“Apparently not. Look. I’m very interested in buying, but we’re way too far apart to even begin to contemplate a deal. Coming down $20,000 is pennies on a project like this, so don’t bug me again.” With that, he shoved the phone back into his pocket. Once he walked down to the next site, he stopped and groaned.
His foreman raised a hand and rushed over to him. “The steel girders didn’t make it off the docks.”
“Of course they didn’t.” Simon wanted to pound somebody into the ground for all the delays. “Why this time?”
He shrugged. “What can I say? Apparently it’s busy.”
“It’s busy? It’s always busy,” Simon muttered. He stared up at the crane—costing him $10,000 a day, and that was a special price—while waiting for these girders. He shook his head. “How much longer?”
“They’re hoping to get them delivered by the end of the day.”
“Great.Now what about the rest of the supplies?”
“Everything else is on the way,” the foreman stated. “The girders always cause trouble.”
“Of course,” Simon muttered. “I want everybody here first thing in the morning to make sure we pick up as much slack as we can and get back on track.”
“I actually think that, if we can ever get things running smoothly,” the foreman mentioned, “we can make up some time down the road and actually get this back on schedule.”
“You say that, then everything blows up”—Simon winced—“so let’s not jinx it.”
When Simon was finally done here, he headed off to the next job site. This one was almost done, and the work was down to theinterior finishing details. He walked inside to see several other business people he’d requested to be here for a meeting. He looked at one of them and smiled. “Barbara, how are you doing?”
She smiled at him. “Well, considering that you’ve been keeping me busy with all these projects, I’m doing just fine.”
He laughed. “I’m a little overwhelmed myself right now actually. I’ve got more going on than I’d anticipated.”
“I wondered about that,” she noted. “Normally you only work on a couple at a time.”
He just smiled and didn’t say anything because she didn’t really know the depth of how much he had going at any given time. “This one is coming along and almost done. How is it going on your end?”
“So far, everything looks good,” she replied. “We’ll start looking at getting it rented.”
He nodded. “This one was always intended to be for low-income families.”
She nodded. “And I’ve got a system in place to start screening applicants. What about the ground floor?” she asked Simon.
“Commercial,” he replied. “Something to start paying the way for the building’s main purpose.”
She laughed. “I do have a couple interested parties, even though we haven’t put out any announcements yet. We haven’t gotten any figures on lease amounts yet either.”
“Have you any idea what you’re looking at?”
And that started a discussion of how long it would take to get his money back on this building, and, when he saw the figures, he winced.
She nodded. “This one wasn’t cheap.”
“No, this is one of the projects that I do because I need to,” he stated.
“One of these days you’ll have to explain that to me,” she said, “because most of the people I work with are motivated by thebottom line. You are that way on some buildings, but, on others, you’re not that way at all.”
“Nope, on the others I’m not.” He didn’t go into any further details. By the time he was done, he was over an hour late for another meeting.
He swore, made a quick phone call, pushing everything back, grateful that this time it was just with his contractor, who was there anyway, and headed out. He briefly thought about Kate, wondering how she was doing on the joggers’ case. He’d seen the news flash about two more dead runners on the same path and realized the public panic would start setting in. At least the path should end up being mostly empty for a bit. He had to admit it was a hell of a nice place to run, and he’d like to go back there himself.
If it weren’t for the drive that would cut into their time so badly, he would put that on a regular run schedule with Kate. Maybe on weekends they could do something like that. He knew that she’d really enjoyed it too. Just the fact that it was in the location where the killer had been active would make it a bigger draw for her, whereas most people would be the opposite. But nothing was normal about Kate. She was all about the bottom line, and it just happened to not be a bottom line that most people understood. She wanted to close cases and to put away killers, but it had nothing to do with numbers for her, unless it was the number of people that she was saving.
As he moved into the foot traffic to get to his next appointment, crossing the street and blending in with the crowd moving with the lunch hour, he thought about giving Kate a quick call, but then realized he was really out of time. As he got nearer to the next location, he stepped into the shadows, feeling a headache coming on—about the only inkling he ever had these days when something was about to blow up in his world.