Free Simple Simon by Ryne Douglas Pearson Page A

knew she was really looking inside. “Something wrong, babe?”
    Anne straightened and let out part of a breath she felt she’d been holding for almost an hour now. “Have you ever tried your damndest to make something happen, but it just wouldn’t?”
    Every day , Art thought, but he knew that wasn’t what she needed to hear. “Sometimes.”
    “Well, I had one of those sometimes this afternoon.” She frowned and shook her head, and even considered giving the steering wheel a good thump with the heel of her hand, but didn’t.
    “Is this about that kid you told me about?” Art asked. Of course the Bulls had been on in the background when she was telling him in mild shouts from the kitchen of their home in Evanston, about an hour from the city on a good traffic day.
    “Simon,” Anne said, irritation beneath the word. “The autistic young man?”
    “I remember,” Art said.
    Anne relaxed a bit. “Sorry.”
    Art rubbed her leg through the blue skirt. “Forget it. Go on.”
    “His…” She retracted the invective she almost let slip. “…father refuses to—” The ringing of a cell phone interrupted her complaint.
    “Yours,” Art said.
    Anne fished the phone from her purse with one hand and answered it after the third ring. “Hello… Yes, this is her… What?”
    Art watched his wife lean forward to the steering wheel, almost as if she needed the support. “Babe?”
    “When did this…” She pulled the Volvo hurriedly to the curb to a symphony of angry horns, and closed her eyes. “How did you get my number?”
    Art saw her nod a few times, then she clicked off and practically dove toward him across the center console. “Babe, what is it?”
    Anne pulled him very close, as tight as she could, and silently cursed herself for the thoughts she’d almost expressed toward Simon’s parents. “It’s…Simon,” she managed to say between sobs, then pulled back from Art and tried to regain her composure. She put both hands very properly on the steering wheel and said, “I’ve got to get to him.”
    “What is it?” Art almost begged as his wife screeched back into traffic and doubled back toward the Eisenhower Expressway.
    *   *   *
    The Cadillac limousine was an hour outside of Tokyo when the youngish man facing Keiko finished reading her report on what the American had revealed. He looked to her and set the twelve pages on the seat next to him. “Again, you have done fine work. Mr. Chappell knew even more about the Americans’ position on tariff limits than we anticipated.”
    Keiko stared back at him through dark glasses. She was reclined in the leather seat, facing the direction of travel, and had counted two trains passing the car on the right at a very great speed. She wore tight black jeans and a black blazer over a white tee-shirt. Her hair hung loose. One hand lay across her stomach. The other picked quietly at a seam in the upholstery.
    “Mr. Kimodo will be pleased,” Mitsuo Heiji said, his expression cooling a bit before continuing. “But he is concerned with your…method.”
    Keiko looked right, past the train tracks to the farmland beyond. In the far distance the morning sky was grey and threatening. The rain was going to come. “Are we going to turn back soon?” she asked the window, ignoring the question.
    Heiji did not answer immediately. With her attention on something outside the car he let his eyes wander over her body. She was forty, and those years showed somewhat in her face, but her body could belong to a teenager. He might have chanced a proposition once, but not after seeing what remained of Carlton Kerr, the first American she’d handled some months before. Heiji had laid eyes upon the body before seeing to its disposal at a highway construction site. It was difficult to think of the man that way with his tongue torn out and one knee bent forward at an impossible angle. That this…woman had done that frightened Heiji more than a bit. If only she were tame his