"Trucker?"

His heart stopped at the sobbing sound of Jude's voice. "Angel? What's wrong?"

"I can't reach Leo and Joyce. Do you know where they are?"

"They should be boarding the plane about now." His heartbeat kicked up a few alarmed notches at her small, broken question.

"Oh, God, that's right. I forgot they changed their flight!" she wailed.

"Angel," he said firmly, with a calm he didn't feel. "What is it? Are Lily and Mikey okay?"

"Mikey's fine," she said. "We dropped him with Tish this morning. They're taking him camping for the weekend. Lily's with my mom." He could tell she was trying hard to control herself, to stomp down the panic he knew she felt. But why? Why?!

"Angel…" he prompted.

"It's Priestly," she moaned, her voice breaking again.

"Where? What?" he asked, feeling the color all but drain from his face, holding up a hand as Marti, a woman whose energy rivaled Sally's, reached out and put her hand on his shoulder, mouthing the question, "What's wrong?"

"Trucker, just please come to Dominican. Hurry."

The line went dead, but it didn't matter. He shouted over his shoulder as he flew out the door of the boardwalk location of Beach City Grill, "Marti, call Davis and see if he can come down! There's some kind of emergency with Priestly!"

*%*

He barely remembered the drive to Dominican even though he vaguely recalled thinking it was the longest drive in the world while en route. His talent for quickly assessing situations, a side effect from his time in Vietnam, was in full force. Jude was at the counter, agitatedly talking to the nurse, her hands gesturing wildly. Though she could grow quickly alarmed under the right circumstances, she wasn't generally given to hysteria, but Trucker sensed she was nearly there now as she slammed her palm down on the counter so hard the sound of it rang out across the moderately crowded ER waiting room, startling several of the patrons waiting there. She held nothing. No bloodied cloths or towels, nothing belonging to Priestly. Chances were, they hadn't arrived together.

He strode quickly to her and gently placed a palm on her back, but she hadn't seen him coming. Her voice as she yelled at the intake clerk covered the sound of his approach. She wheeled toward him, her eyes wild, all set to yell at him, too. But she recognized him at the last second, even as he asked,

"What's happened, Angel?!"

"He's hurt!" she sobbed. "He's hurt, he could be dead, I don't know because these fucking idiots won't tell me anything!"

She really broke down now. Trucker understood her hysteria. He was feeling a horrible panic rushing through his veins now, too, but the warrior in him had learned to feel such things without showing anything on the outside. A whispered curse word could get you killed in the jungles of Vietnam, let alone a scream, no matter how much you wanted to scream. He knew she was going to feel ashamed of herself later, too, but there was no point trying to quell her reaction. It would likely incite her further.

"Tell me," he said, gripping her by both arms and giving the intake clerk an apologetic glance even as his hands gently rubbed her arms in a gesture he hoped she'd find soothing.

She shook her head and just moaned, sagging against him a little in defeat.

Trucker glanced over at the admissions clerk, whose gaze was solemn. She was calm despite the verbal beating Jude had no doubt been giving her, used to such behavior and taking no offense.

"I'm going to do everything I can," the woman said gently, "to get you a status update. Why don't you go sit down and explain things to your friend, and I will be right with you as quickly as I can…"

Jude didn't even seem to hear her, but she let Trucker lead her away to some chairs in the corner. Dread was picking at a place somewhere behind his ribs. The kid had come to mean a lot to him. Here they were, almost nine years into a friendship that almost never began in the first place, save for Trucker's presence in the Gulf of Mexico at just the right time to pull the kid from its January waters. Somehow that friendship had turned into a quasi father/son thing, except that Priestly had a stepfather in Leo, now. But Mikey and now Lily called him Grampa, and that was close enough for Trucker.

"Angel," he prompted, if for no other reason than to seal off the dread that burned behind his ribs now, threatening to somehow burst out of him. And all the while that little voice fostered on the other side of the world hushed him so that none of it showed on his face, except maybe in the single quick twitch of one eyelid.

"We were just leaving Trader Joe's," her face crumpled. "I was just finishing putting our stuff in the trunk and I heard someone cry, 'Mister, please help me!'…."

*%*

She'd slammed the lid of the trunk and moved over to the passenger side, seeing Priestly paused at the driver's door with one hand on the top. A little blonde haired girl, maybe seven-ish, sat with a tear-streaked face. Jude couldn't make out her words but saw her lips moving.

"Jude," Priestly said loudly but calmly, "there's a box cutter in the glove box. I need it," he said. Then, a little more wildly, a little more urgently, "Right now!"

She located it in the glove box even as Priestly had lunged into the cabin of the car to help her find it. He ducked back out as the little girl's voice rose in panic.

"Oh, no!" a loud sob tore out of the little girl's horrified face. "He's coming back!"

Both Jude's head and Priestly's snapped up. Distantly, Jude saw a man striding quickly to the pickup parked beside Gossamer. Jude could see in the slight hitching pause that the man knew he'd been spotted. She saw the exact moment when he realized the two strangers at the old orange-ish red car next to his truck were both watching him with confused alarm, afraid but not entirely sure what they were afraid of.

Jude saw Priestly reach into the truck with a furious motion even as the driver's door of the truck tore open. Jude understood then that something was very, very wrong. Her mind struggled to put things together even as she realized that a rational man would be yelling at the crazy haired stranger. A sane man would be charging over to the pierced, tattooed guy to beat him senseless for touching his kid, for reaching into his personal vehicle without his permission, for wielding a box cutter and for putting his hands on his daughter. And instead the engine of the pickup simply roared to life over the terrified screams of a little girl who'd just asked the tattooed, crazy haired guy for help. Wrong. It was all wrong. Wrong.

Jude realized even as the pickup shot forward into the empty space in front of it, even as the keys to Gossamer clunked onto the roof beside her, even as Priestly hollered, "Call 9-1-1!" that her husband was going to do something very stupid but very much like him. Even as her shaking hands dialed, she watched Priestly lunge forward, grab the tailgate, and scramble into the bed of the truck, falling violently against the right side and almost completely out of the bed as the man floored the truck, squealing out of the space to the left and nearly running over several panicked fellow shoppers.

Her heart dropped to her knees as she ran after the truck, trying desperately to make out the plate as she screamed into the phone that she thought that a little girl had been kidnapped.

And then the truck disappeared from view, and all she knew was that a dusty black pickup with a license plate starting in AR9 driven by a possibly armed, probably dangerous man had just disappeared with the idiot she loved holding on for dear life.