Shamrock Alley by Ronald Damien Malfi Page B

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.

CHAPTER SIX
    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