Just a Kiss Away by Jill Barnett Read Free Book Online Page B

silence.
    Inside the apartment the windows were cracked and loose. Noxious, hot summer fumes of a nearby sweat factory seeped through the gaps, as did the ridged, brittle cold of the Chicago winters. At age seven, Sam had finagled a job at that factory, working twelve-hour night shifts shoveling coal in the heavy burn furnace just so he wouldn’t be cold anymore. His few dollars a week supplied them with bread, and some milk for his two half-sisters.
    Sam didn’t have a long pedigree, but he knew how to stay alive. He knew how to get what he wanted, and his years on the streets had taught him to outthink and outfight the most practiced, the most shrewd, and the most calculating minds.
    And in the last ten years he’d been getting paid for those skills, and paid well, by whatever faction needed him. He’d been in the Philippines for five months, hired by Bonifacio to train his men in guerrilla strategy and to use the Hotchkiss breech-loading rifles and, more importantly, those coveted Sims-Dudley dynamite guns that were due from his arms source any day.
    He glanced at his fellow prisoner. She was still at it, going on about rh-ice and indee-go on her mother’s side. Right now he wished he had one of those dynamite guns. He’d cram it in her mouth.
    She finally made eye contact. There was a moment of blessed silence, a very brief moment.
    “Don’t you think so?” she asked, referring to some dumb thing she’d been chattering about.
    He leaned back against the corner, his motion crackling the dry grass of the walls. He paused before he spoke, making sure he had her complete attention. “When you were growing up on your farms, did you ride around in one of those fancy black carriages—the kind with all that shiny brass and a team of horses whose pedigree was as perfect as your own?”
    He had her. Confusion lit her soft southern-sweet features, and she nodded.
    “I thought so.” He paused. “When we were kids we used to play a game.” He met her wide stare. “You know what that was?”
    She shook her head.
    “Whoever could hit those fancy carriages with the most broken tenement brick won.”
    Her face paled.
    “You know what the prize was?”
    Clearly shocked, she slowly shook her blond head.
    “If you were young—say, five or so—you got the best spot to pick pockets. As I remember, it was near Sixty-fourth Avenue, and there was a dark alley right next to it, a great place to ditch the copper. Now, if you were about eight, well, then, you got first crack at stealing the bread off of Grissman’s bakery wagon while the others bullied old man Grissman away from the wagon doors by heaving garbage and street muck at him. The children who were older than that . . . well, there weren’t many ‘children’ left who were older than that. You grew up fast on Quincy Street. If you wanted to survive.”
    She just stared at him, as if the life he described could never have existed in her sheltered, pampered little world. He’d finally found something that shut her up. So he closed one eye, feigning sleep. The sound of her gown rustling made him crack his eye open a bit to look at her. She still stared at him, a wealth of emotion in her expression. He looked down and missed the look of pity that crossed her face.
    He stared at his bound hands and resisted the urge to shake his head in disgust. She was worse than most. The real world didn’t exist for her. The pale skin, her open mouth, and her appalled eyes said as much. That look told Sam what he’d always suspected. Those people in their carriages never bothered to look at the slums. There was no place in their perfect little worlds for the poor and the ugly, no mars in their finish, no flaws in their diamonds. If the world around them wasn’t perfect, then they’d wall it off and surround themselves with one that was. And they would never let that wall down. The ugly might get in.
    Finally quiet, she began to fiddle with some sparkly thing on her shoe.
    Ah,