Read Shamrock Alley for Free Online Page A

Selano.
    Mickey finished his beer and stuffed the empty bottle into the pocket of his peacoat. Like back at the bar, the room began to waver and shift, to expand and deflate … as if he were watching it breathe.
    “Goddamn,” Irish muttered. “Look at this mess.”
    Jimmy tucked the .38 into the waistband of his pants. He called to Irish without taking his eyes from Raymond’s body. “Get some knives and a few plastic bags.”
    “Goddamn,” Irish muttered again. “You bring this shit to my house without tellin’ me? You gonna do somethin’ like this in my goddamn place, Jimmy, you say somethin’. You don’t just do it.”
    “Plastic trash bags,” Jimmy reiterated, “big ones. And a couple of those small sandwich baggie things. I want the hands.”
    Irritated, Irish shuffled into the kitchen and returned with a cluster of butcher knives and a cylindrical roll of plastic trash bags. He handed the items over to Jimmy, who took them and quickly bent to one knee, grabbed the end of one of the trash bags, and fanned the roll like a magician yanking a tablecloth out from underneath a china dinner setting. A carpet of plastic unraveled the length of the sitting room.
    Mickey dropped beside Jimmy, absently scratching at the back of his shaggy head. With little enthusiasm, Mickey removed a slender knife from his coat and jammed it into Raymond’s chest.
    He winked at Jimmy. “Just makin’ sure.”
    Grinning, Jimmy flicked Mickey’s ear and stood. “Help me drag him to the bathroom,” he said. “We’ll put him in the tub.”
    Jimmy removed his coat like a surgeon preparing for an operation. Mickey stuffed the collection of butcher knives into his own coat pocket, bent, and grabbed Raymond Selano’s hands. With Irish standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the sitting room, the two men carried the kid’s body into the bathroom with little difficulty. While he carried the body, his hands slick with Ray-Ray Selano’s blood, Mickey finally remembered the song that had been eluding him all evening.
    He began to hum.

CHAPTER FOUR
    I N THE SOFT RAIN OF MIDDAY , J OHN stood across the street from a group of run-down West Side tenements. The rain helped to calm him. Each time he closed his eyes, he could see the waxy, emotionless face of Roger Biddleman. Even in reflection, Biddleman’s forced composure and proctor-like countenance, enshrined in the sanctity of his lacquered office, irritated John to no end. People like Biddleman were an open book, their intentions and motivations so clearly defined that they clouded the air about them like the contrail of a jet plane. And more often than not, their intentions and motivations, John knew, were invariably self-serving.
    A taxicab crashed through a puddle beside the curb, and John caught his tired reflection in its passing windows.
    Finishing a Styrofoam cup of coffee and shivering against the cold, he crossed Tenth Avenue and passed through a rusted cyclone fence that enclosed, among other things, Tressa Walker’s West Side apartment building.
    The Secret Service had picked Tressa Walker up roughly two months ago after she’d passed a few phony hundreds at a string of convenience stores around the city. The bills were excellent fakes, and Kersh quickly recognized them from a previous bust, explaining that the printer—some Jew from Queens named Lowenstein—was currently incarcerated. With Tressa’s prints on the money, the Service located and detained her for questioning. A search of her vehicle uncovered numerous boxes of Pampers and aspirin, each purchased from a different location with a phony hundred. In her purse, they discovered two more hundreds. A young, frightened junkie with a baby at home, Tressa Walker was quick to give up information. Her boyfriend, Franics Deveneau, had access to the money and had given her a few bills to attract potential customers. The capitalist that she was, Tressa had decided to simply pass the bills herself, pocketing