by Mary McBride
He rolled his eyes—which she just happened to notice were a stunning hazel, a bit more green than brown—and then jammed his hand into his pocket, producing a metal shield clipped to a small black leather case.
“There.” He held it in front of her face, but far too close for her to properly focus on. “Satisfied?”
“Not quite.” She rummaged in her handbag for her drugstore reading glasses, snapped them open, jammed them on her face, and then grabbed the badge. It looked real enough, so she handed it back. But she wasn’t done yet. “What about something with your picture on it?”
“Jesus, lady.” He ripped his fingers through his already rumpled hair. “Will you get in the goddamned car instead of standing out here like a target?”
“Oh.” Once more, she seemed to have forgotten that she was supposed to be afraid.
“Yeah,” he muttered. “Oh. Just get in, will you, and then I’ll show you my whole frigging family album, if you want.”
“That won’t be necessary.” She angled into the now clean passenger seat and had barely tucked her right leg inside the vehicle when he slammed the door.
Callahan stalked around the front of the car, slid behind the steering wheel, and jabbed the key in the ignition. The Mustang roared to life, vibrating like a small jet. “We’ll stop by your place for a suitcase or whatever,” he said. “Where’s home?”
“The Canfield Towers on North State.”
“I should have guessed.” He rolled his eyes again. Shelby glared at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.” He took the emergency brake off, wrenched the gearshift into first, and pulled away from the curb.
Steaming at his remark, Shelby crossed her arms and stared straight ahead. How rude was that? So she lived in a luxurious high-rise. So what? She didn’t have to apologize for that. She was proud of it. Ms. Simon worked damned hard for every single cent she made, and if she chose to spend an outrageous sum for rent, well then, by God she had every right to do just that.
“Where do you live, Callahan?” She snorted, not too attractively, as she turned her glare on him. “In a refrigerator box under the Green Line?”
He smiled again. This time, though, it was less of a grin that blazed across his face, and more like an involuntary, sideways twitch of his lips.
“Something like that,” he said.
Shifting around, Shelby perused the clutter in the backseat. He probably lived here, she thought. In his car. It smelled like burgers and fries and dirty socks. She wondered what kind of policeman he was, and she was just about to ask when he reached across to the glove compartment, grabbed a cell phone, and thumbed in a number.
“It’s Callahan,” he told whoever answered. “Put me through to the captain.” After a moment he said, “I’ve got her.”
Shelby assumed he meant her.
“We’re headed to her residence at the Canfield Towers. Yeah. Nope. I’ll let you know.” He clicked off, then stashed the phone in a side pocket of his down vest.
“You’ll let them know what?” she asked.
“Where you decide to relocate.”
“Oh, God.” She’d forgotten about that. It seemed as if he were just escorting her safely home. “I don’t see why I can’t just hang out in my apartment. It’s plenty safe. There’s a man on the door twenty-four/seven. I can order in groceries.”
“Forget it,” he said.
“I will not. Nobody asked me about this, you know. Just because my employers think it’s a good idea doesn’t mean—”
“Is that your building up there on the left?”
Shelby looked ahead, where the newly constructed luxury high-rise towered over the block. She’d been one of the first residents there and she loved her spacious one bedroom/one bath on the twelfth floor, even as she aspired to the three-bedroom penthouse on the thirtieth and thirty-first floors. Someday. If the column continued to be popular...If her speaking engagements increased...If she survived this current mess...
A few minutes later, Callahan pulled up at the curb in front. “I’m assuming you don’t have a pass for the garage, right?”
“Right. No car. No pass.”
He killed the engine and got out.
“You can’t park here,” Shelby said when he opened her door.
“Yes, I can,” he said. “Come on.”
From close behind him, she heard Dave the Doorman’s voice. “Hey, buddy, you can’t park there. Oh, hello, Ms. Simon.” He peered through the window on the passenger side. “I’m afraid your friend can’t . . .”
Callahan swore, dug his badge out of his back pocket, and flashed it at Dave, who mumbled something that sounded like an apology.
“We won’t be here long,” Callahan told him.
“Yessir.”
After Shelby got out of the low-slung car, the doorman, still obviously suspicious of a man in ripped jeans and a duct-taped vest, badge or no badge, leaned close and whispered to her, “Is everything okay, Ms. Simon?”
“Everything’s fine, Dave. Thanks.”
The man looked at her as if to say, Well, okay. If you say so, then he loped ahead of them to open the door to the lobby.
Once inside the marble and sleek chrome entry, Shelby pulled her keys from her purse and headed for the little room off the main foyer where the mailboxes were located.
“Whoa. Wait a minute. Hold on.” Mick Callahan caught her arm. “What the hell are you doing?”
“I’m going to check my mail.”
“You’re going to...!” He still had her by the arm, and now he was shaking his head and sort of growling. “What are you? Stupid? Deaf? Suicidal?”
“Excuse me?” she shrieked.
He gave her a look of undisguised disgust, then called across the lobby to Dave, who’d returned to the relative peace and quiet of his desk. “Have the police been here yet this morning?”
Dave shook his head and called back. “No, they haven’t. I’m positive. I’ve been on duty here since seven, so I would’ve seen any sort of police activity.”
The lieutenant pulled out his cell phone, stabbed at it, asked for his captain again, and then inquired about “the bomb guys” just as the big black box of a truck pulled up outside the building, right behind the Mustang. “Never mind. They’re here,” Callahan said, then hung up abruptly.
He turned to Shelby. “Look. I’m sorry I yelled,” he yelled.
She might’ve laughed if she hadn’t been so pissed at him, and at herself, as well, for almost opening a mailbox that could conceivably blow off her hand. Or more. Little wonder he’d accused her of stupidity. “So, what happens now?” she asked.
“The bomb guys will check out the mail room here, and then make a sweep of your apartment. It won’t take too long, assuming they don’t find anything.” He pointed to a little grouping of chairs on the far side of the lobby. “Why don’t you just sit and relax for a minute?”
She looked in the direction of the expensive cream leather club chairs and for a moment she felt so exhausted that she could hardly keep standing. In a matter of a few hours, her entire world seemed to have changed beyond all recognition. She must’ve swayed or something, because she immediately felt a steadying hand on her back and heard Callahan say, “Come on. Let’s get you in a chair.”
Shelby sat, trying to concentrate on the copy of today’s Daily Mirror that someone had left on the table beside her chair. The headlines read like old news to her since they didn’t include this morning’s series of letter bomb incidents. Those would be all over tomorrow’s edition.
She turned to the inside pages and read her own column—twice—with a critical eye, trying to figure out if her words were in any way inflammatory or if they could offend anyone to the point that they’d want to blow her up.
There certainly wasn’t anything offensive in this column. She’d written it just a few days ago, advising Over the Hill in Oklahoma to move heaven and earth in order to pursue her dream of a college education desp
ite the fact that Over the Hill considered herself too old at the age of forty-two. In her encouraging reply, Shelby had included phone numbers and Web sites to assist the woman in her quest for tuition money. Also, in a rare personal note, Shelby wrote that her very own mother had started a business—a very successful one—at the ripe old age of fifty-something.
She smiled weakly, wondering if maybe the mysterious letter bomber was her mother, taking issue with her daughter for using her as an example of an old dog capable of learning new tricks. Nah. Her mother was enormously proud of her midlife success and didn’t hesitate to tell anyone about it, sometimes at great length.
This would probably be her last column for a while, Shelby thought. She wondered if her readers would miss her advice. What if they got out of the habit of reading her, or while she was on hold, what if they got used to reading “Ask Alice” instead? Now there was a depressing thought. Alice, despite the matronly picture that accompanied the popular column, was really Alvin Wexler, a sixty-year-old curmudgeon whose “advice” was really just an excuse to parade his numerous alleged degrees in the social sciences. Ms. Simon wrote rings around him, in Shelby’s opinion anyway.
Just then she heard the elevator doors whooshing open, and out stepped her neighbor, Mo Pachinski. He’d traded his electric blue velour outfit for a gray sharkskin suit that was almost iridescent, complemented by a dark purple shirt and matching tie. After he exited the elevator, Mo scanned the lobby as if he half expected somebody with a submachine gun to be lurking behind one of the potted ficus trees. Then he spotted Shelby, smiled the way a piranha might smile at the sight of human flesh, and—after shooting his purple French cuffs—sauntered toward her.
But Mick Callahan got to her first. He practically sprinted across the marble floor to insert himself between Shelby and the oncoming Mo, who looked startled for a second, then grinned.
“How’s it hangin’, Lieutenant?” Mo asked. He shot his cuffs again. It must’ve been a nervous tic, or else some involuntary reaction to a sudden rush of testosterone.
Callahan, whose plaid flannel cuffs were rolled halfway up his rangy forearms and therefore unshootable, merely shifted his shoulders in a macho, John Wayne kind of way. “What’s up, Morris? When’d you get out?”
“Christmas last year. Hey, I’d’ve sent you a card if I thought you cared.”
“Yeah. Yeah.”
The smirk on the mobster’s face seemed to soften just a bit then when he said, “I heard about your wife, Callahan. My condolences.”
Mick Callahan’s face, however, hardened to granite as he responded with a terse “Thanks.”
A wife? Condolences? What was that all about? Shelby was wondering just as Mo turned to her and asked, “You know this guy, Doll?”
“Sort of,” she said.
“Hey, Lieutenant,” someone called from across the lobby. “We’re ready to go up to the residence now.”
“Let’s go,” Callahan said to Shelby. “Take it easy, Morris.”
“What’s the deal here?” Mo asked, looking from Shelby to the lieutenant and back. “What’s going on? You got some kinda problem I oughta know about, Doll?”
She didn’t know how to answer, so it was a good thing that her stick-like-glue bodyguard intervened with, “Nah. No problem. Ms. Simon asked the CPD to check the locks in her apartment. Just one of the little civic services we provide when we’re not hassling you and your associates.”
“Ha ha,” Mo said as his mouth resumed its standard smirk. “You oughta do stand-up, Callahan.” He straightened his tie. “See ya, Doll,” he said to Shelby, then strode to the door.
“How do you know that guy?” the lieutenant growled, his gaze still trained on the sharkskin suit now exiting the building.
“I don’t really know him. He lives across the hall. How do you know him?”
“I helped put him in jail five years ago. He’s bad news. I’d avoid him if I were you.”
“I try,” she said with a sigh, and then she gasped. “Oh, my God. You don’t think it’s Mo who’s threatening me, do you?”
He shook his head. “Guys like Morris Pachinski don’t make threats. If he wanted you dead, you’d already be that way.”
Shelby didn’t exactly find that a comforting thought. She wanted to ask him about his wife, but when she stood up, Callahan practically rushed her toward the elevator.
They rode up to the twelfth floor with two men in thickly padded jumpsuits and a black Lab that seemed to really enjoy his job. He licked Shelby’s hand and gazed up at her as if to say, Some fun, huh? When she patted his sleek black head, one of the bomb technicians said, “Please don’t distract him, ma’am.”
As they walked down the hall toward her apartment, Callahan held out his hand. “Keys,” he said.
“Right.”
Shelby rummaged through her purse. She had so many doodads on her key chain—a flashlight, a whistle, a mini Etch-A-Sketch—that her keys tended to settle rather quickly to the bottom of her bag. The entourage of bomb guys, bomb dog, and bodyguard stood in front of her door, waiting with that sort of masculine patience that wasn’t really patience at all, but a controlled kind of menace.
She laughed nervously. “I know they’re in here.” And then her fingers touched metal, and she plucked the heavy key chain from the depths of her bag. No sooner were they out than Callahan grabbed them from her and tossed them to the bomb guy closest to the door.
“It’s the gold one with the little dab of red nail polish,” Shelby said as she was frantically trying to recall whether or not she’d made her bed this morning, and if there were dirty dishes in the sink, and what was hung up to dry over the shower door. She wasn’t the neatest person in the world, but she usually had time to clean up before company came.
The officer stuck the key in the lock and pushed open the door. Shelby stepped forward, only to be yanked back.
“We’ll wait out here while they check it out,” Callahan said.
“Right.” She’d forgotten again that she was in danger, but surely she’d have noticed any kind of explosive device in her very own apartment. What was in yesterday’s mail? Had she opened everything? Or was there a lethal envelope lurking under this week’s copies of The New Yorker and Ladies’ Home Journal?
Callahan was leaning against the wall, gazing down as if studying the pattern of the carpet.
“I guess there’s a lot of hurry-up-and-wait in your business,” she said, lowering herself to the floor.
“Enough,” he said.
“How long have you been a cop?”
“A long time.”
Hearing the plaintive note in his voice, Shelby looked up. The lieutenant wasn’t staring at the carpet anymore, but rather gazing down the corridor toward the huge plate-glass window that displayed a big rectangle of bright Chicago skyline. He didn’t seem to be focused on anything in particular. In fact, his gaze seemed to travel beyond anything actually visible beyond the glass. His forehead was furrowed. His mouth bore down at the corners. A muscle twitched in his cheek. He looked so incredibly sad. Just lost. Lost and so terribly, terribly alone.
If he’d been a child on a street corner, Shelby would’ve stopped in her tracks to kneel down and take him in her arms, to whisper, “There. There. Everything will be all right.”
But he wasn’t a child, of course. Far from it. And she hadn’t a clue about the origin of Mick Callahan’s sudden desolate visage, although she wondered if it might have something to do with Mo’s condolences, expressed earlier in the lobby. As someone who made her living giving advice, Shelby wasn’t used to holding her tongue when she encountered obvious sadness or visible depression. A soft and sincere “How can I help?” from Ms. Simon would usually elicit a lengthy tale of woe, and no matter the problem, she was almost always able to make the person feel better, even if only for a while.
But, along with the sadness, there was also something forbidding in Callahan’s expression. Something cold. Something that warned, Leave me
the hell alone.
She was debating whether or not to do just that when one of the bomb techs stepped out into the hallway.
“We’re done in here, Lieutenant. It’s clean.”
Thank God, Shelby thought. That meant she’d probably made her bed.
“Okay. Thanks, guys,” Callahan said, his expression back to its normal severity. “After you,” he said to Shelby, gesturing toward her door.
It was odd, stepping into her own living room and seeing everything just a bit different from the way she’d left it a few hours before. The chairs and sofa weren’t properly centered around the fireplace. Lamps and picture frames looked out of kilter on tabletops. A quick glance into the little kitchen revealed cabinet doors and drawers not quite closed.
She put her handbag and laptop down on a table and immediately began to make adjustments to the decor, realigning a lampshade, sliding a small Waterford crystal vase from one side of an end table to the other, tossing a velvet throw pillow from a chair into a bare corner of the sofa.
“We haven’t got time for that,” Callahan said, scowling at his watch. “Pack a bag and let’s go. I’d like to be out of here in ten or fifteen minutes, tops.”
With her knee, Shelby shoved the sofa a few inches to the right. “Where are we going?” she asked.
He shrugged and said, “That’s entirely up to you, Ms. Simon.”
“Oh.”
Oh, brother.
Ms. Simon didn’t have a clue.
CHAPTER THREE
Mick looked at his watch for the thousandth time while he mentally inventoried his patience only to find it rapidly waning, then decided to give Shelby Simon another five minutes to pack. Assuming that’s what she was doing in the other room. It sounded to him like she was just slamming doors and drawers, rattling hangers, dropping things, and swearing creatively.
He gazed around her living room, wondering what sort of woman paid what must be a small fortune in rent and then chose to furnish the place in a single boring color. Beige. Or maybe sand was a better description of the carpet and drapes and walls. The chairs and the sofa where he sat were a similar neutral shade. The tables were chrome and glass, and the lamps were made of various metals, mostly copper. With the exception of a few brightly colored tapestry pillows, the place looked like the frigging Sahara.
