Un-Connected by Noah Rea Read Free Book Online Page B

out. Her smile had first
caught my eye—she’d smiled at me so big when I’d first come out of the
door—until she’d realized I wasn’t who she had expected to see.  Then she
stopped smiling and then smiled at me a little.
    “I didn’t mean to disappoint you. Please
don’t stop smiling on my account.” I had said.
    “Sorry, I thought for sure you were my
sister. She seems to finish every test first.”
    “Hello? HELLLLLOOOO!” Deb was saying.
    I realized Deb had been trying to get my
attention. “Sorry... I didn’t mean to drift off there.”
                Deb
and I worked together on a plan to contact the FBI. She threw away the first
prepaid cash phone, and she bought another one and activated it for me under
another name. I used it to talk to the guy from the FBI.  We talked several
times and each time we talked, it would be for no more than two minutes. He
said he had equipment that would tell him if someone was listening anywhere on
his end or mine or anywhere in between. With that said now the question was
whether we could trust him? It was still too scary for me.
    Deb normally turned her phone off at night
and put it on a charger. The next morning we were going over the truck doing
our pre-trip checklist.  Just about ten minutes after she turned her phone on,
a black SUV pulled into the parking lot. When I saw it, fear ran through me.
One glance at her and I knew she was terrified. After pausing for just a
minute, it headed straight for us. I yelled to her to turn off her cell. Then I
said we should turn off everything else electronic.
    Then another fear swept over me. What if
someone had put a bug on the truck somewhere? But they would have to know the
truck was ours first. Had they done that? Once she turned her phone off, the
SUV slowed and then began to weave in different directions. It was her phone
they had tracked. Just then a black helicopter passed slowly overhead. It was
really quiet like it was in stealth mode or something.  We didn’t hear it
coming and that scared me even more.  We were somewhat hidden on the darker
side of the truck, but I was petrified.
    “Get in,” she whispered.
    We started rolling ever so gently and lazily
out of the parking slot. She had her phone up to her head just talking away.
She was telling someone about Uncle Willy’s drinking problem. Her face was pale
and flushed. Her phone was off, but she was acting a phone conversation as if
her life depended on it, and we were hitting the road. I was hidden down in the
floorboard, and she was whispering what was happening. We slid right past the
black SUV with her not looking their way except out of the corner of her eye.
It was scary. She couldn’t see anyone in there. Thankfully, they didn’t seem
interested in her truck. They seemed to be checking out all the motor homes,
cars, and SUVs coming in and out. There were quite a few.
    We didn’t talk for almost an hour. We were
both scared. I told her she could drop me off. She didn’t need to risk her life
for a stranger.
    “I am not a quitter, and I could not leave
another human to those thugs.” She said and pulled a handgun out from under the
seat and handed it to me. “Right now I am more afraid of them than I am of you,
and I want you to have a fighting chance if they catch up with you.”
    We agreed we both needed to lay low for a few
days. I bought a hat with a wider brim so when I was around other people or
cameras I could hide my face better. She turned her phone on for two minutes at
a time to get messages. We left all of our phones off most of the time. She
changed the number on her original phone and made double sure it was unlisted
and registered it using her middle name with no D in front of it. She
called her essential customers and gave them her new phone number. One good
thing came out of it, though.  Now Deb knew for sure I had been telling the
truth.  She was on my side for real.
                As
I continued to try to