Page 28 of Simon Says… Fight (Kate Morgan Thrillers #11)
He snorted. “I am so not trying to do that.”
“Good,” she replied, “I would think it would be rather expensive.”
He gave her a droll look. “You think?”
She smiled. “So, maybe this is just, I don’t want to say a wake-up call, but maybe it’s a call for you to consider what you want to do with these buildings, or at least one or two of them,” she offered.
“I know a lot of them have to pay for themselves, but do they all?” she asked, looking at him.
“Is there room in any of them for somebody like Arnie?” she asked.
“How would I even find other Arnie s, who are potentially honest? But I don’t even know that he is. I don’t know if he’s… It’s a stupid idea,” he decided, shaking his head.
“No,” she countered, “it isn’t. This has certainly brought up a need within the system, and maybe it’s more along the lines of needing somewhere for pets that have no other place to go.”
“That’s an option too,” he agreed, with a nod. “It’s just something that struck me.”
“And that’s okay too,” she said. “Sometimes we have things that happen in our lives that get our attention. We think that we’re immune to a lot of things, and then we find out that not only are we not immune but we really aren’t even aware of half of what’s going on around us.
Look at Sonny’s wife today. I’m pretty sure she has no idea that her husband was having an affair, but I’ll have to figure it out, just in case she’s behind any of this. ”
“And you don’t seem to think there’s any chance for him to survive?”
“I got the impression that the docs believe Sonny has significant brain damage, but, last I knew, they hadn’t made any final determinations. They were keeping him in a medically induced coma when I was there, but I don’t know about now.”
“Ouch. I wonder if she’s…” He shook his head and added, “I’m already wondering if she’s considering organ donation.”
“I would say of course not because, at the moment, she’s not even considering that he won’t make it. She still has hope.”
“That’s true. Why wouldn’t she? Plus, she’s probably still just adjusting to the fact that he’s in there.”
She smiled. “I do think that she genuinely loves him. At least at the moment. She’s also dealing with a degree of shock.”
“I understand,” Simon said, “and you want him to be loved. You want somebody to care. It’s like that body that we found, the skeleton.”
“I know, but really who doesn’t report a body like that?”
“Oh, I did ask Arnie about that.”
“ Uh-oh ,” she muttered, as she cut into her steak, then popped a bite into her mouth and chewed, now with pure joy on her face as she closed her eyes and moaned.
He chuckled. “That look on your face is one of my favorites.”
“Sorry,” she muttered. “It’s as if I haven’t eaten for weeks, and then you give me something delectable like this?” As soon as she swallowed, she focused on him and continued. “Okay, so go on. What about Arnie?”
“He had heard lot of rumors that the place was haunted, and he’d even heard a body was up there somewhere, but he’d only ever heard it from the street talk.”
She nodded. “And nobody was willing to contact the police or to do anything about having somebody officially find the body?” she murmured.
“I still don’t understand why it was as…” He chuckled nervously. “It wasn’t stinking.”
“Not right now, no,” she stated, “but it was past that point. I would think almost no flesh was on it anymore. It was dried out and on the top floor in a building with no insulation. The heat over the last few years has been absolutely stifling, so I imagine it probably stank at the beginning, and that might have been enough to keep people away, but now he’s mine,” she declared.
He looked at her, one eyebrow raised. “You don’t get all the bodies though, right?”
“No, but believe me, that one will be mine.”
“So, he was murdered?” he asked hesitantly.
“Yes, I would imagine so. The one blow to the back of the head? That was the final blow—or would be my guess. But I could be wrong, and, without any soft tissues left to look at, I would imagine it would be hard to determine if he had been brutally beaten first. But there was definitely a major blow to the head.”
“Which would line up with your other cases.”
“Yes,” she confirmed.
“Before you ask,… and I know you aren’t asking and haven’t asked, but I want you to know that I haven’t had any contact with anybody else.”
She laughed. “Haven’t you had contact with enough spirits already?”
“Yes, I really have,” he agreed, turning to her. “I was just thinking that I don’t want to be the middleman for people, spirits, to contact me and say, Hey, by the way, my body is over here . Like hell freaking no.… That would just suck.”
“And yet it’s happened a couple times.”
“Well”—he frowned—“the one recent guy was alive.”
“Yes, maybe, and maybe not—because it’s the same building.”
“Oh shit.” He stared at her. “You’re right. I assumed it was him.”
She smiled and nodded. “But, because we found the other body, the skeleton, it’s probably a really good chance that was the same one who was talking to you.”
“Do you think he knew about the other one?”
“No, I don’t think so. He probably thought you were coming in his direction and then got completely sidelined, and he’s wondering what happened.” She laughed. “I don’t know how much knowledge they have about any of this,” she admitted, smiling at him. “Maybe nothing.”
“Maybe,” he murmured. “It does seem it’s never-ending though.”
“It does.”
With that on his mind, they finished their meal in silence.