by Mary McBride
Her bathroom was beige, as well, including the fixtures and the thick terry towels. The only color in there came from an assortment of perfume bottles on the beige marble vanity. Strange. The outfit she was wearing today—black slacks and a white top and a black handbag—was colorless, too, unless he counted the blue swoosh on each of her shoes or the red highlights in her long, shiny hair.
Still, this Simon woman didn’t strike him as colorless or neutral in any way. But what did he know? In his thirty-eight years, he’d really only known one woman well and then it turned out he hadn’t known her nearly as well as he imagined.
“Well, I’m packed,” she announced from the bedroom doorway. “More or less.”
Mick suspected it was more rather than less.
While the lieutenant rearranged the crappola in the trunk of his car to make room for her two big suitcases, Shelby tried once more to contact her parents in Michigan to tell them she would be visiting them for a while. It seemed the logical, the sensible thing to do. Plus she’d been so busy that she hadn’t seen her mother and father for over a year, so she’d managed to convince herself that this exile from work at least had an upside.
Actually, now that she’d had a little time to think about it, Shelby was almost looking forward to spending some time at the old place on Heart Lake where she’d spent every long, lovely summer of her life until she was nineteen or twenty. The huge old Victorian house had been in her family since it was built in the 1880s by her great-great-grandfather, Orvis Shelby, Sr.
Judging from his portrait, which still hung over the fireplace in the parlor, old Orvis bore a strong resemblance to Teddy Roosevelt with his ample paunch, rugged mustache, and rimless glasses. He’d been a lumber baron on a minor scale in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, but successful enough to put together a pretty hefty fortune. His heirs, however, weren’t quite so enterprising, and by the time the fortune had passed through the hands of Orvis Jr. and Orvis the Third, all that was left for Shelby’s mother to inherit was the Heart Lake property.
It would be gorgeous up there now, with October turning all the trees to paint-box colors and the lake to beautiful shades of gunmetal and pewter.
She shifted around to look out the back window of the car. The lieutenant had just slammed the trunk lid, and was standing there looking typically pissed at the world in general and probably at her and her suitcases in particular, just as a red, white, and blue mail truck pulled up behind him.
Callahan walked to the driver’s open door and said something to him that Shelby couldn’t hear. Shelby recognized the mailman. It was Joe, a tall, skinny guy in his late twenties or early thirties, who’d told her once that he always read her column and had even written to her a couple of times. It was on her advice, in fact, that Joe had decided to attend his first AA meeting. She wondered how it was going for him, but now probably wasn’t a good time to inquire.
Right now Joe was stepping out of his vehicle onto the sidewalk, looking none too pleased with whatever Callahan had just said to him. He responded with something as loud as it was incomprehensible, then shrugged, turned to the rear of his truck, and hauled out a large canvas container marked “Canfield Towers.” That was how they delivered the tons of mail, mostly junk, to all three hundred or so residents of her building. The mailman would roll the big container into the mailroom off the lobby, then stand for at least an hour shoving the envelopes and flyers and small packages into the proper boxes.
Callahan, still looking crabby, slid into the driver’s seat and closed the door.
“What was that all about?” Shelby asked.
“I wanted to make sure the post office people had put a hold on your mail,” he growled.
“Did they?”
He shook his head. “I have no idea. Fucking idiot said I’d have to take that up with his supervisor. No wonder those people are always shooting each other.” He dragged in what Shelby hoped was a calming breath, then stabbed his key into the ignition and asked her, “Where to?”
“My parents’ place,” she said, but then, suddenly unsure, she corrected herself. “Oh, well, maybe not. I don’t know how this bodyguard deal is supposed to work. Their place is up in Michigan. It’s about a five hour trip, so maybe that’s too far. Maybe you’re not even authorized to leave the state.”
“Michigan,” he grumbled.
“Well, if that’s such a problem...”
“No,” he said. “It’s not a problem. It’s as good a place as any, I guess.” He started the car. “I just need to stop by my place first to pick up a few things.”
“So you can leave town just like that?” She snapped her fingers.
“Yeah. Just like that.”
“What about your family?” she asked. “What about your job?”
“No family. And right now you’re my job.” Then he added under his breath a distinctly snarky, “Such as it is.”
His enthusiasm was pretty underwhelming, Shelby thought. Even a little insulting. More than a little. Such as it is! Hell. She hadn’t asked for this, after all. It wasn’t her idea. She wasn’t going anyplace with him.
He hadn’t put the car in gear yet, so she reached for the door handle. “You know, on second thought, I don’t want to go to Michigan. I don’t really want to go anywhere, Callahan. Especially with you. I’ll be just fine right here.”
She wrenched open the door and got her right foot out and onto the pavement, but the rest of her wasn’t fast enough to escape Callahan’s grasp.
“Let me go, dammit.” The harder she tried to pull away, the more his grip tightened on her upper arm.
“Settle down,” he yelled at her.
“I will not.”
His voice dropped to a menacing level. “Get back in the car and close the goddamned door.” Then he shouted again. “Please.”
“No. Let me go, Callahan. I mean it.” She felt like screaming bloody murder, and she almost did when she told him, “I’ll have you arrested for kidnapping. Or police brutality. Or...Or...” Hell. She couldn’t think of any other appropriate charges. “Or terrorism.”
“Go ahead,” he said, daring her and still not letting her go. “Be my guest.”
“Hey, Ms. Simon?” It was Joe, calling to Shelby from a distance of fifteen or twenty feet across the sidewalk. “Can I help you or anything?”
Heaven help her. In the two hours or so that Mick Callahan had been her protector, three different men— Dave the Doorman, Mo, and now Joe—had offered their assistance. She didn’t need any help. She needed to get out of this stupid car, away from this maniac.
“No. That’s okay,” she shouted out the window. “Thanks anyway. I’m...”
Joe’s rolling mail cart exploded with a horrific blast that sent black smoke and bright flames in every direction. His lanky body went pinwheeling backward down the sidewalk, bowling over half a dozen oncoming pedestrians, and flaming mail began raining down on the pavement.
Shelby might have screamed. She wasn’t sure. But she was sure that she’d been forcefully yanked back into the seat and Callahan had lunged across her to close her door, then pulled away from the curb with a frightful, almost sickening screech. In less than a few seconds, the Mus-tang was gunning southbound on North State while its driver was barking instructions on his cell phone.
Through the rear window, she could see several people staggering through the smoke and burning bits of paper. Poor Joe! Oh, my God.
“We need to go back and help them,” she said. “Help’s on the way. Do me a favor and scoot down in the seat, will you?”
“But I...”
“Just do it,” he yelled.
Shelby slid down, and as she did she heard sirens screaming up the opposite side of the street. She tried to peek up through the windshield, but a firm hand on her head promptly shoved her back down...
. . . where she decided she’d stay. With her hands clenched and her eyes tightly closed. God. She really was in trouble, wasn’t she?
It was a lot
more than Mick had bargained for. Not more than he could handle, of course. But whoever was after Shelby Simon was after her in a big way, and there was no reason to believe the guy would limit himself to letter bombs and no way to know how close he’d come to his target. The fucker could be anywhere—holed up in an eight-by-ten cabin in Montana like the infamous Una-bomber, or right here, right now, a mere three cars behind them in traffic. Until the investigators came up with some viable leads, Mick didn’t have a clue who or what he was dealing with. Other than a woman who didn’t seem to have sense enough to be afraid.
Well, maybe a little afraid. She was still hunkered down on the passenger side, her legs—all six miles of them—curled under the dash and her head cradled in her arms on the seat. With her eyes closed, she might even have been asleep. Now that he really looked at her, she appeared to be a lot more relaxed than he was. For a minute he’d been tempted to say something reassuring to her, like “It’ll be okay.” But he decided against it. A little healthy fear was probably a good thing in this case.
He pulled up in front of his apartment building on the near West Side—in actual distance only a matter of a few miles from the Canfield Towers, but light-years away in terms of style and status. In other words, the place was the pits, a three-story six-family brown brick box with a rotting roof, a broken concrete sidewalk, three boarded windows, and odors in the hallway thick enough to cut with a machete.
The place was ideal for working undercover, and Mick really hadn’t minded that Home Sweet Home for the past two years was a one-bedroom rattrap on a bad street in a worse neighborhood. He actually liked it in a weird way because it sort of suited his prevailing moods. Still, it wasn’t anyplace he wanted to show off. Not to a woman like Shelby Simon, anyway.
“We’re here,” he said. “You need to come inside with me. It’s not safe here out on the street.”
She lifted her head, blinked her whiskey-colored eyes a few times, and looked out the window, showing very little change in her expression. At least there was no outright distaste or disgust that Mick was able to discern while watching her take in his street, his building, his native habitat. She didn’t say “Eeuuww” or “What a dump.” “Where’s here?” she asked.
“My place. I’ve been working undercover so it’s not exactly a palace or anything.”
“No, I guess not,” she said in a neutral sort of way. “Yeah, well...”
He helped her and her six miles of stiff legs out of the car, then kept hold of her arm along the cracked and hazardous sidewalk to the front door of the building. As soon as he opened the door, they were greeted by a blast of rancid cooking oils and the underlying stench of urine and mold.
Home sweet home.
“Up here,” he said, starting up the dilapidated stairs to the second floor.
“It’s dark.” She sounded a little tentative, nervously polite.
“Dark. Yeah. Well, that’s probably a good thing.” It meant she couldn’t see the broken light fixture above them, the peeling hospital green paint, or the crud that coated the floor. One of these days, when he was done playing wigged-out doper, wanna-be gang banger, and all-around bad guy, he was going to go after the absentee landlord of this stinking hovel on behalf of Hattie Grimes and Lena Slotnik, the elderly tenants who lived here because they had no place else to go.
“Here we are,” he said.
He unlocked the upper and then the lower deadbolts, and pushed in the door, sniffing to make sure the half dozen or so air fresheners were still on the job. Of course, those didn’t always smell that great, either, because he always forgot what brand and scent to get, so typically there was an ongoing battle between citrus and pine and some god-awful garden fragrance. Pine, he decided while stepping over the threshold, was dominant today. Greetings from the cool north woods.
Shelby followed him in, and to her credit, didn’t come out with an insincere “Oh, this is nice” or a sarcastic “Your cleaning lady must be on vacation.” Her expression remained impassive, and after she’d looked around a couple of seconds, she merely asked, “How long have you lived here?”
“About two years.” He shrugged. “Give or take a few weeks.”
Actually, there was no give or take about it. Mick knew the exact date he’d moved in here, three days after his wife’s funeral. He’d cleared his clothes and books and firearms out of their town house on Rush Street, and left everything else—the expensive leather couch, the antique dining-room pieces, the brand-new Thomasville bedroom suite, the oriental rugs, the good lamps, everything—to be dealt with, divvied up, or destroyed by Julie’s cousin, Nicole.
“Even the pictures?” Nicole had asked him. “All the albums of you and Julie?”
“Especially those.”
“Aw, Mick.”
Such were the last, sad words he heard Nicole say because he’d walked out then, for good, and hadn’t spoken to her or anyone in his late wife’s family since. Then he’d come here, to this dump, and spent the next two years furnishing it with selected Salvation Army pieces and curb-sale shit and the odd, discarded Dumpster find.
It was the pits. But at least it was colorful.
“Have a seat.” He gestured toward his couch with its slipcover of dinner-plate-size sunflowers on a dark blue background, then preceded her across the room in order to gather up magazines and newspapers to make room for her. “I’ll just throw some things together. It won’t take long.”
Mick, his arms stuffed with three days’ worth of crumpled Daily Mirrors, assorted take-out menus, and the latest issue of Playboy, headed toward the bedroom, praying his guest wouldn’t ask to use his about-as-clean-as-a-gas-station bathroom.
Shelby had heard the expression “shabby chic,” but this was the first time she’d ever encountered it in real life. Well, actually the place was a lot shabbier than chic.
The sunflowery couch beneath her looked like Vincent van Gogh’s worst nightmare. Across from the couch, the green plaid La-Z-Boy sat half reclined while it spewed stuffing from its back and seat cushion and both arms. In between the couch and the chair was a table of unknown construction and height, covered as it was with precarious towers of magazines and paperbacks, an open pretzel bag, a box of Ritz crackers, one giant Slurpy cup, and empty, mismatched coffee mugs—three to be exact. No—four. One was hiding under Newsweek.
Several crushed beer cans were relegated to a battered end table, along with an open jar of dry roasted peanuts and the remote for the TV. There was a dead philodendron, too. Shelby didn’t think anyone could kill a philodendron.
The only spot of relative order in the room was a homemade bookcase, fashioned of cement blocks and two-by-fours, on the wall opposite the couch. Shelby got up to inspect the titles. The majority of Callahan’s library was nonfiction, and most of those books were devoted to major conflicts, such as the American Revolution, the Civil War, both World Wars, and more. Although she found the collection really intriguing, it probably wasn’t all that surprising. Given his occupation, it made sense that the man relaxed with guns and gore.
She heard his footsteps coming from the bedroom. “While you’re over there,” he said, “hand me that Ulysses Grant biography, will you? The one on the bottom left.”
She plucked the big, heavy book from the shelf and turned to hand it to him, surprised that he’d not only packed in such a short time but changed clothes as well. This current flannel shirt was a bit less washed-out than its predecessor, and these jeans, while faded, didn’t appear to be ripped in any strategic places.
“Thanks.” He took the book from her, shoved it in the gym bag he was carrying, then said, “I’m ready. Let’s go.”
“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.