Chapter Two: Lord Willing and the Creek Don't Rise

Gone were the police cruisers and news station vans.

How insane was it that the front of her son's school looked just like it would on any Thursday morning, knowing what kind of circus had spread out on its every inch just the day before? Emma was glad that there was now an erected chain link fence around the field space where all the chaos had happened, but it did little to assuage the very strange and foreboding feeling in the pit of her stomach. There still seemed to be a mess of cars beyond the privacy slats of the fencing, so she knew that there were still people hard at work identifying what kind of discovery they were dealing with. She just hoped that some of the less well-behaved children from Henry's school wouldn't get it into their heads to scale the fence and unknowingly scar themselves for life. The school district deemed the forensic focus of the area far enough away to keep their doors open, so there they were… Parked in Emma's car in front of the middle school, both mother and son sitting as quiet as church mice.

Her conversation with Henry about leaving town on another job had been a short one. Instead of his normal, excited rambling about this thing or that, he sat in silence for a long moment before reaching for the door handle. Emma knew every hair on his head and every line on his face just as surely as she did the day that he was born, but it was what she couldn't see that worried her. She wanted inside of his head, but it seemed that he just wasn't willing to share. The look on his face alone had been like a punch to her gut. Emma spent most of their drive there trying hard to convince him that this job would be a good one, and that she wouldn't have to leave again for a long while, but the boy just stared at his feet, his crestfallen face devoid of its usual cheerfulness. He hadn't so much as spoken another word to her since.

Everything's gonna be just fine…

"I promise, it'll be the last one for a while." Still sat in the passenger's seat, Henry fiddled silently with the frayed end of a strap of his backpack, not bothering so much as to look up whenever she spoke. She couldn't leave him like this… Emma Swan kept her promises. Come hell or high water, she would not be made a liar. "After this I'll be home so much that you'll be sick of me." She paused then, hoping that a change of subject would get him talking. "Ruby's gonna pick you up after school, okay? You don't have to ride the bus, isn't that great?"

He turned his face to look out the window then, his innocent and odd way of looking anywhere but at her. "If Ruby is your girlfriend, then why doesn't she live at our house? Granny's house smells like mothballs…"

"What?" Emma asked in a squeaky voice, clearly caught off guard. She shook her head and twisted in the driver's seat of her bug, fighting against the tight pull of her seatbelt. "Where did that come from?"

Henry simply shrugged his shoulders and let his gaze fall back toward the folded hands in his lap. He had such a hard time looking at her even when he was in a good mood, something about "feeling it too much inside" when people tried to make eye contact with him. His autism spectrum disorder was a recent diagnosis that did put a lot of pieces together for the both of them, but she couldn't help that aching, desperate feeling that clung to the back of her ribs at times… A mother just wants her son to be able to look her in the face without averting his eyes.

"Ruby's not—" Emma nearly choked. "Ruby's not my girlfriend, Henry."

He looked at her then but quickly darted his eyes to her one hand still perched upon the steering wheel. He'd more than likely meant to take in her expression as a way of using his inherited "superpower", a trait which Emma had passed down to him in order to help keep him safe. Emma was an expert at discerning the truth from a lie, or even if people were attempting to be deceitful in the form of non-truths, vague-truths, or the absence of truth altogether. She was a walking, talking, lie detector test… and it hadn't always been a gift. Especially when her son turned around and used it on her.

She hadn't lied. Ruby was not Emma's girlfriend… not in any official capacity. They had boundaries. Well… Emma had boundaries. Okay, they were walls. Tall, imposing, brick laid ones. The impenetrable kind. If there was ever anyone in the world who wanted badly enough to get past them, they would have to fucking climb.

"She makes sandwiches in your bedroom in the middle of the night… but she's not your girlfriend?" He asked, tilting his head ever so slightly in that endearing, innocent way.

"I—" Emma gulped. "No."

"So you're not getting married?"

"Married? Okay, I don't know what you've heard… but sandwiches do not equal marriage." Emma realized that her tone of surprise could have easily been mistaken for frustration, and she quickly made a leap to correct when Henry's face fell back to his lap a third time. "Listen, I'm just a little unprepared for these kinds of questions… but that doesn't mean that I don't want you to ask them. Do you understand?"

Henry nodded. "How am I supposed to ask you then?"

Emma faltered for a split-second. "You know… I'm not actually sure, kid." Then she shrugged. "Tell you what, you just keep askin' exactly the way you know how, and I'll figure the rest out. I'll try to do better. Does that work for you?"

"Mhm." He hummed and nodded again. Then he reached for the door handle and climbed out. Before he closed the door behind himself, Henry turned and leaned inside, running his eyes over her face one more time. "Are you sure you don't love Ruby?"

Emma fumbled around in her mind again for the right answer, but she knew that only the truth would suffice. "I love Ruby in the way that I care about her and want her to be happy… but I'm not in love with her." Her brow twisted together then with a thought. "Why, do you think people who are in love are supposed to live together?"

"Yeah…"

"Well, I guess they do most of the time." She agreed.

"How do you know when you're in love?"

Emma shook her head and blinked adoringly at him. "It's just a thing you know, kid."

His lovely doe eyes narrowed into a squint when another question struck him. "Have you ever been in love?"

Emma's heart sank. "Yes."

Please don't… please don't…

"With who?"

Shit.

Emma's head spun with the sudden rapid fire of her son's questions. For some reason they just seemed to come in spells like that, as if one led him to another which led him to another and before he knew it, he was unable to stop himself. He was a curious child by nature and seemed to have no filter in the way of timing or awareness of how each question might land, and she knew that it was no fault of his own. It was just the way that his brain worked, and it was wonderful… Except for when she was seconds away from stepping into a conversation she wasn't prepared to have. Again.

Emma suddenly wanted more than anything to be sitting at their kitchen table again, watching him try to talk around a mouthful of waffle about what clock he managed to fix at Granny's house just a few days earlier.

"Henry… let's just—" Brown hair tossed side to side as her son bobbed his head for an answer, and then she gave a final, defeated sigh. "Alright. I was in love with your father."

The look on Henry's face… it broke her heart.

What was at first an expression of disappointment quickly turned into a scowl and Henry pulled himself roughly out of the way to slam the car door shut. Emma quickly unbuckled and stood up as he walked a brisk pace away from the street.

"Hang on, Henry- I promised never to lie to you…"

Hearing her, he made no effort to turn around or to stop.

"Wait—" Emma tried again, louder this time. "We can talk about him, let me explain—" The front door to the school began to close behind him and she shouted then, "Henry!"

But he was already gone.

The flat of her hand came down hard and smacked the roof of her car. "Dammit!" Emma threw herself back into the driver's seat, squinting around the burning sensation in the corners of her eyes that came with the threat of tears. "I don't know how to do this…!"

It was only fair that Henry wanted to know why his father wasn't around. What wasn't fair was that Emma seemed to have gotten it in his head that he shouldn't have one at all.

By no means had anyone told her that motherhood would be easy, but in Emma's case, she hadn't exactly had the best role models herself. She'd kind of skipped the whole "childhood" part of her life, what with being moved around from one place to another like a piece of lonely and pissed off luggage. Now that she was a parent and role model herself, most of that journey had been trial and error. It was only recently that she had paced a burning track into the office floor of Henry's psychiatrist, begging him to just admit that she was the one who'd traumatized him to the point of such social awkwardness. She blessed the man for his honesty and candor when he set her straight, saying that in no way was it anyone's fault, that Henry was just born special.

"You couldn't wait three days before taking off again?" Granny asked in a somewhat accusatory tone as she shoved the bridge of her glasses up along her nose. "A boy needs his mother."

"It's a lot of money… We'd be so good for so—"

"Ahh—" The old woman harrumphed with a wave of her hand as she traded places in the doorway of her office with her granddaughter. The diner was packed that morning, and Granny Lucas was apparently in no mood for excuses. Emma hung her head again with a heaved sigh.

Ruby merely leaned against the doorframe and folded her arms across her chest as she stared. The blonde could feel a pair of eyes boring holes into the top of her head, so she lifted her gaze to meet them. Her hands shoved hard into the pockets of her jeans, unable to help the feeling of shame wash over her.

"Go ahead, everyone's just piling on this morning." Emma said with a shade of remorse the longer Ruby continued to stare.

"Do I look like everyone to you?" The waitress asked with a dry tone, and Emma scrunched her nose apologetically. "You wanna tell me what's going on?" She asked.

A short huff of a frustrated breath fell past Emma's lips. "Listen- I understand it's a shitty job that takes me away from my kid a lot, but—"

"Not that. I meant what's going on with you." Ruby insisted.

Pull it together, Swan.

Quit moping and maybe you won't be so transparent...

Emma pulled in a breath and tapped the heel of a boot idly. "I guess- Henry and I… we just had kind of a weird chat this morning. That's all."

"About?"

Emma shifted her weight for a moment and sputtered for an answer. "I don't actually know?" Her hands lifted out of the pockets of her dark blue jeans and then smacked the sides of her thighs exasperatedly. "First we were talking about you, and then sandwiches, and then the next thing I know we're talking about marriage and being in love with his father and… it all just kinda got outta hand and I didn't know what to do other than to be honest with him—"

"Hey- slow down…" Ruby said softly, placing a hand on Emma's arm to stop her fidgeting. "You know what I think?"

Emma exhaled another emphatic breath and straightened her back to catch Ruby's gaze. "Please, for the love of all things holy tell me, because I've got nothin' at all."

"To start, I think that if you didn't feel that way about being honest with Henry, then that would actually be the thing to be concerned about. But more importantly, I think he's just trying to figure out if you're happy."

Oh…

"You've sort of told me bits and pieces about the way that you grew up, so I know you don't really have any idea why kids do the things they do, ones in stable homes anyway—" Emma began to shrug away when Ruby caught her by the arm again. "No, wait, hear me out." Ruby was looking at her with those kind eyes again. She was always doing that. "I'm one of those kids from a stable home. Stable-ish, anyway… Henry is too, and I can tell you that he's at that age now where he's beginning to be curious about the lives of the people around him, starting with you. For me it was Granny. She had loads of stories about her six older brothers, and my mom and my dad, so Henry… he just wants to know who you are, I think."

Emma gave Ruby's hand a squeeze. "I guess that makes sense."

"He'll relax, eventually. Maybe if he saw you with someone…? Even if that someone isn't me. Sandwiches are just sandwiches, right?"

There went Emma's heart hurtling toward the floor again. "Ruby… I—"

"You don't have to explain… I get it. If I pushed hard like you needed and there wasn't a bottom ready and waiting to fall out from underneath you… then I would, but I guess that's just not for us. At the end of the day, I'm like Henry. I just want you to be happy."

Emma smiled past the cloudiness in her eyes. "You're sort of amazing, Ruby Lucas."

The brunette sucked her teeth and flipped a length of her hair over her shoulder with a flourish as she turned into a spin. "You say these things like I don't already know them, Swan. Keep up." She began a strut down the hallway toward the dining room with a slight swishing emphasis in her hips, and then stopped to turn around and look at Emma once more. "Just… come back with less bruises this time if you can. Even if I don't get to see them anymore, I'll still know that they're there."

Emma chuckled.

Pretty sure I just got dumped...

"I'll do my best, Red."

The hardest part about being both bounty hunter and skip tracer was that it usually meant there was very little time to gather intel before having to hit the road. More specifically, trying to read arrest warrants and bank statements while driving tended to be the more dangerous part of Emma's job, apart from the physical aspect of running and sometimes fighting. She'd been punched, kicked, stabbed, shot at, and even shoved off a balcony once, but what stressed Emma out the most was keeping her eyes on the road while multitasking.

Time was of the essence in her line of work, and the longer she took to get her various ducks all in a neat little row, the further away a target could become. While bounty hunters are typically hired by bail bondsmen to seek out and capture clients who skip town before showing up to court as promised, it's also the work of skip tracers to locate and track said people down. Emma had, in the past, worked with skip tracers who were good at following digital footprints and had access to city and state infrastructure, but a lot of them always wanted too much of her percentage of the take, so she decided to strike out on her own when Henry was young and had been getting by with that for years.

The beginnings of her career were admittedly rough, and full of mishaps. It took a long time to get where she was today, and that was mostly thanks to the boisterous, kindhearted woman who gave her the motivation to strive for a bigger source of income for herself and for her son. The fact that Granny Lucas had immediately fallen head over heels for Henry and offered to watch over him whenever Emma needed was just an added bonus.

Emma's relationship with the Lucas family was the closest thing she'd ever had to one in her entire life.

Though, maternal figures did strike a bit of a sore spot in her chest, somewhere near her bruised and beaten heart. Sure, there were women throughout her childhood who had sworn up and down that they'd look after her, making grand promises like "you're family now" or "you're like a daughter to me", but those words always ended up being the same hollow, oftentimes drunk delusions of women with savior complexes. It cut Emma to the bone each and every time these supposed "mother" figures seemed to magically get over their bond with her so quickly, throwing her back out on the streets with a little less of her belongings in tow each time. It wasn't until Emma was in her late teens that she learned none of them actually meant anything they said. The words had sounded good, that's all. It was then that Emma understood nine out of every ten humans weren't worth trusting, and that tenth one usually wanted nothing to do with her. Her life had been filled with untrustworthy people, but this woman was different. Emma didn't thirst for her approval, and Granny didn't seek to give it. They just were.

As Emma drove further out of town, she began to read up more on her target. Regina White, born Regina Mills, was a well-to-do heiress of a Puerto Rican milling company who married up to a wealthy Texas sugar baron, a man named Leopold White.

Lot of sugar cane to be had in Puerto Rico…?

It wasn't long before Emma connected the dots. The surname "White" was the same family who owned the largest cane sugar corporation in all of the United States. Going back all the way to pre-civil war times, the patch of land that came to be later known as Sugar Land was once home to several large plantations. The same plantations which prospered off the use of slave labor until the ratification of the thirteenth amendment and eventual end of the civil war, where when southern states were restored to the union, were also forced to free their slaves. It wasn't until years after that the plantation conglomerate now known as the Empire Sugar Company, hemorrhaging money from the loss of labor, sought to retain that same labor by leasing convicts from the state prison system to work their fields. Essentially, it was slavery by another name.

Emma thought to herself as she darted her eyes back toward the road ahead of her, what on God's green earth would make someone want to marry into a family like that? Following that, it also occurred to her to be more mindful of which brand of sugar she bought at the supermarket from now on. She read further through the stack of documents to learn more about the deceased sugar baron, and on what grounds the charge of murder was issued. A crime scene photo slipped out of the folder and fell into her lap, revealing the image of a man with a thinning head of silver hair slumped forward onto his face where he sat at a very large desk, a pool of frothy, pinkish blood below his mouth.

Damn…

The wife, now fugitive from justice known as Regina, had been arrested under the suspicion of murder after the discovery of her husband's body, but what seemed to be the nail in her proverbial coffin were her clothes, which were found saturated in the same substance that was also found lining the inside of a bourbon glass. The report read that Regina and the decedent were heard shouting at each other in their home by a family friend the night before the murder, where Regina had been heard saying something to the effect of "if he wouldn't let her go, then she would have no choice but to wait for him to die."

There had been no discovery of weapons at the home other than an antique, civil war era musket and plaque-mounted calvary sabers. With no history of violence and no written reports of domestic abuse, nothing leapt off the page to make Emma think this was anything other than what August claimed when he brought her the job; Regina seemed to be just a scared, rich woman who was running away from the consequences of her actions.

Emma's police scanner crackled over the sound of her radio as she came upon another open frequency with chatter. She tossed the stack of papers into the passenger's seat of her bug and twisted the radio knob on her dash lower before moving the volume slider of her police scanner higher. With no real destination or inkling of where Regina might be headed, Emma employed the use of all her assets… apart from calling for help, that is. That usually involved payment up front and she simply didn't trust anyone else in her line of work not to cross her and take it upon themselves to bring Regina in for the full payday. Until Regina made the mistake of using one of her credit cards, Emma was shit out of luck as far as a heading. The voices on the scanner murmured back and forth between themselves routinely for a while and then fizzled out of range. Nothing of interest jumped out at her, so Emma continued along the interstate toward the only possible route that made sense. Straight west toward the Mexican border, by the fastest route possible.

August's duo of private eyes claiming to have followed Regina all the way to the I-10 westbound in her Mercedes was pretty much the only thing Emma had to go on at this point. She just had to pray that this woman was scared enough to keep hauling ass in the same direction, but Emma also knew that Regina had to stop and rest at some point. Emma could drive on little to no sleep for long stretches of time after years of practice, so she'd catch up to her if that was the case before too long. There was just a lot of road ahead of her.

By the time Emma reached San Antonio, the thought of Regina stopping to ditch and swap vehicles became too much of a probability to leave out when two hundred thousand dollars was on the line. Emma's eyes began to scan for possible dealerships where the interstate dumped out onto Highway 90. That stretch of road was famous for its string of chop shops and though Emma didn't have time to stop in and search all of them, she managed to sort her best guesses into a handful of run-down looking business that advertised "cash" and "no hassle" gimmicks. That combined with each one's location near a fast-food place or five and dime store in less busy parts of the area had her ultimately stopping to investigate, but still losing more time by the second. Out of the five that fit the bill… she came up with nothing.

Three hours had turned into four with all of her stops, including one to refuel. For a seventies year model Volkswagen that could only top out at around eighty-five miles per hour before it struggled, the gas mileage wasn't terrible. It was beat to hell and held together with duct tape and zip ties in some places, but for some odd reason Emma had a hard time even thinking about letting this little kicker of a car go. It had been her home for a while, after all. Right after Henry's father broke her heart and left her to pick up the pieces, and right before she found out she was pregnant. After all this time, it still got her from point A to B, and then some. It handled good like a get-away car should, which was what it was for a time before Henry was born, but Emma rather preferred to suppress those particular memories. The car could take a beating and keep going, just like her. It had been run off the road, shot at, and had weathered all manner of storm, including a twister that rolled right over its hard top once. Built like a tank that drove on a track, Emma's little yellow bug wasn't going anywhere.

As for Regina, Emma was left with no other choice than to continue pushing westward toward the border. It unnerved her how little she had to go on with such a big payout at stake. Considering the seemingly easy apprehension and recovery of said fugitive in front of her, Emma realized the bulk of her difficulty would lie in the locating of Regina, first and foremost. What usually eased her anxiety was the act of giving herself an achievable goal, step by step. Step one: Assess the target. Step two: Use whatever means necessary to locate the target. Step three: Apprehend the target with minimal damage and return to the proper authorities. Then boom, she was paid.

The only problems were steps one and two, which were a bit of a blank. So far, Emma had learned very little about Regina White. The woman had no surviving family —on paper anyways— and there seemed to be very little information with which to glean a personality from, as far as fortune magazines or "old money" blogs go. Typically, rich types loved to talk… apart from the ones in tech, that is. For whatever weird reason, those were mostly introverted men with horrendous social skills, or a complete lack thereof. It was the cotton kings and sugar barons of the south that usually loved any opportunity for a puff piece, either to relate the successes of their generational family businesses or to boast ones of their own, being "self-made" and all that. Emma's circumstances while growing up hungry, filthy, and in a constant state of hyper-vigilance left a rather foul taste in her mouth for those who were born with a silver spoon in theirs. With no evidence to the fact that Regina was puffed up and sick with affluence, why did she still imagine clapping her set of handcuffs around this woman's wrists tightly enough to cut off the flow of blood?

It's not your job to form an opinion… Emma reminded herself as she twisted the volume dial of her radio back up to drown out her thoughts. It was her job to locate and recover bail jumpers and to get paid. That's it.

A sudden -ping- from her phone gladly captured her attention.

It was an app that told her which credit card numbers were used and where. Legal for law enforcement officials and virtually impossible for anyone without a municipal or governmental ID to use, but of course that did little to stop Emma from breaking into one and using it at her discretion. The blonde sat up straight at the notification and held her breath for a moment as she unlocked her phone.

Regina had just used one of Leopold's credit cards in a city called Del Rio. Four minutes ago.

Excitedly, Emma backed out of the app to plug in her destination on the attached GPS hanging from her dash. When she jabbed at the screen to type rather hard —more of a punch, really— the device came tumbling down and fell at her feet. Had she been driving; the mishap certainly would have spelled disaster.

Calm down…

Just breathe.

As she fixed the GPS back to the face of her dashboard, Emma typed the city in and found that it was just an hour from her current location in Uvalde. She was close, but Del Rio practically sat on the Mexican border. Emma worried that Regina would find a way to spirit herself across before she could get to her. Getting across the border would be relatively easy, it was the "getting back" part that usually came with a struggle.

Realizing that she had only an hour before her payday was lost to the wind, Emma stomped onto the clutch and threw the shift lever of her bug into drive, flinging gravel beneath her tires when she hammered down on the gas. She'd shave a good fifteen minutes off her travel time if she sped the whole way there.

Hopefully I don't get pulled over… Emma thought as she gulped past a hard knot in her throat. Catching Regina was the only thing on her mind. It's not like two hundred grand or her kid thinking of her as a liar were on the line or anything.

Lord willing and the creek don't rise…

Here we go.