Bicycle Built for Two (19 page)

# # #

Kate had a quivery feeling in her middle as
Alex’s coach approached her neighborhood. Although she knew she was
being not merely silly, but totally impractical, not to say insane,
she had a mad urge to leap from the carriage and run home so he
wouldn’t see the dump she lived in.

Reminding herself that she was as good as
anyone, even though she didn’t feel like it more often than she
did, and also that her circumstances weren’t her fault and that she
was doing her very best to better them, she still felt bad about
Alex witnessing this God-awful part of town. Garbage lay
everywhere. Sanitation was a laugh. Ladies of the night paraded
their wares. Drunken men shouted and laughed. Dirty, half-naked
children played on stoops. The whole area was characterized by
filth, poverty, and desperation, and Kate wanted out so badly, she
could taste the longing every time she came home. She was glad for
the dark of night, because the neighborhood was even uglier with
the sun shining on it.

That was one of the main reasons she loved
working at the World’s Columbian Exposition. Everything there was
clean and tidy. It was the only place in Kate’s whole life where
everything worked the way it was supposed to work. Even her.

She wasn’t there now, however, and the
carriage was rapidly approaching her little corner of the world.
Kate sometimes thought of her tiny apartment as a refuge in a
storm-tossed sea. It might be small, and it might be falling apart
in spots, but she kept it clean, and nobody bothered her there. And
that, as she well knew, would last for as long as her father
remained in ignorance of her address. The mere thought of her
father made her lift her hand and finger the fading bruises on her
throat. With luck, he was still locked up. Kate wished she believed
in luck.

Girding her loins, so to speak, she said,
“We’re not too far away now. It’s just down this street and to the
left.”

Alex grunted something, and Kate shot him a
glance. As she’d expected, he was glaring out the window, looking
as if he disapproved of everything he saw. What the heck. She
didn’t approve of it, either. She didn’t say anything. After
another few seconds, she muttered, “It’s that big gray building
over there. The one with the sign painted on the window. The
butcher’s shop.” It might smell bad, but Kate would be forever
grateful to the old German couple who allowed her to rent the room
over their shop. The Schneiders were nice folks.

Without a word to Kate, Alex leaned out the
window and gave a command to his driver. The coach pulled up to the
curb in front of Schneiders Meats. With a sigh, Kate prepared to
climb down from the high life and reenter her own low place in the
universe.

“I’ll see you to your door.” Alex’s voice
was gruff.

“You don’t have to do that. I know the
way.”

“Stop being stubborn, dash it! I’m going to
see you to your door.” He pushed the door open, flipped down the
stairs and reached for Kate’s arm.

She allowed him to help her down. Why not?
It was kind of fun being treated like a lady for once. “Thank
you.”

As if the words were pushing past his
restraint, Alex snapped, “Stop thanking me! Dash it, I can’t even
imagine you living in a place like this.”

The words hit her like a slap across the
face. Stiffening, Kate snapped back, “It’s better than where I came
from.”

“Good Gad.”

Before she could wrench herself away from
him and dash up the stairs, humiliation burning inside her, a loud
roar made Kate stop in her tracks. “Oh, God, no!”

Alex tightened his grip on her arm. “What is
it?”

As if life weren’t hard enough already.
Kate’s heart sank into her resoled shoes. In a voice shaking with
rage and shame, she said, “It’s my father.”

Chapter Nine

Alex whirled around, putting Kate behind
him, and saw a huge, barrel of a man heading straight at him, his
head lowered, as if he intended to ram Alex in the stomach like a
bull. “Good Gad.”

“Oh, Lord, Alex, please don’t let him hurt
you!”

“Hurt me?” The remark wounded Alex in a
sensitive place: his pride.

“He’s a monster,” Kate cried. She’d started
tugging on his coat sleeve, trying to get him to run away.

Alex would be damned before he’d run away
from this lout. “Don’t be absurd,” he barked. “Stay here.” Yanking
Kate’s hand away from his arm, he straightened and stepped away
from her, hoping her maddened father would aim for him instead of
her. His ploy worked.

With a roar of fury, Mr. Finney lurched
toward Alex. Alex, who had plenty of experience in felling animals
bigger and heavier than himself, stepped nimbly aside as the
charging bull of a man reached him, whipped his arm out and up,
thereby catching the other man around the throat, and felling him.
Mr. Finney hit the pavement with a thud that rattled the
Schneiders’ front window.

Time seemed to stand still for a moment as
Alex stared down at Mr. Finney, who lay there, his sides heaving,
looking confused and in pain. Alex glimpsed Kate from the corner of
his eye, pressed against the butcher shop window, her hands
pressing her cheeks, her eyes huge. He turned to her. “Are you all
right, Kate?”

“Me? Am I all right?” She gaped at him.

She had such beautiful eyes. If Alex weren’t
otherwise occupied, he’d have been happy to stare into them for
several hours. Under the circumstances, her evident inability to
understand his question annoyed him. “Yes! Are you all right. For
God’s sake, this man is twice your size!”

“I know.” He heard Kate gulp. “I’m
okay.”

Alex hadn’t experienced violent urges very
often in his life. He understood now, as he had never done before,
that this was a product of his privileged life and background. He
felt extremely violent at the moment. It was all he could do not to
pick Kate’s father up by the scruff of his neck and beat him to
death.

Kate took a tentative step toward him. Alex
snapped, “Stay back. I don’t know what this animal is going to do
next.”

“He’s going to try to kill somebody,” Kate
said in a shaky voice. “Probably you. Then me.”

“Damnation.” The word, coming out of his own
mouth, shocked Alex. He shook himself. No matter how bad
circumstances were, profanity was no answer. “We’ve got to do
something with him, then.”

“What?”

Alex shot Kate a frown. “There’s no need to
sound so hopeless, Kate. We only need to think for a bit.”

He hadn’t noticed the crowd gathering until
the murmurs and exclamations finally penetrated his concentration.
Glancing around, he saw a mob of faces, all looking on with varying
degrees of fascination, outrage, and relief. He heard somebody say,
“About time somebody leveled that ox,” and took heart. Evidently,
the crowd wasn’t going to lynch him for leveling one of their
own.

Since they seemed to be on his side in this
issue, Alex decided to press his luck. “Does anybody have a
suggestion what to do with him now?”

“Shoot him?”

This suggestion, offered by a toothless man
who grinned down at Herbert Finney, prompted laughter from the
crowd.

“I wouldn’t mind,” Alex told him, “but I
don’t think the police would like it.”

Mr. Finney, gaining strength, muttered a
profanity and started climbing to his feet. He’d made it to his
hands and knees when a young man in the crowd stepped forward and
whacked him with the lunch pail he carried. Mr. Finney collapsed
again.

“Thanks, Benny.”

Alex turned to find Kate smiling feebly at
the young man with the lunch pail. The boy couldn’t be any older
the Alex’s sister.

“Sure thing, Kate,” said the boy Alex
assumed was Benny. Benny looked from Mr. Finney to Alex. “Why don’t
go and try to round up a policeman.”

Alex contemplated the problem. “Do you think
it’ll do any good? I was under the impression the police don’t take
much of an interest in Mr. Finney and his family.”

“They don’t,” said Benny in a matter-of-fact
voice, “but they wouldn’t like it that Finney tried to hurt a
swell.”

From the murmurs of approval that went up
from the mob, Alex realized they all agreed with Benny. “That’s
terrible,” he growled.

Benny shrugged. “Maybe, but it’s true.”

“Good Gad.” There was no time to worry about
the inequities of Chicago law enforcement, since Mr. Finney was
beginning to make challenging grunts from the sidewalk. Alex gave
himself a short mental shake and barked, “Anybody have a belt or
some rope?”

The men standing around exchanged glances. A
woman, quicker to understand Alex’s intent than her male
companions, jerked forward, untying the scarf wound around her neck
as she did so. “Here, you can use my scarf.”

“No, Rose,” Kate said, causing Alex to whip
his head her way. She took a shaky step toward him. “Use this,
Alex.” She took a black ribbon out of her handbag. Alex recognized
it as the one that encircled her neck during her dance performance;
the one she used to hide the bruises this same man had inflicted
days earlier.

“Don’t be silly, Kate,” said the woman named
Rose. “That wouldn’t keep a baby’s hands tied. Use this.” She
thrust her scarf at Alex.

The men in the crowd finally caught on to
the purpose of Alex’s request. Several of them nudged Rose aside
and handed Alex items appropriate for securely tying up a large,
drunken man. When Mr. Finney’s alcohol-fogged wits allowed him to
understand that Alex had deftly tied his hands together—he’d had
lots of practice on bulls of another variety—he set up a roar of
vile curses and epithets.

Without pausing in his deft movements—he had
started binding the drunken man’s feet together—Alex said out of
the corner of his mouth, “Somebody give me a gag.” Several men’s
and ladies’ handkerchiefs were thrust forward instantly. Alex
grabbed at the one he saw first and jammed it into Mr. Finney’s
mouth. When he was through binding and gagging Mr. Finney, he stood
up, taking Kate’s father with him by means of Rose’s scarf, which
he’d tied around the man’s neck. Alex thought it was fitting, and
if Mr. Finney struggled and managed to strangle himself thereby,
that would be fitting, too, not to mention convenient.

“All right, you son of a bitch.” He heard
Kate gasp at his use of such foul language, but didn’t care. “We’re
going to wait right here, and as soon as the police come, I’m
sending you with them. Tomorrow, after you sober up and before you
can get sprung from the clink, I’m filing charges.”

Mr. Finney’s eyes bulged, although Alex
judged the emotion behind the bulge to be ire rather than worry.
Because he was so furious himself, he shook Mr. Finney, hard.
Fortunately for all, Rose’s scarf held up under the pressure of
such violence. Mr. Finney’s face turned an alarming shade of puce.
Alex didn’t care about that, either. Still holding Kate’s father in
what he wouldn’t have minded if it had turned out to be a death
grip, he turned to Kate. “Are you all right, Kate? Do you need
anything?” Shaking her father for emphasis, he added, “This ape
won’t be bothering you again tonight.”

She shook her head. “Yes. I mean, no, I
don’t need anything. Thank you.”

Like hell she didn’t need anything. She
looked as if she were about to faint and her eyes were huge, too,
with what Alex judged to be a combination of shock, anger, and
mortification. Potent combination, that, and he deeply regretted
the fact that Kate was forced to endure it. Of course, it was all
her father’s fault. He actually grinned when he realized that’s
what Kate had told him in the first place.

“I swear to you, Kate, that I’ll take care
of this. I won’t let this man terrorize you or your mother again.”
Even if he had to kill the bastard with his own bare hands. He
didn’t add that part, but he silently vowed it, to himself and to
Kate.

This time she nodded, although Alex clearly
read the doubt on her vividly expressive countenance. Little did
she know that Alex never promised things he failed to deliver.
She’d learn, though; he’d see to it.

Someone had evidently hurried to fetch a
policeman, because a grumbling man in uniform showed up at that
precise moment. Alex presented Mr. Finney to the uniform with a
vicious thrust forward. Mr. Finney staggered, but Alex held him
upright by the scarf around his neck. As soon as the policeman saw
who was behind the drunkard, he stopped grumbling and
straightened.

“Jaysus,” the policeman muttered. “What’s
this? Finney’s been at it again, has he?”

Before Kate or anyone else could respond to
this less-than-caring commentary by the law, Alex said in a voice
of ice, “Yes. Finney’s been at it again, and this time I’m going to
make sure he never has a chance to hurt his daughter or his wife
again.”

The policeman frowned. “And you are?” He
didn’t take Mr. Finney from Alex’s care, a fact that fueled Alex’s
irritation to a degree he hadn’t believed possible. Did Kate and
the people in this neighborhood have to endure this sort of thing
from official police representatives all the time?

Stupid question. Of course they did.

“My name is Alex English, and I’m one of the
directors of the World’s Columbian Exposition.” The assertion
wasn’t entirely untruthful. Alex was one of the directors of the
fair’s Agricultural Forum. “I expect the Chicago Police Department
to do its duty in this instance, and I intend to make sure they do
it. So if you’re not interested in doing your duty, I’ll find an
officer who is.” He gave the policeman a toothy grin and hoped the
idiot would choke on it. “And I’m sure the police commissioner will
be intrigued to find out how his deputies honor their
responsibilities to protect the community they’ve been hired to
serve, as well.”

He was pleased to see the uniform swallow
hard. “No need for that, Mr. English. I’ll take Finney into custody
right now.”