Mountain Madness Read Online Free PDF Page B

transactions had become an increasingly larger percentage of his overall annual sales, though he hadn’t admitted this to Libby and didn’t really want to admit it to himself. No matter how much of his furniture sold online, it wasn’t made there, and he was proud of that, as happy about the clunking tools in the bed of his truck as he was about the blisters on his fingers or the sawdust in his hair.
    He’d tuned the radio to a station playing a contemporary song he hadn’t yet heard but that seemed to have an acceptable amount of electric guitar. The band transitioned from a distortion-heavy guitar solo to the chorus, and Mike glanced down at the dashboard clock. If he kept driving at this speed, he would just barely make it to the Mountain View on time. He applied a little more pressure to the gas pedal, meaning to bring his speed that much closer to the limit, but the truck bucked and shook, and he let up. Although punctual by nature, Mike recognized that sometimes it was better to be a little late than a lot dead. Especially when the kind of death you were talking about would more likely than not involve being twisted around the axles of a Mack diesel.
    He drove toward Foothill, the traffic still flowing around him like river water around a slow-floating log; he thought of his son, and the part of him that was Mike faded away. Trevor was waiting for his daddy , and Daddy was almost there.

FOUR
    ONCE, MAYBE A year ago, she’d lost sight of him in the supermarket. He’d strayed down the cereal aisle to get a closer look at a box with a swooping Batman or Spiderman while she searched for an undented can of green beans. It took only three or four seconds for her to look up, realize he was missing, and whip around the corner to find him all but salivating over the combination of sugar and superheroes. But in those few ticks of the clock, her heart must have beat about a thousand times.
    Now, standing motionless in the middle of the overflowing food court, smelling the juxtaposed odors of fried fish and chocolate chip cookies, hearing but not listening to the chattering shoppers and the carousel’s souped-up elevator music, Libby felt the old chest pump beating its way to an all-time record.
    If her fingers hadn’t instinctively tightened around the soda, she surely would have dropped it onto the tile between her feet and ended up standing in a yellow puddle looking like she’d wet herself. But as it was, she managed to hold on long enough to move a few steps to her left and plop the cup onto the corner of the nearest table, where an elderly couple looked up only long enough to eye her suspiciously. 
    While her heart continued shooting adrenaline through her body like bullets from a rattling machine gun, Libby wove her way through the tables and chairs toward the spinning carousel and its crowd of would-be riders.
    She’d left her bags under her chair, and although she realized this somewhere deep in the back of her mind, she didn’t care. Until she had her arms cinched around her son’s narrow body, there would be room in her head for only one thought: find him .
    Walking past the table where they had shared their early dinner, Libby looked for the group of girls Trevor had been charming before she’d gone to get her refill.
    Jesus , if I lose him over sixteen ounces of Mountain Dew, I’ll never ever forgive myself .
    The girls clustered together near the back of the gathered onlookers, shuffling their feet and biting at their lips but looking otherwise undisturbed. One of them would have screamed if someone had jerked Trevor right out from under their noses, wouldn’t they? Kids these days weren’t that desensitized. She pushed through the crowd, ignoring half a dozen varying degrees of protestation, and grabbed the shoulders of the first of the girls she reached.
    “Please.” The word came out like the hiss from a broken steam pipe. “Where did he go?”
    The girl’s eyes bulged.