My blood turned right away to ice, and my gut, too—this really fast, sudden deep freeze, because I figured they were talking about the flattened box we were hiding under.
“Go up and look,” the smart guy said.
But I don’t know who he said it to.
“Me?” the idiot said. “Why should I go?”
“It’s steep, and my shoes are bad.”
“Your shoes? Your shoes are bad? Your shoes are heaven compared to my shoes. I would trade you in a heartbeat if your feet weren’t so small.”
“I’ll go,” the quiet guy said.
You could tell by the way he said it that he was sick of both of them. Just sick of the whole thing.
Then nobody said anything, and I figured he was coming up. And he was really the last one of the three of them I would want finding us.
My blood got even colder, and my heart started pounding so hard that I could hear it and feel it in my ears, and it actually hurt a little because it was throbbing so hard. And it made a lot of noise in my ears, but I could still hear the little girl suck in her breath to cry, so I pressed a finger to her lips again and said, “Brave girl, quiet girl,” with barely any sound, partly just to be quiet and partly because I barely had any breath.
And she said, “Brave girl, kiet girl” back to me.
And that was when I knew I couldn’t just sit there any longer. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. If he was coming, I had to know. I had to know the exact moment he was about to get there, so I could fight him. Maybe I could use surprise to beat him, even though he was big, because he wasn’t expecting somebody to jump out and knock him over backwards on that steep hill.
But then a second later I’d have all three of them on us and I would lose. I already knew I would lose, because I can’t beat three older guys who are all bigger than I am, no matter how important it is to try to win.
But I still had to do it. I couldn’t just sit there and do nothing and wait for them to come take her away from me. I had to try. Maybe after I bought some time by knocking him down the hill, I could climb up onto the freeway and flag down a car. I’d been thinking about it anyway, earlier that night—climbing up the high side of that bridge onto the freeway, but I didn’t think I could do it with the baby in my arms, and besides, it would’ve been dangerous to take her on the freeway. What if there was hardly any shoulder to stand on? And nobody was going to stop for us anyway, because it was the freeway, and they would only get crashed into from behind if they tried, and how did I know the person who stopped for us wouldn’t be even worse than what we were running from?
But I had to do something, even if it was something dangerous, because what was headed our way was too dangerous for me to just sit there and let it catch up.
I decided I had to look out and see how close he was, so I could surprise him and not the other way around.
So I lifted that cardboard again, only about an inch, so one eye could look out. And what I saw made all the air rush out of me at once, with a sound. But it didn’t matter.
He was on the other side.
He was climbing the hill on the other side of the street. There was a big cardboard box sitting under the other side of the freeway bridge, but not flattened—a regular set-up box, and that was what they wanted to look behind. They must not ever have seen the flattened boxes we were hiding under.
I let our cardboard cover back down and put a finger to the little girl’s lips again, but maybe I didn’t even need to bother, because she could tell I wasn’t as scared anymore.
A second later we heard a big whap sound that I figured was the boy hitting or kicking the cardboard box, and it made us both jump, but we didn’t make a sound, because we knew what we needed to do by then.
Then a minute later I heard their voices again, down on the street, and it sounded like they were going away, because I could hear their words getting quieter as they walked off.
“I’m tired,” the dumb guy said. “I just want to go back.”
“Go back? Go back? Do you have any idea how much money this could be? We could buy a car. Maybe even a house. And you just want to go back and rest? What’s wrong with you? After tonight we can do nothing but rest for our whole lives. And you want to give that up because you’re tired? Fine, go back, idiot. I’ll keep the money.”
“No. I’m still in, I want the money, too. But I’m just not sure how we’re supposed to get it.”
“Well, you saw that Amber Alert up on the freeway. So you know the parents want her back.”
“But we don’t know who the parents are.”
I was starting to think the dumb guy was not as dumb as everybody thought. But I only had one quick second to think about that because I had just heard something really important. There was an Amber Alert, which meant she hadn’t been dumped by her parents. They wanted her back.
They were still talking, but in a minute they would be too far away to hear.
“Well, the police know who they are,” the smart guy—who I figured was not as smart as he made himself sound—was saying.
“That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard in my life! You think we’re gonna call the
