Street Spies Read Free

but he sounded okay. Something about Lightfoot's tone of voice, though, made him uneasy. It sounded almost sinister. Had this been an initiation — the kind of thing a street gang does when somebody new tries to break into the group? Or were the messengers on to them?
    Back in the alley, Joe picked himself up from the asphalt, feeling his ribs and wondering if he hadn't cracked one or two. Dazed, he just stared at his bike. There wasn't any real damage — only the handlebars had been twisted out of alignment. He swallowed the anger he felt at Lightfoot for the potentially deadly joke he had played on him. Joe had hit the brakes just in time to avoid racing full speed into a loading dock at the end of the alley.
    "Hey, Hot Dog!" Joe looked up. A half-dozen messengers were clustered around him. A thin white kid in dark glasses, jeans, and a T-shirt stepped forward to help Joe twist the handlebars back into shape. "They call me Slim," he offered, when the handlebars were straight. He took off his dark glasses and grinned at Joe as the knot of messengers began to break apart.
    "Congratulations, man. You passed. You were way ahead of him, too. That doesn't happen very often."
    "I passed?" Joe was still slightly dazed and more than a little mad.
    "Yeah, it's a trick they play on all the new guys," Slim explained. "They race them into this blind alley, and the ones who come out in one piece get hired." He put his glasses back on before adding, "Personally, I don't think it's such a great idea."
    "That makes two of us," Joe growled. He felt for the mike, wondering if it was still working. Frank had undoubtedly heard the crash—but had he heard anything else? Did he know that Joe was okay?
    Slim gestured. "Come on. Let's get your name on the board in the dispatch office."
    Wheeling his bike, Joe followed Slim through a back door and down a long hallway, past a storage room and into the office where he had applied for the job minutes before.
    Activity had picked up. There were four or five messengers sitting at one end of the room, two of them playing cards, the others sprawled on the floor listening to rock music on a portable radio. Behind them was a row of wooden cubbyholes filled with messenger bags and personal gear. In the corner was an old sofa and table with a hot plate and coffee pot.
    At the other end of the room the man with the leg brace had a telephone glued to one ear, and he was beckoning impatiently to one of the messengers. The kid ran up to the desk and the man thrust a piece of paper at him and snapped, "Get going!" As the messenger disappeared out the door, the man stood up and wrote an address beside the messenger's name on the dispatch board.
    "Say, Gus," Slim called out over the noise of the radio, "how about putting Hot Dog's name up?"
    Without a word, Gus wrote "Hot Dog" at the bottom of the list and sat down again. He picked up some personnel forms and thrust them at Joe.
    "I guess you've already met Gus Ireland," Slim said as they walked to the sofa.
    "Yeah," Joe replied. He sat down and started to fill out the forms. "Does he hate the whole world or is it just me?"
    "Oh, Gus isn't so bad," Slim said with a grin. "He used to be one of the best riders on the street. Then a cabbie plowed into him at Broadway and Fulton, and he nearly lost his leg. Now he's stuck behind a desk. I think it's soured him."
    Across the room, the two guys had stopped playing cards and were talking intently in the comer. One of them glanced suspiciously at Joe, and they both stopped talking abruptly. Joe wondered why.
    "That's Apollo and Wipe-Out," Slim said. "They've been in the business longer than the rest of us. There's not an address in the city that they can't find—blindfolded."
    Before Joe could answer, a pretty girl walked in from the street. She was wearing fatigue pants and an oversize jacket with the sleeves rolled up, and her short red hair was brushed back from her large green eyes. Joe caught himself staring at her.