Read Online Dismember by Daniel Pyle - Free Book Online

have been harder than keeping a hungry dog from a steaming t-bone. If Mike knew his son, there was only one place the two of them could be.
    Mike walked casually past food-court diners, not in any rush. A quick look at his watch told him he’d actually arrived a few minutes early, despite the truck, and the line for the carousel was extensive. If Libby and Trevor were among that crowd, none of them would be going anywhere for quite some time anyway.
    Walking closer to the waiting crowd, Mike let out a little whistle of disbelief. Two hundred people must have been standing in line, many of them children and young teenagers. Mike didn’t think he’d had that much patience as a kid. Hell, he wasn’t sure he had it now.
    He moved around the perimeter of the crowd, always more comfortable away from the center of activity, scanning the field of hair, looking for Libby’s distinctively sleek do. Her hair. He’d always loved it, from the day they’d met, and he hadn’t grown so bitter that he couldn’t still see it for what it really was. 
    Her hair wasn’t there. He made a second lap around the crowd to double check, but he didn’t see her, and he was pretty sure he would have managed to pick her out. Trevor, being so small, might have disappeared beneath the surface of the crowd, but not Libby. Mike frowned and turned away from the carousel. Short of bulling his way through the line and screaming out their names like a rescue worker tearing through the wreckage of some collapsed building, he wasn’t sure what more he could do.
    He supposed he ought to head back to the tables, see if somehow he’d passed them by. About to move in that direction, he happened to catch sight of a woman zigzagging her way down the corridor.
    “Libby?” He said it quietly, could barely hear the word himself over the music coming from the loudspeakers behind him. Standing with his head cocked, he raised a hand to draw her attention, but she was looking at something behind her shoulder and didn’t seem to be aware of him at all.
    He started to say her name again, but then decided he’d better move out of her way instead before she mowed him down.
    He wasn’t fast enough.
    He’d played football in high school, had been plowed over many times by linebackers and linesmen and once by a rival school’s mascot on a particularly embarrassing play, but that had been many years ago, and he hadn’t expected his ex-wife to come charging into him like a blitzing defenseman on an adrenaline high. He stumbled half a step back and grunted out, “Hey,” before reversing direction as quickly as he ever had in his gridiron days and moving to catch Libby before she could rebound onto her ass. He needn’t have bothered. She caught herself and seemed to consider hurrying past him without acknowledging his presence, but then she looked directly at him for the first time and stopped.
    “What’s going on?” he asked her, peering into eyes maybe one blink away from a torrential tear storm. “Where’s Trevor?”
    He leaned to the left and glanced around her waist, as if the boy might be hiding there. Of course, no Trevor. No Trevor anywhere, and Mike knew without Libby saying a word what had happened.
    You lost him , he wanted to say, but he couldn’t phrase it that way, couldn’t make it an accusation even if he’d wanted to. She’d obviously been through enough.
    “Missing,” he said simply, and Libby nodded, still not crying but looking close to it.
    “I let him wait in line for the carousel,” Libby said, searching the area immediately around them with her eyes while she spoke. “He wanted to wait alone, didn’t want me—” She laughed a little in a way that made Mike cringe. “Didn’t want me cramping his style, I guess. And I got up to get a refill, and when I turned around, he was just gone.” She stopped talking long enough to crane her neck over a group of baggily dressed boys before continuing. “I talked to the girls he’d