Thin Lines (The Child Thief #3)(100)

I stared at the one he was talking about. It was a big, cherry-red number, the tank behind it an enormous oval of bright chrome, rather than one shaped more like a cylinder. The truck itself was certainly large enough to have one of the mini-bedrooms in the back, and in this entire time of standing here—maybe half an hour, give or take—we hadn’t seen anyone getting in or out of that truck.

It could mean that the guy was asleep in the back.

It could also be exactly the sort of truck we needed.

“Agreed,” I said. “You guys ready?”

Everyone crouched down a bit, flexing their muscles in preparation for the sprint we were about to have, and I glanced out across the space once again.

“Okay, if we get there and the situation’s not right, we turn to the left and go up to the next truck. That blue one,” I said, pointing. “If that one isn’t right, let’s get back here and regroup before we move to another.”

It would give us two shots at finding the truck we needed, but also keep us from running around out there without a plan. At least this way we only would have tried the trucks that would keep us hidden. I really didn’t want to get out into the open space unless we had to.

“Agreed,” Kory said. “Seems like a solid plan.”

I nodded. It was a solid plan. I just hoped it worked.

“Okay,” Jace said. “Enough talking. Let’s go.”

He turned and darted to the left, toward the opening in the bushes we’d spotted earlier, and the rest of us fell in quickly after him, all of us sprinting at top speed to get this over with as quickly as possible. We hit the opening, turned and darted into the parking lot, and then hurried toward the red truck.

We reached it within a few seconds, and I jumped up on the sideboard and threw the truck’s door open, then crawled up into the driver’s seat. A quick pat-down of the underside of the seat, and then the turned-up sun visor, and I found the keys. Of course, I thought, why would a truck driver leave them anywhere else but in the truck? We’d hoped they’d be there, but there had been a lot of back and forth about how stupid the drivers would have to be to actually leave them there.

It looked like when it came to truck stops like this, the drivers assumed that everything was safe. Either that or we’d happened across a truck that belonged to the laziest driver in the entire world.

I whirled around, my mind jumping to the next step in the plan, and scooted out of the driver’s seat, heading for the bedroom at the back. This truck had a wall between the driver’s cockpit and the room, which I found sort of silly—what a waste of space—but I didn’t take any time to admire it. Instead, I threw the door open and charged through it, my gun out and at the ready.

I walked right into the smallest, most compact bedroom I’d ever seen. To the right was a bathroom so minuscule it looked like it would barely fit me, and against the left-hand wall was a tiny pilot seat made of bright red leather, presumably to match the truck itself. Dead ahead of me, against the back wall, was a set of bunk beds, built so close to each other and the ceiling of the space that no reasonable human being would have been able to sit up in either one of them.

They were empty.

“Dammit,” I breathed.

I whirled around and dashed back out of the area, hurtling myself into the driver’s seat again and then almost falling out of the cab itself.

“Nobody there?” Jace asked, glancing beyond me into the truck.

“Nobody,” I confirmed. “The keys were there—oh.” I turned and threw them back into the driver’s seat, having completely forgotten that I’d grabbed them. “But no driver. So unless we want to sit here and wait for him to come back from wherever he is, we’ve got to move on. I’m not attached enough to this truck to want to wait. Anyone else?”

Around me a range of heads shook in the negative, and we turned toward the blue truck that we’d chosen as our backup.

“But walk this time!” I hissed before anyone started sprinting. “Running makes us look suspicious!”

Jace cast a surprised look in my direction, but everyone nodded, and a second later we were walking oh-so-naturally across the pavement, staring at anything but the truck we were making for, our minds centered on what we would find inside.

With luck, we’d find the driver. The longer we were here, the better chance we had of getting caught. But if we had a truck with a driver, we could just take them both—and avoid the possibility of any driver reporting to the authorities that his truck had been stolen.

We’d come here thinking that I could maybe try hotwiring one, and that we could steal it that way. It had only taken me one glance at the size of the engines to know that would never happen, and we’d quickly adjusted our plan to take an entire partnership: truck and driver.

It took us a full minute to get to the next truck at the slower pace, and by the time we got there my skin was humming with nerves. We followed the same process on this truck—mostly because if we were actually going to steal a truck, I was the one who was going to be driving it.

I had no idea how to drive a rig this large. But as it turned out, among the five of us here, I was the only one who had a driver’s license. And though I obviously wasn’t going to be showing that to anyone—and if I did, that would be the end of me, and not because I had been caught speeding or driving a rig that I wasn’t licensed to drive—it also meant that I had the most hands-on experience with operating a moving vehicle of the four-wheeled variety.