Read Online Shamrock Alley by Ronald Damien Malfi - Free Book Online

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,