She was going to find her daughter. And then she was going to make Tony's guys regret ever putting a finger on her sweet kiddo.
They're dead, every one of them, even if they don't know it yet.
Damaris looked around. All the male Swansons, as well as Elle's nieces Jodie and Hannah, were hundreds of yards away, busily setting up the fireworks display on the island.
The only other bear shifter in the vicinity was Elle, and she was busy comforting Maggie, whose fun meter had apparently pegged and who was currently clinging to her grandma's legs, bawling her eyes out.
Annabeth rose and went to her daughter, giving Damaris the perfect opportunity to escape.
"Excuse me, I'll be right back." Forcing herself to smile, Damaris got to her feet and put the idea book down on Annabeth's chair.
"If you want to skip the line and don't mind a short walk," Steffi said, looking up from her novel and pointing at the long line snaking around the park's small cinderblock restroom building, "There are a ton of porta potties set up in the parking lot at the back of Justin's restaurant."
Damaris blessed Steffi for handing her the perfect excuse to leave the park without attracting awkward questions.
"Thanks, that's good to know," she said. "I'll be right back."
"Are you feeling okay?" Steffi asked with a concerned frown. "You're white as a sheet."
"I'm fine," Damaris managed. "Or I will be in a couple of minutes, if you know what I mean."
Her heart was racing, and she wanted to sprint for the gas station.
But she couldn't afford to raise suspicions and get anyone else involved in this, not with Sophie's life on the line.
So she forced herself to act normally and walk down Main Street at a brisk pace that fell short of the run that she craved. She wove around people holding ice cream cones and big fluffy masses of pink cotton candy, all of them smiling and laughing and completely oblivious of the fact that her little girl was in danger.
You know it's a trap, right? asked a rational-sounding voice in her head.
Of course I know it's a trap, Damaris retorted silently. But that doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is my kiddo.
You should text Dimitri. Let him know what's happened. He'll help you.
The weight of the almost-forgotten gun in her purse reminded her that she had options.
Dimitri would be mad at her for leaving him out of the loop, but she couldn't put him—or any of the Swansons who'd been so good to her and Sophie over the past four weeks—at risk.
Yeah, they were bear shifters and stronger than the average human, but she was pretty sure that they weren't bulletproof.
This was her mess, and she needed to clean it up before anyone got hurt.
When she drew closer to the gas station, she realized it was closed for the holiday. There were cars parked in the station's small lot, and all along the curb up and down Main Street, but no people. Everyone appeared to be at the festival.
Damaris stopped and surveyed her surroundings when she reached the corner of the final building on Main Street, a hardware store that was also closed.
Her little girl was somewhere close by, stuffed into the back of a car and probably scared out of her wits. And it was all Damaris's fault.
She peered around, desperately looking for Tony or anyone who looked like they might be one of Tony's associates.
At the same time, she reached into her big purse and dug for her gun. If I can just get the drop on them…
Her fingers touched smooth, cold metal an instant before she sensed a presence behind her and felt something hard poke her in the back.
"Drop the purse, D," ordered the familiar, hateful voice of Tony Rizzo. "You and me, we're going for a little walk."
Damaris froze but kept her grip on her purse.
Tony was here! He'd actually come in person instead of sending one of his goons to do his dirty work!
"I'm not going anywhere with you until you tell me what you did with Sophie," she demanded. "Where's my daughter?"
Tony scoffed and prodded her with the barrel of his gun. "You don’t get to make the rules, D. Now drop the fucking purse and start walking. Act natural if you want to see your little girl again."
Reluctantly, Damaris obeyed.
"Why are you doing this?" she asked, though she already knew.
Still, pretending ignorance was the safest tactic, just in case.
"You think I wouldn't find out?" Tony snarled, pushing her forward. Damaris stumbled. "That you were fucking Dimitri fucking Medved? And that you were planning to fuck me over by cutting a deal with the feds?"
Shit. Shit shit shit. "If you know that much," Damaris said, trying to keep her voice from shaking, "then you know that you can't just kill me. They'll know who did it."
"Sure, but if they can't prove it, it doesn't count." Tony gave an ugly chuckle. "Lemme tell you something, D. We catch undercover cops or FBI guys, we teach 'em a lesson but we don't kill 'em. Killing cops is bad for business because the other cops don't let that shit go. But no one cares if an informant gets whacked. That's just a cost of doing business for the cops and the feds."
"Okay, you got me," Damaris said, trying another tack. "You don't need Sophie anymore. Let her go. Please, Tony."
He laughed again. "Now that's more like it, babe. Tell you what—you cooperate with me, I'll turn Sophie loose. Not a scratch on her. But you gotta do everything I tell you. And I mean everything."
She knew exactly what he meant, and it made her feel sick to her stomach. But she would do anything to save her daughter.
"How am I supposed to believe you?" Damaris demanded.
"Look at you, still tryin' to make the rules. You may be a chick, but you got real balls, babe."
She was being herded towards a large dark-green Chevy Suburban with tinted windows. It was parked at the end of the street, just in front of the entrance to the gas station.
"Look, I'm not gonna lie to you," Tony continued. "You're toast. You know it, and I know it. But I don't like to kill kids. I got a little girl of my own. And we made sure that your Sophie didn't see none of our faces."
Tony jerked his head in the direction of the Suburban and someone inside opened the back passenger-side door.
"Now get in the fucking car, D. We're gonna go somewhere a little more private, and then you're gonna show me and the boys how sorry you are for tryin' to backstab us. You convince us that you're sincere, and we'll let Sophie go after we've had some fun with you."
* * *
"They took her! Some men took Sophie!" Matt Swanson shouted from the edge of the park.
Dimitri looked up from the row of mortar tubes where he was connecting the wires that would allow Ash's computer to set off the fireworks in a controlled sequence.
He was on his feet in an instant.
"We have an emergency. You take over," he snapped to his fellow firefighter Zack Barenkamp.
Zack was also a bear shifter. He nodded but looked concerned. "You sure you don't need any help?"
Dane and Ash were already heading for the narrow pedestrian bridge that connected the river island with the city park.
"I think we got it covered," Dimitri answered over his shoulder as he sprinted after them. "Mark, can you handle the computer?"
"No problem," Mark assured him as Dimitri took the concrete steps up to the bridge three at a time.
When he arrived, Elle had her arm around her grandson. "What happened, sweetie?" she asked.
"I tried to stop them," he said and began sobbing.
Dimitri saw his clenched fists and recognized all the signs of helpless rage.
Matt's right arm was all scraped up from the short sleeve of his T-shirt down to his wrist, and his elbow was bleeding, with specks of dirt and bits of gravel stuck to the broken skin.
"Who took Sophie? Where did it happen?" he demanded.
But Matt was crying too hard to answer.
Then Annabeth was suddenly there, taking her son in
her arms.
"Matt?" Dane asked, kneeling next to his wife. He handed his son a Kleenex and patted the boy's uninjured arm. "Can you tell us what happened?"
"When we went to get ice cream, two men grabbed Sophie and put her in a big green SUV," he said. "Ellie and I tried to stop them but they hit us and we fell."
"I hurt my knee." Ellie pointed at a bloody scrape on her leg. "Look, Aunt Annabeth."
"You're a brave girl," Annabeth told her, and gave her a kiss on the cheek before dabbing at the wound with a fresh Kleenex.
"What happened then?" Dane asked.
"The men—they put a bag over Sophie's head." Matt looked up at his dad. "And they called Uncle Mitya's friend a really bad word."
Damaris? They were targeting Damaris? This wasn't a random abduction?
Dimitri went cold. Dan and Jim had warned him that Damaris would be in danger when she returned to New York to testify. But he hadn't expected that she'd be in danger here.
And speaking of his mate… "Where is Damaris?" Dimitri looked around for her.
"She left a little while ago," Steffi said, looking suddenly stricken. "She said she needed to use the porta potties." She thought a moment. "She got a couple of text messages just before she left, and she didn't look well. Do you think she knew something had happened to Sophie?"
"If so, why on earth didn't she say something? We were right here!" Elle put her hands on her hips, and her expression looked frustrated. "Why sneak off like that?"
Dimitri had a bad feeling about the answer to that question
"What did the men look like?" Dane asked Matt and Ellie.
Matt shrugged. "They looked like fishermen. You know, with hats and those vests with all the pockets."
"Were they younger or older?" Ash prompted.
Damaris's "second dads" approached them, carrying ice cream cones.
"What's goin' on here?" Dan asked, and Dimitri remembered that Dan and Jim had both been NYPD cops.
As the kids continued to answer Ash's and Dane's questions, Dimitri quickly explained the situation to Dan and Jim.
Dan promptly pulled out his phone and tried calling Damaris.
Embarrassed, Dimitri realized that he hadn't thought of the obvious solution.
But then Damaris's phone went to voicemail after three rings, and his worry deepened.
That worry turned to fear for his mate at Dan's next words.
"Oh God," said Dan, scrolling through the messages on his phone. "Adriana—she's one of the Organized Crime Task Force members—sent me email a couple of hours ago. I wished I'd looked at my phone sooner." He shook his head, clearly angry with himself. "I was having so much fun, I haven't looked at my phone for a while."
Jim put a comforting hand on his husband's shoulder. "What's going on? What did Adriana say?"
"It's Tony Rizzo. He and a couple of his known associates apparently boarded a morning flight for Missoula."
"And you think that Damaris's client might be headed here?" Dimitri asked sharply.
"Dude's a mobster. Bad news all around," Jim said, confirming Damaris's earlier description of Tony. "I'm afraid that he must have found out somehow that our girl cut a deal with the feds, and he's determined to stop her from testifying."
"We have to find her and Sophie," Dimitri said.
"I'll call Mary and get her to put out an Amber Alert for Sophie and a green Chevy Suburban. Maybe we can help get some roadblocks put up," Dane said, pulling out his own phone.
As Dane spoke to the Chief of Police, who was working foot patrol at the festival alongside the other officers of the town's small police department, Dimitri looked around frantically. His instincts were screaming to do something to rescue his mate and her child, but he needed a starting point.
Ash came to his rescue.
"Hey, let me see if I can find Damaris and Sophie using SwansonFinder," he said, digging his smartphone out of his pocket.
Ash had originally written the app so that his mother could locate Dane and the other members of the family in the far-flung reaches of the ranch, but it had proved useful in other ways, too. It used the phones' built-in GPS features to track the locations of the various subscribers.
Dimitri quickly reached for his own cellphone and called up the app.
"It looks like Damaris is at Hawkins Hardware," Ash said, sounding puzzled. "Hey, Mitya, is Sophie a member of your family circle? She's not in mine."
"Yeah, and the car that took her is apparently moving north on Highway 93," Dimitri said, frowning down at the app on his screen.
"Got it," said Dane, who was still on the phone with Mary.
"Let's go find Damaris and tell her what's happened," he told Ash.
"Keep Mary in the loop with whatever Damaris tells you," Dane said. The big man's mouth was drawn taut with anger. "Between kidnapping Sophie and hurting my kid, those guys had better hope the police find them before I do."
"You acted like a hero," Annabeth told her son, as he blew his nose. "Just like your Dad, when he saved me from that fire."
"Is Sophie going to be all right?" Matt asked anxiously.
"Yeah," his cousin Ellie chimed in. "Those men were mean."
"I'm going to do my best to find her," Dimitri said and started off.
"And I'm coming with you," Ash told him, falling into stride next to Dimitri. In a lower voice, he said, "It's gonna be okay. You gotta believe that."
Chapter 22 – Bear Justice
Damaris's large designer purse lay on its side in front of Hawkins Hardware. It was unzipped, spilling her rhinestone-bedazzled smartphone, lipstick, and makeup compact onto the sidewalk.
"Oh, damn," breathed Ash.
Dimitri swallowed the rising tide of sick horror and knelt to look inside the purse. Damaris would never voluntarily leave her purse behind, not when she jokingly referred to it as her "survival kit."
Damaris's wallet with her driver's license and money nestled against her Smith & Wesson revolver. Whatever had happened to her hadn't given her a chance to use her gun in self-defense.
A thousand scenarios, each worse than the last, rushed through his brain. He had never felt so helpless.
He looked at his phone. The bald eagle icon that Sophie had chosen for herself was still on the move up the highway.
"I think Damaris found Sophie, and then maybe Tony and his associates caught them," Dimitri said, surprised at how calm he sounded when his bear was howling with rage and frustration inside him. "Let's go. I'm parked just over there."
Ash peered at Dimitri's phone. "They're headed north. Do you think they're making a run for the Missoula airport?"
Dimitri shook his head. "That doesn't make sense. They'd have to take Sophie through airport security."
"Only one way to find out," Ash said grimly. "Find them and make them answer some questions."
Dimitri's bear liked that idea, especially if asking questions involved removing the limbs of the people who were trying to separate him from his mate and her daughter.
Not bothering to hide their shifter speed, they ran to Dimitri's Ford F150 pickup, parked on the other side of Main Street from the gas station.
As Dimitri pulled a quick U-turn and headed for the highway, Ash called Mary Jacobsen and explained what they were doing and where they were headed.
"Look, you guys are firefighters, not cops. Why don't you just wait—" he could hear her saying.
"No way," Dimitri said sharply, knowing that her wolf shifter hearing was just as sharp as his. "I'm not going to pull over and just sit on my hands while my mate's in danger. Ash will keep you posted on our location and any other info, and you can meet us there."
He heard Mary's sigh. "Bear shifters," she said, and he could almost see her shaking her head in frustration. "Try not to get shot, okay? Dan Bianchi thinks that these guys are armed and dangerous."
"Gotcha," Ash said cheerfully. "Talk to you in a bit, Mary."
He ended the call and turned to Dimitri. "So, do you have a plan?
"
Dimitri clenched his jaw muscles and pushed the gas. His truck roared in response and leaped far beyond the speed limit, but it still wasn't nearly fast enough to satisfy him. "Find them, kill them, rescue my mate and her daughter."
"Um." Ash cast him a concerned look. "You ever kill anyone before, Dimitri? I haven't."
"I'm sure the killing part won't be a problem when I catch up with them," growled Dimitri's bear.
"Look, here's another plan: why don't we shift, scare the shit out of them, make sure Damaris and Sophie are safe, and then let the authorities handle it from there? You'll still get to be Damaris's hero."
"Damaris needs to stop trying to fix everything herself!" Dimitri exploded, giving voice to his frustration. "And this is probably my fault, you know."
"How so?" Ash asked.
He seemed infuriatingly calm for someone on a rescue mission. For his part, Dimitri's skin was prickling with the eagerness to shift into his other form and let his bear take control.
"Tony Rizzo's sent other goons try to kill me, thanks to my mother and father," said Dimitri, trying to control his bear so that he could concentrate on driving. "I know that Damaris was worried about some threats Tony made, but would he really come all this way just to harm her unless he were trying to get to me, too?"
"Maybe," Ash said. "But I also think Damaris knows more about Tony and his business than she's told either of us. Mark probably knows everything, but he can't talk about it."
"First I'm going to save her, and then we're going to have a long talk," Dimitri said grimly.
* * *
"They've pulled into the parking lot at the Edward Einarsson Memorial Bridge," Ash said, a few long minutes later.
Dimitri's blood ran cold. That parking lot was one of many along the Salmon River designed to provide access to fisherman and kayakers. It was located in a grove of huge cottonwood and willow trees two hundred yards from the highway, making any cars parked there effectively invisible to anyone driving past on the highway.
It was the perfect spot for an assault…or worse.
But the trees that hid the parking lot and picnic area from the highway also provided cover for anyone approaching.
Blaze (Bearpaw Ridge Firefighters Book 8) Page 20
