Simon Says... Jump (Kate Morgan Thrillers Book 2)

by Dale Mayer

  As he sat on the bench, a bus came and opened its door. He shook his head, and the door shut, and the bus carried on. It took a long moment for Simon to press the taunting voice out of his brain, then give his body the once-over enough to realize he would be okay to get up and to cross the street. Anybody watching him would think he was either drunk or in some medical crisis.

  It hurt to think he would come across that way, and it gave him the added impetus to get out of sight of anyone. With every step he took, he got stronger and stronger though, and, by the time he made it around the corner and out of view from everyone, he felt just that much better. He quickly crossed the next block and then the next. By the time he got one more block over to where he wanted to be, he got comfortable again. But, just as he took another step, the voice slammed into the back of his head.

  Just do it.

  Simon stopped, froze, turned around, and glared at the complete emptiness around him, confirming the voice wasn’t anywhere close by but was inside his head, which he knew all along. But it was so hard to stop that instinctive reaction to look around and to tell somebody to shut up. He told it quietly but firmly, No.

  The voice stopped, fading away into the darkness.

  Simon managed a couple more blocks, changing his plans from going to his favorite restaurant to heading straight home. He might be short on food, but he could quickly order something from home, if it came to that. Food was a constant irritation in his life. He liked good restaurants, but, after a long day, like today, he didn’t want to go home only to change clothes to go back out again.

  Forcibly trying to stay in control, he raced back to his apartment, lifting a hand at the doorman as he headed to the elevator. He felt the pressure, a swelling in his head, as if somebody were pounding on the outside of his brain. By the time he made it inside the front door of his penthouse, the voice slammed against his forehead.

  It screamed, Just do it.

  Simon collapsed to the floor, his mind already consumed with the vision that had overtaken him.

  As he looked down at his feet, all he saw was the edge of a metal piece, his hands gripping a rail, and water. Water flowing underneath his feet, as he looked over the railing. He stared at the rushing depths, almost mesmerized. There was pain, and there was fear, yet also a longing for whatever that water offered. Simon stared down, paralyzed, unable to move, terrified, and yet desperate to break free of this image. He screamed in his head, No, no, no, no. But whoever it was that he had connected with lifted his head and looked around at the area. Somebody called out in the distance. A vehicle honked. Then someone spoke.

  “Hey, are you okay?”

  Almost instantly the paralysis eased, and the person stepped back from the bridge.

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Just looking at the rushing water.”

  It seemed like it was a kid’s voice, the timbre between male and female, almost neutral. Simon couldn’t tell who it was, and there had been nothing else to help with that. As he viewed the bridge ahead of him, he knew exactly where the kid was. He was on the Lions Gate Bridge. Simon bolted to his feet, even as the person in the vision started to walk away. And, with that, the vision left him.

  Exhausted, sweat running down his face and his heart slamming against his ribs in his chest, he tried hard to figure out what the hell he was supposed to do with this. So what? Somebody looked down at the water. Big deal. He heard that voice in the background.

  Do it. Do it.

  But was that even somebody else, or was that just the person on the bridge? Their own subconscious telling them, Hey, this is the time. This is what you need to do. This will make it all stop. Just make it all go away. Did that have any value, or was this just straight fiction?

  Groaning and feeling like every step he took had cement weights attached to his feet, Simon walked to his couch and collapsed on top of it. His hands shook, his breath raspy, and his head still boomed. And all he could think about was the scene on Lions Gate Bridge and how he felt a terrible sense that he needed to be there, even while he wondered just what going there would do for anybody.

  He didn’t want to do anything because that would mean, every time something like this happened, he would feel like he had to go to the scene of the crime. Indeed, he felt an urgent sense of go, go, go. Hating what it was trying to say, he managed to stand and to walk to the door, even as he fought the impulse. No, came this … his inner sense of knowing. You have to go. Shaking his head, he said out loud, “It won’t do any good. By the time I get there, it will already be over, or the person will be gone.”

  Go, go, go.

  Groaning, and yet past the point of ignoring it, he took the elevator downstairs, grabbed his vehicle, hopped in, and headed toward Lions Gate Bridge. He parked at a pullout on the shoulder, then got out, locked up the vehicle, and almost raced down to the bridge. As he got onto the pedestrian walkway, he headed in the direction where he thought the person had been standing. Then as he got here, Simon noted it wasn’t quite right. He walked over a bit farther and then back again, only to realize he needed to be on the opposite side of the bridge. The traffic was heavy, coming in all directions. Yet there were traffic cams. He pulled out his phone and contacted Kate.

  When she answered, her voice was distracted. With his words coming fast and stumbling over each other, his tongue feeling thick, as if he were pushing back another vision, he said, “Can you access the cameras on the Lions Gate Bridge?”

  “Simon? Is that you?”

  “Yeah,” he said, trying to pull himself together. “Can you access the cameras on the Lions Gate Bridge?”

  “Yes,” she said, “it might take a bit though.”

  “I need to know if somebody was at the bridge railing about twenty minutes ago.” He heard her brain stumbling through the bits and pieces of information and trying to figure it out.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Because I think somebody was here, ready to jump,” he said quietly. “It came through my head, and this time I was caught in a vision. I saw the bridge. I saw his feet, as he or she looked out at the water,” he said. “There was this voice in the background, saying ‘just do it’ over and over. But, at the same time, there was almost a longing for the water down below.”

  “Jesus,” she said, her voice hushed. “Can you identify who it was?”

  “No,” he said, “I only saw the sneakers.”

  “Girl sneakers, guy sneakers?”

  “I don’t know,” he snapped, his voice rising. “I’m on the bridge now.”

  “Seriously?”

  He heard a chair being pushed back, as she got up. He could almost imagine her walking over to her window, as if staring out in that direction would show him at the bridge. “Yes,” he said, “I’m here. I couldn’t stop the impulse to come down.”

  “God,” she said. “What are you getting into? The last thing I want is you running around, heading to bridges, because people are committing suicide.”

  “Do you think I want to be here?” he said in a hard voice; yet, in her background, he heard clicking keys.

  “No,” she said, “I get it. You don’t want to be there, and something’s driving you to be there. I just don’t want you to become a victim too.”

  At that, he stopped and frowned. “I don’t think that’ll happen.”

  “But you don’t know that,” she snapped. “I don’t know what’s going on with you, and I don’t know why this is even happening. I know it’s not something you want to happen either, but it doesn’t seem to matter because it’s coming anyway.”

  “Thanks,” he said almost bitterly, “like I need to hear that.”

  “What you don’t need to hear,” she said, “is any more voices in your head.”

  “Well, instead of telling me to not hear what I can’t control, why don’t you just find out if I’m right and if somebody was here.” And, with that, he hung up.

  “God,” he said, as he stared out at the water, the wind picking up his sho
rt hair and spreading it flat against the side of his head. He gave his head a shake, trying to clear the cobwebs in the grip of a vision, still sitting in the periphery of his brain. “I don’t know what the hell’s going on here,” he said, “but it can damn well stop.” And, of course, all he could think about was his grandmother’s words of warning.

  Once you start down this pathway, you can’t stop it.

  “Grandmother, please tell me that you found a way to stop it.”

  But he knew that she’d spent a lifetime avoiding people because of these visions. Sometimes she was a huge help, but she paid a high price, a penalty that he didn’t want to pay. She’d been ostracized and hated, terrified by so many. She lived the life of a hermit, tormented more and more as time went on by visions that she had less and less control over. He remembered seeing her in her last few days, where the visions were just pouring out of her.

  She carried a recorder, keeping track, yet not keeping track at all. He frowned at that, for the first time remembering her recorder. What had happened to it? Maybe she had thrown it out. Maybe when the house had been cleaned out, nobody had seen the value in it and had tossed it. Or maybe somebody had been afraid of what it held and made sure to destroy it.

  He stood here, taking several deep gulps of breath, and, when the pain finally eased back and when he could breathe normally and when the pain in his chest wasn’t quite so gripping, he slowly turned toward his vehicle.

  Chapter 12

  Kate placed her cell phone down quietly on the desk, staring at it still.

  Rodney walked over and said, “You keep looking at your phone these days.”

  “I need to access the traffic cams on the Lions Gate Bridge,” she said abruptly.

  “Another jumper?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said, trying not to say too much because she didn’t want to explain. Simon was already tormented by this. The last thing she needed was others weighing in on his potential inability to handle this stress. Or his bizarre messages. Particularly after what had already happened to his friend David. On that note, she checked her watch, remembering that Louisa had asked for the laptop back. She hadn’t bugged the Computer Forensics guys and gals for more, but she had asked, and the least she could do was try to get it back for her.

  As she waited for access to the traffic cams, she contacted her computer nerds. As soon as the phone was answered, Stoop said, “Yes, I’m done with the laptop.”

  “Perfect. Anything on that license plate?”

  “Yes, we’re working on it,” he said. “The video isn’t 100 percent clear, so we’re trying to clean it up.”

  “Good enough,” she said. “That’s progress.”

  “Hey, we’ll take any progress we can get at the moment.”

  “I know,” she said. “I’m still working on that whole suicide thing too.”

  “I can’t imagine that’s even feasible,” he said, “but I get why you don’t want to let it go.”

  “What about those chats and emails?”

  “We’re still working on that one.”

  “Okay. I’ll check with Andy, since he’s our decoy account on the chats.”

  “Yeah, and make sure he doesn’t commit suicide under some of the pressure from these guys.”

  “Are they that convincing?”

  “It’s kinda weird,” he said. “I’ve been monitoring a bunch of the chats. So far, it’s mostly supportive, but then you get those little passive-aggressive digs, like ‘You’re just too scared,’ or ‘You know the world will be happier without you’ and that sort of thing. And then that odd follow-up with, ‘Hey, I was just kidding’ or something of the like.”

  “Yeah, yet they aren’t kidding at all.”

  “Well, that’s the thing, right? I mean, you get these kinds of assholes all the time, and they’re everywhere. You just don’t expect to see them on a chat like this.”

  “But then why not?” she said quietly. “When you think about it, assholes are on every loop. Look at every one of the big sites where you can comment on any subject, and you’ll find trolls.”

  “Trolls, trolls, and more trolls,” he said. “I was just hoping on a site like this that they would be more supportive.”

  “But, at first glance, they probably are, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, exactly. Supportive and teasing and mocking, all at the same time.”

  “I get it,” she said. “I really do. I just wondered if more than one person is making these mocking comments or whether it’s really just one person using multiple accounts.”

  “That’s an interesting point too. People do have multiple accounts in various places, so it’s possible. I don’t know why they would though.”

  “Because it would appear to represent opinions from more than one person. Often people can shrug off a single negative or differing opinion, but, if there’s more than one, it tends to make people stop and think like, ‘Are they both right? Am I the one who’s wrong?’”

  “Jesus,” he said, under his breath. “I really don’t like your thinking on this thing.”

  “Like you,” she said quietly, “the mind-set comes from time on the job.”

  “I know,” he snapped, “and it all sucks.”

  “It does, indeed,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean it’s any less valid.” And, on that note, she hung up.

  She had access to the camera feeds now for the bridge, so she took it back an hour and watched. Several people walked up and down the length of the bridge, but the traffic was heavy, and the cameras were pointed more at the actual traffic than the pedestrians, which is what they were there for, but, at the same time, it was frustrating when she was looking for something specific. The controls gave her a little bit of a Zoom function, plus a Focus feature that she could manipulate, but the bulk of it was not that easy.

  If she found something of interest, she could get the tech guys on to it to get her a better image. She watched carefully, as people came and went and as vehicles traveled, and, at one point in time, she did see what looked like a teenager stand at the side of the bridge. Noting what Simon had mentioned, she watched as the teen’s hands reached out and gripped the railing and looked over.

  But it was a motion that a lot of people would have done. If you’re walking along a bridge like that, and you see all that beautiful water underneath, scary water, with the wind blowing the whitecaps, a lot of people would grip the railing and then carefully look over. So, on the surface, it didn’t appear to be deadly or threatening or in any way indicative of somebody looking at suicide.

  Just then the person jolted, when somebody else called to them. The person lifted a hand, shook his head, and kept on walking. Not sure exactly what was going on with Simon, she kept watching and watching, and by the time another ten minutes had passed, she was about to let it go, when Simon appeared on-screen and raced to the area.

  “Well, he’s at least being consistent,” she muttered.

  At that, Rodney came up behind her. “Who’s that?”

  “Simon,” she said quietly.

  He looked at her, then at the screen and said, “What’s he doing?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Look. After the last scenario I’m not saying that I don’t believe. I’m just saying that I have to be convinced each and every time.”

  “You and me both,” she said quietly. She pointed, and they both watched as Simon looked around, looked over, and walked up and down a few times, then raised both hands. Afterward he pulled out his phone. “There he is, calling me,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because,” she sighed and then said, “he felt as if somebody were there, ready to commit suicide, that he connected with a vision of somebody else, pushing that person to do it.”

  Rodney pulled up his chair, plunked down beside her, leaned closer, and said, “Seriously?”

  She nodded. “He keeps getting these visions. I haven’t had a chance to talk to him abo
ut this one specifically, but he sounded pretty shaken.”

  “Oh, I would be too, if that were the case,” he said, staring down at the frozen image of Simon, who was almost close enough to determine it was Simon there on the bridge. “He looks a little shocked and shaken right there.”

  She nodded. “It’s happened a couple times.”

  “Different people?” he asked, looking at her in surprise.

  “Yes, but nothing conclusive. Nothing that he could give me and say, Hey, this person’s committing suicide.”

  “Which vision would, of course, be of zero help,” Rodney said, leaning back, crossing his arms and frowning at her.

  “I don’t know that he knows whether these visions are happening at that moment or if he’s connecting to something that happened before or if he’s seeing something that could still happen.”

  At that, Rodney’s eyebrows shot up, and he pinched his nose and said, “Besides the whole mind-bending concept of somebody connecting to someone thinking about committing suicide, how the hell is it of any help to him or to us if we don’t even know if it’s current news?”

  “Exactly,” she said. She motioned at the video feed. “You can see he believes it’s current. And, for this vision, he is seeing it currently, just got to the scene ten minutes later. Yet I don’t know how to help him determine whether each vision is current.”

  “Of course not,” he said. “Since when have you become some psychic specialist?”

  She snorted at that. “I don’t know if you know this,” she said, “but I had fairly strong feelings about psychics to begin with, and they weren’t pleasant.”

  “Oh?”

  She nodded. “My mother married a charlatan, supposedly a psychic. She ended up giving him basically everything she could possibly give him, and he took it and ran.”

  “I can only imagine the bedtime stories you and Simon have together.”

  She shot him a fulminating look. “Not happening.”

  “The bedtime stories or the one about charlatans?”