Pit Stop Read Online Free PDF

you kidding me?” Kelly got the message and hit the button to retract the belt, and slid off the end of the seat to reach down for the cylinder.
    And as she did this, she thought.
    She thought very, very quickly.
    Kelly was not like the other kids. Kelly was only ten, but she’d seen and been through some bad things in her short life. The kinds of things that girls her age shouldn’t have to go through.
    The big one, of course, was losing her mother. No little girl should lose her mom. And no little girl should lose her mom the way Kelly lost hers.
    But that was just the beginning.
    Not long after that, someone took a shot at her house. Blew out her bedroom window when she was in the room.
    But it got even worse. Before that very, very bad time in her life was over, a man threatened to end her life. And not just any man, but a man she believed to be a good man.
    And who got her out of that fix? Well, sure, her dad was there just in time, but it was Kelly herself who took action. It was Kelly who thought of a way to disable that man just long enough for the scales to tip in her favor.
    In a split second, too.
    Kelly wondered whether a similar opportunity existed now. Something that might give her an edge, buy her enough time for her dad and the policeman to help her out.
    That was when her eyes landed on the cup of hot coffee sitting in the center console.

    â€œGREAT PLAN!” GARBER SHOUTED. “RAM the truck! Is that right out of the FBI playbook?”
    Reilly had to admit to a level of frustration. He had no backup, and he had no weapon. (If there was any good news, he knew Faustus had no weapon, either. He’d checked him for one just before the man got the jump on him.) What he needed was a frickin’ helicopter with lasers, but this wasn’t James Bond.
    This was real life.
    What he needed now was some kind of break. For the truck to have a flat tire. For it to run out of gas, but based on what Garber’d told him, that was unlikely. A goddamn moose trying to run across the highway right about now would be a blessing.
    At least the cruiser was topped up. He needed to get Garber to make some calls, try to get a roadblock established farther up the interstate, or maybe—
    What the hell?
    The pickup was swerving all over the road.

    KELLY SAID, “CATCH.”
    She was perched on the front of her seat, leaning down into the footwell. She had her right hand on the canister and tossed it underhand and to the left, aiming it right toward Kristoff’s face.
    â€œJesus!” he shouted.
    He took his left hand off the wheel to catch the cylinder before it flew out his window, batted it down into his lap. Then it started to roll toward his knees. He wanted to catch it before it dropped by his legs, where it would be rolling around his feet, interfering with his operation of the pedals.
    It was during this moment of distraction that Kelly pried the plastic lid off the coffee cup and wrapped her hand around it.
    Her dad was right. It would have stayed hot all the way to their destination. How did anyone drink this stuff?
    As she whipped it out of the cup holder, some coffee slipped over the edge and onto her fingers, scalding them. It hurt like hell, as her father would be inclined to say, but Kelly didn’t have time to whine about it, because she only had about a tenth of a second to throw this too-hot-to-drink coffee in this bad man’s face.
    Which is exactly what she did.
    The black liquid arced through the air, splashing across Kristoff’s right cheek and neck and, judging by the way he was throwing his right hand over his eye, that, too.
    Kristoff screamed. Not “Jesus!” this time. Just a cry of intense pain and anguish. Primal.
    He tried to maintain steering with his left hand, and was stillattempting to see the road with his left eye, but the truck was pitching all over the place, and the canister had hit the floor, rolling side to side in time with