Read Before He Finds Her for Free Online

9:30. It was a frequent stop, and he trusted the dock supervisor to have him in and out. Sure enough the unload moved, easy paperwork, and by noon he was pulling into the Monmouth Truck Lot.
    The office was a narrow trailer up on cinder blocks. Inside, the walls were wood paneled, the floor linoleum. Same as when he’d bought his truck five years earlier. Probably the same as twenty years before that. On the grassy lot itself, trailers and cabs sat like vast tombstones surrounded by swaths of reedy weeds. Nothing about the place hinted at a successful business, but Bob Parkins, the owner, knew more about trucks than anyone Ramsey had ever met. Ramsey had bought his sleeper cab and trailer here on a tip from his fleet manager after two years of driving a company truck. Hard to say whether the move from employee to dedi-cated owner-operator was worth it, but the tip on where to purchase had been sound. Ramsey came away with a dependable truck at a fair price. Since then, he returned whenever his rig needed servicing beyond what he himself could do.
    A counter split the trailer down the middle. Behind it were a couple of desks with papers piled everywhere, Bob’s filing system. In a corner of the trailer, on the customer side, was an upended milk crate, and on it sat a coffeemaker, a stack of Styrofoam cups, and a container of powdered creamer.
    “Help you?”
    The guy behind the counter was some kid with a faded blue collared shirt and stupid-looking spiky hair.
    “Where’s Bob at?” Ramsey asked.
    “Took the afternoon off,” the kid said.
    “You gotta be... ” He felt the heat climb and took a breath. “Bob said he’d be in till three today. I talked to him from the road, coupla days ago. I made sure.”
    The kid shrugged. “Weather got good, and he hasn’t had a day off in forever. He went fishing.”
    “What do you mean, ‘weather got good’?”
    The kid nodded toward the window. “You know—sunny. Warm.”
    There was a time before Ramsey started driving when he considered buying a fishing boat and chartering it out. The risks ended up being too great—bad weather, red tides, polluted water, expensive insurance—but you didn’t need to be sea smart to know that today was no fishing day. “Wind’s blowing hard out of the northeast. There’s gotta be four- to six-foot seas out there.”
    The kid shrugged again. “I wouldn’t know about it.”
    “You don’t fish?”
    “Nah, never did.”
    “Your old man never took you?”
    “My old man’s a piece of shit.”
    Ramsey sized the kid up some more. Shirt too large in the shoulders and neck. Probably a hand-me-down from the piece-of-shit himself.
    “So Bob ain’t coming back today?” Ramsey said it more to himself than to the kid. He was counting on Bob being here, making everything nice and easy.
    “That’s what taking the afternoon off means.”
    “You being smart with me?” When the kid’s eyes narrowed, Ramsey backed off. The kid’s name was Frank, according to the tag on his chest. He couldn’t be older than twenty or twenty-one, and he had a lousy old man and a crappy haircut and God only knew what else. “Forget it. Listen, Frank. Bob sold me my truck five years ago. I need to sell it.”
    Frank looked out the window again. “The Kenworth?”
    “The very one.”
    “What year is it?”
    “Seventy-four.”
    “How many miles?”
    “Million two.”
    “You bought it with how many?”
    “About five hundred thousand.”
    He nodded. “Runs good?”
    “Real good.”
    “You trading in for a newer one?”
    “Nope.”
    “Then why do you want to sell?”
    “That’s my business.”
    The kid looked unsure whether to be courteous or a brat. He wasn’t a bad-looking kid if you ignored the oversized shirt and that spiky haircut of his. But girls his age probably liked his hair that way. And he had an okay job, which was more than Ramsey had at his age.
    “Bob’ll be in tomorrow at seven,” Frank said. “He can—”
    “No, I need