere there’s a ledger I’ll help balance, for somebody else if not myself.”

“Lost men can’t see the books much less keep them,” she said. “You balance this ledger of yours when you do what must be done for the people you help. When you do so without becoming what you struggle against. You’re one of the few men I know who does what he says he will, when he says he will, no matter the personal cost.”

“I don’t know if—”

She cut me off with a kiss, soft and deep and slow. Afterward, she stepped back. “Like it or not, I’m going to pay for some of this. We’re a unit and we help each other any way we can. Caso cerrado. Case closed. Meanwhile…”

She slipped off her jacket, letting it fall to the carpet. Then she began to unbutton her white top, revealing her prosthetic bra and the red-gold-green phoenix rising to cover her torso. I loved to trace her tattoo with my fingertips.

“At dinner, mister, you said you would show me a Jacuzzi big enough for two. It’s time you did what you said you would.” She dropped her top and bra onto her jacket and undid my second and third shirt buttons, warm fingers reaching inside. “If you’re going to be here for the next week, I need some quality time with you to tide me over.”

16

The van I rented for transporting Drea Wingard to her various appearances was a customized metallic green Ford Transit with a drink cooler, four luxury bucket seats, a three-person bench seat in back, and no side windows. At ten-thirty Monday morning, I parked in front of the stone façade of Weisskopf Security on Delaware—to pick up the guards the publisher hired to meet Drea at the airport. As Sam moved to the bench seat, Pete and I went inside.

Still annoyed I had been unable to meet the hired guards earlier, I introduced myself to a matronly blonde woman behind a reception counter. Her nametag said Suzanne Hauser. I recognized her breathy voice from our two phone conversations. Daughter of the founder and current owner, she gestured us into chairs and disappeared behind a frosted glass door. Then she returned with an eager-looking light-skinned man in his early twenties and a shorter dark-skinned woman about forty. Each wore a tan windbreaker with a Weisskopf patch on the left breast. The patches matched the logo on the two brown sedans in the parking lot.

Hauser introduced the pair as Manuel Ramos and Lucy Bishop. Pete and I shook their hands. They would ride with us today, I explained, so we could establish the parameters of our working together. Tomorrow they would park at the hotel with a permit, which my gut told me to hand to Bishop. Depending on our schedule any given day, they would ride with us or follow us in their car. “Company jackets are okay right now,” I said. “But after today I want you in clothes that don’t identify you as security. That includes your car. If you don’t have something unmarked in your fleet, use a personal vehicle.”

Hauser cleared her throat. “Company policy requires our employees to wear company clothing when they’re on duty and drive an official car.”

Museum guards, I thought, letting out a slow breath. “Ma’am, I understand it’s important to keep your logo out there, but the price of this advertising may be kind of high.”

“It’s not advertising,” she said. “We pride ourselves on our professionalism.”

“The men hunting our protectee pride themselves on their ruthlessness. They already killed her husband.” I waited a moment so the three of them could absorb what I had said. “That’s why my partner and I are wearing covert ballistic vests.” I held open my sports jacket enough to show the vest and my shoulder holster. “This is the soft armor I told you about, Ms. Hauser. A type IIIA Kevlar weave for handguns up to a .44 Magnum. It weighs about four pounds and is designed to look like ordinary clothing. A Weisskopf patch right over the heart just tells the bad guys who and where to shoot first.”

Ramos’s boyish enthusiasm had peaked when he glimpsed my gun. Now it vanished. For a millisecond Bishop glared at her boss, who obviously had not passed along my body armor recommendation. Hauser narrowed her eyes at me, annoyance evident in the tightening corners of her mouth. Pete pressed his lips together to smother a smile.

“All right,” Hauser said. “Street clothes and your Malibu, Bishop—unless you want to drive, Ramos, because you finally bought a car.”

He shook his head.

“Keep a mileage log, Lucy, so New York can reimburse you at the federal rate.”

Bishop nodded. “Can we get vests like the ones they got?”

“Unfortunately, it’s not in our budget this year,” Hauser said. “I’ll talk to the CFO. He’s finishing the budget for the next fiscal year, which begins July first.”

“With all due respect, ma’am, that