Shamrock Alley Read Online Free PDF Page B

people, make some calls. It’s good, everything’s real in-line. Just, you know, wanted you to know that.”
    “We trust you, kid,” Jimmy said. “Forget it. In fact, you can make it up to us tonight. Help out a couple of street thugs like Mickey and me?”
    Raymond grinned, now somewhat at ease. His teeth were like busted fence pickets. “Shit,” he said, “what you got?”
    Jimmy said, “Let’s take a ride.”
    Raymond watched Jimmy rise, watched him crush his cigarette out on the floor, watched him half-walk, half-trot to the bar and knock down the last of his Guinness.
    “Got this song in my head,” Mickey told Raymond. “Damnedest thing. You know what that’s like? You hear it, but you can’t think of what it is? Right there. Son of a bitch.”
    The room seemed to tilt, to spin, to try and shake him off the floor. With one hand, Mickey grabbed the back of a chair, drummed his fingers along it. Looking over his shoulder, he searched for the young girl in the tight polka-dot dress, but she had disappeared. So had the old guy who’d lit her cigarette.
    They made it to the Cadillac, although Mickey couldn’t recall leaving the bar, and from the back seat he watched the red sodium glare of Manhattan flit past the window, as if in a dream.
    Fifteen minutes later and Jimmy was maneuvering the Caddy through a confusion of rundown apartments on Tenth Avenue. It had rained earlier that evening, and now the car crashed through puddles and splashed through ragged dips along the alley. Few lights were on in the windows of these apartments. Time was suddenly an absurdity. Mickey wondered if the eleven o’clock deli was still open.
    Brakes squealed. Jimmy pulled the Caddy against one of the tenements, slammed it into park, and hit Raymond with the punchline of some joke he’d been telling. Mickey saw that the clock on the Cadillac’s dash read 10:47.
    Outside, the air was bitterly cold. Mickey blew plumes of vapor into the air. As if in a parade, the three men pulled their coats closed as they mounted the steps to the rear stoop of one of the apartments. An invisible cat hissed and scurried away through a curtain of metal trash cans. Raymond jumped at the noise, and Jimmy found this hysterical.
    “This your place?” Raymond asked no one in particular.
    Jimmy rapped both his fists along the door in a circular motion. “Yoo-hoo,” he muttered.
    After a few seconds, a light came on at the back of the house. Mickey could hear footsteps coming to the door, could see Irish’s grizzled form shuffling toward the door through the wire-mesh glass that looked into the kitchen. Bolts snapped and the door creaked open, spilling a soft yellow glow along the wet patio.
    “Bastards,” Irish muttered, grinning wide enough to split his face in half. Irish was old—late fifties, if Mickey had to guess—and looked like a cement truck fitted with a sleeveless undershirt and tobacco-stained khakis. He had thick, meaty jowls and what looked like a million teeth stuffed into his mouth. His gut was large enough to be obscene.
    “What’s up, Irish?”
    “Jimmy,” he said. “Come inside. Cold out there.”
    They moved into the cramped kitchen and stood around like mopes, their hands stuffed into their coat pockets, until Irish told them to sit inside, relax.
    The parlor was dimly lit and cluttered with mismatched junk, presumably accumulated throughout a number of decades. The carpet was thick and kicked up sparks of electricity when Mickey dragged his feet. The entire apartment reeked of spoiled eggs.
    “The place isn’t too warm,” Irish apologized, hitting the refrigerator for some beers. “Old burner. Swear to Christ, nothing works right in this lousy city. If it’s not the heater in the winter, it’s the goddamn window unit in the middle of summer. Busts my ass.”
    He distributed the beers around the room. Raymond claimed a chair beside a flickering black-and-white television set. Once seated, he seemed preoccupied