Eagle Day - Robert Muchamore Page 0,17

outdoor clothes were in the storeroom at the Unicorn and he got looks as he walked through temperatures below freezing in a short-sleeved shirt. He ordered breakfast at a near-empty diner but only pushed it around his plate and got a raised eyebrow when he paid with a torn-up twenty.

‘My dad hit the numbers,’ PT explained, as the waitress eyed him suspiciously. ‘Told me to spoil myself.’

He’d only glanced at Leon as the truck came up the ramp, but the image was glued in his head: clay-spattered torso, blood pooled in the snow and the expression on Leon’s face like he got when you caught him cheating at cards.What, me?

Leon didn’t have PT’s brains, but he was the kind of big brother you looked up to: he’d stick up for you in the neighbourhood and only had to look at a girl to get what he wanted. The horror of his death was too big to grasp, but PT had to get on top of it and deal with his situation.

Cold was the most immediate problem. PT knew a Sunday flea market and bought new gloves, a second-hand overcoat and a clean shirt. But the cops around here knew his face so he took a bus south to Brooklyn.

He hopped off in a spot he didn’t know. Apartment blocks ran up both sides of a hill, breaking only for a kid’s playground and a Laundromat standing on its own. An old man from the neighbourhood played good Samaritan, shovelling a path through the overnight snow.

Vending machines on the next corner were filled with the final edition of the Sunday Post. Blood and guts sold newspapers and the main picture was a gory shot of Officer Vernon spattered over the side of a police car and the headline: TWO COPS, TWO ROBBERS DEAD IN $10-MILLION TUNNEL HEIST.

Two robbers.

PT scanned the article until he came to it. Notorious Chicago bank robber, Miles Bivott, died after a struggle with police officers trying to restrain …

The cops would have arrived less than a minute after PT ran off and his dad was in no state to struggle, but the news was no great shock. PT had mixed with bad people his whole life and every crook knew the score: if you kill a cop they’ll either kill you or make you wish that they had.

Next he scanned the columns for his little brother:

Bivott’s youngest son was found in the back of the truck and is being questioned by police. A third child, believed to have been Bivott’s middle son, Philippe, escaped the scene and is being hunted …

PT wanted to cry as he imagined little Jeannot in a cell, scared witless. With two dead officers on the scene they’d be pressuring him, most likely with some hard slaps and the threat of worse if they didn’t like what he said. But Jeannot’s age counted in his favour: at seven years he was too young to be locked away and hopefully they’d see him more as a victim than a perpetrator.

Unlike Jeannot, PT was old enough to cop a murder charge. NYPD had his photo and fingerprints on file and if they caught him he had more than juvenile hall to worry about this time. There might be an outcry if both he and his father died at the hands of the police. So they’d be unlikely to kill him, but they’d beat him senseless. The judge wouldn’t do him any favours either and the prison guards would ensure that he did the hardest time possible when he got to juvenile hall.

PT had to run, but where?

*

He waited until darkness on Wednesday evening. After four days on the street, PT was in a real state. Boots and trousers crusted with rock salt and dirty snow. Black face, black fingers and dried-out clay itching like mad beneath half a dozen layers of clothes. He dreamed of heading west to California, but he was scared of the cops picking him up at a train station and his picture had been in Monday’s paper, which made hitchhiking an invitation to get busted.

After three freezing nights huddled in an unheated garage, PT couldn’t bear a fourth. He’d have to throw the dice and hope they didn’t land him in a police cell. PT’s aunt and uncle – the brother of his late mother – lived in an apartment on the lower east side of Manhattan, close to the docks.

The cops had probably figured that they were PT’s only surviving