Page 12 of Simon Says… Fight (Kate Morgan Thrillers #11)

“Why would they take it now?” he asked curiously.

“It’s one of the things I’ve just been talking to the real estate agent about,” he shared. “No guarantee they’ll accept it, but it’s more likely now than it was before, as their lives have changed.”

“Right,” Quinn muttered. “I’ll take another look.”

“Also take a look at it from the point of view if we dropped it and rebuilt something bigger and better on top of it.”

“If you got it cheap enough, this location could do well. I can tell you that right now. It’s problematic when you want to rebuild what’s there, keeping a lot of the old structure.

As you and I both know, that’s where a lot of the expenses come in.

But if you’ll take it back down to either the steel or the foundation,” Quinn stated, “still, you can’t lose money on it. ”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Simon agreed. “I’ll make an offer tonight then.”

“Make sure it’s low enough though. Just because you can make money doesn’t mean you make enough for your trouble.” With that, he was gone.

Half laughing over that, Simon turned and looked back at the old girl. Somehow she seemed to have lightened up, almost smiling at him. “I know. If I get you, I promise I’ll do something to make you proud,” he vowed.

It would stretch him if he bought the property, then let her sit.

That’s what had been happening to her all these years.

At the same time, he also knew that he might just have to let her sit for a time while he figured out what he was doing with her.

Plus, he needed the manpower for it, which meant one of his other rehab projects had to get finished up—or at least to the point where he could get his framing crew back again.

And, with his thoughts full, he headed home, only to realize that his feet had once again taken him to that damn creepy warehouse that he didn’t like.

“I should just buy you and drop you flat,” he muttered, as he stared up at the old building.

It was another derelict, probably mostly a drug-addict-inhabited building, not his favorite by any means.

Although it would certainly be spectacular if somebody took the time and the effort to redo her as well.

He just wasn’t necessarily sure he was up for the job.

He forced his feet to walk past, but he soon hit an invisible wall.

He groaned, turned to look back at the building, and asked, “Why?”

He got no audible answer, yet he felt this weird sense, and soon a whisper came in the back of his mind.

Because we need you.

He didn’t know what that meant, but, as he walked hesitantly outside, he heard a weird whine inside. He wasn’t sure what it was. As he headed toward the building, he called out, “Hello. Hello.”

He heard a faint groan, followed by swearing.

He went inside, knowing it could literally be a trap to get somebody like him to go inside and then get pounced on.

With his guard up and all the psychic energy he could muster at the ready, he moved forward.

He hadn’t gotten very far inside when he recognized a form on the ground, not in very good shape. He raced to the man’s side.

The old man looked up at him and whispered, “You need to leave. You need to get out of here.”

Simon nodded. “Probably, but no point in leaving you behind.”

“They’ll come back, and, if they do, they’ll likely be done with me today.”

“Maybe,” he murmured. “Is this where you want to end up?”

“Not like this,” he said.

As the old man reached up, Simon bent down and scooped him up. When the old man called out, a dog appeared from nearby and followed them outside into the sunlight. The old man looked up at the sky and smiled. “Now that,” he whispered, “makes it worthwhile.”

“What happened to you?”

“I don’t know,” he replied, a sad smile on his face. “Feels like I hit my head or something,” he muttered.

“We need to get you to the hospital and get you some care.”

“That ain’t gonna do no good either,” he shared. “I’ve been dying for a long time.”

“Dying from what?”

“Cancer, and I refused the treatments. I don’t want to go that way either,” he said, his gaze on the sun. “It’s just me and Elsie.” He pointed to the dog following them.

It looked to Simon as if Elsie was just as old as the man in his arms. Both of them had quite aged features.

“Where do you want me to take you?” Simon asked, as he shifted the weight of the man in his arms, the dog at his feet trembling in the cold. “Can you walk?”

“Barely,” he muttered.

“Is there a shelter you go to normally?”

“Some won’t take me, saying I have to be ambulatory,” he muttered. “And other places won’t let me take the dog.” He swore at that, and then the man smiled. “See? That’s why you shouldn’t have come in.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Simon admitted, “but I did, and now the question is, what do I do with you?” He walked over to a bench and slowly sat the man down.

The man laughed. “Yeah, this is good. At least I’m in the sun.”

Simon phoned Kate and asked, “Is there a place for homeless people who have disabilities?”

She thought for a moment and muttered, “I’m not sure about that. There are places for seniors.”

“He has a dog.”

“Yeah, that’s where the problems begin,” she muttered. Her tone seemed distracted.

“Never mind. I’ll figure it out.” And he ended the call, looked down at the man, and sighed. “Surely there’s a place for people like you.”

“There is no place for people like me,” he muttered. “If I didn’t have Elsie, I could probably go to some shelters. But she’s so old, and she’s been with me this whole time, so I don’t want to desert her right now.”

“Well hell, any idea…”

“You mean, any idea of our life expectancy?” The old man laughed. “You can say it. I don’t mind, and neither does Elsie.”

“It just sounds crude,” Simon said apologetically. “That’s not a nice thing to ask somebody.”

“No, it’s not a nice thing, but it’s the truth, and the truth can be bitter,” he noted, with a groan. He took several gasping breaths. “Honest to God, both of us are goners. We were just looking for a place to finish it, preferably somewhere safe.”

“And what if you die before Elsie?”

“She won’t last much longer,” he replied. “She’s been with me a very long time. We just need a place out of the cold for a little bit.”

“Yeah, and, when you say, out of the cold for a little bit , what does that mean?” His mind said, Don’t do it, Simon , but something inside him said that he had to. He had no choice in the matter. He frowned as he looked around and then asked, “Have you got any place, any family?”

“No, no family,… at least not anybody who gives a crap about me anymore,” he added.

“I lived pretty rough for a long time, so just leave me here. The cops will tell me to move on. I’ll tell them I can’t.

Then they’ll try to put me in a shelter, but I won’t leave Elsie, so they’ll end up leaving me here. ”

“Well, crap.” Simon stared at the old man. His skin appeared paper thin. “When did you eat last?”

“Not eating much anyway,” he murmured. “Food doesn’t sit well, doesn’t travel through the system as it should. Seriously I’m just days away from croaking.”

“You can’t just sit out in the street like this, just waiting to die,” Simon argued.

The old man looked up at him and smiled. “You haven’t seen enough of the city side of life to realize that’s exactly what happens, day in and day out,” he murmured.

“That may be, but I’m hoping I don’t ever see that,” Simon snapped. “Look. I’ve got a place where you can stay for a couple days, but I don’t want you bringing any of your neighbors with you.”

“You mean, other homeless folk? No, I wouldn’t do that,” he stated. “Would you really give me and Elsie a place to stay out of the weather? We just need a few days.”

Simon hated to do it, not because of potential damage to his place but because he couldn’t properly look after the old man. Yet Simon didn’t want to be old himself and in a similar situation and not have anybody give a crap. Swearing to himself, he asked, “What’s your name?” Then he called a cab.

“I’m Arnie. Where will you take us?” he asked. “I can walk a little bit, you know.”

“We’ll have to go to the opposite side of downtown,” he replied, “and I’m not carrying you. I need to get you settled, so I won’t worry so much about where else you could end up.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever met anybody who gave a crap where I ended up,” Arnie pointed out, looking at him curiously. “Don’t you care that I might steal something?”

Simon shook his head. “I would be pissed if you broke things, but I’m not too worried about your stealing anything.… I’m more concerned about the lack of humanity in the world when somebody is in your situation.”

“Ah, you can’t blame them,” he suggested. “Everybody tries to do something, but there isn’t a whole lot of space in this world for people who can’t provide their own keep or who don’t do whatever it is that the world expects.”

“Which is no excuse,” Simon declared abruptly.

The old man laughed. “No, it sure isn’t,” Arnie agreed, “but it does make people feel better when they can’t do anything.”

“I can do something.”

Just then the cab arrived. He helped Arnie into the back, Elsie beside him, as Simon took a seat and gave the driver instructions to head back toward his penthouse.

“I don’t think you should take me in,” the old man argued. “I’m sure people in your world would much prefer you had nothing to do with me.”

“Maybe, but, if that’s the case, they’re not people who should be in my world, are they?” As soon as the cab got to the location he wanted, he helped the old man out.

Arnie looked around at the harbor and smiled. “Now this brings back memories,” he murmured.

“Yeah, what memories?”

“I used to have a boat myself, way back when,” he shared and smiled. “I lost my wife and my children in the divorce, and afterward I never seemed to make good decisions.” He shook his head. “I lost everything at that point. So, it doesn’t even matter.”

“What is everything?”

“Way too much to say. I did the things you do because you don’t know how to cope,” he explained, with a headshake.

Simon urged him on, and, with the little dog now in his arms, directed Arnie down to the Running Mate.

As the old man stood on the wharf and looked around under the graying sky, he whispered, “Good God.”

“What?” Simon asked. “Don’t you like her?”

“Of course I like her,” he declared, grinning from ear to ear. “You giving me a place to stay for a day or two, aren’t you?”

“A day or two while I try to figure out what the options are,” he shared. “I know about women shelters because I help them out, but I don’t know that I’ve ever seen anything for old men.”

“No, I don’t know that there is anything. It’s not a sexist thing. It’s just that we’re supposed to always look after ourselves,” he noted, with half a smile. “And we can,… right up until we can’t.”

“And that’s the hard part,” Simon murmured.

“It’s very hard because we don’t try to not look after ourselves,” he clarified. “It’s something else entirely.”

As Simon got him into the boat and down into the cabin and explained how everything worked, the old man turned to him and nodded.

“I just want a place to lie down. I swear to God I’ll be dead in forty-eight hours anyway.

” Simon stopped to stare at him. He nodded. “I’m not kidding. I really am done.”

“Your willpower might be done,” he countered, “but that doesn’t mean your body is.”

“Isn’t that the truth,” the old man muttered, staring at him. “Okay, we’ll do it your way. See if you can find a place for me and Elsie here.”

Elsie was already curled up on the couch against the blankets, still shivering. Simon walked over and couldn’t help himself from tucking the little dog in. He looked back at the old man. “When did you eat last?”

Arnie shrugged. “Neither one of us eats much anymore. It’s one of the ways that you can tell that you’re getting there,” he murmured. “We just don’t really care a whole lot for food.”

“Maybe Elsie here does.”

“Nope, Elsie really doesn’t. She just wants a place to curl up and die too.”

“Jesus,” Simon muttered, staring at him.

“You’re angry, and I get that. It’s kind of nice, young man.”

“You can call me Simon.”

Arnie smiled. “It’s a surprise to see anybody angry about something like that,” he said, “but life is really simple at this stage. We really just want a place to be safe.”

“So, what was happening in that warehouse? You said, they would come back .”

“Yeah, some assholes,” he muttered, with a careless wave.

“The world seems full of them when you’re run-down and out of luck.

But they were… I don’t really know what they were doing.

I don’t think they saw me, but I figured, if I stuck around, they would eventually run across me. They were doing some fighting.”

Simon lit the gas fireplace and sat down beside him. “When you say, fighting , tell me more.”

“Yeah, I don’t really understand.” Arnie shrugged. “It seemed they were fighting, but it didn’t seem to be a fair fight.” He yawned at that and rolled over, so he could curl up to the warmth of the little fireplace. “You’re a blessed man, indeed,” he murmured.

“Maybe now,” Simon noted, “what I do know for sure is that, if you can do something, you should do it.”

Arnie looked at him, his aged face shivering, and he smiled. “And again, that’s the young idealistic part of your heart. Most of the world doesn’t give a crap.”

“I’m not most of the world,” Simon declared. “Now, get some rest, and I’ll make sure some food is here when you and Elsie wake up.” And then he waited, while Arnie closed his eyes and fell into a deep sleep.

Simon got up, grabbed blankets from one of the cupboards.

When he turned around to cover up Arnie, the poor shivering dog was now tucked up and sound asleep beside her owner.

Simon put the blankets around them both, smiling.

“Not exactly the rescue I expected today,” he whispered to himself, “yet why not?”

And with a self-satisfied smile on his face, he turned and headed toward Kate, knowing that her reaction could go either way. Regardless it wouldn’t matter because Simon meant what he had said to the old man. There was no room in his world for people who weren’t on board with helping others.

He highly doubted Kate would have an issue with it.

She might have an issue trying to find Arnie and Elsie a place to go because it didn’t seem any such place existed.

Simon found that a difficult aspect too.

But that wasn’t today’s issue. Right now, it was all about making sure he got home and got some of the leftovers before Kate ate them all.