Ms. Simon Says (12 page)

He levered out of his chair and held his hand out to her. “How ’bout if I take you out to lunch? I’m famished.”

“Oh, God,” she moaned. “I haven’t fed you. Some hostess I am.”

“That’s okay. I’m not exactly a guest. Come on.”

The restaurant Shelby Simon chose—The Blue Inn— overlooked Blue Lake, which was even more stunning in its reflected autumn colors than Heart Lake was. Maybe that was because this lake was smaller, Mick thought as he looked through the expansive picture window by their table. It was a cozy lake. That notion struck him as pretty funny since he wasn’t an outdoorsman by any stretch of the imagination, or someone who appreciated pastoral landscapes. He was an urban animal. At least since the age of fourteen when he first came to Chicago and the concrete shores of Lake Michigan.

Shelby Simon, on the other hand, seemed as content up here in rural Michigan as she had in the Windy City. Well, maybe content wasn’t the right word. She fit in here. She seemed at ease, as much as she had seemed at ease in Chicago. She looked even better here, in her jeans and that mouthwatering sweater and her long hair wind-blown from their recent drive.

She had ordered a margarita, and Mick had figured what the hell. He wasn’t on duty. Not technically anyway. He was on vacation. So he asked the waitress to bring him a beer.

“Nice place,” he said, putting the cold brown bottle back on the little square coaster with a line drawing of the rustic building they were sitting in right then.

“It is nice, isn’t it?” She put her own glass down, but not before her tongue peeked out to catch a few big crystals of salt from the rim. “It’s been here forever. I’m glad they’re still open. Most places around here close right after Labor Day when all the summer people go home.”

“Pretty good deal,” he said, “being able to get out of the city every summer.”

She nodded with enthusiasm. “Yes, it was. I didn’t spend a summer in Chicago until I was nineteen or twenty.”

“You were lucky.” Even better, she looked as if she totally agreed. There was nothing in her expression that gave the impression of entitlement he so often witnessed with people who had money. Shelby Simon, of the big Victorian house and the recycled family name and the fancy Canfield Towers pad, struck him as surprisingly unaffected by it all.

“Mm.” There went that pretty pink tongue again when she took another sip of her drink. Then she tilted her head to one side and fixed him with her glossy, cognac-colored eyes. “So, Mick Callahan, tell me about you. Have you always lived in Chicago?”

For a second, Mick had the damnedest reaction to her question. Maybe it was her earnest expression as she gazed at him across the table. Maybe it was the beer on his empty stomach, but suddenly he felt like telling her his life story. His true life story as opposed to the abridged and cleaned-up version he usually told everyone else.

What the hell was he thinking? That she’d somehow put all the details together and then tell him just where he’d managed to go wrong? Or point out things, moments, incidents that he should have noticed at the time in order not to have been flattened by the truth when he finally learned it? What was she going to do—give him advice on how not to screw up in the future? Not that he didn’t need it, but...

“Tell me about your family,” she said now.

He must’ve had an odd expression on his face, because Shelby immediately followed up her question with an apology.

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t prying, Mick. Really. I just thought since we’ll obviously be spending some time together, it would be nice to know you better. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“You didn’t offend me,” he said. “It’s just not a very interesting story. My father walked out on us when I was about two months old, and then my mother dragged me around the country for the next thirteen years until we finally landed in Chicago.”

This, of course, was the abridged version. Even so, the look on Shelby’s face seemed genuinely warm and sympathetic.

“Doesn’t sound like such a great way to grow up,” she murmured.

“Well, it was a great way to grow up fast.”

“And cynical,” she added.

“Yeah. That, too, I guess.” Jesus. He was already tired of talking about himself, so he changed the subject. “What’s the deal with you and Sam Mendenhall?”

She looked surprised, then picked up her margarita again, as if she needed a little liquid courage before she answered. “There’s no deal,” she finally said.

“I got the impression there was something between the two of you in the past.”

Another sip. Another lick of salt. “Not between Sam and
me
. Between Sam and my sister, Beth.”

Before she could elaborate, the waitress came to take their order. While Shelby debated aloud between the patty melt and the tuna salad, Mick found himself feeling strangely relieved that the relatively good-looking gimp on the north side of the lake wasn’t going to give him any competition, and then realizing—son of a bitch—that for the first time since Julie died, he was actually interested in a woman for something more than a bleary, boozy hour or two of medicinal sex.

Something told him he was in trouble here, and it had nothing to do with letter bombs.

After lunch, Callahan was quiet, nearly grim, as they began their drive back to Heart Lake. Come to think of it, he’d been pretty quiet all through their meal, too. Even though he’d insisted that her personal questions hadn’t bothered him, Shelby was convinced otherwise. It seemed pretty clear to her that Lieutenant Mick Callahan wanted to keep their relationship on a strictly professional basis.

Fine.

No problem.

She had a talent for picking the wrong men anyway, so the fact that she was attracted to Callahan served as a warning all by itself. It never ceased to amaze her that she could fix her friends up with people who turned out to be their ideal mates. There was terminally shy Stanley Feldman who suddenly discovered he had a personality in the company of Cathie White. On a hunch, Shelby had fixed up confirmed bachelor Michael Marvin with her old friend, Susan Kent, then a single mother of three. Michael proposed on their second date, and now Susan was a happily married mother of five with another one on the way.

The list went on and on. Sometimes Shelby felt like a fairy godmother. And yet when it came to her own love life, Shelby Simon was a flop. She should probably write herself about that, she thought only half in jest.

Dear Ms. Simon,

I’m thirty-four years old, and all my friends are either married or hooked up while I can’t find a guy

I want to be with for more than two or three dates much less a lifetime.

Signed,
Always a Bridesmaid

It was letters like these that were the most difficult for Shelby to answer. Usually she wrote something short and uplifting.

Dear Always,

Relax. And trust me. It will happen when you least expect it.

Ms. Simon Says So

Not that finding her perfect mate was uppermost in her thoughts all the time. When it came right down to it, she spent so much time tending to her professional life that she rarely gave her personal life a second thought. Maybe that was her problem. She was just too damned busy to fall in love.

Yeah. Right.

But she sure wasn’t busy anymore, was she? She reminded herself that she still needed to cancel her upcoming appointments. Hopefully she’d be able to log into the office computer when she got back to the lake.

That would be soon enough given Callahan’s tendency to speed even on this rural blacktop. She glanced at the needle on the speedometer. Sixty! Good grief. The lieutenant, she noticed now, kept scowling in the rearview mirror.

She turned to see a car moving up fast behind them.

Jeez. If they were doing sixty, the other car must’ve been doing seventy-five. The driver started honking now.

“Asshole,” Callahan muttered, his gaze flicking repeatedly to the mirror.

“Maybe he’s trying to pass,” Shelby suggested.

He ripped his gaze from the mirror just long enough to give her a withering glare.

Shelby looked back again. The driver was waving his arm out the window, then pulled it back inside to honk again.

“Pull over, Callahan,” she said. “I think he’s trying to signal us or something.”

“Oh, great. Is that what you’d do if you were alone right now?” he yelled over the sound of the Mustang’s roaring engine. “Pull over?”

“Well, I wouldn’t be going . . .” She leaned over to check the speedometer again and then screamed, “I wouldn’t be going eighty-two fucking miles an hour on a narrow two lane road, I can tell you that. I’d rather take my chances with a homicidal maniac than commit suicide by car.”

“Really,” he shouted.

“Really.”

Callahan hit the brakes, turning the wheel and muscling the car onto the weedy shoulder of the road, where it came to a dusty, diagonal stop. The car behind them squealed to a stop thirty or forty feet away.

Having just endured at least two Gs between her seat belt and the seat back, Shelby was trying to catch her breath when Callahan pulled his gun from beneath his vest and jumped out of the car.

Oh, jeez. A gun. Somebody was homicidal, and it wasn’t necessarily the guy in the other car. Okay. Maybe she’d been wrong. Maybe death by Mustang would’ve been preferable.

“What’s your problem, buddy?” the lieutenant shouted at the other driver.

He had also exited his car. He didn’t look like a homicidal maniac to Shelby. In fact, the elderly man looked slightly familiar. He had to be in his late seventies if not early eighties, and he was wearing a white cook’s jacket.

“Didn’t you hear me honking?” the man yelled, sounding slightly out of breath. “I’ve been trying to catch you for the last five miles.”

“Yeah?” Callahan challenged. “Why?”

When the man turned to reach back into the front seat of his car, Shelby could see every nerve in Mick Callahan’s body snap to attention. He widened his stance and was just raising his gun into position with both hands when the man turned back.

“Here,” he said. “Ms. Simon left her purse behind at the inn.”

That’s who he was! Old Mr. Keeler who owned the restaurant at Blue Lake. Shelby’s family had known him forever. She jumped out of her side of the car and walked toward him.

“Thank you so much, Mr. Keeler,” she said. “I didn’t even realize I’d forgotten it.”

“There you go, Ms. Simon.” He handed the black handbag to her. “I used to go hunting with your grand-dad, you know. A long time ago.”

“Yes. I remember.”

“And I want to tell you how much the wife and I enjoy your column in the paper.”

“Thank you. That’s very kind of you.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Shelby could see that the lieutenant had holstered his weapon and was now walking toward them. Mr. Keeler saw him, too, and seemed none too pleased.

“Yeah, you give real good advice, Ms. Simon.” He turned back toward his car as he added, “You might want to advise your friend here not to drive so fast, and not to be so damned suspicious of strangers.”

Mick glanced toward the passenger seat. “You can stop laughing now,” he said.

“I’m sorry.” She could barely get the words out. “It’s just that . . .” Once again, giggles overwhelmed her.

“Yeah. Yeah. I guess you wouldn’t be laughing so hard right now, Ms. Simon, if that old man had produced an AK-47 from the front seat of his vehicle,” he grumbled when, in all honesty, Mick was having a tough time not laughing at himself. There was reacting, and then there was overreacting. He had just been a prime example of the latter. A prime jerk.

She sighed and wiped the tears from her eyes. “Thank you, Mick. Really. I mean it.”

Apparently she did because her goofy expression had turned quite sober.

He shrugged. “Well, we still don’t know who’s after you. It’s smart to be cautious.” He felt a grin cut across his lips. “At least you got your purse back.”

“The turn to the house is just ahead on the right,” she said, pointing.

“Thanks.” He already had his directional signal on, but she probably hadn’t noticed in her attempt to be helpful. That reminded him of something she’d said earlier when they were being pursued. “What did you mean earlier when you said you’d pull over rather than try to escape?”

“Well, it’s probably better than winding up dead in a ditch.”

He frowned. “So back there, when you didn’t have any idea who was chasing you, you would’ve pulled over? Just to see who it was and what he wanted?”

“Probably.” She didn’t sound too certain until she added, “Yes. If I’d been alone, that’s what I would have done.”

Mick swore, and then muttered, “That’s a really good way to get yourself killed.”

“So would crashing a car into a tree at eighty miles an hour,” she snapped. “Listen. Give me a little break here. I know a thing or two about self-protection, Lieutenant Callahan.”

“Right.”

“Well, I do,” she insisted. “In fact, that’s something I write about frequently in my column. Advising women on protecting themselves, especially against rape.”

This was a subject that had always made him crazy, and it had made him even crazier since Julie’s death at the hands of a purse snatcher. In Mick’s opinion, a little female self-confidence went a long way in getting women in more trouble than they were physically able to handle. One or two karate lessons just wasn’t good enough. Not nearly.

“What do you do?” he asked, unable to repress the vitriol in his tone. “Tell them to enroll in a martial arts class at some strip mall and then send them out like vigilantes on the streets?”

“No, I don’t. I advise them to use their brains before they use their bodies in order to avoid those kinds of situations in the first place.”

“And then what? A key across his cheek? A knee to the groin? A little shot of pepper spray?”

She was staring at him now. He could almost feel the heat in her eyes boring through his skull. He’d obviously managed to push one of her hot buttons, but he didn’t care. His own hot buttons were sizzling right now.

“What’s wrong with you, Callahan? Don’t you think women have the ability to protect themselves? Oh, wait. Don’t tell me. I know. You’re one of the ones who think we should just quietly comply in order to stay alive, just lie back and enjoy it, right?”