Hunched over with cold and pain, Linda is a small blur rushing toward the hospital in the middle of the night, on New Year’s Eve, in the midst of a great Chicago blizzard. Too poor to afford a car, and too bloated and awkward to run, she half drags herself along. She’s working hard at not dropping the baby which is destined to be born within minutes whether or not she happens to reach the hospital in time. The hot fluid which earlier ran down her legs to signal the alarm of the imminent birth has long since frozen. She doesn’t have time to think about that now. In between her labored breathing she is panting and gasping with each pain as she fights to keep the babe whose head is already crowning between her legs, from spilling into and being swallowed up by, the great mounds of snow crunching beneath her feet. Lumbering clumsily along, she leaves a trail of bright red blood crystallizing in the snow behind her. She concentrates only on the sight of the hospital looming ever closer. In frozen numbness she covers those last few remaining yards and falls through the doors to the “pay if you can”County Hospital. She lies on the cold, marble floor, writhing in pain, and only half seeing the faces of orderlies gathering above her. She is scarcely aware of their putting her on a gurney and rushing her down a long corridor and into an elevator. It doesn’t matter where they are taking her; she knows all their rushing will be useless. This is the fourth time she’s made this trip in the night, in four years. It’s the second time this year, for the poor Nebraska farm girl of “dirt poor” alcoholic parents and grand parents.
When her father lost his job crop sharing, her family hadher family had been forced to move in with her grandfather, who collected garbage around the town for a living and whose home was a dilapidated, putrid smelling shack. Unable to stand the beatings from her father and grandfather, she had run away from her abusive home. After repeatedly running away, she was placed in Reform School. Then at sixteen she managed to run away from the reform school. In an effort to prevent being sent back there, she married the first guy that asked her. She soon found herself in an even more abusive environment, with a husband who drank constantly and beat her regularly. Feeling trapped and afraid, and looking for a way to get out, she stabbed her husband seventeen times with a butcher knife and ran off to Chicago, without so much as a glance back to learn whether he had lived or died. She didn’t care. She just knew she needed to be free. Growing up in rural Nebraska didn’t provide Linda with much opportunity for education. Hers was a one room elementary school, with a single teacher for all the students. The teacher felt validated if she could get the students to learn to read and write, and do some very basic math. Nothing more was expected of them.
As a runaway in Chicago, she soon realized that faced with such a limited education, and no job skills, employment was impossible to find. She was forced to live as a prostitute in poverty on the cold Chicago streets. She considered herself lucky if she earned enough money each night to buy the cigarettes and alcohol she had become addicted to. When she could afford it, she’d rent a cheap room in an even cheaper hotel, being careful to always seek out the kind of place that wouldn’t ask questions about the number of men visiting a lady’s room during the night. When she thought things couldn’t get any worse for her, she discovered she was pregnant. Her constant vomiting made it impossible to bring johns to her room and a week later she was kicked out. She decided it was time to find another husband. Since few men are looking for a pregnant fiancé, she realized she would have to work quickly, before her pregnancy started to show.
She certainly never wanted to be a mother! She didn’t like children at all, but knew nothing about birth control as was evident by this painful trip destiny mockingly forced her to repeat, with her now, second husband, in tow. As for him, he can be seen sheepishly following his wife, deliberately careful to keep a few metered paces behind. Mike’s feelings of never wanting to have children are as strong as his wife’s, but that’s where their similarities end. His own mother had died in childbirth when he was just a young teen. He had adored his mother and her death left him with a lifelong fear and hatred of everything having to do with women. He didn’t like or trust them, and felt especially inadequate in maternity surroundings. He sincerely wished he would have been able to get out of accompanying his wife on this painful excursion. He was void of a single shred of concern for her well being. He felt only anger toward her for having put him through this, again. He was disgusted by the birth process and wanted no part of having to witness any of this “woman’s stuff”. He was thirty five and still single when he first befriended the pretty, twenty year old who seemed fragile, helpless, and vulnerable. They met at a park where he liked to sit on the bench and read his news paper. In addition to her usual pursuits at the park, she was now on the hunt for a husband so when she spotted the older man she decided to sit down beside him. She knew he wouldn’t marry her if he suspected she was a prostitute so she played the role of an innocent young girl. She found humor in the way he took the bait so easily. After their third meeting she faked tears as she told him she just had to run away from her family because her step father was an alcoholic and he was always beating her and trying to force himself upon her. From the corner of her eye, she observed his reactions while weaving her story to suit his responses.
Before you begin feeling sorry for Mike, you should first know a few things about his own hidden agenda. Thinking himself very clever to have devised a plan to find a wife, he was very eager to marry her as quickly as possible. He was a criminal who would do anything for a price. Mike grew up on the rough New York streets and learned as a very young child, how to fight back and survive. He blamed god for his mother’s death, and after denouncing his religion, he ran away to Chicago where he lived off his wits. He started out as a common thief and scam artist. He and a buddy would go to restaurants, eat a fine meal, one would spill water on the floor and the other, in front of a crowd of witnesses, would pretend to slide and injure himself. They would go to a lawyer where they would eventually agree to settle out of court. If a car was backing up on a dark night, Mike would thump himself against the back corner of it and throw himself to the ground where he would lay in apparent agony. First thing the next day he would contact a lawyer and of course, being a reasonable man, Mike would settle out of court. This lifestyle suited him for awhile, but with his intellect and craftiness, he was soon noticed by the more influential and powerful element of the underworld society, and was quickly moved up from petty thief and scammer, to greater payoff insurance frauds, where he offered to testify as an eye witness to countless cases that he actually had no knowledge of. Then he would go to the opposing side and let them know that if the price were right, he would forget to show up in court to testify against them.
As he moved up the criminal ladder, his next job was to manipulate the legal system from inside the courts. He was to learn who could be bribed and who couldn’t, then bribe the ones necessary to get “certain” cases moved up on the docket to an earlier date, while making certain the other litigants were never told about the change of date. When the court case came before the Judge, and only one side was present, (that, of course, being the side that paid for Mike’s service), the case would be dismissed. Mike also dabbled in elections fraud and bribery, and in counterfeiting. Mike took up boxing and was very good at it. Once he found he enjoyed the feel of his fist crunching into another man’s skull, he decided to make some extra money on the side by roughing up and breaking the arms and legs of men who owed money to Mike’s associates, and were late on their payments. This was a job Mike enjoyed. Continuing to move up the corporate ladder, Mike was promoted to Hotel Manager. This was no ordinary hotel. This was a place where the select criminals brought their mistresses. There was always much going on that couldn’t be seen with the naked eye. One of Mike’s jobs here was to give excellent employment and background reports to jewelers who would call up to inquire about persons requesting credit at their stores. The “persons” were of course, using fictitious names. The jewelry would be purchased on the spot, based on the glowing reports given by Mike. Another of his jobs was to keep track of the prostitutes, and direct “gentlemen” to the right rooms. He’d also beat the hell out of any guy who tried to get away without paying. For this extra work, Mike collected a good sized percentage. This would have probably been enough criminal activity for most men, but not for Mike. He was also involved with the illegal abortion clinic on the second floor of the hotel he managed, and if things didn’t go well there, (and with medical residents filling the role of real doctors, things often didn’t go well at all), it became his job to make sure the bodies were never discovered. Mike had no scruples whatsoever, and there was no job too dirty for him. He has even been known to dress up and pose as a minister, priest, or rabbi, to trick young, trusting girls into believing they were marrying the men they love, when in fact the men were already married and really just wanting a mistress on the side. It was rumored Mike had been to prison, and rumored that he was AWOL from the military. Nobody could say for sure because of all the alias names Mike used. Yes, he was proud of himself and of his craftiness.
After accepting a job to take a special trip to Vegas to deliver a suitcase full of money, his life changed forever. No one but Mike knows what happened on that trip, but when he returned, he left the Hotel business and married (under an alias, of course), and seemed to settle down. In real life, things are not always as they “appear” to be. The people Mike worked for had found him a job in the import/export business. While to the casual observer Mike’s job may have seemed mundane and even boring; standing out on the dock every day, checking the contents of boxes before loading, his job was very important to those who arranged for him to work there. By being the last person to check every box and package before they were loaded at the dock, and by making sure they contained exactly what they were labeled to contain, Mike was positioned to be able to insert whatever was given to him, at the very last minute then seal the box himself. No other person would see the contents of the box until it reached its destination, where another well positioned employee, would be entrusted to collect the contents. The only problem for Mike was that at this “front job”, with the retail company, he was expected to keep a certain image. They placed high value on their employees being married and having families. It looked good for business. So Mike set about finding himself a wife as quickly as possible. He was shorter than most men and only had average looks, but was a very smart dresser, and always well groomed. He had an air about him which gave the impression he was a big spender when in fact that couldn’t have been further from the truth. He was a terrible miser who would lie, cheat, and steal, to save a dollar.
When the very pretty young woman sat down beside him on the park bench, that fateful day, he glanced out the side of his eye, taking her in from top to bottom while feigning reading the paper. He thought to himself, “She’s young, has a good figure, is very pretty with a kind of fragile beauty to her. She’ll do.” Their hasty marriage suited both their hidden agendas. He received a nod from his boss when he said he was getting married, and he smugly thought he was very clever because in addition to pleasing his boss and securing his position with both companies he worked for, he was enjoying having sex three times a day on a regular basis. At this point he saw the marriage as a win, win for him. Meanwhile Linda was doing everything in her power to hide from Mike, both, her former lifestyle as a prostitute, and her pregnancy. One month after their marriage she told her husband she was pregnant, and knowing it would please his boss, and not caring at all about the woman or the baby, he said that was great. This is also the same time that Mike, being the liar that he is, broke the news to Linda that he is practically penniless. Of course he had a ton of money stored away in a Vegas bank, but he was determined that Linda should never find out about that! Mike and Linda were a perfect match. They were well deserving of each other. While she had been dreaming about all the money she would be getting to spend, he had been working out a plan to keep every cent he owned far from her grasp, hidden away in places where she’d never discover it. He chuckled to himself as he thought, “No sir, not even if she lived to be a hundred”. When asked, Linda would readily admit that she wasn’t a very smart person. When asked, Mike would readily volunteer that his intellect was far superior to anyone else’s around him. These were not the ingredients of a match made in heaven. Some would say it was even too sinister for hell. Too late now; they had freely made their pact and were destined to live it out.
The story has begun..
