Shamrock Alley Read online

  “Can I do something for you gentlemen?”

  “Is this Douglas Clifton’s room?” John asked.

  “Are you relatives of Mr. Clifton?”

  John flashed his badge. “We’re Secret Service. We want to have a few words with Clifton—”

  “Mr. Clifton’s in no condition to talk with anyone.”

  John sized the doctor up, looked for a name plate on his coat. There was none. “Who are you?”

  “Dr. Kuhmari, Mr. Clifton’s doctor. I’m going to have to insist Mr. Clifton remain undisturbed—”

  “Look, I respect what you do. Now respect what I do.” There was a small window beside the door—thin and narrow, like windows in a castle tower—but the blinds were drawn and John couldn’t see inside. “What’s wrong with him? When’d he come in?”

  Intimidated by John’s forwardness and inability to be swayed by doctoral politics, Dr. Kuhmari delivered a resigned sigh and began massaging his forehead with his brown fingers. “Came in yesterday,” the doctor said. “Stumbled into the ER bleeding profusely, hardly even conscious when—”

  “Bleeding?” Kersh said. He’d loosened his tie on the drive over, and now a red, raw-looking patch of neck peeked out over his shirt collar. “What the hell happened?”

  “Mr. Clifton’s right hand had been severed completely. It was bad, and he’d lost a lot of blood.”

  “Did he say what happened?” Kersh pressed.

  “He just said it was an accident, didn’t go into detail, but it was severed pretty roughly. Not a clean cut. We had to amputate some more just to clean the area, make it workable. It’s not our business to investigate the cause of a patient’s accident. I’m a doctor; I just fix the problem.”

  John resisted the urge to slug the prick. “You gonna be around for a while, if we have questions to ask you?”

  Kuhmari glanced at his clipboard, at his beeper. “I’m pretty busy today. You can have me paged.”

  Kersh thanked him, and the doctor nodded and hurried away.

  “Prick,” John mumbled under his breath.

  “Doctor Prick,” Kersh corrected, reaching out and pushing open the hospital room door.

  The first thing that struck them was the smell—of clotting blood and ammonia and large doses of human sweat. The smell went straight for the stomach.

  It was an unusually large hospital room with a single occupied bed alongside an enormous bank of windows. The windowpanes themselves were tinted, making it appear gloomier outside than it really was. It took a moment for their eyes to adjust to the lack of light in the room. Meanwhile, the shape in the bed shifted almost in agitation. John let the door swing closed, blackening the room even more. Across the room, the figure beneath the bed sheets continued to shift restlessly. A soft, pathetic moan escaped the patient’s mouth as both he and Kersh stepped farther into the room.

  Indeed, the man in the bed was missing his right hand. The arm itself tapered off into a bandaged stump and was propped up in a mechanical sling bolted to a rack above the bed. A network of tubes ran from the wound and were collected in a confusing machine beside the man’s bed. The section of gauze bandage at the wrist—the section covering the stump, the actual wound—was blotted with drying blood, so dark it looked nearly black in the poor lighting. The stink of blood in the air was impossibly thick, like the reek of a brutal crime scene.

  The man himself looked close to eighty years old, though John knew he was perhaps a little older than himself. Morphine had played a cruel trick on his youth. He was bearded, though not heavily, and he watched both agents approach with muddy, drooping eyes. A crest of dark hair was cropped close to his scalp. Beneath the starched white bedsheets, the man’s legs kicked with little strength.

  “Douglas Clifton?” Kersh said, his voice low as he moved around the side of the man’s bed. “Hello-hello-hello.” Clifton’s expression suggested his mental status was currently that of a fevered child, and Kersh was quick to catch on.

  “He even conscious?” John practically whispered.

  “Uh …” The figure in the bed began turning at the shoulders, his head turning impatiently from side to side. From the foot of the bed, John examined the man’s abbreviated right arm. He could see the muscles and tendons working up the terrain of Clifton’s arm where the bandage concluded and skin began. Phantom fingers, he thought, wondering if Clifton could still feel his absent right hand.

  “Mr. Clifton,” Kersh said again, moving a foot closer to the bed. “William Kersh, Secret Service.” Kersh paused beside the bed, seeming to consider, then moved in front of the tinted windows and placed his hands on his ample hips. His shadow fell across Clifton’s face. Yet Clifton would confess no emotion; his medication had rendered him incapable.

  “Do you … hear somethin’ ringing?” Clifton managed, his voice groggy and inept. The man shifted his gaze from John to Kersh, John to Kersh, his eyes void of cognizance and dulled like that of someone just recently dead. “You hear it?” Those sloppy eyes continued to move wetly in their sockets. Finally, just when it seemed Douglas Clifton was powerless to stimulate that portion of his brain that worked with reality as a medium, Clifton managed a languid, “Who’re you?”

  John and Kersh shared another glance. Casually, John moved around the other side of Clifton’s bed, opposite Kersh. Their dual presence above him and on either side might have intimidated a person not hopped up on meds, but it did nothing to Douglas Clifton.

  “What happened to you, Doug?” Kersh said in a serene voice.

  Clifton just stared at Kersh. John moved a step closer, but the man did not alter the position of his head on the pillow. This close, John could make out indents in the shape of teeth along Clifton’s lower lip, flecked with dried blood.

  “Doug?” Kersh held up two fingers, waved them in front of Clifton’s face. “What happened to your hand?”

  “An accident,” Clifton intoned.

  “What happened?” Kersh continued, wanting the man to elaborate. He was like a deep sea fisherman, slowly reeling in his catch. “Tell me about the accident.”

  “I …” The man’s eyes folded up into his head, as if searching for the information in the deepest recesses of his mind. Then he blinked, turned, and looked John up and down, his eyes cut to slits and eerily sober. “Who sent you here?” he demanded.

  “Douglas,” John began, “what—”

  “Who sent you?”

  “Nobody sent us. We’re cops.”

  Eyes boring through John, lower lip quivering, Clifton said, “You ain’t no cop.” Clifton now turned to look at Kersh. “This guy here a cop? He with you? You both … the both of you’s cops?”

  “Both of us,” Kersh said. “Do you want to tell us about your hand, Doug?”

  “My hand?” Clifton’s bleary eyes widened. There was an exhale so powerful John was nearly knocked unconscious by the stench. “What about my hand?” His voice was suddenly pleading: a trembling bridge on the verge of collapse. “You have my hand?”

  “This is useless,” John muttered, disappointed. “This guy’s out of it. He couldn’t tell us his birthday.”

  “My hand,” Clifton continued. And laughed. He suddenly looked insane. John watched the man’s Adam’s apple vibrate. “Don’t know what you’re talkin’ about. Goddamn.” A second burst of laughter. “Goddamn!”

  A minute later and they were both back out in the hallway. John stood against the wall staring at Clifton’s hospital room door while Kersh paced like a caged animal, furiously rubbing his temples. Kuhmari was paged and took a long time coming.

  “When’s this guy get out of here?” Kersh asked the doctor, one hand still working at the side of his head. He’d bore a hole through his skull before long, John thought as he watched him from against the wall.

  “Maybe three, four days,” the doctor said, “depending on how well he responds to the surgery.”

  “Well, this guy’s going to be placed under arrest the second he’s out of here,” Kersh told th
e doctor, “so I want you to call me before releasing him. Also, you been giving him something for the pain?”

  Kuhmari uttered a contemptuous laugh. “Are you serious? Of course. Do you have any idea what kind of pain he’d be in—”

  “No,” Kersh said, shaking his head, “I don’t care. Cut out the meds. We’re going to be back tomorrow to talk with this guy. I want his head clear and his eyes on me. Besides, a little pain never hurt anyone.”

  Kuhmari, not impressed by Kersh’s humor, shuffled his feet and glared at Kersh from atop his glasses. When Kersh handed him his business card, the doctor took it without so much as a glance and moved quickly along down the corridor. His shadow had a difficult time keeping up.

  John pushed himself off the wall and saddled up beside his partner. “I’m glad you talked with him. I would’ve knocked him out.”

  “Might’ve done him some good—get those neurons firing properly.” Kersh winked at him and it made John suddenly feel very tired. The gloom of corridor shadows and the sodium ceiling lights were getting to him, wearing him down. And making him feel somewhat guilty, too. Once again, his mind was with his father, and he was thankful when Kersh spoke, thankful for having something else to think about. “I’m gonna run this guy through NCIC, CCH,” Kersh said. “This fool has got to have a record. Meanwhile, I’m gonna rush the prints on those folded hundreds, see if any of this guy’s prints are actually on them. Same for the gun and silencer we took out of the trunk. I got a guy who’ll dust it for us quick. I want to have as much ammo as possible for when this skel gets out of the hospital. No chances on this one. You wanna grab some lunch?”

  John shook his head. It was useless: the hospital’s sounds and smells had appealed to a different part of him, a part that wasn’t completely cop. “Skipping lunch today,” he said. “Think I’m gonna go see me dad.”

  Kersh smiled, squeezed John’s shoulder. “Life’s one big hospital visit after another, huh?” Looking in Kersh’s eyes, John could tell the man wanted to say more. But he was too slow finding the words.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  KATIE WAS THERE WHEN HE ARRIVED. AN undetected ghost, he stood just outside the doorway of his father’s hospital room and listened while they talked.

  “‘It’s this strange, strange thing,” he could hear his father saying, “you women have, like some witch’s power. Who can understand it? I don’t even think women understand it half the time.”

  Katie laughed. He felt a pang of sadness and envy at hearing their candid conversation, at the sound of his wife’s laughter. Leaning further into the room, he could see her seated in a small folding chair at his father’s bedside, her hand gently on one of his. She looked so young sitting there that her innocence startled him, almost embarrassed him, as if he were the perpetrator of some great crime against her. The tender swell of her belly rested in her lap, hidden beneath an oversized knitted sweater.

  “I certainly don’t understand it,” Katie said.

  “Well, you’re not supposed to. I don’t think, anyway. That’s God’s job; leave it to Him, let Him sort things, explain things. But you know, Rachel was the same way, felt the same things.”

  “John’s mother,” Katie said. And although it wasn’t phrased as a question, the tone of her voice betrayed her unfamiliarity with the name.

  “She knew from the first month we were gonna have a boy. She didn’t bother considering girl names, and she wasted no time running out every chance she got to buy clothing—little blue pajamas with baseballs on them, anything you’d want. I kept telling her not to get her hopes up, that the baby could just as well be a girl, but she’d say no, no, no, that she knew it was a boy and that was final and I would just have to wait and see. And she was right.”

  “That’s amazing,” Katie said. “I wish I’d known her.”

  “She was beautiful,” his father said. “Kind … and generous … and …” He smiled. “All the stuff husbands say, right?”

  “It’s still nice to hear.”

  “Well…” He pushed back against his pillow, patted her hand. “We were young and carefree and what-have-you. She was a good wife. She … she was good …”

  “Special lady,” Katie said. The tone of her voice suggested she craved more information, but dared not ask. Looking up, she noticed her husband standing in the doorway. “Hey, you. Eavesdropping?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  His father frowned. “That any way to talk to your beautiful wife?”

  Katie stood with some difficulty and gave John a one-armed hug. “Had some time before class, figured I’d say hello to Dad.”

  “She’s a good kid, this one,” his father said. “Puts up with a crotchety old bastard like me.”

  “And a crotchety young one at home,” she added, grinning.

  “How you feeling, Pop?”

  “All right.” The old man turned to a wall-mounted television set, flipped through the channels with a remote.

  Standing between them, Katie looked as though she could feel their discomfort like a solid thing. She crept to the side of the old man’s bed, bent and kissed him on his forehead. “Bye,” she told him.

  “Wait!” His father patted one hand against her arm. “You owe me one name before you leave.”

  Laughing, Katie picked up her books from the night table beside the bed. “Oh, I was afraid you wouldn’t let me get away with it …”

  “Come on,” his father scorned playfully, “you know the deal. One name per visit.”

  “It’s just that I don’t think you’ll like this one …”

  “Why not? If it’s a good, wholesome name, I’ll like it.”

  Katie frowned, pouted, put a fist on her hip. Her eyes narrowed, and a meager smile crept along her thin lips. “Fielding,” she said finally.

  “Fielding?” his father said. “This is one of the names you’re considering for my grandson? Fielding? Sounds like an old Jewish guy. You can’t do that to the poor kid.”

  “I said you wouldn’t like it.”

  “You can do better,” he said. “Next time.”

  She bent and kissed his head again. “Next time,” she said. “Always next time. Get some rest and quit watching those trashy talk shows, all right?”

  “You’re leaving?” John nearly whispered, putting his hand against the small of her back as she brushed past. He followed her halfway out into the hall. “Stay.”

  “I have class.”

  “Let me drive you.”

  “I’ll get a cab. I’m a big girl.” She rubbed her swollen abdomen. “See?” She caressed his cheek, pinched his chin. Yet she looked upset about something.

  “What?” he said. “What is it?”

  “The hospital. They’re going to discharge him, send him home.”

  “Jesus. When? Who told you?”

  “The doctor. Sometime after Thanksgiving.”

  “Does Dad know?”

  “Not yet. I didn’t say anything. The doctor just told me right before you got here. John, this was going to happen sooner or later.”

  “He’ll be all alone in that house. He can be taken care of here. He should stay right here.”

  “You don’t have to convince me. But that’s not how things work.”

  “Damn it.” He pressed two fingers to his forehead, squeezed skin between them. Turning, he looked at the blinds on the window, at the water fountain against the wall. Things always had a way of falling apart. “Just gonna send him home to die then, right? Damn it.”

  “It’ll be all right,” she promised. “Now go in there.”

  “Christ, Katie …”

  “Quit grumbling.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You are. Smile.” She hugged him, her belly awkward but beautiful between them. There were no other feelings like it in the world. “Will you be home for dinner tonight, or am I eating alone again?” she asked.

  “I’ll try to be home.”

  “I’m making a London broil with scall
oped potatoes, seasoned asparagus, apple pie for dessert, all washed down with a nice, smooth bottle of Dom Pérignon.”

  “Sounds delicious.”

  “I’d hate to have to eat it all myself.” She winked, and turned down the hallway. “I’ll save you a couple of hot dogs. Talk to your dad.”

  Back in the room, the old man continued to flip soundlessly through television channels. When he spoke, he did not look in John’s direction; like a greenhorn reporter swiping cues from a teleprompter, he kept his eyes focused on the television,. “She’s something, that wife of yours.”

  “Yes, she is.”

  “She misses you at home. All your late hours. You should spend more time at the house.”

  “Pop, please. I’m not a kid.”

  “Knows for damn certain that baby’s gonna be a boy. I had some feeling, too—did I tell you? I guess sometimes people just know.”

  John’s eyes scanned the room—the walls, the bedspread, the tile floor, the machinery beside the bed. He sat in the chair next to the bed, watched the slow rise and fall of his father’s small chest from beneath the sheets. He was thankful for the television, thankful that he needn’t meet his father’s eyes. The disease—even the dying—itself wasn’t the worst part; rather, it was the weakness that went along with it. Fathers were not made to be weak, and he was angered by the old man’s inability to hold true to that principle. Like a resurrection, the words of Bill Kersh surfaced briefly in his head: Life’s one big hospital visit after another, huh?

  “Heard you talking about Mom,” he said.

  His father’s hand slowed on the television remote. Perhaps he was lost in reverie of his own. “Your mother,” he said, his words dry and brittle like ancient cloth. There was no sentiment in his voice. “Katie was talking about the baby, about how she knew it was a boy. I told her your mother felt the same way.”

  “I didn’t know that. You never told me.”

  “She came up with the name John, too. From the Bible. Said it was bad luck for Catholics to name their first child anything but a biblical name. You got lucky. My choice was Deuteronomy.”