Simple Simon Read Online Free

bet she is,” Anne said, accepting the roundabout compliment.
    “Okay, Simon.” Ohlmeyer placed a hand on the young man’s shoulder. “You had better get moving.” He opened the door and guided Simon through it. He watched him until he was safely in Carolyn’s hands. When Ohlmeyer turned back, Anne was resting against the table in a half-sit. “You passed muster, I have to say.”
    “He’s—” She checked ‘nice’ before it came out. “—sweet.”
    “He’s special,” Ohlmeyer added not as a correction, but as a statement of additional fact. “Very special. If we can work with him, and get him to explore his abilities, we might pick something up in the process.” He crossed his arms, his face twisting into a teeth-gritted smile. “Something to help explain this damned disorder.”
    “Anything I can do, Chas, just put it to me.”
    “Talking to the parents might help. I want him here five days a week. He needs to be here five days.”
    A slow nod agreed…almost completely. “Just promise me something.”
    Some old friends never changed, Ohlmeyer recognized. “Anne…”
    She showed a cautionary palm to her friend. “Not you, Chas, but that young man does not need to be made into a lab rat for one of these eager young PhD candidates you’ve got lurking in the shadows. He has a life, he deserves a life. I won’t be party to his exploitation.”
    Ohlmeyer held four fingers up. “Scout’s honor.”
    “Wrong number, Chas,” Anne commented. “Well, this has been a rather pleasant ending to the day.”
    “And now you get to go home to your G-Man,” Ohlmeyer said with a smile. “So, tell me, is the Windy City keeping Art busy?”
    “Well, he has a saying: There’s bad guys wherever you go.”
    “Atrocious grammar,” Ohlmeyer said, then added soberly, “But true.”
    Anne nodded. “Very.”
    *  *  *
    The day was almost done when Art Jefferson swiveled his chair toward the window that, on a clear day, afforded him a partial view of Lake Michigan and pulled the folded note from his shirt pocket. He opened it and smiled at the five words.
    Love you. Tonight, my place?
    As if it were some tryst his new bride were planning. He tucked the note away and chuckled to himself, realizing that he felt somewhat like a twenty year old newlywed. Well, he was the latter, but he was thirty years and change past the former, on his second and last wife—knock wood—and at a place in his life he’d hardly dreamed possible three years ago.
    Recently divorced, number four in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Los Angeles Field Office, handling the biggest investigation of his career, and on the edge. What had come of that combination? A good agent—a friend—with a bullet in his neck, a heart attack, and a quasi-demotion from command to street duty. Two years of taking stock followed, case after case, some big, most not, just plodding along until the world began to spin his way again.
    Anne … he thought, feeling his warm cheeks rise. On a blind date of all things he had met her. A woman of impossibly meshed qualities. Fiercely strong and independent, vital, intelligent beyond his measure by far, and at heart she was a little girl who savored life. Tonight, my place?
    He could mark the instant in time when the change in his life took hold. It was the moment when he realized that he loved Anne. Truly loved her beyond anything he’d felt for his first wife, in fact so different from any emotion he could remember that he’d wondered if he ever really loved Lois. The feeling ushered in a newness to his life, relieved him of whatever demons had haunted him. Opened new paths. The job he held now, A-SAC (assistant special agent in charge) of the Chicago field office, had come not as an offer, but as a request. I want you as my number two, Art , Bob Lomax, the SAC, had said in the call some five months earlier. The two had worked as street agents together during Art’s posting to the Windy City more than a