I Spy Read Online Free PDF Page A

i soldi .” The boy rubbed two fingers against a thumb. “ Dollari, ragazzo – ora! ”
    The boy wanted money, that much was obvious, and he was demanding it – with menace – which Trey did not appreciate one bit. He jabbed back.
    “Beat it, palooka!”
    Silence, as a slightly confused look passed across Red Shirt’s face...and then, as the boy sneered, the silence was broken by a metallic TCH-KK! and Trey found himself going
cross-eyed as he stared at the needle-sharp point of a switchblade. He had, in his anger, forgotten about the knife.
    “ Cretino... ”
    Trent Gripp would not have stood for this kind of treatment, but like he always said, there were times when acting brave was the height of foolishness, and to his mind this was beginning to look
like one of them. The trouble was, having already acted the hard-boiled tough guy, no matter what he did now he was going to be in deep trouble because when this joker started to cut up rough,
things were going to get bloody. And the blood was going to be his...
    “E’scuse me, you have trouble, kid?”
    Trey whirled round without thinking and was amazed to see a man in a dark suit and grey fedora, standing a few feet away with both hands in his trouser pockets...a man with a heavy accent, a
pencil mustache and smoking a yellow cigarette. Signor Giovedi! Before he had a moment to say anything, like “Watch out – he’s got a knife!”, Trey saw Signor Giovedi slowly
unbutton his double-breasted suit jacket and let it swing open to reveal...the butt of a pistol.
    “ Lasciatelo anddre, ragazzi. ” Signor Giovedi jerked his thumb for Red Shirt and his friends to leave, and be quick about it.
    “ Perché, che dice? ”
    “Why? Ho una pistola – va bene? ”
    Trey felt like a pawn in a very dangerous game of chess, stuck in the middle of the board and unable to move because there was a knife still hovering far too close to his face for comfort.
    “I thin’ you should be ready to move, my small fren’.”
    “Me?” Trey hated the fact that his voice had sounded like a mouse’s squeak.
    Signor Giovedi didn’t answer, instead he took his right hand out of his suit pocket and let go a fistful of copper and silver coins. They went everywhere, bouncing off the ground like
metal rain, flashing as they spun like miniature tops. The sudden gesture, the noise, the fact that this man had thrown away money as if it was rubbish, distracted Red Shirt and his friends
long enough for Signor Giovedi to grab Trey’s arm, hauling him away and back out into the piazza .
    Trey was lost for words as he stared at Signor Giovedi, taking a moment to realize that his beautiful companion was standing next to him. She was observing him with an
unnerving Mona Lisa smile on her face (although he had to say the rest of her looked nothing like the picture his father had dragged him to the Louvre in Paris to see). What on earth was going on? Had he been right all along and this man really had been following him and his father...and if so, why take such a risk, even if he had got a gun (and exactly why did he have a
gun?). Questions tumbled around his head, unable to find a way out of his mouth.
    “You hunky-dory now?” Signor Giovedi lit a cigarette.
    “You ask me, this kid is the picture of lost, César.”
    The possible Signora Giovedi was chewing gum and spoke with a raw Brooklyn accent, pronouncing the name as Say-zar; she did not, Trey thought, talk anything like the way she looked, but after
what he’d been through any American accent was posi-lutely fine by him.
    “You lost, kid?” she queried. “Not that I’m surprised in a place like this...they got streets here narrower than a Mexican gunslinger’s tie, right,
César?”
    César nodded. “E’zactly, amore mio ...narrow streets. Where you got to be, amico ? Where you stay?”
    “The Excelsior.”
    “Very chi-chi.” The woman raised one finely-plucked eyebrow.
    “ Molto ,” agreed César. “Less go,