Henderson's Boys: Eagle Day Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 door with a water hose running out. It was flung open by PT’s seventeen-year-old brother, Leon. He was drowning in his own sweat and his muscular torso was streaked with clay.
    ‘Get ’em, bro?’ Leon asked.
    PT waved the drill bits. ‘Close thing with the cops, but I lost ’em before I got back here.’
    ‘You sure?’
    ‘Hundred per cent.’ PT nodded.
    ‘OK, get on the trolley and take ’em down to Dad.’
    Jeannot and PT ducked under their brother’s arm into a narrow room used for storage. There were buckets and cleaning chemicals on the shelves and a rail at one end on which hung jackets and caps worn by the Unicorn attendants. More unusually, linoleum floor tiles had been lifted up and there was a half-metre-wide hole in the floor at the opposite end. A rubber hose ran out of the hole, attached to a hand pump.
    ‘How’s the