The Mike Murphy Files and Other Stories Read Free Page A

think Person A has Person B by the throat and is shaking him like a hippy with a tambourine.”
    “Do something about it! Don’t just stand there like an idiot!”
    I sighed. Checked that the safety was off on my gun. And tiptoed down the stairs. A lamp hung from the ceiling. Its light fell on the face of the shoemaker. His legs were windmilling through the air. His face looked a little green, but that was understandable because a huge gorilla had him by the throat. No. Not a gorilla. It was Joe Lugg.
    “Where’s yer pot of gold, little man?” growled Lugg. “Spit it out, or I’ll snap yer neck like a wet French fry.”
    “Howth gnn eearrghle zorrgl-gl grmma?!”
    “You talkin’ slop ‘bout my gramma? I’ll count to three! 1. . . 2. . . ”
    Lugg seemed to flounder on the mysterious transition between 2 and 3. The shoemaker’s bulging eyes fell on me and widened.
    “All right, Lugg!” I yelled. “Drop the shoemaker and put your hands up!”
    He didn’t drop the shoemaker. Instead, he whirled around with one hand coming out of his coat. Lamplight shone on the dull black matte of his Glock. I gotta say, Lugg wasn’t the sharpest toothpick, but he was faster than a politician lunging for a shiny nickel.
    I shot him in the chest. Three times. And then three or four times more for good measure, because he was looking kind of stubborn. He toppled over with a crash, squashing the shoemaker beneath him.
    “Gemmoff! Gemmoff!”
    It took both Maura and myself to roll the dead body off the little man. The shoemaker popped to his feet, spitting and swearing. He kicked Lugg in the side.
    “Is that his blood?” said Maura.
    We all stared at the floor. The shoemaker stopped kicking Lugg. A thick, green liquid seeped out from under the body.
    “An ogre,” mumbled the shoemaker. “A bloody ogre.”
    “True enough,” I said. “Hope I put enough bullets in him. Ogres take a lot of killing. Sometimes you gotta kill ‘em twice.”
    But the body didn’t twitch, even though the shoemaker kicked him a few more times.
    “An ogre,” murmured Maura, looking fascinated. “Are they always so pungent?”
    “I suppose you’ll want your shoes for free now,” said the shoemaker, not meeting my eyes.
    “Hadn’t even thought of it,” I said. Which was the plain truth.
    “No?” he said, his voice sinking lower.
    “No. Shoes are just shoes. They wear out.”
    “Mine don’t,” he mumbled.
    “The way I see it, I saved your life, not just two minutes ago. Me. Mike Murphy. That’s worth something in my book. Worth quite a bit. Maybe even a pot of gold?”
    “Pot of gold?” His voice rose to a squeak. Sweat beaded on his forehead. “What, er, are you talking about?”
    “1648,” said Maura. “I think your sign says 1648, underneath all that grime. Finnegan and Sons has been around a long time. I bet that pot of gold’s gotten pretty big. Hasn’t it, leprechaun?”
    He moaned and whined and wrung his hands until I felt my heart softening from the chunk of calcified road tar that it was. But Maura held firm. She’s not much of a sentimentalist unless there’s a practical reason for it. She did the bargaining and kicked me in the ankle when I tried to put in my two cents. After a while, I limped over to the stairs, sat down, and reloaded my gun.
    “I can’t!” groaned Finnegan. “My pot of gold! My poor pot of gold. Why does everyone bother me? The love of money is the root of all evil. Don’t you know that? Save yourself from crass materialism! The consumer lifestyle leads to depression, dyspepsia, and broken marriages. I just read a study proving that. Harvard Psychology Department. They took rats and gave them unlimited cheese. The rats were so unhappy! And ungrateful, too.”
    “Spare me your Irish blarney,” said Maura. “Hand over the pot of gold!”
    That’s when they got down to serious bargaining. The leprechaun pointed out that the pot of gold was tied up in an IRA, diversified into blue-chip