Shamrock Alley Read Online Free Page A

in his head before he sat down and said one word to anybody. Thinking of his father only muddled things.
    Before leaving, he kissed Katie on the mouth, bent and kissed her belly, and slipped out of the apartment. His wife knew better than to ask what time he’d be home.

    Bill Kersh sat on a bench beneath a giant oil painting of two hunting dogs outside the office of Assistant U.S. Attorney Roger Biddleman. Kersh was forty, looked sixty, and smoked like he need not fear death. He sat with his eyes closed, his head back against the alabaster wall, and a pair of headphones over his ears. His shirt was white and wrinkled with one of the buttons undone; his necktie was crooked and spotted with conspicuous burn rings from careless cigarette ash. A heavy, broad-chested Protestant, he was the type of man to ruminate, when left alone, on the intricacies of life and death and all the miserable groaning in between. He found simple pleasure in familiarity and had managed to fashion his personal life in such a way that catered to the predictable. A creature of habit was Bill Kersh.
    John approached and sat beside him on the bench. Looking at Kersh’s face, the older agent appeared to be in a trance. Eyes still closed, Kersh tapped one of his fingers lightly on the portable tape player that sat in his lap. He smelled faintly of aged tobacco and cheap aftershave lotion.
    Without opening his eyes, Kersh said, “Your heartbeat is vibrating through the bench.”
    “I took the stairs.”
    Kersh didn’t answer, didn’t open his eyes. Across from them was the wooden door with the pebbled glass—Biddleman’s office. A number of distorted shapes shifted behind the glass.
    “Who’s in there now?” John asked. He looked at Kersh. “Can you hear me with those things on?”
    Kersh sighed and clicked off the tape player. He slid the earphones down around his neck while humming the last few bars of a tune beneath his breath. There was nothing musical about Bill Kersh’s humming. He looked John up and down, examining him the way a psychiatrist might take visual inventory of a patient at the first meeting. Bill Kersh was a good man and a talented agent. Though he was older than most of the agents in John’s squad, Kersh was seen not as a father figure but, rather, as a jaded recluse with a predilection for the eclectic. His disheveled and awkward presence would have elicited snickers behind his back in a less conscious environment. “You doing all right?”
    “I’m fine,” John said, looking up at the pebbled glass on the door, “but I think things are gonna change.”
    “Don’t worry about it. How’s your dad?”
    “Stable.”
    “All right.” Kersh glanced casually down at his fingernails. He’d chewed them down to the quick. “Katie?”
    “She’s a trooper.”
    “Hmmmm.” Kersh pushed his head back against the wall. There was a small red nick on his chin where he had cut himself shaving. “These people don’t understand what we do. And they don’t care to. Don’t forget that.”
    The office door opened, and a pair of suits filed out. They talked in murmurs and acknowledged both John and Bill Kersh through glances from the corners of their eyes. Together, they receded down the hallway, their shoes clacking loudly on the marble floor while their shadows stretched along the wall.
    A young woman stepped out of Biddleman’s office. “Mr. Biddleman will see you now.”
    Roger Biddleman’s office was spacious and well-furnished, with a wall of windows that overlooked the trinity of One Police Plaza, the Metropolitan Correctional Center, and the gothic steeples of St. Andrews. A number of framed photographs ran along the wood-paneled walls, their glass panes shimmering with the reflection of Manhattan. The carpet was green plush, and the chairs facing Biddleman’s desk were upholstered in cordovan leather piped with brass tacks. The entire room smelled of cedar and, faintly, of cigar smoke.
    Biddleman stood from behind his