Shamrock Alley (7 page)

Pier 76 functioned primarily as the city’s car tow-away pound. Recently, the city had been discussing the relocation of the pound to a more accessible midtown location to make room for the growing string of high-profile condominiums that had begun creeping up the coast several years ago. As a child, Glumly had exhibited a proclivity for all things large and mechanical, and would spend hours at the piers watching the great ships maneuver in and out of the ports, their hulls dull and iron pitted with protruding bolts as big as a grown man’s fist, their wakes white and crisp and frothy. He would try and creep as close as possible to the piers, the pungent stink of fish tremendous in the air, before someone saw him and shouted at him to leave before he got hurt or killed. In all this time, the piers had changed, as had the entire West Side Highway, though there remained an air of nostalgia for him. He was aware of the feeling even now, as an adult and as a cop, searching no longer for great ships and seagoing vessels but for a severed human head.

Brice was the name of the fellow working at the pound who’d discovered the head, roughly thirty minutes ago. A uniformed officer was with him now, as well as a collection of motley roustabouts in soiled overalls and scarves tucked into the collars of their flannel work shirts. A pound attendant in his mid-thirties, James Brice was clear-eyed and lucid, with a rugged complexion, surprisingly nice teeth, and sideburns that dipped down like twin hockey sticks at the lines of his jaw. In another life, Glumly supposed Brice could have been considered movie-star handsome, though after he’d worked so long on the river, the bitter sea air had managed to harden and manipulate his features.

To his cohorts, James Brice spoke of the severed head with great fanfare. “I seen a man dead once, but heads that’s on a body don’t look the same as heads that’s off a body. This one just had some
look
, my God, and I tell you what—whatever the hell’s in that river took with it whatever it wanted. Eyes, lips, nose. Gone. Almost didn’t look like no head at all, not until I hoisted it up onto the docks to see what the hell it was. But, man, you can’t mistake no goddamn head.”

“You think the body’s down there, too, Brice?” one of the workers asked him.

“Hell,” said Brice, “could be
anything
down there—you know what I’m saying? I mean, who even says this is the last head I’ll pull outta there? Couple fishin’ lines, we maybe pull a whole buncha heads out.”

Some men laughed.

The head in question was wrapped in a section of tarpaulin on the floor of the pound’s main office. A sallow-looking man named Kroger, introduced to Glumly as the fellow in charge of the pound, stood toward the back of the office, as far away from the misshapen lump on the floor as he could get. Unlike the enthusiasts who had migrated toward James Brice—and Brice himself, for that matter—Kroger looked on the verge of collapse. With his right hand, he supported himself against the office wall, while his left hand fidgeted jerkily with a leather strap that hung from his belt loop. His skin was the color of uncooked fish, and his small, rat-like eyes had to them the irritated squint of a newborn.

“This ain’t good,” Kroger said upon meeting Dennis Glumly, as if such a declaration warranted reevaluating the entire situation.

A second uniformed officer unwrapped the head for Glumly. Glumly crouched, examined it with a hand to his chin, and, after a moment, whistled.

“Christ in a fedora,” he said.

“Something’, ain’t it?” the officer asked for the sake of asking. “The hell you make of this?”

“Well, it’s in pretty bad shape. Could have been down there a while.”

“Fish got to it.”

“Looks like it’s male—fella in his forties, maybe. What’s this here?” Glumly pointed to a section just above the left temple where the skull had been broken, leaving behind a silver dollar-sized hole in the surface. Behind him, he was aware of Kroger starting to grumble to himself.

“Shit,” said the officer. “The fella who dragged the thing out of the river did that…”

“Jimmy Brice,” volunteered Kroger in a dull voice.

“Said he wasn’t sure exactly what it was when he first saw it,” the officer continued, “so he used some sort of metal hook on a pole to scoop the head out of the river.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake …”

“Yeah.” The officer almost chuckled.

“You call for divers?”

“No.”

“Call for divers.”

“You think the body’s down there, too?”

Glumly stood, popped his back, and peered out at the river through the grime-smeared windows of the pound office. “Who the hell knows what else is down there,” he said.

The officer tossed a corner flap of tarp back over the head and stood. Scratching his brow, he looked in Glumly’s direction. “What you got on your mind?” the officer said matter-of-factly.

Glumly just rolled his shoulders.

He didn’t tell the officer he was thinking about the severed foot uncovered in a dump last month.

I
N MANY WAYS, COUNTERFEIT MONEY IS LIKE
a disease. The bills appear first in an isolated incident, much as a small child in a classroom of perhaps thirty children will all at once come down with the flu. These bills appear throughout the bustle of an enormous city, such as Manhattan, and perhaps fester for some time before they are brought to anyone’s attention. Perhaps at a local dive, a cathouse, an expensive Park Avenue boutique. The bills surface like a sneeze and, sometimes, seemingly evaporate into the air before anyone becomes the wiser. Other times, however, the bills—much like a flu bug—become airborne and spread. Soon, that same viral strain crops up in the immune system of every third or fourth child in the classroom—at every third or fourth city block in some major city. A savings and loan bank on West 86
^th
Street becomes wet with fever, and the federal physicians make a house call. And if the strain is particularly virulent, the physicians—the feds—begin keeping an eye out for it. And they see the disease along Lexington Avenue; they study the malignancy beneath the bleeding sodium lights of Wall Street; they follow it through the neon jungle of Times Square; they are aware of cupped hands and coughing fits throughout the seedy alleyways and busted down tenements along Tenth Avenue; prostitutes, all nylonlegged and leopard prints, find themselves infected with it; a shop clerk finds himself feeling and re-feeling the consistency of the disease, holding it up to the light, scrutinizing it, suddenly knowing he is in the presence of some crooked man-made plague. And as with any illness, if left unattended, it is only a matter of time until the entire classroom of children is infected—until the entire city is host to the festering sickness.

And, as is sometimes the case with illnesses, people die.

Within the filth-infested alleyways and poorly lit, subterranean corridors along Manhattan’s West Side Highway, one man uttered some nonsensical excuse in a shaking voice and was stabbed in the throat. A second man, a bit quicker than his companion, began to run.

His breath burned his throat. He ran, pushing himself as fast as he could, to beat both God and the devil. At one point he nearly choked on his own laughter, quite certain of his escape. Then he felt something in his right knee snap. With a cry of agony, he collapsed to the trash-littered alleyway, grasping his knee and moaning softly. Hot fluid spread through his leg. Behind him—no, all around him—shadows materialized and solidified, the hint of bodies became actual ones, and footsteps crunched through broken glass along the street.

“You make us run like that, you shit?”

Squirming on the ground, the man closed his eyes, did not open them. He could smell the sewage-stink of the street, could smell the alcohol-rich reek of his pursuers. From behind his eyelids, he watched his friend collapse again, dead in the alley, this time in sickeningly slow motion. The memory less than a minute old, he watched again as the knife blade shot straight out and caught his friend in the throat. There was a dull
plink!
as the tip of the blade pierced through the flesh at the back of his friend’s neck and made contact with the concrete wall of the alley behind him …

Someone’s booted foot stepped on the ground two inches from his face. He gasped for air, eyes still shut tight.

“You see this? Now I’m outta goddamn breath.”

Someone laughed. Nonsensical voices …

“What—hey, you got—”

“That’s mine—”

“Come the fuck on—”

“Hey, use this, Mickey—”

“I got a hammer—”

“Open your eyes.” Someone was very close to his face now. The man could smell his pursuer’s breath, could feel its heat pushing against his cheek. “Open your fucking eyes, Harold.”

Slowly, Harold did … and couldn’t make out any details, because his eyes were wet and blurry. There were a few orange streetlights across the street—close, yet at the same time seemingly in another part of the world. These lights smeared across his field of vision like the work of some abstract painter, and were occasionally blotted out as someone stepped in front of them.

“His eyes open?” someone else asked.

“Yeah,” muttered the man very close to his face, “they’re open. You see me good, Harold? How you doin’, my man? You doin’ all right? Doin’ A-fucking-okay, Harold? Make me goddamn run like that…”

Something metal and solid scraped along the ground in front of Harold’s face. His vision faded in and out, in sync with the throbbing pain in his right knee. For an instant, his vision cleared up, and he was able to make out what the object was: a serrated knife.

“Mick—” His throat closed up, and he couldn’t finish the name.

“I just wanted you to get a good look at what I’m about to use on you, Harold,” said the voice just in front of his face—Mickey O’Shay’s. “You see what kinda guy I am—lettin’ you see it? Big fuckin’ knife, Harold, you lousy piece of shit. Heavy one, too. For guys who don’t know how to do their fucking jobs.”

Then the knife was gone, lifted back off the ground.

There was a moment of absolute, blessed silence. Harold could hear only the rustle of discarded newspapers tumbling down the alley in the wind. In that moment, nothing else existed on the face of the Earth except for him and those tumbling newspapers. Then the hurried movements of feet all around him, and someone grabbed his lower jaw and forced his mouth open. He tried to scream, but no sound came. Fingers pressed painfully into the sides of his face.

“Hold him!” someone shouted. “Get his mouth open!”

He tried moving his head, tried escaping the hand’s clasp, but could not. The hand held him down against the pavement. Bright whorls of color exploded beneath his eyelids. Something snaked into his mouth: someone’s
fingers
. He gagged, was slapped, and felt the fingers dig down into the soft flesh of his lower jaw. Frantically, he tried to work them out of his mouth with his tongue.

“I want his tongue!”

A sharp, sudden, stinging pain infiltrated his mouth. Liquid flowed freely down his throat, nearly choking him. He felt pain and pressure and the abrupt
chunk!
as the serrated blade of the knife pierced through his tongue and clanged against his teeth. In his agony, he worked his tongue around his mouth to assess the damage … only to find that his tongue was no longer there.

“Teach you,” said a voice. “School’s open.”

Then the hammer came down on his injured knee, and an electric charge of pain exploded in his leg. He screamed into the night, his throat full of blood, and the sound of his own agony was suddenly all he could hear, all that existed. Again, behind his clenched eyelids, an image was summoned. Only this was not the image of his friend’s death in the alley just moments ago. This image was of a place upstate where his family used to vacation during his childhood, where he and his father would pull large perch from a lake hidden behind a stand of giant firs, and where his mother would sing to them all at night before—

The hammer came down on Harold Corcoran forty-three times that evening.

Yet Harold only lived to feel the eleventh blow.

Special Agent Bill Kersh, who had never married and who had never desired the companionship of a roommate, wholly appreciated the silence of an empty room. When working late, he sooner preferred the company of Charlie Byrd, Benny Goodman, Dave Brubeck, and Billie Holiday to the raucous cacophony of the younger agents. On stormy autumn nights, the soft patter of rain against the office windows soothed him. The look of the darkened cubicles after hours was welcomed, and he would sometimes pause and look up from his work to simply study the emptiness of the office, the way a priest may search for peace in an empty cathedral. On occasion, when he found time to entertain such thoughts, he absently wondered how some of the younger agents viewed him. Not that it really mattered. It was a different generation, after all.

The office was never really asleep. Aside from Kersh, there were always others working the late shift, typing reports, slipping in and out of the office like phantoms through walls. Though he preferred to work alone, their presence did not disturb him; rather, their approaching footfalls in the hallway and their under-the-breath muttering as they stepped from the restroom provided him with some semblance of time and place. There had been times when he’d worked in absolute silence only to find himself staring—quite perplexedly—through the bank of office windows at a rising sun. Watches and clocks served no purpose: easily forgotten, they only ticked away in silence. A living, moving presence, on the other hand, kept him grounded.