A/N: This chapter is dedicated to a reader named SeluciaV, who was amazing enough to leave me rave reviews in almost all of my stories in one sitting. Let me tell you, made my week.

So, a lot of you guys are yelling at me about leaving cliffies, and I just want to explain something to you. I'm writing this whole story in one, long document and then choosing chapter breaks arbitrarily by page number. So I don't actually choose to leave a cliffy to be evil; it's just a fringe benefit. Enjoy!

"Veronica?" He looked at Keith as Keith looked at him, both shell-shocked and disbelieving. "Veronica, is that really you?"

He had left the oh-so-conspicuous X-Terra in the motel parking lot and hitched a ride with Keith as they headed blindly east. It was one less vehicle out there searching, but if he knew anything, he knew Keith would be the first to be informed, probably the first to find her. He wanted to be there when he did.

"Oh God, Logan." Her voice shook and he could hear her tears, the sound closing his throat. "You don't know how good it is to hear your voice."

"Veronica," he whispered into her ear, and in her sleep her head turned of its own accord. He couldn't help but smile. She was beautiful in the morning. "Veronica, wake up."

Slowly she came back to herself, making soft little noises in her throat that made him think so many things he wished he could tell her. "It's Saturday morning," she whimpered, and he swallowed it with a kiss. When he pulled away, her eyes were half open, stardust and sunshine sparkling in them. "Mmm. Saturday morning kissage. I could get used to this."

He laughed. So could he. There was something about a girl wrapped in his sheets, wearing his clothes, smiling at him the way she was…he couldn't get enough of it. Even with no sex involved, he could so get used to it.

"What time is your dad getting back?" He played with a lock of her hair and tried not to sound worried. He was starting to hate the mornings she wasn't there. "I'm not really up for the third degree." Especially since, for once, he was being the good boy.

Her voice was still thick with sleep, her hair ruffled. He loved her. "Not till tonight. Plenty of time to sleep."

"Alright," he whispered, stroking her cheek gently. "You sleep."

She was already half there. "Talk to me, will you? I want to listen to your voice," she mumbled, wrapping her fingers around his against her neck. "That way when I dream…" yawn, "…I'll dream of you."

"I just wish—" The painful hitch in her voice broke his heart. "And if 'ifs' and 'buts' were candy and nuts…" She trailed off on a humorless laugh, and he wondered what the end of the statement could be. "I have to talk to my dad. Where is he?"

"He's right here. We're coming to find you. Where are you?"

"There's no time, Logan. I need to say this in case I don't get another chance."

"Alright, alright," he sighed a sob. He didn't want to give her up. He wanted to tell her so but thought better of it, and then realized that it was stupid to rationalize just then. "I love you, Veronica," he blurted out instead, knowing it was what he really wanted to say. "I just needed you to know that."

And then before he could resist—keep her all to himself until one of them stopped breathing—he passed off the phone to Keith and put his head in his hands.

---

When he pressed the phone to his ear, the first thing Keith heard his daughter say was, "I love you too."

He promised himself he wouldn't cry. "It's me now, Sweetie, but I'll tell him."

"Dad?" Her voice jumped up an octave, but he could hear relief in it too. He remembered that voice coming from a walkie-talkie once. "God, Dad, I'm so scared."

"I know, honey," he choked out, trying to keep an eye on the road. Nothing would compel him to pull over right then and waste precious time. "I'm coming to find you. Can you tell me where you are?"

"We're at a Mobil off a minor highway just west of Escondido. I have to go, though. If I'm in here too much longer he'll probably break down the door."

"Veronica, I love you," he said desperately, needing to get it out. He knew people in these situations always wanted their last words to mean something. He hoped that they wouldn't be the last they shared, but the nagging voice inside his head told him not to tempt fate. "I'm coming to get you. Just hang in there."

"I love you. I'm going to keep the line open so you can trace it. No loud noises, Dad."

"That's my girl." He smiled sadly, handing the phone to Logan so he could concentrate on the road. "She's keeping it open. I need to you listen, and I need you to call Mac on your phone and have her trace the number is using."

The boy didn't wasted half a second following the order.

"Oh yeah," he said quietly, staring out the windshield. "And my daughter says she loves you."

---

She didn't want to leave the bathroom. Everything inside her screamed to just curl up in a corner and let the world pass by outside the door. But she knew it wasn't that easy. He'd get in sooner or later—and the later it was, the angrier he'd be.

The dingy mirror above the sink had three different shades of lipstick pressed near its frame. Marks left behind, doomed to be washed away in the night's closing. Still, brief as it was, it was a mark. She looked into the reflection at her broken, bruising face. Such marks would also fade…hopefully.

She almost jerked around when someone touched her shoulder. Gut reaction. Emotional overload. Whatever. Even if she'd called the woman, Alicia standing there behind her came as a shock.

"Thanks for coming," she stuttered out, looking back at her father. "I didn't want him to wake up alone."

"I'll be here," the woman nodded, caught somewhere between her manners and the instinct to gasp at Keith's condition. Veronica was thankful for the manners. "Wallace is out in the hall. He wanted to drive you home."

The look on her best friend's face when she stepped out of the room was something she would never forget. It was all the things she expected, all the things she needed: strength, protectiveness, fear, relief, anger, love. She could have done without the anger—she'd had enough male anger in the past 24 hours—but she understood it. It wasn't for her.

"You're alright?" he asked, even though she was standing of her own volition not three feet from him. It was her father in the hospital bed. "I mean, seriously?"

She nodded and let him pull her into a hug. He was her Wallace. She was his V. Not even a can of gasoline and a Zippo were going to take that away from them. She didn't even care that his jacket was chaffing her bruised cheek. They held each other just as tightly as they could.

Touching the corner of her lip gently, she pulled back her finger and saw blood. She swallowed the metallic taste of it, but more just filled its place. Without thinking about it, she pressed her finger against the mirror, leaving a burnt red fingerprint behind. Now she had a mark there too.

An idea sent her mind racing and she dabbed her lip again. With a shaky finger, she smeared the blood over the mirror in what she could manage of legible letters. Veronica Mars. White Ford Focus. TWV 668. East. Send police.

A pounding on the door made her smudge, but she didn't bother trying to fix it. She just washed her hands, splashed some water gently on her face, and slid the thin, still-transmitting cellular phone down the front of her shirt before slipping out the door. Lucky was, as promised, standing right outside with a sour look.

"What took you so long? I went and topped off the tank, came back, and you were still in there."

Damn. She'd missed a perfectly good chance to run. "I had to wash my face," she replied as passively as she could muster. "I look like hell and someone's going to notice soon if you don't stop hitting me."

His answer lent her no comfort, "Next time I'll go for someplace not quite so visible." He stopped her attempt to head back to the car with a hand on her arm. "Hold it."

For a second she thought she was caught. He was going to go into the bathroom and wipe the mirror. Or he'd heard her talking and knew about the phone.

"Hands on the wall." She just stared at him. "Don't look at me like that, Mars. There are a lot of things you could find in the bathroom that you might be planning to use against me."

"Name one."

He was silent for a minute. "Not the point. I'm still going to have to pat you down."

Veronica didn't know how this could possibly get worse. Of course, if he found the phone, it no-doubt would, but she was done playing the 'what if' game. Just then, being frisked by Lucky Dohanic outside a dingy Mobil restroom a hundred miles from home, she wanted to imagine this was the worst it could get.

Lucky ran his hands down her sides, over her hips, between her legs, and all the way down to her shoes. He took a moment to slide his hands over her breasts, softly enough not to notice the phone, but intimately enough to make her tremble. She wished it was just her imagination that he lingered there a moment longer than necessary, but then again he was a guy.

"Take off your shoes," he ordered, stepping away, and his voice was strangely hoarse. She didn't want to read into it.

She pulled off her shoes one at a time, holding each upside down and showing him the inside. No hidden weapons. He seemed satisfied.

"Alright, let's go. It's starting to get dark."

Her sights jerked up to the horizon and she let out a soft whimper. The sun was hanging dangerously low on the tree-line, and one thing she'd never wanted to see was Lucky in the dark.

---

Mac sat at the computer, pouring over Woody's records. She'd gotten a hold of one of the bat boys, but he had vehemently denied any kind of abuse. And if she hadn't believed him, his voice didn't match either of the ones on the recording. The third of the batboys was being elusive, but it wouldn't take long. She was good at what she did.

She stepped into the office without a flourish. It had never been her way. But she stepped in confident nonetheless. It was always nice to end a day with a job well done.

"Roberto Nalbandion."

Veronica looked at her strangely, which she'd expected. That was definitely their way. "Who's Roberto Nalbandion?"

"I have no idea."

The expression got stranger and she reveled in her own mental game of I Know Something You Don't Know. "Okay, forgive me if as of yet, I'm unimpressed."

Alright. Enough fun with the She-Bond. "I don't know who he is but I do know that someone purchased his Argentinean passport off of eBay and had it shipped to the airport at Marriott."

Veronica smiled a delighted smile, a proud smile, and Mac loved it. It wasn't often she got to out-sleuth a sleuth. Sure, to her it was only a couple days work, barely a broken sweat to be found. But to those that weren't quite so fetishly attached to their computers, she was a freaking genius. She liked that.

Growing up, there hadn't been a lot of people she would call friends. Her eccentric tastes matched with her parents' bank balance had always kept her on the outskirts of most crowds. Her computer prowess had earned her a small following among the hackers and the hopelessly clueless, but it was never about her.

Somehow, with Veronica it was. Even if it was usually about computers, too. Still, there was something real about the girl. Something she hadn't seen very often before. It was nice, to have a girlfriend.

She had already called the sheriff's department and given them what information Logan had given her about the phone Veronica was using. They were in the process of contacting the provider, obtaining a warrant, and activating the trace. While she waited for that call though, she would do what she could to find these witnesses.

So she looked into Goodman's past. He had been the owner of the Neptune Sharks baseball team (where Lucky had been a batboy). Before that he'd founded a very successful fast food chain.

Wait, what?

She'd been flipping through screens so quickly that she almost missed the small black and white picture in the corner of the window, the online newspaper article proudly proclaiming: "SHARKS LEAD WITH UNDEFEATED SEASON." What she hadn't noticed was that the picture hadn't been of grown men...

The ringing of the phone startled her, though the sound was quickly imbedding itself in her brain. Logan. Keith. Teachers. Reporters. The sheriff's department. All of them wanted a minute of her time tonight.

"Mars Investigations," she answered absently, hoping it wasn't another reporter. She was getting really tired of the reporters.

"Who's this?" Not the usual greeting.

"That depends. Who's this?"

"Weevil," the guy said, and she recognized the attitude. "What are you people doing, playing musical detective?"

"Name's Mac. I'm running the computer on Veronica's rescue operation," she answered his first question, not even bothering with the second. "Is there a reason you called or are you just wasting my time for the heck of it? Veronica—"

"Left a message in Escondido," he finished, and her mouth snapped shut. "On a mirror. In blood. Pretty sure it was hers, too, so you'd best be telling me what's up."

"You first. What'd the message say?"

"Headin' east in a white Focus. Plate number TWV 668."

She sighed. They knew all that from the motel clerk's DMV records. Still, it was good to know Veronica had left breadcrumbs…even if they were in blood and bullet wounds. "We have an open line on a cell she's hiding," she said, feeling like she owed him an explanation. "The sheriff's department is working on a trace right now. Should have her location within minutes."

She could almost see the head nod in his silence. "Alright. Keep me informed."

He left her with his number and a few bits of sarcasm. Seemed vaguely inappropriate, but a little humor in an otherwise morose situation was more than moderately welcomed. When the phone rang again a minute later, she almost expected to hear his voice.

Instead she heard that of the deputy she'd talked to before. "Mac, I've got a couple gems for you."

She smiled. "Hit me."

Once she'd heard her fill and the line clicked, she dialed faster than she ever thought possible.