You can run, but you can’t hide.
Finally he stepped into an alleyway and hissed out loud, “What the hell do you want?”
Youcame the whisper, and then complete silence followed in his head. Shaken and not sure what the hell to think, yet only able to consider that maybe itwashis nan, he slowly returned to the bench where he’d been sitting. As he sat down again, he looked at his hands and realized somewhere along the line he had completely misplaced his coffee. Struggling with that and really wanting the hit of caffeine to jolt his senses, not to mention the comfort of the hot brew, he got up and walked back to the block where the vendor was. As he bought a second cup, the vendor frowned. Simon shrugged. “I lost it somewhere.”
The vendor just laughed, gave it to him, and told him to keep his money.
He looked at him in surprise. “You don’t have to do that. It was my fault.”
“It doesn’t matter if it was or not,” he replied. “You’re a regular, so enjoy.”
Appreciating the gesture, Simon added a tip to the jar, then turned and walked away. More nice people were in the city than not, as far as he was concerned. Although he certainly heard an awful lot from other people about how it was so hard to get to know anybody or how cold and uninviting the city was. It was truly a beautiful location, but that didn’t always make for warm bedfellows.
In his case though, he’d been blessed on so many fronts for many years. Of course he made money, and money was always a strong reason for people to put a smile on their face. Either you could do something for them or they wanted you to do something for them. It was a strange thing about money, but he was acclimating himself to having it. It had been a few years since he had come into such strong success, and it was now second nature. He certainly wasn’t born to it, and he was working his way up, dealing with as much as he could. But he kept most of his business quiet and under the radar, trying to stay out of trouble. Because, once trouble started, it never ended well.
That was always the lesson; it never ended well. You had to do what you had to do to stay clear of it. So Simon tried to stay on the straight and narrow and to not get involved with any of the very distracting and often very profitable side businesses that went on around town here—side businesses that were anything but legal.
He stayed legal because it was easier and because it helped him sleep at night. The last thing he wanted was to lose everything he’d worked so hard for. He knew others who took a lot of fun from that whole aspect of cheating the system, and Simon could admit there were times when cheating the system might not be a bad thing. The system sucked, and sometimes it was as corrupt as anything else in this world, but long ago he’d made a promise to his nan to not get into any of that trouble. She’d saved him at one point in time and had dragged him out of the foster care system, when he’d been in desperate need.
After her death, when Simon was only ten years old, he’d gone back into the system again, where he’d become a handful, as a sad and frightened preteen who acted out, guaranteeing he would never be adopted. And unfortunately Nan could do nothing to stop the foster care system from having responsibility for Simon that time.
Chapter 6
Walking into theoffice at the end of the day, Kate plunked down in her chair and stared at her monitors blankly.
“Before you get involved in anything, you may want to go outside and talk to your boyfriend,” Owen said from the other corner of the room.
Boyfriend?What on earth? She turned and looked at Owen—the happily married family man in the team, truly an exception in their profession—wondering if she would ever really be accepted here. “What are you talking about?”
“Simon. He’s been pacing outside for a while.”
She frowned, got up, and walked over to the window Owen pointed at. She stared down at the street, and, sure enough, she found Simon, but he sat on a nearby bench, drinking coffee.
“He’s just sitting there,” she muttered. Of course, for him to be on her block, chances are he wanted to talk to her, but he hadn’t texted her or come to her office. Then again he didn’t really want anything to do with the cops, and she couldn’t blame him. If she wasn’t one, she probably wouldn’t either.
Every time her presence wrought fear in others, she cringed. That part of her job she absolutely detested. Just the sight of her showing up on somebody’s doorstep made them anxious. But Simon was made of sterner stuff than that. Of course it had to do with his history that, so far, they hadn’t fully discussed—and probably wouldn’t, given her profession. It was likely to rear its ugly head at some point in time and was part of the reason she held back from getting even more involved with Simon. Besides, he was just a distraction she could often ill afford.
She shrugged, then turned and walked away.
Owen watched her and asked, “You’ll leave him hanging out there? Not the best way to handle a relationship.” When she frowned at him, he shrugged. “Just saying.”
“He hasn’t texted me. He hasn’t done anything to suggest he wants to talk to me,” she replied. “For all I know, he’s buying a building in this area.”
“Is that what he does? Buys and sells real estate?”
“I think he buys, rehabs, and then sells,” she explained.
“You think?”
“Yep, I think,” she stated. “Or maybe he keeps some. I don’t really know.”
Andy chimed in now. “How the hell is it you don’t know more about this guy?”
“Because I don’t know anything more,” she stated, with a shrug. “It’s not like you know anything about any of your one-night stands.”
“You’ve been dating him for a while though,” he replied quizzically.
She shrugged again and headed back to her desk. The last thing she wanted to do was discuss her relationship with reluctant psychic Simon among her coworkers. They had bugged her about it a lot when they first found out, some asking questions that, even now, Kate didn’t have answers for. Things like, whether he could read her mind or if it bothered her to think that no real privacy could be had between them.