Chapter 5
FIVE
Allie sat on the hot curb next to Dakota in front of the hospital. She wasn’t a firefighter like Emily. She had no clue how to douse the fire raging in the man next to her. The heat radiated off his body as the sun baked them both. An older woman with obviously dyed black hair and a bright green top with huge purple flowers walked past with the man that must love her—or at least love her enough to wear a polo in the same obnoxious green. Allie tried to ignore the woman’s obvious stare. The paper sack with her prescription cough medicine gave her something to hold at least. She twisted the bag, unsure how to bring up what’d just happened.
The last time Allie had seen Dakota using his fists like that, it had been his own brother on the other end of it. She’d been horrified. But this time…well, this time it was completely different. She’d almost cheered when Dakota had got that last punch in before the deputy pulled the men apart. Too bad the cop hadn’t thrown Ray in jail then and there. Instead, the deputy had sent Ray right back to his family.
He may have tried to keep his voice low, but on her way back to her exam room, she’d heard the threats he’d muttered to Jen.
What have you been telling people?
Nothing, Ray. I swear .
If I hear anything ? —
You won’t. The boys are sorry. They…just got lost, is all .
You better keep them in line, or else they’ll be in a lot more ?—
Of course, the nurse had come around the corner then and called Allie back to her own room.
When she’d finished with the nurse practitioner, she’d tried to talk to Dakota about it. He wouldn’t look her in the eye, but he did manage to release his clenched jaw enough to say, “Emily is on her way to pick us up.” Then he’d walked out here and sat under the blazing sun, lost in his own thoughts. He hadn’t said a word since. And Allie didn’t know how to break the silence between them.
One thing was sure. There was a lot more to this man than she’d ever realized. Maybe she could start there.
“Kota, the way you stood up for those boys—” It made her wish she’d waited for someone like that. Someone who protected others and didn’t run away at the first sign of trouble, casting her or anyone else in their way aside. “It was?—”
Dakota stood and walked a few steps away. “It was useless.”
“No, it wasn’t. You barely know these boys, but you stood up for them. And the way you carried them through the burning forest…” Well, whatever he’d been in the past, he’d been quite the hero today. “I just want to say I’m sorry I didn’t believe you at first about changing.”
“Probably haven’t.” He shook his head, his mouth set in a firm line, jaw clenched tight and pulsing, like he was grinding his molars.
Just as Allie was going to say more, his intense blue stare narrowed in on her. “The team doesn’t know.” He released a long, slow breath like he’d just gotten something huge off his chest.
“What?” Allie tried to make sense of what was obviously a big deal to him.
“The hotshots. They know I was a cop. Well, some of them. Maybe. But…they don’t know about the rest. About rehab.”
Oh. That. “Why are you trying to hide it?”
“I’m not. But…I have a lot to prove here. If they knew I’m an addict?—”
“Dakota, you went to rehab. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Maybe. But I don’t want to be defined by it. It’s bad enough everyone I knew back in Benson looks at me with judgment. I let down my team there. But I have another chance here. Understand?”
Oh, she could understand all right. The judgment. The guilt and shame. For a moment, she was back at that place?—
His warm hand grabbed hers, pulling her out of the memory before it could suck her under. “And I’m not asking you to lie. It’s just…could you keep my history, about rehab and getting kicked off the SWAT team, between us?”
“I…”
“They need to know they can trust me to do the job I have now. I can’t mess this up. It’s all I’ve got.”
“That’s not true, Kota. You have family and friends. And who cares about what happened back in Benson? You’re a hero. You saved those boys. You saved me. That’s who you are. You’re not the troublemaker you claimed to be when I first met you.”
“Well, it’s not like I was going to leave you there in a burning forest with two boys alone. Of course I would do everything in my power to keep you safe.”
He didn’t know how rare that was. “Not everyone is like that.” Some men showed up with all the big romantic gestures, luring naive women into a fantasy world. And the minute the fantasy bubble popped, they left her high and dry to face all the consequences alone.
Maybe Dakota was different. It seemed like he was a really good guy. Sure, he had a temper. He was passionate. But his passion was protecting others. Not trying to get ahead or take advantage of the innocent. He deserved his fresh start.
Before she could say anything, Emily pulled up in her 4Runner. “Anybody need a ride?”
Dakota held the front door for Allie, then threw their packs into the trunk and climbed in the back seat.
“You two sure had an exciting day. But no rest for the weary. The fire is out of control, and they need us on the line as soon as we can, Masterson.” Emily glanced at him in the rearview mirror.
“Sure, but what will you do now, Allie?” he asked her.
“I’m not leaving Ember. I don’t care what that deputy says. Jen and the boys need help.”
“Maybe you should go home. I’ll watch out for the boys,” Dakota said from the backseat. “It’s dangerous out here. For you too.”
“But you’ll be out fighting fires. Someone needs to stick close by for Jen and Ethan and Nolan. And I have to find Scout. He’s out there somewhere. I can’t leave him behind,” Allie said.
“You can stay with us at the firebase,” Emily offered. “It might be a little cramped with the extra crews coming in, but you can stay in the ladies’ bunk room or with me and Sanchez and Jojo at our rental house in town.”
Allie glanced at Dakota. Did he want her to stay? Not that it mattered. She couldn’t leave now. “If you’re sure you don’t mind, yeah, I’ll stay at your place.”
They pulled into the vacant campground. It was eerily silent as they stepped out of the car. One of the crew fire trucks was still there. Emily and Dakota walked over and talked with some of the team. Allie threw her backpack into her own SUV. Opening up the back, she saw Scout’s kennel and blanket. She fingered the well-worn piece of fleece, tears immediately stinging her eyes.
Scout. She couldn’t even keep even a dog safe.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. Belle. She wiped her cheeks before answering.
“Hey, you must’ve made it home, huh?” Allie sank onto her truck and watched the hotshot crew. Dakota and Emily stood over one of the picnic tables. Dakota’s whole body leaned in to study the map, intense concentration on his face.
“Yeah, I’m back home. So, how did the training go. How’s Scout?”
“Well—” Allie swallowed hard. “Not so great.” She told Belle what’d happened.
“You were caught in that forest fire? Allie, what were you thinking, walking into a wildfire?”
“I was thinking I couldn’t leave those two boys lost in the forest. What was I supposed to do? Leave them to die?”
“Obviously not, but—” Belle paused. “Now that they’re safe, why don’t you leave? You could be here by tonight. We could still have these next four days together.”
Allie shoved off the vehicle. “Leave? Scout is out here somewhere. Lost. You expect me to abandon him? I won’t!”
“Take it easy, Al. I forgot about Scout. It was just a suggestion.”
“Well, it was a bad one.”
“I’m just…I’m worried about you. Your voice sounds awful. You probably have smoke inhalation. You need to be careful and take care of yourself.” Belle’s concern helped calm some of the ire, but it didn’t change the facts.
“I can’t leave my dog lost in the woods. I’m staying until I find him.” Allie stuffed her free hand deep into her pocket. She might not deserve another chance, not after all she’d done. But she wouldn’t leave until she’d exhausted every resource. Because maybe Dakota wasn’t the only one with a second chance here. Maybe this was a test. A test to see how much she was willing to do to make up for her past mistakes.
It was a test she intended to pass this time.
Finally, Dakota was doing what he’d come to Montana to do: fight fires.
The crew moved in a line around trees, rocks, and brush. Kane worked next to him, sawing down vegetation to stop the fire from spreading toward a small community of homes nestled in one of the mountain valleys. One of the guys up the line blared Metallica on a small speaker. Hammer called for his brother Mack to throw him a water, which he caught easily. Dakota’s chain saw buzzed and spat sawdust into the air as he cut into the trunk of a beautiful spruce. A sad but necessary sacrifice. He moved on to the next tree.
On the outside, he was pure hotshot. Part of a team again.
Inside?
The cop instinct in him wouldn’t die. And it was an instinct that might get him into trouble.
He wanted to snatch Ethan and Nolan out of Ray’s grasp and find a safe place for them. And while one part of him regretted coming to blows, the other part hadn’t got in nearly enough to satisfy the burning rage against the injustice of it all.
With one last slice of the chain saw, Dakota felled a scrubby tree. He killed the saw, hefted the skinny trunk, and pitched it over the break line.
“You got some anger there you’re trying to quench?”
Huh. Kane talking? That was new. Usually he just sat around listening, rarely joining in the conversations and banter in their short breaks.
“Maybe.”
“This about those lost boys and their stepfather?”
“You heard about that?”
“Heard you got into a fistfight.”
Wonderful. Who else knew? Hopefully it didn’t get back to Commander Dafoe. Dakota still had a lot of money to pay back to his brother, and the sign-on bonus he was counting on to do that was only good after three months. Not to mention, with Emily Micah here and Allie and her connections in Benson, Will would definitely hear if Dakota got kicked off the team.
“Who did you hear it from?”
Kane shrugged and killed his own chain saw. He picked up the big branches and shrubs he’d cut and threw them out of the way. “Doesn’t matter. I’m guessing you had your reasons.”
“I did. Innocent children shouldn’t be subjected to living with a man like that. Those boys are in danger.”
“You think the stepdad is beating up on them?”
Dakota hefted another heavy limb, but it barely budged. “I don’t have proof, but yeah. I do. I don’t get how Jen can stay with someone like that.”
Houston James came and helped lift the fallen pine. “A lot of people in those situations think that’s what they deserve. They don’t really believe that there’s anything better. She may even come from an abusive situation herself, where it seems normal.”
“How do you know all this?” Dakota grunted as they carried the log across the break line.
“I’m a youth pastor. Well, I was a youth pastor. You see a lot working with teens. A lot of brokenness.” Houston nodded and together they dropped their load.
Dakota picked up a branch light enough to throw this time. He pitched it to the other side. “Yeah, but Jen is a grown woman. She can leave. She can report Ray. But she’s choosing to stay. Staying at the expense of her own children.”
Okay. He’d done enough therapy in rehab to admit it might be harder to empathize with her with all the history he had with his own mother. He’d been Ethan and Nolan. But even his own mother had eventually left. Did Jen have any idea what staying was doing to her sons?
Did she even care?
“Did the boys say anything to you?” Houston asked.
“They might’ve made up some story of seeing a bad man get shot in the forest, but I think that’s just a cover up.”
Kane stopped. “They said they saw someone out here get shot?”
“Yeah, but I think it was all made-up.” Dakota mopped the sweat off his forehead with his bandanna.
Houston stilled too. “What exactly did the kids say?”
Dakota played back the conversation with Ethan. “He said they went off-trail and saw a man with a ponytail shoot a guy in the back and then the head. They mentioned a necklace too.”
“The man was shot in the back and in the head?” Kane came closer, his voice low.
“Yeah. What of it? Why are you acting so weird?” Dakota sat on one of the stumps.
Houston sank down next to him. “The body Sophie and I found burned to a crisp? In an area that hadn’t been reached by the fire yet? It wasn’t too far from the campground hiking trails. No identification last I heard, but COD was a gunshot to the back and the head. And a necklace was found near the body.”
A chill cut through Dakota. Kane shoved his shoulder. “No surprise you didn’t connect the two, since you were distracted by a certain search and rescue handler.”
“Knock it off.” The last thing he needed was the hotshots asking questions about how he knew Allie. She’d never said if she would keep the old Dakota where he was. In the past. And now she was staying with Emily, Sanchez, and Jojo. Hopefully it wouldn’t come up. But the boys?—
“You really think those boys witnessed that murder?” Dakota asked. “That body was nowhere near a cabin. That’s where the boys saw everything go down.”
“The body had been moved. Someone tried to cover it up. Did the boys say when they saw the shooting?”
Dakota shook his head. “Ethan just said the last time they were here. I don’t know when that was.”
“Sophie and I found the body when we were out looking for her horses after the evacuation for the ranch came through. We brought the body back to town, but I haven’t heard anything since. She thought the guy was her brother, dead. But it turned out he’s alive.” Houston grabbed his canteen and took a long drink. He grabbed his chain saw and joined the others on the saw crew.
Dakota pinched the bridge of his nose. He’d been so focused on keeping his past a secret and doing his job that he hadn’t connected the boys’ story with the body Houston had found. “Did they figure out who did it?” he asked Kane.
Kane shrugged. “No idea. Guess the only way to know what actually happened to the guy is to talk to the kids again.”
He snatched another branch off the ground to drag it over the line. “That’s a little tricky since I’m not a cop.”
“But you were.”
Dakota stilled. He’d never said so. And Kane wasn’t asking. He knew. “Not anymore. Besides, pretty sure after I let fists fly with Ray Haroldson, I’ve burned any chance of the LEOs sharing info with me.” He squared off with Kane. “But you seem to know more about this body than I do. Did they identify it yet?”
Kane shrugged. “Dunno. I imagine you still have friends in law enforcement. Ask them.”
Thankfully, he let it drop, and they got back to work. If he wanted to get into Dakota’s sordid past, Dakota had some questions of his own he was pretty sure Kane wouldn’t want to answer. There was some kind of history with Sanchez, Kane, Hammer, and Saxon. Maybe even Ham’s little brother Mack was in on it, but they were all rather secretive. They came across like a military unit, guys who moved in sync. Who seemed hyperaware of the world around them.
Who reacted faster than Dakota had on SWAT.
“How about you?” Dakota eased into the question, all casual-like. “Who were you before Ember?”
Kane only snorted under his breath.
He wasn’t going to answer? Dakota didn’t have time to dig when there was more going on in this forest than just a raging wildfire.
It could involve a murder, if the boys were to be believed.
But was Dakota projecting his history onto Ethan when he assumed Ray was abusive and the story of the bad man was a cry for help? Had the brothers really witnessed a murder? Allie had seemed to think they were scared of Ray as well, so at least that was confirmed.
If the wrong person found out Ethan and Nolan were witnesses to a murder, they might be in even more danger than a simple jerk stepfather situation.
Kane continued clearing the brush they’d mowed down. “So, what’s going on with that woman we saw this morning? Emily’s friend.”
“Allie? Nothing.”
“But you know her, right?”
“Not well, but yeah. We met last year.” When she saw me lose it and then drove me eight hours to rehab .
“So…there’s no relationship or anything?”
“Wait a minute.” Dakota spun around, frowning. “You wanna ask Allie out or something? What about Sanchez?”
“Sanchez?” Kane balked. “What are you talking about?”
Dakota raised an eyebrow. “You watch her. Like a hawk. All the time. I mean, she’s got more attitude than I like, but if that’s your thing?—”
“It’s not like that.” Kane grabbed his saw and hiked uphill toward the next patch of vegetation. “And you have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Dakota followed after him. “Then how is it?”
“Not…that. And that’s all I’m saying on the matter.”
If this were his old SWAT team, Dakota would know how far was okay to push or tease or when to back off. But this wasn’t his old team. This wasn’t the group of guys he’d once considered as close as family. Gage still called. Liam had moved to a federal task force, and both Blake and Jasper were detectives in different departments.
They’d all tried to stay tight over the last year, but it wasn’t the same. Benson SWAT wasn’t working together day in and day out. After Dakota left, the whole team had disbanded anyway. They weren’t putting their lives on the line to protect each other and the citizens of Benson. They might be cops still at least, but Dakota wasn’t one of them anymore.
And there was no one but himself to blame for that.
“Let’s get this break line done.” Kane yanked on the rope start. His saw revved to life, the loud motor putting an end to the conversation.
Fine with Dakota. He started his own chain saw and sliced through the branches in their path. The others followed in line. Some on the saw crew, others with their Pulaski pick hoes and pick rakes, digging through the ground to clear a thick black line of soil.
Hopefully, removing all the fuel would stop the fire.
Dakota watched Kane as he attacked a thick lodgepole pine. Probably he shouldn’t begrudge the guy if he wanted to ask Allie out.
After all, the woman was stunning, smart, and brave. She didn’t back down from danger. He liked that spunk. The way she was tenacious going into a dangerous tinderbox of a forest to find the Haroldson boys wasn’t something a guy found every day. When they’d all had to run, she’d fought the pain and pushed through.
Kane seemed like the decent sort too, but he didn’t like to picture Kane and Allie together.
At all.
A tickle in the back of Dakota’s throat demanded attention. He stopped his chain saw and dug in his pack for water. He couldn’t afford to get distracted by thoughts of Allie.
Dakota needed to find out more about this dead guy. Maybe he should go into Ember and see if he could talk to the medical examiner. Find out who the man was. Then he’d find a way to talk to the boys?—
“Watch out!”
A half-burnt Douglas fir some fifteen feet away swayed toward the line. Dakota jumped out of the way. He lifted his left arm to shield his face from the branches and sparks crashing toward him.
Pain seared his side as he fell to the rocky soil.