Eagle Day - Robert Muchamore Page 0,9

with no order to them.

He read the packaging and threw them down at his feet. Eighth of an inch, one-quarter, five-sixteenths, one-sixteenth. His salt-crusted boots were encircled by boxes when he eyed a pair of three-sixteenths sitting right next to each other.

PT pocketed the two bits and slid a glove back over his hand as a flash of blue light burst across the street: cop car.

He thought about charging back through the busted window and making a run for it. He fancied his chances of outrunning the cops but not their cars or the bullets in their guns, so he gambled on a little door at the back of the shelves and prayed for a rear exit.

There was a draining board stacked with mugs and a desk covered in ledgers and hardware catalogues. The only door had a bar across, but a small window swung open easily enough and PT straddled his way into a paved yard as a cop yelled something like over the rattling alarm.Come out with your hands up

Buildings backed on to all four sides of the courtyard. PT’s only hope was a gated alleyway at one end. The lead cop was already coming through the window and if the gate was locked he’d be looking at another three months in juvenile hall. But the catch lifted, the gate squealed and PT swept out on to the icy street.

It was a broad avenue, with shops, offices and steam rising from vents in the tarmac. PT only had twenty seconds over the cops, but he made the most of them, cutting bravely in front of a delivery truck and ending up across the street on a corner in front of Bert’s Joint, a twenty-four-hour diner frequented by cab drivers and printers from the newspaper building on the opposite corner.

After cutting down a side street, PT peeked back. The absence of chasing cops was a pleasant surprise, but the escape through the courtyard had disorientated him. Whilst he couldn’t be more than a kilometre from where he wanted to be, PT couldn’t tell what street he was on or what direction he needed to take to get back. What’s more, you didn’t see many thirteen year olds on the street at this time of the morning and he’d stick out a mile if a cop car cruised by.

PT jogged to the end of the alleyway, losing his footing as he reached the next street. He skidded into a mound of snow in the gutter, but the only harm was a soggy trouser leg, and as he stood up he saw the familiar red neon glow of the sign over , two blocks down. He looked back, reassuring himself that the cops weren’t following, before striding the two blocks.Unicorn Tire Repair & Parking

The Unicorn was a multi-storey parking lot used by Wall Street types: bankers and stockbrokers. On a weekday it brimmed with Packards and Cadillacs and the chauffeurs who drove them spent whole days smoking and playing cards in a ground-floor lounge behind the tyre shop. But when the gates were locked at midnight the lights went out and you could hear your shoes echo down the gloomy concrete ramps.

Even after three months working in the basement every night and all day Sundays, the Unicorn lot still gave PT a creepy feeling. There were two ramps the width of a single car – one up one down – a booth where you paid to park and a sign resting on the wall that was put out when the lot filled up. PT opened a door-sized gate-within-a-gate and the instant he was through the head of his seven-year-old brother, Jeannot, popped over the brim of the down ramp.

‘Took you long enough,’ the boy sneered. ‘Did you get the bits?’

‘Like to see you try doing it quicker, you stick of piss,’ PT said, rattling the two boxed drill bits under Jeannot’s nose and expressing the special contempt he reserved for his little brother. ‘You cried your eyes out when the cops picked you up for stealing newspapers.’

Jeannot snapped back as the boys jogged down the vehicle ramp to the basement. ‘That was decades ago. You think I’d crack now? Anyway, you cried like a girl when we visited you in juvie.’

‘What do you know?’ PT scoffed. ‘I was one of the littlest guys there. You’d shit your little dungarees if the tough guys in juvie so much as eyeballed you.’

At the bottom of the unlit ramp there was a small access