Phase 12: Paper Locks

Enjoy!

oOo

One hundred miles of silence.

He watched the odometer change even as the scenery around them seemed to be the same ocean of corn in all directions.

One hundred miles.

He should feel better. He was a hundred miles closer to his daughter, a hundred miles closer to holding her again. He should be celebrating that, but closing the distance was bittersweet.

Then the odometer changed to begin counting another hundred miles of silence.

Russ sighed and for a moment, Booth thought he might say something, but that moment passed and he turned his head to look out at the green waves of corn.

He had nothing to say, either. He could touch the keys they'd retrieved in the pasture, recount the answers they'd gotten at the bus station, recheck the train schedules for the area, but none of those things would bring her back.

Temperance Brennan might be lost to him.

He didn't want to believe it. But he'd been fighting back that feeling for so long that he was tired of the battle and he just wanted some small sign of hope. Just freeing her from the damned arrest warrant should have been enough to buoy his feelings for days, but he had sunk back into a sea of worry brought on by the sense that he could do almost nothing to help her.

And now?

Perhaps his Catholic guilt was nibbling at his conscience as well. If he had only been able to put thar bastard away. If only he'd acted sooner. If only. . . .

His phone vibrated and he pulled it from his pocket without a glance toward Russ.

With a single word, his last name, he broke the record 104 miles of silence.

And hearing the name and the voices on the other line finally broke another long string and finally gave him a burst of hope.

oOo

The screams from the children drew her away from the pain radiating from her back and shoulder.

Almost 90 kgs pressed down on her and above her a melon crate threatened to topple over on top of them. The acrid smell of burned rubber only confirmed that the tire had blown out, sending them careening down the road until abruptly they'd been jolted to a shuddering stop. Their angle in the bed of the truck—she estimated it to be about 35 degrees—suggested they had ended up in one of the ditches at the side of the road.

"¿Estás bien?" she asked the children crushing her. "¿Está herido?"

Tears streamed down the girl's face as her brother tried to pull himself away from her, using the open spaces in the gate of the truck for handholds. He managed to remove at least 50 kgs of pressure from Brennan and she took the opportunity to check the little girl quickly for any injuries.

"¿Estás bien?" she repeated for the little boy who was using the soles of his shoes to brace himself.

He nodded solemnly.

The truck quaked and the boy slipped toward her. The little girl, more frightened than hurt, sobbed harder and her brother began to comfort her with a string of endearments in Spanish.

The truck rocked again and she assured the children in Spanish that it was only their parents trying to get out of the truck to check on them. With some effort, she stood in the bed, bracing herself against the side of the truck and managed to bully the melon crate back on top of the others.

She felt decidedly unsteady in the truck bed, the angle and the beating her body had taken combined to work against her.

"Estás sangrando," said the boy, pointing at her. "Su cabeza."

She swiped at the sweat at her temple and looked at the streak of blood in her palm. "Estoy bien," she said. "Es sólo un rasguño."

The little girl was wide-eyed with fear and the tracks of her tears still glistened on her cheeks.

"¿Rosa? ¿Carlos? ¿Son usted bien, mis bebés? ¿Hacen daño a usted?"

The children called back to their parents, reassuring them that they were fine, and asking the same questions of their parents—are you fine? Were you hurt? What are we going to do?

It was the question that consumed Brennan. The crates had shifted enough making egress through the window of the truck cab nearly impossible. The angle of the truck suggested that the one door available to their parents—the driver's side—was the only exit available to them.

She heard the muffled sound of the door clicking open, then shutting almost at once as if the occupants of the cab did not have enough leverage or strength to prop it open. Each effort drew a shudder through the vehicle.

We need to get out of here, she told the children in Spanish. They can't get out of the truck. We need to open the gate and help them.

Normally it was an easy operation—reach over the top of the gate and remove the steel rods that held it closed. But the angle and gravity made that a challenge.

She told the boy what she needed him to do and he called out to his parents, "Mamá. Papá. Estamos para ayudarle." Then he shifted positions with her, taking the low end of the bed while she pulled herself to the high point.

Can you get the bolt out? she asked him in Spanish.

He was bent over the gate, straining to reach it, but he couldn't.

Her side wasn't easy. The angle and pitch of the bed made just reaching for the bolt a mission requiring acrobatics and strength. On the third try, she managed to grab the top and fingered her way down to the chain that attached it to the truck bed. It gave her greater leverage to pull at the chain and free the bolt.

Using the top of the gate as a handrail, she made the return trip, waving both children away from the corner of the bed. Leaning over the side, she easily removed the bolt and pushed at the gate.

It banged against the bumper, sending up a shudder under and around them.

Climbing down, she helped the boy, then the girl onto solid ground, then watched as they scrambled up the sides of the ditch and disappeared onto the road. She gingerly climbed up, her head throbbing, and joined the children in the road where they could stand and assess the damage. The passenger side of the truck was angled downward in the ditch making it impossible to open that door, while the driver's side faced the sky.

From inside the cab came the muffled cries of the woman and the deeper voice of the man calling to them.

The road stretched in both directions between tall rows of corn, empty of any traffic save the birds that used it as a landing strip to hunt for insects on the graying asphalt.

She took a breath and steeled herself as her muscles protested her climb up to the truck cab. Using the step, she braced herself awkwardly, but with the man pushing from within and her pulls from without, they were able to open the door.

"I need something to prop it open," she called down to the boy, who, with his sister, had been shouting up encouragements.

Between rocks and sticks they settled on a flat stone that held the door at an angle acceptable for egress.

Hopping down from her perch, she watched as the man gingerly found the step with his foot, then climbed from the cab, flattening himself against the cab before finding the right angle and hopping down. Calling up instructions, the man talked his wife out of the truck cab and onto the step. But her foot slipped and she went shrieking off the cab, landing awkwardly. She began wailing, clutching her arm as she rocked back and forth.

In a flurry of Spanish and English, she broke through the tight circle that had formed around the woman and began examining the arm.

This was something she knew. The small knob of bone pushed against flesh and she felt along the break and along the bone, the sensation both familiar and distant.

"I can set the bone," she said. "Puedo configurar el hueso."

But she was still the stranger, the extra cash to help balance the books at the end of the month and the woman only continued to cry as her husband tried to comfort her. She straightened and climbed back into the truck bed, peeling wood from one of the broken crates and locating a cotton shirt she'd managed to buy at a thrift shop.

The woman was already sending up prayers to her god and Brennan was wont to tell her that prayers were not nearly as effective in setting the bone as she would be, but she remained silent, only bending to the work of ripping the shirt into strips of cloth.

"You'll need to hold her," she instructed the man in Spanish. He understood. The man sent the boy back to the ditch with his sister to gather wildflowers at the side of the road "por su mama."

"This is going to hurt," she told the woman. "Vamos a enderezar el brazo. Va a doler."

The man wrapped himself around his wife as a brace and with a solemn nod to the woman, Brennan pulled.

oOo

He played her voice again.

The message had some coded hoohah that made more sense to Max than it did to him, but it didn't mean any less.

She was alive.

Her voice was strained and tired sounding, and he could imagine being separated from Christine for only a little while had tested her, but she definitely sounded alive and she had claimed that she was well. Everything else could be fixed later.

"According to Dad, she's what, a day behind us?" Russ paused in eating his sandwich and did the mental calculations. "Rural routes are at least 10 mph slower than highways, then there are the towns which means. . . ."

The math didn't matter much to him. What mattered, the only thing that mattered was that she was alive and slowly making her way back to Christine and to Max. And in a couple of days they'd all be together.

Together.

He picked up his iced tea and eyed the other messages on his phone. He wanted to play the message over and over and over until he could hear the real thing, see the real thing, but he held off as the voice replaying in his head only reminded him they weren't together yet.

"If there aren't any problems along the road," Russ was saying, "my guess is we should see her the day after tomorrow at the earliest."

It was more hope than educated guess, but he'd take it.

"You okay with this?" Russ asked over his sandwich. "I know you're pretty pissed at Dad, but are you angry with my sister? Tempe taking off like that, it hasn't been easy for you. I know how angry Tempe was with me. Fifteen years of being angry at me. And she's never quite forgiven Dad."

"Are you still angry with her for taking off with your kid?"

That was the question he'd been struggling with. He washed down his own sandwich with his tea and tabled that question for later. "What are you, a dog whisperer or something?" It was an easier discussion. "I thought that dog was going to make minced meat out of you and then here you come out of that garage with the dog on a leash. I think that dog would have followed you anywhere."

But Russ wasn't so easily distracted from the topic. "I thought Tempe had the temper," Russ countered, his eyes never leaving his. "Guy was ready to tell you just about anything he was so scared. Is that what happens when someone gets on the wrong side of you?"

He might want to let it go, figure out later how and what he was feeling about a reunion with Bones, but Russ didn't. In Russ' eyes was a challenge.

"Bones does the rational thing." He was trying to replay the argument he had had with himself weeks ago. "Running was the rational thing."

"And you're good with it?" Russ sat back, wiping a napkin across his mouth. "You're sure you're still not angry at her for running?"

Booth crumpled the napkin in his hand and wondered if Russ had been talking to Sweets: that seemed to be his question of the week.

"I've seen both sides, Booth," Russ said his gaze intense, "Running and being run out on. You know my sister—she takes no prisoners when it comes to the truth. Just be honest with her."

Booth studied his hands and wondered. Was he still angry?

And despite all the time that had passed, all the emotions that had come and gone, Booth really wasn't sure of the answer.

oOo

She just wanted him to leave.

As grateful as she was for his tractor and his expertise in pulling the truck from the ditch, she really just wanted him to leave to allow her to signal the Vasquez family and to drive off. But the man, Matthew Connolly, seemed much more inclined to stand in the middle of the road with her and talk.

And talk.

Comments about local events—"three high school students turned their truck over about a dozen times and landed in the middle of Jake Weatherby's cornfield" she could handle, no matter how exaggerated they might be.

She could even handle the occasional glance at her breasts or the comments about the state of her clothing—she and Sr. Vasquez had muscled a new tire onto the truck practically lying on their backs and while it had gone quickly, her shirt bore the marks.

She was having some difficulty with ending the conversation.

"You headed over to the farmer's market in Larabee?"

Her father's rule had been to allow people to assume certain details, so she had nodded and hoped Connolly would leave soon. But he was leaning against the back of the truck in a posture that suggested he was in no particular hurry to return to his farm, peppering her with questions that he answered as if to spur on his mostly one-sided conversation.

She knew the more time she spent with him meant he had more time to record the details of her face. With no makeup and her hair pulled back into a ponytail there was little to disguise the general architecture of her face. The baseball cap only obscured the details to some degree, but she felt vulnerable like this.

It had been why she'd offered him a couple of crates of melons in payment for his kindness, why she'd thanked him again and again in a vain effort to hurry him along, why she kept saying she had to leave. But it wasn't as if she could simply climb back into the truck and take off—the tractor straddled the narrow road and there was no way to simply turn the truck around without ending up back in the ditch. But he had followed her back to rear of the truck, had helped her close the back gate, and had proceeded to tell her more about farming conditions in the area.

"I really should be going," she said, her accent borrowed from the northern part of the state on the license plate of the truck. "I'm already a half day behind and I thought I'd be in Larabee before the night."

"Oh, you've got time," he said, seemingly digging in for another volley of talk. "Larabee's but an hour away, especially if you take highway. . . ."

She half-listened, noticing some movement in the distance.

A lone vehicle, little more than a speck on the road was approaching and she secretly cheered the driver. Connolly craned his neck, then slowly smiled.

"That's Dawes."

"Dawes?" she asked, trying to appear polite.

"Frank Dawes." The car closed the distance and even she could see who Dawes was. Or at least the mars lights visible through the windshield indicated what Dawes was.

The law.

oOo

Sweets practically vibrated with anger. "He keeps putting up roadblocks when he should be giving us free rein to go after Pelant. He shouldn't do that."

Angela kept one eye focused on her computer and one on Sweets. "He shouldn't do what? Mix his metaphors?"

"I don't see how you can all be so calm." Sweets really was having a hard time dealing and Angela felt sympathy for him. Nothing about the situation had been easy and they had had few reasons to be optimistic, but word from the computer techs at the FBI had given her some good news that morning and Hodgins had surprised her with a project he'd been working on that had shown some real promise.

And Booth had called. His had been the best news.

"You know how Brennan is," she said, "she likes to know everything about the case? Well, that's what we're doing, Sweets."

"You've all looked at the evidence a dozen times," he groused. "And you come up with something and Flynn will shut you down or pull you from the case."

"Hey, Sweets," she countered, "weren't you the one who said we can 't give up? Weren't you the one who got Flynn to let you re-examine the evidence?"

He sighed heavily and nodded. "It's just damned frustrating."

"We're not giving up, Sweets." She began to run the finished facial reconstruction of their latest murder victim into the Angelatron. "We're making progress. Miss Julian's back at work, and Cam said. . . ."

But she didn't finish her thought. The Maryland DMV database provided a match to her facial reconstruction and the name was all-too-familiar.

Sweets read the screen: "Derek Sims." He shook his head at the coincidence. "That's our deliveryman."

"Let's see Flynn ignore this."

A/N: My high school Spanish is rusty, so if what I've written isn't quite correct, my apologies. Online translators don't capture nuances of language.

Happy 4th of July to my fellow United Statesians! (I'm off to do a rain dance. . . .)