Ms. Simon Says (6 page)

“That was quick,” Shelby said. She smiled up at him as she angled her head toward his bookcase. “I see you’re a student of military history.”

Callahan gave her such an odd, forbidding look that Shelby immediately regretted her impulsive comment about his reading preference. The expression on his face was similar to the one she’d witnessed earlier, in the hallway outside her apartment door. That cold,
leave me the hell alone
look. Clearly, the man had no intention of sharing anything of his personal life with her, even something as relatively insignificant as his books. She was just his job.
Such as it was.

Before he could come up with some sort of snide reply, Shelby turned her back on him. “Well, let’s hit the road,” she said, walking to the door.

Mick secured his deadbolts, then trotted down the stairs in Ms. Shelby Simon’s hot little wake. He could tell she was pissed—boy, was she pissed!—at his lack of a response to her comment about his books, and he couldn’t really blame her. It was just that she’d caught him off guard with that “student of military history” phrase, which just happened to be the way Julie used to introduce him to her medical cronies.

It was never “This is my husband, the cop,” or “...my husband, Lieutenant Mick Callahan of the Chicago PD,” but always “This is my husband, who’s in law enforcement and a student of military history.”

The instant the Simon woman had said those same words, he’d felt the old and all-too-familiar tic of anger that he used to experience with Julie. When had his being a cop turned into an embarrassment for her? It had been good enough to put her through med school, hadn’t it? When had she stopped loving him?

Why the hell was he thinking about her now? Jesus. Julie was usually banished to those wee, small, inebriated hours of the morning when no amount of liquor could drown the memories, good and bad alike.

Mick shook his head to clear it of the intrusive thoughts, and then swallowed hard to get rid of the sudden, unexpected tightness in his throat. He continued down the stairs, and by the time he got outside, Shelby Simon was standing in the middle of the sidewalk, flanked by his neighbors, Hattie Grimes and Lena Slotnik.

The two of them were like day and night—literally. Round little Hattie’s skin was dark mahogany and she dressed in large, long, and darkly exotic dashikis that she ran up on her ancient Singer sewing machine. Long, tall Lena’s skin, in contrast, was white as the snows of her native Vladivostok, and she always wore blue—dresses, slacks, whatever—along with some kind of sweater or wrap, even during the hottest days of summer.

They had met about a hundred years ago when they worked as lunch ladies in the cafeteria at Lawndale High. After retirement they’d apparently struck some sort of pact to serve and protect each other in their sunset years.

In his two years in residence here, Mick had never seen one without the other. Hattie and Lena were inseparable, joined at their mismatched hips, black and white Siamese twins who pulled their shopping carts to and from the market together every Monday and Thursday, who went to Mass at Saint Jerome’s every day and played Bingo there every Tuesday night, and who seemed to consider their downstairs neighbor a soul-in-jeopardy, someone in desperate need of their prayers.

Hell. He probably was, but what he didn’t need right now was for Hattie and Lena to delay his mission of getting Shelby Simon quickly and safely out of town.

“Ladies,” he said, approaching the little triad on the sidewalk.

Hattie wrapped her fleshy arms around him. “Let me hug you, sweet boy. Let Hattie hug the daylights out of you.”

“He looks tired forever,” Lena said in her perpetually thick and dour accent. “He looks like he never sleeps. You will get sick, Mikhail, I warn you, and then where will you be? You’ll see.”

Mick rolled his eyes in Shelby’s direction. “My mother hens,” he said, somewhat sheepishly.

“I can tell.”

Lena pointed to Shelby. “This is lady in picture on bus. Ms. Simon Says. No? Only without the mustache.”

“No,” Mick replied. “She just looks like the lady on the bus. This is my sister.”

All three of them looked surprised, Shelby most of all. Her light brown eyes opened wide.

“Your sister!” all three of them exclaimed.

“Honey, you never said anything about a sister.” Hattie stepped back, then stared from Mick to Shelby and back again. “She don’t look nuthin’ like you.”

“Half sister,” Mick corrected himself. Half ass was what he was thinking. All he was trying to do was maintain a low, even invisible profile for the woman he was protecting, so he’d said the first thing that came into his head. Stupid. But he was stuck with it now. “Different fathers.”

Shelby was looking at him as if he’d just dropped fifty or sixty I.Q. points. He could only hope she’d instinctively know why he’d lied—for her own good—and that she wouldn’t dispute it.

“So,” Lena said to her, her pale Russian eyes growing slitty with suspicion, “you two have same mother, then.”

“Um. Well. Yes,” Shelby answered. “The same mother. Yes, we do. Good ol’ Mama. Bless her heart.”

With a deep sigh of brotherly relief, Mick grasped Shelby’s arm and turned her in the direction of his car. “Come on, sis.”

Hattie stopped them with an insistent “Hold on now. Wait a minute. Don’t you be rushing her off that way. There’s something I want to say to this sister of yours, Mick.”

He halted. What? What now? “Okay. But we’re in a hurry,” he said, hoping to speed the woman up. Hattie tended to be pretty long-winded if given the slightest encouragement.

“What hurry?” Lena demanded.

“We’re...uh...we’re late for...uh...” Shit. His mind went blank all of a sudden. He probably
had
lost a dozen or so I.Q. points over the course of the past few hours.

“For a family reunion,” Shelby said, coming to his rescue with a level voice and a totally straight face.

“Family is good,” Lena said, nodding sagely.

Hattie, however, was not to be denied. “This won’t take long,” she said. She practically ripped Shelby’s arm out of his and marched her up the sidewalk, near the building’s front door, where she appeared to launch into a multigestured harangue. Mick couldn’t hear what she was saying, nor could he even imagine what the woman felt so compelled to tell his “sister.”

“Family,” Lena murmured as she, too, watched the animated monologue taking place several yards away. “Family is good. Important. You have pretty sister.”

Sometimes Lena sounded so much like Natasha, of Boris and Natasha fame, that it was all Mick could do not to laugh, but he limited himself to a smile while he looked at Shelby Simon. She was more than pretty. Aside from her shiny dark brown hair, and those long legs, and the suggestion of Victoria’s Secret breasts beneath her tailored white shirt, there was the sparkle of intelligence in her whiskey brown eyes and a suggestion of confidence and inner strength in her posture. She was probably five feet six inches, give or take an inch, but she stood as tall as any WNBA player.

Not that her looks mattered, he reminded himself. Still, if he had to spend a significant length of time with an endangered female, it was nice that she was fairly easy on the eyes.

Hattie walked her back down the sidewalk and turned her over to him with a wave of her hand.

“I said my piece,” she announced. “You children go on now and have yourselves a big ol’ time at that reunion.”

After several fleshy hugs from Hattie and a warm but stoic handshake from Lena, Mick finally got Shelby inside the Mustang.

“To Michigan,” he said, pulling away from the curb. “To Michigan,” she echoed, not too enthusiastically. He turned east, toward the Interstate. “Maybe you should give me a general idea of where. It’s a pretty big state.”

“Just head in the general direction of Grand Rapids for now.”

“Right.” That would take care of the next four hours or so. He wouldn’t need to ask for more specific directions until close to sunset. He wouldn’t need to talk at all. Only...

“So, what did Hattie have to say?” he asked. Not that he cared. He was simply curious.

“She said you drink too much, stay out too late, don’t eat right, live in a pigsty, hang around with the wrong people, and don’t go to church. In a nutshell, Callahan, she said you’re on the fast track to hell in a handbasket.”

“Sorry I asked.”

“I’ll bet. So? Is she right?”

“Well...”

He glanced toward his passenger, who had one shapely eyebrow raised and a funny—cute, actually— quirk to her mouth. Hell, if he had to be saddled with a woman at all, it was definitely better that she had a face that could stop traffic.

“Yeah,” he said. “She’s right.”

“Uh-huh. That’s what I thought.”

He chuckled, which wasn’t really like him. Usually he either yelled or growled. But the sound that had just come out of him was such a reasonable facsimile of genuine laughter that it startled him. “You’re not going to start giving me advice, are you, Ms. Simon?”

“Who me?” she exclaimed. “I wouldn’t dream of it, Callahan.”

CHAPTER FOUR

T
raffic wasn’t too terrible, and Callahan had a lead foot and an aversion to staying in one lane for more than thirty seconds, so after about forty-five minutes the ancient Mustang had roared across the state line into Indiana. Shelby stared out the passenger window at the smokestacks of Gary while she contemplated her current, pitiful, sorry-ass plight.

How had this happened? From the moment she had opened her eyes this morning, her life had been spinning faster and faster out of control, and now here she was— jobless, homeless for all practical purposes, threatened, and speeding north in a smelly car with a maniac at the wheel.

The last thing the maniac had said to her, maybe ten minutes ago after he’d talked once more to his supervisor back in Chicago, was that the authorities wanted Shelby to make a list for them of possible enemies. Enemies! She didn’t have any
enemies
, for heaven’s sake. She barely had any
friends
these days, given her incredibly busy schedule. She hadn’t had time for a luncheon get-together or a girls’ night out in more months than she could remember. It seemed as if E-mail and cell phones had pretty well replaced any face-to-face contact with her pals lately.

“Enemies!” she muttered. “How about you, Callahan? Do you have enemies?”

“Plenty,” he answered without elaboration and without taking his eyes off the road.

Well, no surprise there. His neighbor, Hattie Grimes, had painted a fairly vivid picture of Mick Callahan’s lifestyle. Of course, the woman didn’t know that he was a cop working undercover, but she seemed to have a fairly good handle on his comings and goings. “Late to bed and late to rise” in her words. “That boy’s got one foot in perdition already, I’m telling you here and now, sister girl. You help him. You hear me?”

Help him! Ha! She apparently couldn’t even help herself at the moment. As for her proclivity to tender advice, Callahan had already made it clear that he didn’t want any.

Fine. Great. For once in her life, she’d keep her mouth shut. Anyway, she was the one who needed advice right now. Shelby tilted her head back against the seat, closed her eyes, and composed a letter to herself.

Dear Ms. Simon,

Help! Somebody’s trying to kill me. I’ll bet you think shit like this only happens in movies or in cheesy melodramas on TV. Ha! A lot you know. The thing is, though, it feels like it’s happening to somebody else. The danger just doesn’t feel real. And to make matters worse, there’s this guy who’s supposed to protect me, and instead of being grateful and cooperative, I’m being a bitch, which really isn’t like me at all. I’m a nice person, dammit. None of this makes sense.

Signed,
Edgy in Indiana

Shelby sighed quietly. In twelve years of writing her column, she didn’t think she’d ever gotten a letter from someone under duress of one kind or another who wasn’t scared out of his or her mind. Women wrote in all too frequently about husbands who’d threatened to kill them. Sometimes it was children in mortal fear of a parent. Once an elderly man sent her a long, shakily printed letter about his suspicion that his wife of fifty years was lacing her meat loaf with ground glass.

In such instances, Ms. Simon’s advice was usually a variation on a single theme. Get help. Tell someone. Alert your local police, your minister, your teacher, a neighbor, somebody. Just get help. And get it now.

She opened one eye and took in her helper’s profile. He really was good-looking, despite his perpetually furrowed forehead and the sour slant of his mouth. His chin was strong and his jaw pleasantly angular. He hadn’t shaved today, she noticed, but the stubble on his cheeks and chin had a certain appeal in a
Miami Vice
kind of way.

The hands that gripped the steering wheel were tan and strong, with blunt fingers and surprisingly nice nails. At least he didn’t bite them as far as Shelby could tell. His legs...Well, all she could see at the moment was the suggestion of hard-muscled quads beneath their faded blue covering of denim. That was nice...

She closed her eyes again, reminding herself that Callahan’s looks, good or bad or indifferent, weren’t important. Was he good at his job? That’s what mattered.

Dear Edgy,

It’ll be okay. Ms. Simon says so.

It would, wouldn’t it?

Mick’s passenger had been asleep for almost two hours when they neared Grand Rapids. How could she sleep? he wondered. Either she had a lot of confidence in him or she’d taken a tranq at some point or she still didn’t have the slightest comprehension of the danger she was in. Maybe all three.

Nah. He didn’t get the impression that Ms. Shelby Simon had any confidence in him at all. Why would she, especially after good old Hattie’s keen observations and dire predictions?

He did drink too much, keep unhealthy hours, and all the rest, including no doubt having one foot already planted in perdition, but Shelby Simon didn’t necessarily know that. All she really knew about him was that he lived in a crappy apartment, drove a dark green beater, and wasn’t the most cheerful guy she’d ever met. Oh, yeah. And then there was that “student of military history” thing.