Friday Five – A Neat Trick

It’s Friday, so it must be time for The Friday Five writing prompt! Five different words each week to get the creative juices flowing. To visit the other participants, click here.
This week’s words are: exchange, firsthand, friendly, jump, trick
Back to #SaveFred… Here is a link the last installment if you need it…

A Neat Trick

Joel and I exchanged a quick glance as Fred ran past. I knew from firsthand experience, if Fred didn’t want to be caught, he’d make it a remarkable challenge. In the past, though, he’d been contained in a room and hadn’t had the freedom of essentially the entire world.
I was determined not to panic. After a few deeps inhalations to settle my nerves, I jumped down from the bumper of the truck. Panicking would do no good at all, and it wasn’t really my forte anyway. Historically, I’m pretty great under pressure, if I do say so myself.
“So, what now?” Joel ran fingers through his hair and huffed out a breath.
“I don’t suppose you have a live trap hanging around somewhere?”
“I don’t even know what that is.”
I wracked my brain, running through every trick of the trade, and finally settled on food and patience. “What about this… do you have any fruit?”
He tapped his chin a minute. “I think I have an apple in my desk, and some grapes in my lunch. Will that help?”
I smiled. “Perfect.”
We hurried back to the office where he retrieved what we needed: the fruit and a pocket knife to cut up the apple. Once I had a dish of very small pieces, we hurried back to the last place we’d seen Fred. The Land Cruiser. It was going to work as a live trap. Maybe not as efficient as a Havahart, but any port in a storm, right? I hoped he’d want to get back to some version of familiarity and safety. He’d spent a lot of time inside that truck and, honestly, I just didn’t have any other ideas.
The next few moments were spent in friendly silence as we tossed fruit in a wide circle nearby, with a heavier trail leading to the open door. Once that was done, Joel looked at me.
“Now what?”
“Now we wait.”