Free You Don't Know About Me by Brian Meehl Page A

surprising was the driver on my side of the truck working controls.
Most
surprising was the driver being a she: a short woman with tattoos covering her thick arms.
    â€œHow long you been in there?” she asked, her eyes bulging.
    I jumped up. “Just for breakfast.” I snatched the bike off the ground and popped on. “Thanks for the ride!” I hammered away. If she said anything it was drowned out by the sound of the garbage sliding out of the Dumpster.
    I hit a highway called WW and headed away from the sunrise. I had to go west and needed a map of Kansas. I had no idea how far Hunter was. The first gas station I passed was closed. The sun was still shining up the rolling farmland.
    After an hour, I rode into Columbia, Missouri. I stopped at a 24-Hour Petro Mart and bought a Kansas map. I took it outside and looked in the index for Hunter. It was a tiny town in the center of the state. I figured it was about four hundred miles away. It was a long day of hitchhiking or I could bike there in three to four days. As long as I didn’t have to ride through Independence and get nailed by Mom, or picked up by the cops.
    I went back inside the Petro Mart and asked the whiskery old man at the counter, “Do you have GPS things?”
    â€œNo,” he said, giving me a cockeyed look. “You’ll have to go to Bass Pro on the north side of Seventy.”
    As I was leaving he pointed outside at my bike. “You gonna ride that all the way to Kansas?”
    My stomach wonked. What if the old guy had seen my picture on the news? Now he knew I was headed west and he might tell the police. “Nah,” I told him, “I’m just on a scavenger hunt with some buddies. I gotta find a Kansasmap and borrow a GPS thing.” It was a lie I thought Huck Finn might be proud of.
    I crossed the interstate. The Bass Pro Shop was a giant wooden building the size of an airplane hangar. I rode past a parking lot filled with fishing boats and hid the bike behind the building. I didn’t have a lock; the last thing I needed was someone stealing my stolen steed.
    I found the electronics department and got a guy to show me their cheapest GPS device. I barely had enough money; it cleaned me out. I wasn’t worried. No matter how long it took to get to Hunter, I wouldn’t starve. Once you’ve eaten at McDumpster’s, you know where to find a Crappy Meal.
    Outside, the lot was filling up. Going back around the building, I did a panic skid in my sneaks. There was a police car cruising the lot like the cop was looking for something, or someone. I put it together in a flash. The old guy at the Petro Mart
had
seen my picture, called the cops, and told them I might be at Bass Pro.
    I did a one-eighty and started the other way. I glanced back and saw the cop car doing its own one-eighty. Luckily, he hadn’t checked behind the building and found my bike. But he was coming my way again. I had to hide. There were no ladder rungs leading up the side of Bass Pro. The only way to get on the roof was to go back inside and buy climbing equipment.
    Then I spotted a second cop car coming from the other end of the lot. They were closing on me like a vise. I slid back into the store and looked for another exit. It was just a matter of time before the cops came inside. I slipped out a side entrance into another lot. It was for campers and big RVs.I ran between RVs, using them for cover till I could get to the woods and hide. Reaching the end of the RV alley, I peeked around a camper. One of the cop cars was cruising toward me. He didn’t see me, but I had to disappear, quick.
    I backtracked and checked the doors on RVs. All locked. I came to a small camper that looked like a puffy white mail truck. I tried the side door. It opened. I slipped inside and shut the door. It was empty. I had no idea when the owners would be back: minutes or hours.
    My heart almost locked up as the front of the cop car nosed into