4. Maryland (The Killer in the Concrete)
When he and Bones first arrived in Baltimore to examine a body of questionable origin, Booth thought that his biggest problem would be the sharp pain in his tooth. He had hoped that it was just a passing ache and that he would be able to avoid a trip to the dentist, but no such luck.
"Are you afraid of the dentist?" Bones asked when he winced in pain for the tenth time in as many minutes. Bones was always telling him that he was afraid when really he just didn't like something- clowns, dentists, clown dentists. He flinched again at the thought of a clown dentist, and decided that he could put off making an appointment for one more day.
The next problem, not counting Bones' insistence that they ship an entire block of concrete to the Jeffersonian (he was used to her ridiculous demands after two years of partnership) arose when Bones quietly told him that she'd seen her fugitive father at her mother's grave. She had, of course, called the police. Bones wasn't the easy going, forgiving type who liked to hear people out when their behavior wasn't up to her standards.
"Did you talk to your dad at all before you called the cops?" he asked, although he suspected that he knew the answer already.
"No. Why would I?"
"Well, I mean, I haven't seen my dad in a long time and if I had the opportunity to talk–" He grabbed his face as if in sudden pain. "Ow, God."
"Go to a dentist," Bones scolded, predictably distracted from asking what, precisely, Booth might say to his inaccessible father.
Want to try to hit me now?
Thanks for leaving. Best thing you ever did.
Why? Seriously, why? I've been to war. I've got a son. I understand a lot of things about a lot of people but one thing I don't get is how you could...
Stupid stuff, really. There was no reason to say any of it. Edwin Booth couldn't have said anything to change the past or the future. Seeley Booth wasn't interested in anything that Edwin Booth might have to say.
If he had had the opportunity to talk to his dad, he wouldn't take it. That was why he never bothered to use his position at the FBI to look into the man's whereabouts. He had no desire to relive anything about his life before Pops had stepped in.
But Bones didn't need to know that.
The irony wasn't entirely lost on him. He didn't want to think about the early years of his childhood because he didn't want to remember how much of an asshole his father had been. Bones claimed not to remember the early years of her childhood because she didn't want to admit that she had had an adoring father.
Booth was going to arrest Max Keenan at the first opportunity because that was his job, but it was not lost on him that Max looked at Bones with the love and reverence she deserved.
It was a shame that Bones wouldn't let herself see, but he was working on it, and if he had to give her a misleading picture of his own family situation to nudge her along, well, that was a good use of his time and energy.
He swallowed down the tiny twinge of guilt at the misleading statements he'd thrown her way over the past year.
"Do you like your father?" she'd asked once.
"I love my father," he'd told her, and she had been too caught up in her own mixed emotions to notice that he had technically avoided answering her question.
The one time that she had specifically asked him about his childhood- and that was a big step for Bones, who when they'd first partnered up had barely been willing to acknowledge that he was a human being- he'd skirted the issue just as easily. He'd mentioned the mother who wrote jingles and the father who was a barber in his post-military life. He hadn't mentioned that they'd both abandoned him or that if he was a functioning human being all credit went to his grandfather.
That wasn't a betrayal of Pops, who deserved credit for being a saint, or of Bones, who had so much difficulty extending trust to anyone about anything. It was simply withholding information that was only going to cloud her thinking on her own situation.
She was confused enough as it was, although she did seem to listen when they reviewed Max's rap sheet together and he pointed out that Max had never killed an innocent citizen or an honest cop.
But it didn't surprise him when he got a phone call from Bones that night. The sound was muffled, as if the phone was half-hidden, and Bones ignored his greeting. He was left to listen, and it took only a split second to register that Bones was not alone and that the man with her was Max.
Of all things that a wanted fugitive could be doing, Max was singing a 1970s country-rock ballad to his skeptical daughter.
"...I've been thinkin' 'bout
All the times you told me
You're so full of doubt
You just can't let it be, but I know
If you keep comin' back for more
Then I'll keep on tryin'
I'll keep on tryin'..."
Booth tried to picture Bones as he rushed to her apartment. In his mind's eye, she fought to pretend that she didn't remember and that she didn't care whether Max stayed or left. But she cared. Booth knew that she cared, and Max knew it, too.
Max stopped singing and apparently found Bones' notes on their current case. "Hugh Kennedy. Bad guy," Max expounded. "But he's dead, about five years ago in a car crash in West Virginia."
"Recent evidence suggests otherwise. How do you know him?" asked Bones.
"Well, him and his ice pick were pretty famous in some circles. I gotta go."
"Now?"
"Yeah. You speed dialed Booth. Now he's been listening to everything and the SWAT team's on its way."
Booth couldn't decide whether to swear or chuckle. Max was a criminal, and he had abandoned Bones, but he was clever. Bones would slap Booth if he said it out loud, but he could see father and daughter reflected in one another.
"I mean, I'm just guessing," Max continued. "There's something I do want to say to you."
"Mom," said Bones bluntly.
"It's not about mom. It's about you and it's about stuff that she wanted you to know. She never got the chance to tell you."
Suddenly Max's voice was clearer, as if he had spoken directly into the phone for the first time. "Hey, Booth. There's a couple of things that you should know about this guy Kennedy. He's got an addiction to model airplanes."
Getting advice on a case from a wanted fugitive wasn't that strange, all things considered. The model airplane lead could be put to good use.
"What's the second thing?" Bones asked
"He's wily. You be careful, okay?"
Bones sighed heavily into the phone. "Did you get that?" she asked Booth.
He had.
The model airplane lead was good, all right. It was so good that Booth found himself punched in the head, separated from his gun, and duct taped into a rug by Hugh Kennedy. In the short term, it was actually an improvement as far as pain level went because Kennedy knocked out his tooth in the struggle.
In the long term, Booth now had problems that loomed larger than a visit to the dentist or facilitating the world's strangest father-daughter reunion.
He managed to roll himself off the bed, but he remained bound and gagged on the dirty hotel room floor for the next 18 hours with only the red light of the digital bedside clock to keep him company.
When he convinced himself that there would be no escaping his bonds, he resumed the old habits that had served him well as a POW.
Hail Mary, full of grace
Our Lord is with thee…
Kennedy had been pleasant for someone who had beaten Booth around his head and left him wrapped in a rug in a hotel room. Settle down. Someone'll find you. You have a good day now, he'd said as he left
Unfortunately, the "someone" who found Booth turned out to be Melvin Gallagher with his attorney Clark Lightner in tow.
Gallagher had a hand in practically all the organized crime in West Virginia, ranging from prostitutes to extortion to drugs to gambling. If Booth cared to take the time to ponder it, and he didn't, he had probably patronized one of Gallagher's establishments during his gambling days. Gallagher was a crime boss through and through. There was no humor or kindness in his fat face. There was greed and violence.
Booth knew men like Gallagher.
The weasley little attorney, Lightner, might be worse. Bones had liked Lightner when they'd done an interrogation the day before- but only because Lightner knew the difference between cement and concrete.
Booth knew men like Lightner, too. He was just as bad as Gallagher, and the fact that Lightner played smart while Gallagher played dumb didn't change that.
It was Lightner who began the interrogation.
"Was it Hugh Kennedy that bundled you up in a carpet?"
Kennedy had shown Booth mercy, but Kennedy was still a criminal who had never paid for his crimes. Booth would have been on secure moral and ethical ground if he'd answered the question.
Answering still would have been an incredibly stupid thing to do. Lightner and Gallagher would kill him the moment he gave them what they wanted, and they might even manage to frame Kennedy for the job.
"I can't discuss ongoing investigations with civilians, all right, so just cut me out of here," he suggested as naturally as if he hadn't been bound in a rug for 18 hours."
Gallagher picked up the gun that Kennedy had thoughtfully left behind for Booth.
"Put that down!" Booth ordered.
Gallagher pistol whipped him.
It hurt less than the tooth had, really.
When Booth regained consciousness, he was tied to a chair in what, unless he missed his guess, was a hanger in an airfield. The beating that had begun in the hotel room continued.
He'd had worse as a POW.
He'd had worse at the hands of his father.
When the interrogation began again, he was more pissed off than frightened. He knew that the FBI was looking for him. So were Bones and her squad of obnoxious geniuses. He liked his odds. His only job was to hang on.
"Perhaps he didn't see Kennedy," Lightner began conversationally. Lightner was trying to play good cop, but he wasn't very good at it. Booth was a something of an expert on good cops, what with being one himself.
"Yeah? Now how'd you come to that though?" Gallagher pretended to wonder. The way the two thugs contorted the interrogation techniques that Booth himself used on a regular basis was downright pathetic.
"Well, Kennedy would've have left him with an ice pick protruding from his head," said Lightner.
"Just one simple question, big dog. Did you see Kennedy?" asked Gallagher for at least the fourteenth time.
Booth remained silent. Every minute of silence on his end was one more minute for the FBI to sweep the area or for Bones to find the clue that told her where he was. He really hoped that the FBI had left Bones in the loop. Communications between the FBI and the Jeffersonian were frequently terrible without the designated FBI liaison. Sometimes communications were terrible with the designated FBI liaison, although that was hardly the fault of the handsome and talented man in question.
"We could get our own ice pick, make it look like Kennedy killed him," Lightner suggested, as if Booth hadn't known that that was their endgame hours ago.
"You know we can't let you live, right?" added Gallagher, as if Booth hadn't known that from the first moment that he saw them.
"You've been struck and restrained. Technically, kidnapping a federal agent is as bad as murdering him these days," lamented Lightner. "How would you like to kill him?" he asked Gallagher.
"First I gotta know for sure if Kennedy's dead or alive," said Gallagher.
"Good luck with that one, big dog," Booth told him. Now he had two reasons to hold out. The first was that making his death long and painful instead of short and painful gave Bones and the FBI more time to get to him before his death became less of an abstract concept. The second was that Gallagher was fucking annoying.
"Big dog," mulled Gallagher. He was pissed, but Booth doubted that making Gallagher angry made him any more of a psycho. The man was almost certainly too experienced to be the type who made mistakes when he was angry, but it was worth trying.
"Oh, I suppose we could do that thing that McKenna used to do. But I'd need a blowtorch and a sharpened screwdriver," said Lightner as if he'd just thought of it.
"Just tell us," asked Gallagher.
"Woof," whispered Booth.
Lightner rifled through Booth's wallet and handed a photograph to Gallagher. Booth knew what the picture was; it was the only one he carried. It was, of course, of Parker.
"Oh, cute. Must be his kid, huh."
Booth remained silent and unmoving.
Gallagher punched him.
"Head like an anvil. I hurt my hand," whined Gallagher. He held up the picture of Parker, and even though Booth had known that this was coming he felt a rush of cold fury at the sight of Gallagher's fat fingers beside Parker's beautiful face. "Gonna let you take a look at your sweet boy. Consign his face into your memory and then I'm gonna ask you which one of your eyes you like best."
Gallagher made his first real mistake. He leaned in too close.
Booth headbutted Gallagher to the ground. If Gallagher really was going to kill him, he wasn't going to enjoy it.
While Gallagher rolled on the floor, the little weasel Lightner knocked over Booth's chair and began to kick Booth in the stomach.
It hurt more than anything Gallagher had done so far. Gallagher had been in control. Lightner was not, and Lightner, a bully at heart who didn't have the strength to back it up, delighted in the opportunity to kick someone stronger when that person was bound and didn't fight back.
What's the holdup, Bones? Booth thought into the universe.
And how had he reached the point that he expected Bones, not the FBI with its army of men and weapons and information, to be the one who came for him?
"Stop it, now," commanded Gallagher as he rolled to his knees and then climbed to his feet.
Lightner dusted himself off, almost looking abashed.
"Get the screwdriver and the blowtorch," said Gallagher, and Lightner did the closest thing to skipping Booth had ever seen a mobster's attorney do.
Meanwhile, the beating commenced in earnest.
Booth had known that Gallagher was holding back, but that didn't make it any more pleasant as the blows rained down on his head from every angle. There was no more affected whining about hurting his hand or jokes about big dogs; there was only systematic torture up until the point where Booth's eyes began to close of their own accord.
That, of course, was when Gallagher stopped so that the two of them could watch as Lightner used the blowtorch to heat the screwdriver.
"Did you see Kennedy?" Gallagher asked almost conversationally.
Booth was silent. He watched the blowtorch.
He was a gambling man- reformed, but still a gambling man. The odds were no longer in his favor. The odds said he would never see Parker again, and now the light of the blowtorch looked like the light of the candle that had lit Rebecca's face when she'd refused to marry him.
The stale smell of his bound, unwashed body brought him back to the small room in the desert where he'd spent a week having his feet broken in places he hadn't known existed.
And the heat of the screwdriver as it came closer and closer to his thigh was the heat of the August day when he'd been thirteen and Jared had complained about ice cream to their drunken father.
Was this how you saw me ending, Dad? What will you say when you hear? If you hear?
No, he corrected himself. His last thoughts would not be about his father. They would be about the way Parker threw his arms open for a hug on Friday afternoon at the start of their weekends together.
The screwdriver seared through his suit pants and branded his leg. He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again. The human body could take a lot, and he knew that better than most.
Lightner pulled back the screwdriver, and Booth breathed in a second's reprieve.
No.
It wouldn't just be a second, because the door had been flung open.
His rescue team had finally decided to show up.
He gathered himself and shoved his shoulder into Lightner. His chair tipped over, but Lightner and his screwdriver fell to the floor, too. Unless Booth missed his guess, Lightner had fallen on top of his precious screwdriver.
What could Booth say? He was a sniper. He had damn good aim.
Then Bones was hovering over him, casually suggesting to Lightner over her shoulder that if he lay still enough he might not die.
Max Keenan, wanted fugitive and savior of kidnapped FBI agents, burst into their little powwow.
"I need your car," Max told Bones.
"Max Keenan, you're under arrest," said Booth. He was lying on the floor while tied to a chair, but he figured that he would let all involved knew where he stood (metaphorically speaking) anyway.
"Not if I get the keys," Max wheedled Bones.
"They're in the ignition," Bones told her father, and she got a kiss on the forehead for being a dutiful daughter.
What the hell, Bones?
"Well, it's not like I actually gave him the keys," she rationalized, as if she'd heard him speak.
There was no time to discuss it further. The beam of a flashlight blinded him as the FBI stormed into the building. At least two dozen agents had come looking for him. He recognized every one of them. Even Deputy Director Cullen had shown up in person.
They set the chair upright and cut his arms free. A whine of relief and pain involuntarily escaped his lips when his arms found themselves able to move again.
"Easy," Agent Sugarman coaxed. "The ambulance is right outside."
"I'm not going in the ambulance," Booth objected.
"Yes, you are," said Bones and Cullen in unison.
Cullen grinned and Booth was taken aback. The man had rarely smiled even before the death of his daughter the year before; now he almost never did.
"You listen to your partner, Agent Booth," said Cullen with a mocking mirth that Booth wasn't sure he deserved. "You were the one who pushed to allow Dr. Brennan in the field. Surely you can handle any and all consequences. In fact, she should probably ride in the ambulance with you. Shouldn't you, Dr. Brennan?"
"Yes, I should. Thank you, Deputy Director Cullen," said Bones politely. First Cullen was grinning, and now Bones was being polite. Almost sweet. Booth had obviously taken more punches to the head than he'd thought.
Cullen was kneeling in the dust beside Booth, mindless of his $8,000 suit. "How did you manage to call her? While they had you bound like that? I can't imagine they left you alone," Cullen asked.
Booth's eyes flickered to Bones' stricken face. It appeared that in addition to helping fugitives escape, his Bones was now actively lying to the FBI.
"I… well, Kennedy left me rolled in a rug in a hotel room. They had to get me out of that and into…" he broke off in a dry cough. "Water?" he asked to buy himself some time. He needed it, too. Lightner had given him a few sips while playing good cop, but it hadn't been nearly enough.
Someone opened a bottle and wrapped his hand around it. The liquid burned its way down his throat to his stomach.
"I'm sorry," Booth told Cullen. "What happened when is all messed up. They hit me on the head a few times."
"More than a few, I would say," returned Cullen. His eyes swept over the bruises forming on Booth's face with real concern. "I'm the one who's sorry. You'll do your report after you get checked out. We have Gallagher. The details can wait." He nodded at the paramedics. "Get him to the hospital."
Booth didn't argue this time. He stood up before anyone could make any suggestions about stretchers or wheelchairs and made his way to the ambulance under his own power.
The paramedics opened his shirt and examined his stomach where Lightner had kicked him. Bones, of course, had to lean in to get a look, too.
"Let them do their jobs, Bones. You're not that kind of doctor anyway."
She whirled on him in predictable outrage and he couldn't help grinning. He was glad that he hadn't died without more of this. He was glad that he hadn't died without more of her.
"Besides," he added, just to tweak her further, "you have to have some respect for my modesty."
"I've seen you with your shirt off before!" she objected emphatically, and he could have sworn that one of the paramedics had to swallow a laugh.
"If they take x-rays, I'll let you see them. That'll make you happy, right?"
She looked ever so slightly mollified.
"You can tell me everything that ever happened to me."
"Not everything," she said quietly, and his eyebrows climbed toward his hairline in surprise. She rarely admitted that there were things she couldn't tell from bones. People lie, bones don't, she was fond of saying. Spending a day with her father must have left her emotionally raw. He'd have to make certain that she was all right.
When they were left alone in an exam room as they waited for a doctor to make triple sure that the burn on his leg didn't require any further attention, he saw his opportunity. "What was it like? A day with your dad? You must have been working pretty closely together."
"The FBI wouldn't tell me anything. He was the only way I could help. Cam would've tried to keep me in the lab if I'd gone out without him."
"And Cam would've been right," said Booth sharply. Bones was a good shot, and skilled in martial arts, and God knew that she was brilliant. But she had no business messing around with the likes of Gallagher on her own.
"Isn't she the one who's supposed to make sure the rest of us follow the rules?"
"I don't think you violated any Jeffersonian policies with one little daddy-daughter day."
"I lied to the FBI about you calling me. It would have taken too long to tell them how I knew where you were, and they might not have believed me anyway."
"I figured. I'll fudge it over in my report. You did the right thing." If she'd done anything else, he would have died. "Thanks, Bones," he said quietly.
"It's what partners do," she said just as quietly. "Right?"
"Right."
He thought that they would sit in silence until the doctor made his grand entrance, but then Bones spoke again. "It was surreal," she said. "Being with my father again. Needing something more than anything else in the world and knowing he was the only one who could give it to me."
"He came through for you."
"This time." Her light eyes flickered, strangely fathomless. "Did your father always come through for you?"
"No parent comes through every time," said Booth in the understatement of the year. Then he decided that it was time to mitigate, just slightly, one of his lies of omission. "I even lived with my grandparents for a while."
"Just you? Or Jared too?"
The sound of Jared's name made the room lurch around them. He hadn't seen Jared in years. He didn't bring his family into his work. "When did I tell you about Jared?"
"You didn't. You were asking a little boy about his foster brother. You thought that there might have been an accident." She pointed at his hip. "You said that you got that scar playing soldier with your brother Jared."
"Right." He remembered the case now. Trust Bones to file away that nugget of information.
"Was I not supposed to know?" she asked. "Is Jared dead?"
"You're not a fan of subtlety, are you?"
"I don't know what that means."
"I know you don't." He sighed. She had just saved his life. "Jared's in the navy, which some of us in the army would consider worse than dead."
"What about your grandparents? Are they still alive?"
"Pops is."
"Pops," she repeated, trying it out and smiling as she did. He couldn't help but smile back.
"But I don't like to talk about my family a lot, okay?"
"We talk about my family."
"When my family shows up at the FBI or the Jeffersonian, we can talk about them."
"All right."
"Where is that doctor?" he wondered aloud, not only because he wanted Bones off the subject of his family but because he wanted to get this over with so he could get home to his shower and stand under a stream of hot water for at least an hour or two.
"Are you in pain?" she asked frantically. "What hurts?"
"I want to go home and take a shower. That's all."
"They're keeping you overnight," she said. "They decided. I heard them, and I think they're right."
He swore under his breath. He was willing to risk death by concussion or internal bleeding or whatever had the doctors so cautious in exchange for clean clothes. He kept a bag in his office and another in his car for this kind of situation, but he wasn't sure what had become of the car after he'd tracked down Kennedy.
The office was a possibility.
"Can you do me a favor?"
"I'm not helping you sneak out of here."
"I would never do any such thing or ask you to help me," he said primly, and she laughed.
He liked her laugh.
"There's a bag in my office. It has-"
"Oh, your emergency overnight bag," she completed. "Of course." She stood up quickly, ready to run from the room. At the last minute, she turned. "Am I supposed to… bake you a pie or anything?"
He hadn't known what he expected her to say, but it definitely hadn't been that. "Do you know how to bake a pie, Bones?"
"I have cookbooks. Cookbooks have recipes. It can't be that difficult. I am a genius, after all."
"You don't even like pie."
"Fruit shouldn't be cooked. My father says I like snickerdoodles."
He didn't push her on the snickerdoodles, but filed away the information for future use. "You do not have to make me a pie. Why would you have to make me a pie?"
"I don't know. You're in the hospital. You're supposed to bring food to people who had something bad happen to them, but I don't usually... I should have thought of getting your bag for you."
"Bring me my bag now and take me to the diner for pie when I'm released tomorrow morning?" he suggested.
She nodded, satisfied with her marching orders. She leaned toward him for just a second; then she stepped back hastily and vanished.
He knew what the lean meant. For a fraction of a second, Bones had considered kissing Booth on the cheek the way her father had kissed her. Then she'd changed her mind and decided that two years of working side by side in life and death situations didn't make them close enough for a platonic kiss goodbye.
He would never say it out loud, but Bones was downright adorable when she tried to get the interpersonal stuff right. It was almost enough to give him a little more patience while waiting for the doctor.
After an uncountable (to a normal person at least- only squints counted that high) number of tests and examinations, he was finally permitted to take a shower, and all by himself even if an orderly stood close by in case he needed help. It was nice to be clean again.
He stood under the hot water and let it soothe some of the aches that hadn't quite been chased away by whatever painkillers he'd been fed so far. He turned it off quickly when he heard Bones' voice.
"I have your clothes, Booth," she sang out. "But I'm putting them here and then leaving. See? Respect for your modesty."
He snorted. He should have known that she wouldn't let that go. "Thank you, Bones," he called.
"And I looked at your x-rays. I didn't learn anything new," she added with petulant disappointment. "But you're fine. I'll see you tomorrow."
He was looking forward to it. The pie would be good.
That night, he dreamed of Bones. It wasn't precisely a sex dream; it was just that he had his head on her naked breasts and it felt good to be there.
After he shook himself awake, he determined that he didn't have any kind of weird or unprofessional feelings for his partner. Obviously the breasts, which were soft, were symbolic of how vulnerable his strong, tough partner was when it came to her family. And he had been touching them because he had spent the past year making it his business to help her reunite with her family, at least to the extent that he could when he knew that he'd have to arrest her father the next time he saw him.
Even though there was nothing untoward about the dream, he decided that, rather than going back to sleep, he would write the report on his kidnapping. Bones had brought everything he needed along with his overnight bag.
The sun was starting to rise by the time he finished the report and emailed it off to Cullen. It was too late to go back to sleep and too early to start agitating for his discharge. Only babies and old people were up this early.
He smiled and reached for the phone.
The conversation with Pops started the way conversations with Pops always did. Booth asked about Pops' health and told him not to overdo it; Pops told Booth to be careful on the job. Booth assured Pops that he was fine and might have neglected to mention that he was calling from the hospital.
From there, they moved on to discussing Parker, the happenings in Pops' neighborhood, and the state of the Philadelphia sports teams.
And then there was a casual mention of breakfast.
"My partner's coming to pick me up, and we're going together," Booth said. "I've been promised pie for breakfast."
"Didn't know you were working with a partner," said Pops. "He's a good cop?"
"Not a cop," said Booth. "Or a he. It's this liaison with the Jeffersonian thing. It's working so well that it's almost my whole job instead of a little part of it. The scientist I work with, somehow she turned into my partner."
"You feel safe out there with someone who's not carrying a gun?"
Safer when she doesn't have a gun than when she does. "She knows how to handle a gun. She goes to the range, has a hunting license and everything. Even though she's a vegetarian and believes in animal rights."
"Sounds complicated."
"She is."
"And then there's the thing that makes it the most complicated. Is she married, and is she pretty?"
"She's not married, and she's beautiful. But that's the one way it's not complicated."
"She older? She a lesbian?"
"She's a few years younger than I am, and she's definitely not a lesbian, Pops." Booth chuckled.
"Then at some point this will get complicated and you'll need a new partner."
"She's the only forensic anthropologist south of Montreal, so I can't replace her. It'll just have to stay professional and uncomplicated."
"You were exaggerating about how pretty she is, then," Pops decided.
"'I'm not," said Booth.
"Prettier than Rebecca?" asked Pops slyly.
"As pretty," Booth decided. Then he thought it over. "Prettier, because she's never trying to tell me I can't see my son."
The conversation turned back to Parker, but telling Pops about Bones and Bones about Pops left Booth with a strange sense of rightness.
Bones showed up right on time to spring Booth from the hospital and drive him straight to the diner. She asked him what had happened with Kennedy and Gallagher and Lightner, and he obliged.
"Why didn't you just- just tell them about Kennedy?" Bones wanted to know when his story was finished. There was still a slight hesitance about her on this rare occasion when she was admitting to not having all the answers.
"I needed to give you time to find me," he told her, figuring that she would take that better than they would have killed me the minute I told them. She still looked worried, and it had crossed the line from cute to concerning. He was the one who worried about her, not the other way around, and he was not going to allow that dynamic to change any time soon. He didn't even like it when his own family worried about him, so he certainly wasn't going to put up with it from the queen of the squints. "I've been tortured worse," he assured her, before realizing that that wasn't very reassuring. Time to change the subject, then. "So, uh, you hear anything from your old man?"
Bones produced a glass dolphin and a letter. "He left my car in the garage," she said.
The letter, Booth found, was all but a promise to return to discuss Bones' mother. "He'll be back."
"How do you know?" Her past being what it was, Bones wasn't about to trust an obvious promise laid down in black and white when it came to her father. Not even after her father had risked his life and freedom to save an FBI agent because that was what his little girl wanted.
"Max Keenan does not strike me as the kind of guy who leaves things undone," said Booth simply.
"Next time he shows up, what do I do? Do I call you? Do I knock him on the head? What's my obligation?"
"Well, if I were you, Bones, I'd wanna know what he has to tell you about your mother, but that's just me."
Bones was quiet for an instant as she considered that. "There's this old song. It's called Keep on Trying."
"Yeah. Poco."
"You know it?"
There was no need to tell her that he'd had it stuck in the back of his mind since he'd heard Max say that, once, it had been important to her.
One of his few memories of his own mother was her firm admonition that while he had the makings of a fine dancer, he would never be a singer. Nonetheless, he quietly sang his answer.
"I've been drinking now, just a little too much."
The shock came when she sang back.
"And I don't know how
I can get in touch with you.
And there's only one thing for me to do.
It's to keep on tryin'"
Bones had a beautiful singing voice. Her mother had definitely never told her that she would never be a singer. Singing with her made him feel like he had a beautiful singing voice, too.
"To get home to you."
They laughed together.
"Yeah, what about it?"
"It's a good old song, right?"
"Right."
Right.
To be continued, seven years or so down the line in Virginia….
Auxiliary Disclaimer: Some dialog in this chapter is taken directly from The Killer in the Concrete, my particular favorite episode. Keep on Trying belongs to Poco.
