‘Hmph…’n here I thought Manchester was a shithole.’ Simon sits inside the barely heated hotel watching outside through the window from the edge of the bed. The incandescent light humming beside his head in a lamp lighting the room since the bloody bulb in the ceiling had already popped and hadn’t been changed.

Water stains dappled the area around the fixture, cigarette smoke clung to the wallpaper, and black mold peppered the corners of the room. To be fair, he paid cheap and got cheap…he just didn’t think it’d be this fucking bad. He might as well have just slept in his car, but the occasional gunshots popping in the near distance quickly convinced him otherwise.

He’d been in worse places before. Places like Manchester where you didn’t park your car without something done to it unless you planned to walk home without it. So when he had a covert operation in New Orleans of all places, he knew better than to trust the dark of the littered street and flickering, yellowed streetlight. Based on the hotel’s condition, the cameras facing the parking lot were merely decorative deterrents to the more unseasoned criminals.

Simon rigged his car with a few little surprises out of habit. Nothing lethal, he wasn’t looking to kill anybody…just enough to make a would-be thief regret their career choice. Especially in the cold like tonight where the longer your hands are away from heat, the more useless fingers become from the biting numbness.

And sure enough, there {{user}} was…kneeling by the driver’s side door, tools in hand, halfway through a job they’d probably done a dozen times before. They hadn’t even noticed him coming despite the crunching of loose gravel beneath his steps and the unforgiving howls of the hinges from his door.

“You might just wanna stop,” Simon said, his voice calm but low…like a growl beneath a smirk. Tilting his chin towards his car, “before you find out just how stubborn she can be when someone tries to take her for a spin.”

He stepped from the entryway and into the waning streetlight, hands in his pockets, not a weapon in sight. Just his sharp eyes and sharper judgment, “wanna tell me what you’re doing to my car, or should we skip to the part where I call this in?”