Read Online Once a Spy by Keith Thomson - Free Book Online

creating a comet tail ofsparks, until swinging sideways and clipping the trunk of a streetlamp. Charlie felt the high-pitched clank in his teeth.
    Severed from the truck, the cargo door flew at the Dodge like a hatchet.
    The Dodge swerved to avoid it. The door gouged the pavement a few feet ahead of the Dodge, cartwheeled past its windshield, and slammed into a cluster of garbage pails, scattering them like tenpins.
    Charlie would have cursed the luck, but the monstrous banging and rumbling in the cargo hold seized his attention.
    “The newspapers,” Drummond said.
    “Or Hippo actually refers to a hippo,” Charlie said.
    It was quickly evident that Drummond was right: The stacks of newspapers were toppling, due either to the collision with the streetlamp or suction through the rear doorway. Bundles of papers could be heard bouncing around, like corn in a popper. The side mirror showed the cargo hold disgorging hundreds of individual copies.
    The Dodge slalomed to avoid the bulk of this tabloid-sized confetti. Sheet after sheet slapped its windshield, flattened, and stayed put. The driver had to lower his window and stick out his head to maintain his course.
    A still-intact newspaper clouted him in the face, bloodying his nose. A page clung over his eyes, blinding him. He kept one hand on the wheel and swept the other wildly in an effort to peel away the paper.
    The passenger shouted and pointed. The driver cleared his eyes in time to see the dumpster. Too late to dodge it.
    Charlie looked on like a baseball fan whose cleanup hitter has just sent one deep.
    The driver of the Dodge jogged his wheel counterclockwise, so rather than head-on, he struck the dumpster with his right front quarter panel. The car bounced back into the street, its hood tented, the right headlight gone. The quarter panel flopped off.
    Still, the car resumed its pursuit.
    “They don’t make dumpsters like they used to either,” Charlie grumbled.
    The newspapers had been a lucky break, he thought. Per horseplayercalculus, that severely diminished the chances of another lucky break, and it was hard to imagine escaping the Dodge, let alone lasting the night, without another half-dozen lucky breaks. As the horseplayers say, “Luck never gives; she only lends.”
    “Go right at Fillmore,” Drummond said. “I have an idea.”
    Charlie took the sharp right from Flatbush onto Fillmore Avenue, requiring that he not turn the wheel so much as wrestle centrifugal force for control of the truck. The axles and tires moaned, and it felt like the Hippo might split in two, with the cargo hold continuing down Flatbush on its own afterward. The whole of the vehicle careened onto Fillmore without harm, save to Charlie’s digestion.
    Fillmore was a narrow, single lane through shuttered warehouses, or, as Charlie saw it, one big shooting alley. Without the cargo door, all they had to protect them from bullets was the cab’s very penetrable rear wall.
    What the hell was Drummond thinking?
    Charlie opened his mouth to ask when the side mirror again filled with a muzzle flash. A bullet pounded through the cargo hold wall and ricocheted around like a hornet.
    The Dodge sped to within a half block behind them. The gunman leaned out of the passenger window for a better shot.
    “How’s that idea going?” Charlie asked.
    “Stop at the red.” Drummond pointed at the traffic light dangling ahead.
    “The rule is except when someone is shooting you!”
    “Simple tactic. Listen, and we’ll lose them.” Drummond sounded intrepid and full of conviction. Like Patton—or at least unlike anything Charlie had ever heard from his father or thought within his range.
    And it steadied Charlie. He threw the gearshift into neutral and pressed the brake. The truck slid, tires grating against the street and sending a whiff of rubber into the cab. They came to a halt on the crosswalk at the intersection with busy Utica Avenue.
    “Now get ready to turn right when I say so,”